The Extraordinary Tourist
Artist tries Adwords for the first time
Thursday, July 03, 2008
As an individual artist, with a web site from which I sell my own art, write a blog and run a Cafepress shop, I decided to give Google's Adwords a try to raise more awareness of my cat themed art and gifts.
I'm completely new to Adwords. I've studied everything I can on the other side of the equation - which is Google Adsense. You can see Google ads all over my web site, placed where you'll be tempted to click. Trialling Adwords is like being 'the man behind the curtain'. Suddenly I'm in control of what goes on behind the scenes, creating ads and adjusting settings, in the hope I can get a lot of targeted traffic in a big way. Adwords isn't like Adsense. You can't just set and forget.
Before you read further, I highly recommend Dan's series of five articles about Adwords on his site, Empty Easel. These will take you through the process of signing up for Adwords in a more detailed, step by step description. You can also read Dan's experience and compare it with my own.
Succeeding with Adwords is mostly down choosing the right keywords to bring targeted traffic to your site. Traffic that you know is interested in your content because they were either searching, using your keywords, or they saw your ad on a site that shares some common themes, subject matter or keywords with yours.
Before I signed up for Adwords, I looked at my own site's visitor statistics on search engine keywords. I discovered that I have a problem that relates to my blog.
My web site receives around 700-900 visitors per month, approximately 60% comes directly from search engines. My most popular keyword phrase for the first half of June 2008 was 'Krippin Virus' - What the..? (I am Legend fans will know it). The second most popular keyword phrase was Hazel Dooney - who is a great, female Aussie artist but... not me. Both keyword phrases come from posts in my blog.
My blog is an eclectic mix of topics from movie opinions to humorous personal observations on life along with art commentary and more. The problem is, most of my search engine visitors, once they've read the article they followed a link to, rarely stay on and browse. Many never see my art or visit my shop. I can tell this because of another statistic called 'bounce rate' - the number of people who leave my site from the same page they arrived.
The lesson here: If you're writing a blog for the purpose of attracting search engine traffic, make sure you are writing about your art, how you create it and, more importantly, the subjects and themes your art covers. Otherwise you'll be like me with visitors who are only interested in the specific article/post they clicked a link to.
I have very little interest in blogging about my own art. Not only that but it took me a long time to warm to the idea of writing a blog in a way that would fill a creative void for me. I like my eclectic mix of articles - they are another aspect of my creativity and not simply something I write to get search engine traffic. As well, my significant collection of articles is starting to earn a modest but very promising amount of monthly Adsense revenue (a high bounce rate does have some benefits in the form of people clicking ads).
One way I've tried to improve my search engine ranking for my art is to to write about each artwork in my Gallery. It's early days yet so it'll take a while to see if that strategy is successful with the search engines.
The majority of my art is related to whimsical cat paintings. However anyone conducting a Google search for 'Cat Art', 'Cat Painting' or 'Cat Gifts' won't find me at all because 'cats' is a huge theme online. I'm not anywhere within sight of the first two pages in search results for these keyword phrases.
This is why I'm trying Adwords. Adwords seems like it works best when you can target a specific subject or theme. By targeting cat specific keyword phrases I can get my Adwords Ads onto the first page of search results. The ads also make me look some what more professional because, people familiar with Adwords, know I've paid money to get my ads onto that page.
Cost, Pay-per-click and Payment options.
Something that deterred me from using Adwords was the idea of pay-per-click. That is, every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay Google money. Google has the largest ad network bar none online which gives rise to the notion that millions of people will suddenly start clicking your ad and you'll be taking out a second mortgage on your house just to cover the debt.
Thankfully this notion is unlikely, as evidenced by Dan's experience in his article, Advertising Your Artwork with Adwords But Not Getting Many Clicks? in which he received only 2 clicks (at a cost of five cents per click) on his ads in his first two week period. More importantly though, you can set a daily budget and set a specific time period your ads will run making it easy to control spending.
For example, I signed up for Adwords Standard Edition, with a budget of five cents per click, up to a maximum of one dollar per day. Doing the math, that's 20 clicks per day before my ads will stop showing across Google's network for that day.
I also chose to prepay my account via bank deposit rather than have the clicks automatically deducted from a credit/debit card. That way I can budget an exact figure and have my adds running until my prepaid amount runs out. If you pay by credit card then you'll need to pay more attention to how many days you want your ads to show up on the network for. I went for the minimum payment of AU$20.00 for my starting budget ($10.00 of which is an account activation fee).
It's important to remember that, although Adwords does cost you money every time someone clicks your ad, that is actually what you want to happen. People clicking on your ad - the more the better. The strength of Adwords is that people click on your ad because they are interested in what you have to offer. The ideal result is, for every click on your ad (costing a few cents), you make a sale that brings in a few dollars profit.
So many options
 When my ad went live I didn't have to take out a second mortgage (I don't even have a first mortgage... actually). Unfortunately all my keyword choices were either lousy or pointless, or so I thought. Many of my keywords weren't active for search - meaning my ad wouldn't appear for those keywords in Google searches but they'd still appear on the content network (i.e. on related web sites).
I was completely overwhelmed by the Adwords Campaign Management pages. So many options and settings. It all made my head spin. It didn't help that I was trying to make sense of it all late in the evening either. In the end I decided to just leave everything as it was for a day - which I highly recommend.
Twenty four hours later my ad had been clicked seven times. Not earth shattering but better than I'd expected. Apparently my keywords weren't all quite so bad after all.
Closer inspection revealed that all seven clicks came from the same keyword phrase, 'pictures of cats'. To get those seven clicks my ad was served more than 1100 times on the search network. Obviously a common search phrase because the phrase became inactive for search until I significantly increased my five cent bid.
By day two, all eighteen of my keyword phrases were inactive for search, requiring me to raise my bid on each one by varying amounts. As well, eleven of my keyword phrases weren't even triggering my ad to be displayed anywhere.
My budget ran out after about a week and a half. In that time I created a second variation on my text ad (at no extra cost) which performed equally as well as my first. I created a second 'landing' page for my ads, which Google switched between automatically (again at no extra cost), to test which layouts performed better (my budget ran out before I could get any worthwhile data). I trimmed down all my keyword selections to those phrases that were most specific to my site. Finally I raised my bid on just the keyword phrases, mentioned previously in this article, to make them active for search.
In total my ads were displayed across both networks more than 29,000 times and received 47 clicks - 46 from the search network and 1 from the content network. Clearly the search network is where people are more likely to click (and why not, these people are looking for a link that will give them what they want).
None of those clicks resulted in sales or new web site subscribers. However I can safely say Adwords sent people to my site that were searching for cat art and cat gifts - which is what I set out to achieve.
At this time I haven't added any new funds to restart my ad campaign. Although I'm very encouraged by the amount of traffic I received. My budget of $1 per day means I would need to make an average of one sale in my online shop every six days to break even (this is based on my own profit margins and will likely be different for you). There are other factors that would vary these figures but for the sake of simplicity I'm excluding them. If I can get at least that kind of conversion rate I'll be happy.
Something I'm very keen to try is image ads. Considering art is a very visual medium I'm interested to see if seeing the art will encourage better quality clicks. That is, unlike text ads, people will have seen my art before clicking. If they go ahead and click then, in theory, that suggests they like the style of my art and are interested to see more.
There are other features that I'd like to experiment with too, such as video ads, but all this will have to be for another article.
For now, I hope you've seen that, whilst there is a lot to learn, budget wise Adwords is very manageable. You can learn the basics with a minimum payment then, once you feel a little more confident and understand things better, you can consider topping up your advertising budget.
Adwords is well within reach of your average artist's budget and it can certainly assist in capturing some of those first page, search result clicks when your own Search Engine Optimization isn't achieving the right kind of traffic.
Author's Note: This article is an re-edited and extended version based on three previous articles about Adwords in my blog. It includes some updated information and analysis not previously written about. Labels: Adwords
Adwords for Artists - my journey. Part 3
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Note: If you haven't read part 1 and part 2 of my series on Google's Adwords program then you should read those before continuing.
So many options - techno-fear!
 My ad finally went live on Tuesday night (that's my ad on the right) and not only did I not have to take out a second mortgage (I don't even have a first mortgage... actually) but all my keyword choices were either lousy or pointless, or so I thought.
I'm going to admit I was completely overwhelmed by the Adwords Campaign Management pages. It all literally made my head spin (and I'm used to all this technical stuff). It didn't help that I was trying to make sense of it all at the end of the day either. In the end I decided to just leave everything as it was for a day.
If you decide to use Adwords I'd recommend you leave everything too for 24 hours after your first campaign goes live. The reason being, when I came back today my ad had been clicked seven times. Not earth shattering but better than Dan's (from Empty Easel) two clicks in two weeks. Apparently my keywords weren't all pointless after all.
The lesson here is to give your ad some time after it goes live because all that information you're confronted with is confusing and you may be tempted to fix things that aren't actually broken.
I won't go into detail about my keywords because these will be different for everyone. However closer inspection revealed that all seven clicks came from the same keyword phrase (or set), 'pictures of cats'. To get those seven clicks my ad was served more than 1100 times. Obviously a common search phrase as evidenced by the fact that, unless I significantly increase my five cent bid, my ad will no longer be served in search results (but it will still appear in the *content network, i.e. on web sites with related content).
In fact, by day two, all eighteen of my keyword phrases are inactive for search unless I raise my bid on each one to varying amounts. As well, eleven of my keyword phrases aren't even triggering my ad to be displayed. Could be because there are no sites with similar words, or my bid really is too low, or that no one is searching on these terms. It's hard to tell with everything inactive for search.
From here on I'll have to spend some time trialling different keywords, evaluating whether raising my bid is really cost effective and even trying differently worded ads (which doesn't cost any extra - so worth trying).
I'm not going to bore you with all the details of me trying to fine tune my ads. If you want an explanation of the Adwords interface then read Dan's series on Adwords. For now this is my final article about my initial experience.
Hopefully you've seen that, whilst there is a lot to learn, budget wise it is very manageable. You can learn the system for just AU$20.00 then once you feel a little more confident you can start fine tuning your ads (for which Google provides several optimization tools to help you).
Perhaps, some time in the future, maybe about a month from now, I'll write an update to let you know how things are going and whether Adwords has been a benefit to this site.
* Note that a day later, despite my ad not being active for search it had been displayed another 1000 or so times on the content network and netted another click.
Labels: Adwords
Adwords for Artists - my journey. Part 2
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Note: If you haven't read part 1 of my series on Google's Adwords program then click here.
Cost, Pay-per-click and Payment options.
Something that deterred me (and I'm sure many others) from using Adwords was the idea of pay-per-click. That is, every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay Google money. Google has the largest ad network bar none online which gives rise to the notion that millions of people will suddenly start clicking your ad and you'll be taking out a second mortgage on your house just to cover the debt.
Thankfully this notion is unlikely, as evidenced by Dan's experience in his article, Advertising Your Artwork with Adwords But Not Getting Many Clicks? in which he received only 2 clicks (at a cost of five cents per click) on his ads in his first two week period. More importantly though, you can set a daily budget and set a specific time period your ads will run.
For example, I signed up for Adwords and decided to follow Dan's lead, signing up for the Standard Edition, with a budget of five cents per click up to a maximum of one dollar per day. Doing the math, that's 20 clicks per day before my ads will stop showing across Google's network.
I also chose to pre pay my account via bank deposit rather than have the clicks automatically deducted from a credit/debit card. That way I can budget an exact figure and have my adds running until my prepaid amount runs out. If you pay by credit card then you'll need to pay more attention to how many days you want your ads to show up on the network for.
If you prepay your account the minimum spend is AU$20.00 of which AU$10.00 is an account activation fee. I decided to stick with the minimum for the moment just to make sure my bank deposit is successful before committing more funds.
Note that if you want your ads to start showing immediately then you'll need to pay via credit/debit card. The disadvantage of bank deposit is that you'll have to wait for Google to receive your money transfer before your ads begin to run. I actually chose this option because, for me, it makes my book keeping easier.
At the time of writing this article I'm awaiting my money transfer to reach Google. This can take up to 5 days. Given that I did the transfer on a Saturday, I'm guessing it'll be about Tuesday or Wednesday at the soonest before my ad becomes active.
By the next article my ad should be up and running. When that's happening I'll show the ad I'm starting out with and I'll also have a look at some of the keywords I'm using.
To finish up this article I think it important to remind you that, although Adwords does cost you every time someone clicks your ad, that is actually what you want to happen. People clicking on your ad - the more the better.
Not just any people either. The strength of Adwords is that those people clicked on your ad because they are interested in what you have to offer. If you're an artist in the business of selling art (like me) then the ideal situation is that, for every click on your ad (costing a few cents), you make a sale that brings in a few dollars pure profit.
It's not that different from paying a commission to a gallery for selling your art.
Read the final installment of this series here [ Part 3 ]Labels: Adwords
Adwords for Artists - my journey. Part 1
 Are you an artist looking for someone who's tried Google's Adwords program to sell their art or promote their art web site? Well this article (or what looks like will be a series of articles) is for you.
Before we go any further, if you're looking for a step through, blow by blow account of the Adwords process then I highly recommend Dan's series of five articles on his site, Empty Easel. I made a point of reading them first before starting my journey because I trust Dan's insight. He does a superb job of explaining everything and recounts his own experience of using Adwords to promote his site.
However Dan's site isn't an 'artist' site as such. It's a collection of articles and resources all related to art and selling your art. This is where my experience can supplement what you read there.
I'm an individual artist running an artists web site. I maintain a blog, sell my own art on ebay and I have a Cafepress shop. All common pursuits of modern web 2.0 struggling artists.
So... back to me. I'm a complete noob at Adwords. I've studied everything I can on the other side of the equation - which is Google Adsense. You can see Google ads all over my site, placed where you'll be tempted to click but Adwords is all new to me. So let's stumble through this together.
Obviously succeeding with Adwords is all down to keywords and choosing the right keywords to bring targeted traffic to your site. People who you know are interested in your art because they were either searching, using keywords that describe your art, or they saw your ad on a site that shares some common themes, subject matter or keywords with yours.
With this in mind, before I signed up for anything, I went to look at my sites visitor stats (which I monitor using Google analytics) relating to search keywords. I discovered that I really have a problem and it relates to my blog.
My web site, each month, brings in around 700-900 visitors, approximately 60% of which comes through search engines. My most popular keyword sets for the first half of June 2008 was 'Krippin Virus' - What the..? (I am Legend fans will know it). The second most popular keywords were Hazel Dooney - great, female Aussie artist but... not me. Both keyword sets come from posts in my blog.
If you've read a few articles in my blog you'll know it's an eclectic mix of topics from movie opinions to humorous personal observations on life along with art commentary and more. My problem is that most of my search engine visitors, once they've read the article they followed a link to, rarely stay on and browse. Many never see my art or visit my shop. I can tell this because of another stat called 'bounce rate' - the number of people who leave my site from the same page they arrived.
The lesson here: If you're writing a blog for the benefit of attracting search engine traffic, make sure you are writing about your art, how you create it and more importantly the subjects and themes your art covers. Otherwise you'll be like me with an eclectic mix of traffic, most of which is only interested in the specific article/post they clicked on.
I have very little interest in writing about my art. Not only that but it took me a long time to warm to the idea of writing a blog in a way that would fill a creative void for me. I have no intention of changing tact now. I like my eclectic mix of articles - they are another aspect of my creativity and not simply something I write to get search engine traffic.
My solution has been to write about each artwork in my Cafepress Gallery shop in the hope that search engines will start to pick up on that text over there. It's early days yet so it'll take a while to see if that strategy is successful.
This is why I'm considering Adwords. Adwords seems like it works best when you can target a specific subject or theme. Since the majority of my art is related to whimsical cat paintings I'm thinking Adwords might be a great way to get seen on other web sites relating to cats and the people who like them.
From selling my art on ebay, I know my cat artworks are bought mostly by women, often mothers with young children, particularly girls. Quite a few of my artworks have ended up on children's bedroom walls. However my art doesn't just appeal to children. Cat lovers everywhere enjoy my artworks and a few take pride of place in lounge rooms too.
If you're thinking about Adwords then, given that it is going to cost you money, I think it's important that you establish a specific profile of who it is you're trying to target. I've read a few stories on various forums about people who say Adwords is a waste of money. At this point that could well be true if you don't at least start with a notion of who you'll be writing your ads for.
So the next step is to sign up with Adwords. Looks like I'll be writing about that in part 2.Labels: Adwords
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