Everyone knows that Google Adwords is a great marketing resource. It’s cheap, it’s effective and it’s targeted. But it ain’t easy.

Search optimization with Google can feel like a Sisyphusian punishment, but in the long run, once you’ve established best practices, you’re good for a while.

Figuring out Adwords is even more challenging. Adwords are displayed based on a complex rating system that Google more or less makes up as it goes along. Human input on top of algorithm, determines your campaign’s fate. And if you don’t take the time to get it right, you’re ads simply won’t be delivered. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that they’re keeping  the spammers and the perverts out, but it’s frustrating to spend so much time nurturing just one segment of a campaign.

Ad placement depends on the quality of  the keywords you select, the text in your ad, the optimization of your landing page, the amount you bid on the space and some times a hands-on review by a Google employee.  Understanding that no two Adword campaigns are treated equally, here are my 5 tips for moving in the right direction and hopefully taking some of the pain out of the process:

1) Be honest with yourself and honest with Google: Be selective and targeted with all of your Adwords decisions. This is a job for a scalpel, not a shotgun. Be sure your ad, your keywords and your landing page relate in a meaningful way. Don’t try to trick Google by adding a bunch of irrelevant keywords or making claims that aren’t true. It’s also debatable at the moment whether you’ll get away trying to buy a competitor’s name as a keyword. I’d err on the site of caution and avoid it.
2) Use multiple keywords to target better and pay less: Say you’re a Ford dealer in Boston. If you want to run an ad, you might consider bidding on the keyword “Ford” or “Truck”. But that wouldn’t capture the audience you’re looking for. If someone types “Ford” into a search engine, they’re probably looking for Ford’s corporate site. You’d be competing with every business in the world who wanted to appear when someone searched Ford and you’d probably spend a small fortune on worthless clicks. However if you cluster your keywords and used “Ford trucks Boston”, you’d not only save a lot of money, but people performing that search are probably the ones who are actually looking for you.
3) Checking and changing often - but be careful not to wreck your good numbers: Because of all the variables that go into displaying your ad, it’s understood that you’ll want to do some testing and make changes. You need to tweak your ad copy for better clicks, add and subtract keywords to display with better frequency, raise and lower your bid to save money. Follow your metrics and continue to make those changes until you find your sweet spot, but be careful. If you edit too much and add the wrong keywords or price yourself out of the bidding, it may take a while to recover a spot you once held.
4) Landing pages matter: It should go without saying that if your landing page isn’t any good, the fact that you got someone to visit it doesn’t really matter. But because Google looks at it to determine your ad placement, you need to take an even harder look at it. Your landing page should be geared toward your customer, it should use keywords that are relevant to those that are associated with your ad. It should have a clear navigation to other sections of your site as well as other SEO-friendly things like page title, alt tags on images etc.  The url structure of your page should make sense too, so be cautious when using internal marketing codes in your url. Spending the extra time to get it right is worthwhile, especially if your commercial effort gets you organic search optimization.
5) Read “Winning results with Google Adwords” by Andrew Goodman: I bought the second edition and Google changed the rules again shortly thereafter. Most of what’s in the book is still valid though. A lot of what I’ve shared in this post is tempered by what I learned from Goodman. He’s a little long-winded in spots, but it’s worth the time if you’re planning on spending any serious money with Google.

Black liquor, for the uninitiated, is a byproduct in the creation of pulp from timber that will later be made into paper. This substance is captured used to power the mills that make the pulp. Because it is a byproduct of trees being torn to shreds, it is a 100% pure biofuel. (This is not to imply it is 100% environmentally friendly).  In 2004 Congress passed a bill giving a  tax credit to companies that add a percentage of plant-based fuel to the diesel they use to power their businesses.

Seizing an opportunity, paper companies began to add a small percentage of diesel fuel to the black liquor already powering their mills.  At very little cost, these companies began to save millions in tax deferment. The loophole remains open, but Canada and other papermaking countries have become more vocal in their complaints of government subsidies and unfair trade practices. Congress is having another look at the legislation and President Obama has even spoken on the need to amend the situation.

The black liquor issue has generated a lot of buzz among paper makers and has probably helped keep the industry afloat during recent economic hard times. Watching the metrics on our site, we could see the importance of the issue among our audience. Every story/blog/poll/etc. we ran on the topic was gobbled up.

My first thought was do something to capitalize on this. We took all of the coverage we could find in our archives and did a write up on the whole mess with links back to all of our old stories. Within a matter of days, we had quadrupled the traffic on the papermaking section of our site. This was another quick win, that reused existing material and generated a ton of traffic.

The next step is a bit more difficult – selling sponsorships around this content to monetize the effort. Our advertisers supply the paper industry worldwide. And even though the traffic is there, it may appear tainted since U.S. papermakers are the only ones benefiting.

So how do we do it? I’m open to suggestions.

It’s just not exciting any more. Six years ago, sure. I was eating it up. But now I want to do video and social networking and widgets. Unfortunately, there’s no denying it. Email works.

My colleague Arthur Cohen, director of audience development at RISI puts it this way,

“I get about at least 50 emails in my work inbox every morning. That’s less than some email stats indicate—75, or even 100. I bet your professional inbox is at least as cluttered. So what’s to love about this time sink? Nothing at all. But if I can craft a message that grabs you through that swamp and makes some big bucks for my company, I feel the love all right, you betcha. But wait—there’s more; if you’re good at your craft, it’s the best ROI in town. Come to think of it, what’s not to love?“

Arthur’s right of course. The last marketing campaign I ran included the following:

Flash Banners (x2) : 19,169 impressions : 0.16% CTR*
Video Banner : 14,248 impressions :  0.20% CTR
Google Ads : 364,934 : 0.03% CTR

email: 28,351 sent : 5,104 opens : 1,103 unique clicks : 21.61% CTR**

*Click through rate based on clicks/impressions. **Click through rate based on clicks/opens. I generally go by opens rather than sent because it’s a more equatable to a page impression.

This was a rush campaign that was put together in a couple of days and only ran for 2 weeks, so the overall results clearly aren’t stellar. But you can’t sneeze at the email number.

Another more long-term campaign I’m running has seen similar results. I’m promoting free subscriptions to the digital edition of my company’s magazine. The Google and banner ads slowly trickle in subscriptions. The print ads are harder to quantify, but at least they’re good for branding. Again, the email blasts are killing. Every time I send one out, I get another thousand subscriptions.

Over time, I will have exhausted my lists and won’t be able to get such high numbers with each blast, but it’s certainly done well the last five times.

My last recent example is an enewsletter we use to promote content on our site. We’ve got  a pretty good list established for this weekly newsletter and we have a very strong open rate. Over the last several months, we’ve seen this email become the single biggest traffic driver on our site. It’s great, whatever we feature seems to become the hot item on our site.

Yes, I’m resigned to using email until it stops working, but I don’t have to like it.

I don’t know about you, but I almost never log out of a web site. Sure, if it’s my bank or something else really sacred, but otherwise, I just navigate away or close the browser tab.

Seriously, does anyone log out?

Apparently a bunch of people who use my company’s subscription content site do.

I was casually browsing our sites popular pages in Omniture a few weeks ago and was surprised by how many page views the log out page was getting. It’s a simple page, with nothing on it:

Log out page - Before

So I figured we should slap an ad tag on there and see what happened. I had a good feeling the ad would work well there because: a) I could make it huge. b) It was going to pretty much be the only thing on the page. c) It would appear when people were finished with our site, a seemingly perfect time to catch them between tasks.

Log out page - after (ad is a mock up for illustration purposes)

So far, it seems to have worked! It’s still early, but the ads delivered on this page are outperforming display ads everywhere else on our site.

It pays to watch metrics trends. This was an easy win that took practically no time or resources to pull off. Do you have a log-out page, just sitting there doing nothing?

Exasperated publishers, who must continually lay off staff and reduce their book size, are grasping at  straws like micropayments for web site content and whizbang digital editions of print products. These efforts aren’t entirely without merit. The whizbang digital version of my own company’s magazine has attracted many subscribers and racked up tons of page views over the last few months. Unfortunately, it has not brought in much additional revenue and will not be the future of our business.

The problem in the publishing world isn’t a lack of new product ideas. The problem is compartmentalization of existing products. Instead of using the strengths of each publication to support the others, most publishers look at their print publications and their web sites as  separate entities. While content is often shared (usually published first in print, then added to the web), it is generally accepted that each medium will have its own readership, advertisers and even staff.

Current print to online publishing model

The strategy seems to be that whoever we can’t reach with our print product, we’ll get with our web site. It’s true. There’s generally only a small amount of overlap between print and online audiences. But is that because people who read print don’t go online? Or is it because there’s little point in reading both versions when the content is the same in both places?

My goal is to break this self-fulfilling prophecy and instead, take advantage of both vehicles to not only tell our stories but to develop them as well. People read print and online differently, online is for short bursts of information, interaction, animation and sharing with friends. Print is for ponderous, in-depth elaboration and glossy, tactile photo spreads. People enjoy both experiences and use both in their daily lives. They will use both versions of your publication provided they have reason to.

Combined use of both mediums to one end

For example, imagine the development of a typical feature story in a magazine. Research and data are collected. Experts are interviewed. Photos are taken. Over the course of several days or weeks, the information is refined and formed into a package that can be published in a future edition.  Later that finished piece is published on the corresponding web site. Then the whole cycle starts again. Little is done to promote the upcoming piece, there’s just a hope that people who like the magazine’s content will continue to like it and continue to purchase the book/visit the web site and read it.

Now imagine developing the same feature using the strengths of each medium.

While collecting research and data, the writer creates a blog entry describing the upcoming feature to be published in the magazine. She writes about anticipated conclusions and asks advice on people to interview. She adds a poll to find out more about what her audience thinks and to enhance her data. She asks her readers to submit any photos or video that could help her tell the story.

Later in the process, the writer posts a rough draft of the story online. The draft helps give readers an idea of what’s coming in the print product and invites them to share their opinions. These opinions can be added to the magazine story as quotes or as a sidebar of readers’ thoughts. When the final story publishes in print this time, it is more nuanced. It has reader interest baked in and has given online readers a reason to pick up the print version.

The final story will eventually find it’s way online again, accompanied by all of the photos and other material that wouldn’t fit in the printed piece. But that’s not the end of the cycle. While developing this story, the author had an idea for a related story. In the printed piece, she included a sidebar sharing the idea with readers and asking them to share their opinions on the idea by reading her next blog entry. This is not a generic refer to visit the web site. It’s a calculated call to action that will not only help the author develop more content, but helps make the audience feel a part of the story.

Ultimately, these practices can help an audience find value in both products by making them a partner in the creative process, rather than a mere observer.

I became intrigued by this idea while working with Tim Windsor at The Sun.  We were building bthesite.com – a blog that aspires to be the starting point of Baltimore’s daily conversation.  I’m now instituting this approach at RISI, I’ll keep this blog updated with our progress.