Chapter Thirteen

The “Peel Off Strategy”

By Ben Hart

This brings up one of my favorite strategies of all.

I call it “The Peel Off Strategy.”

When I start an ad campaign using Google AdWords, it’s always too general.  Like everyone else, I put too many different kinds of keywords under one ad. Then what I find is that maybe 5% of the keywords are really generating any traffic.

“What’s the problem?” I wonder.

I look at my huge list of list of keywords and phrases under one ad, or a few ads.

I then create families of related keywords.  I do all this on an Excel spread sheet.  This makes moving words around and grouping families of words together much easier.

So then let’s say I find I have six separate families of keywords and phrases.

I will then create new ads that more exactly line up with each separate family of keywords.  I will create headlines for the ads that include the main keyword.

I will create separate landing pages for each new ad – landing pages that line up with the new ads.  I then create new free offers – my “ethical bribes,” as I call them – that also line up exactly with the keywords that were not working before.

The new “ethical bribe” free offer might actually be the same eBook – just with a slightly different title – again, just a little “repositioning” can make all the difference.

Or it might be a chapter from one of my books that I reformat into a “White Paper.”

Offering “white papers” as your free-gift incentive to get people to fill out your sign-up form work almost as well as full-blown books – better (actually much better) if the “white paper” is exactly on the subject the searcher is looking for with the keywords in the title of the “white paper.”

That’s how you get a sign-up rate of 40% or more on your op-in form instead of the more usual 10-15% for your free offer.

If you can triple your sign-up rate on your landing page by slightly changing your free offer, you have just tripled the profitability of your business.

Why?

Because you have kept your adverting cost constant, while tripling the number of leads you’re getting.  In fact, more likely you have also cut your advertising cost because the more specific your keyword phrase, the cheaper it is.

Even a slight increase in your opt-in percentage can have geometric implications for your business?

Why?

Because every improvement you make is compounding.

Let’s say you have a product that has to do with helping people solve their problem with the IRS.

Some people will type IRS into the Engine. Others Internal Revenue Service.  Others will type in “tax problem.” 

You might need different ads and different landing pages for each of these ways of saying IRS or tax – with the name of one ebook or white paper referencing IRS, the other Internal Revenue Service the other “tax problem.”

That’s how exact the match must be to maximize your click-through-rate and your conversion rate (which in this case is your sign-up rate).

That’s why spending time on dominating every keyword and phrase – especially the slightly-off-the-beaten-track phrases (phrases no one else is focused on) can deliver such mega returns.

You want to play the AdWords game like Bobby Fisher plays chess.

So as you move along like this, with your new mindset, you might have many ads – each ad with just one small family of highly targeted keywords connected with the ad.  And you’ll have many landing pages, each corresponding to its own ad.

Same with your free offer (your “ethical bribe”).  It must match the keywords the searcher is typing into the engine.  Your keywords, ad, landing page and “ethical bribe” free offer must all line up as one seemless conversion on this one very narrow topic – the topic that is described by the keywords.

So yes, this is a lot of work.

You might have thousands of keyword combinations and dozens, even hundreds of ads.  Obviously, this is not something you can do overnight.

You start out with one ad and one landing page and one free offer.

Then you “peel off” the under-performing keywords, and create a new ad and a new landing page and a new free gift “ethical bribe” offer.

And you just keep doing that.  You keep fine-tuning.

So this certainly is not a the “set-it-and-forget-it” approach that Google encourages.

That’s how you win the AdWords game.

So yes, it’s true you want to come up with a big list of keywords that describe your product in all its manifestations and permutations.  But you almost certainly need to create different ads for your different families of keywords.

In my case, I have a different ad and landing page for the keyword “marketing plan” and “marketing tips.”  A different ad and landing page still for “marketing secrets” and yet another for “marketing strategies” and yet another for “marketing ideas” and still another ad and landing page for “how to market.”
 

People looking for “marketing ideas” might not be interested in “how to market” or “marketing strategies.”

Yes, these phrases might mean just about the same thing to you and me – but not necessarily to the person typing in the search term.  “Exact” matches in headlines are what gets a searcher’s attention.  And exact match instantly signals to the searcher that “this is exactly what I am looking for” – which is a whole lot better than “maybe this is what I’m looking for.”

The precision of your message-to-market-match is difference between success and failure on Google AdWords.

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