The other day when I logged into my Adwords account I noticed one of those fun alert boxes at the top, advising me that Adwords had a new feature.

Upon further inspection, it appears that Google has finally decided to let people see what sort of search volumes each keyword is getting. This is a great new source of data for internet marketers, who have previously been relying on all sorts of other sources which are then extrapolated to guesstimate total search volume.

For instance, to carry on from my last keyword research post, I’ll use “affiliate marketing” as the keyword again. Previously, if I wanted to research this term I would have gone to the free tool at WordTracker, and punched it in. They give a result of 546 people per day, which is something like 16,000 a month. Now this is only a small percentage of the real searches, so you always need to do some sort of rough extrapolation to figure out where the market was at. I read it was 1% somewhere, so if you multiply by 100 you get 1.6 million searches.

Well, what does Google data say? Google says that approximately 1 million people search for that term every month. So if you throw in Yahoo and Live/MSN the 1.6 million figure is probably in the ball park. Still, isn’t it nice of the big G to give us a sort of semi-firm approximately averaged number for our research?

The other day I decided to try promoting a new affiliate product, as I hadn’t done anything new that way in a while. So I picked one from CPA Empire, which had a good network EPC (Earnings per click), and paid per lead. I’ve had good success with lead based affiliate programs in the past. I like the fact that there’s a very low level of commitment required of the customer  - they don’t have to make a purchase decision right then and there, and I still get paid!

Initially, I went to Google, because Google has traditionally been a great place to get a campaign up and running in a jiffy. Unfortunately, with affiliate marketing you don’t always have control over the landing page. I went to the landing page to check it out and it was one of these one page wonders. It is a very simple page, nothing wrong with it from a user’s perspective; however Google’s crawler clearly thought it was lacking. So only 3 of the 40 keywords I wanted went live, and only after I put my minimum bid up to $1.00 / click. When I looked into it further with Google’s tools they told me the landing page sucked. Uh-huh. Already knew that.

So anyways, I let the thing run, and managed to get one lead that day. Unfortunately I spent nearly twice as much on Adwords as the value of the lead. The extremely interesting thing was that I actually got clicks on keywords that were classified by Google as Inactive. Has anyone else seen this? Is it some sort of fraud, or is Google actually letting me get those clicks for some reason? I thought that was extremely interesting.

So I recognized this wasn’t going anywhere, so I thought for a second, then realized if the landing page was the problem, from Google’s perspective, then maybe I should try it out on a different engine that didn’t care nearly as much as Google does about these things. So I fired up my trusty 7Search account and plugged in basically all the same information as went into my Google campaign, and turned it loose.

The immediate difference: I was paying approximately 14 cents per click for second and third place positions on 7Search, whereas I was paying $1.00 per click on Google just to get active. I knew from the start that at least I wouldn’t lose my shirt if nothing much happened, 14 cents a click is a lot more forgiving than $1.00.

So that has now run for about 3 days on 7Search, nothing spectacular, but I have got 97 clicks so far, at a total cost of $14. Out of that traffic, I’ve managed to generate two leads, at $10 a piece. So I’m actually showing a very modest profit. That’s encouraging. Better than a loss, but still nothing to throw a party for. Now I’ve got to figure out how to grow that so it does that regularly and consistently.

Anyways, I guess the lesson of the day is that you need to look at the landing page you’ve got and then go from there; if it doesn’t have much text on it, chances are strong Google isn’t going to like it, and you might want to try it on a different engine first.

I was over at AskHowie.com and found a clip where he was talking about finding the correct triggers for your product. He gave an example of selling a weight loss product for kids. What are the triggers that would prompt a concerned parent to search for such a product? It could have been a doctor’s visit, a comment from another parent, a comment from the kid themself, or any number of other things.

By understanding the different events that would trigger a motivated buyer to start searching for your product, you can market to them much better. A “triggered” searcher is one who emotionally is ready to buy, right now. All you need to do is get your product in front of them and clinch the deal with some compelling copy that plays on that trigger.

Take the weight loss example again; if you identified a common trigger being a doctor’s visit, and you created an ad that was titled or included “Fed Up With Doctor’s Visits?” or something of the like; your searcher is more likely to identify with that ad because of their recent experience. Immediately they feel a connection with your ad because you’ve identified with their experience. They get the impression you understand what they’re going through.

Taking this beyond the ad, if you can exploit these triggers in the sales letter itself you can take this to a much higher level. Suppose a concerned parent got to your site by searching for “weight loss for kids,” and when they get there, they immediately see a leading statement related to doctor’s visits. Do you think they’re more likely to at least read the whole sales letter?

If you can get inside your target market’s minds, you will have a far higher success rate than simply taking the “if we market it they will come” approach.

PS: today I randomly discovered that 138 people per day search for the keyword phrase “excuses for being absent from work” and there are no Adwords campaigns running! I wonder if there’s potential here for a work from home product… then again perhaps its a bomb? Let me know if you try it out…