If you’ve been listening to us preach the AdWords gospel, by now you know that you should be using conversion tracking and Google Analytics to learn more about works and what doesn’t on your web site. But what if you’re just getting started and none of your AdWords are doing the trick? What then? Where to start?

First, take off your shoes. (Not literally!) But it is time to start thinking like your customers and walking in their shoes. One word of caution: This may be doubly tricky if you’re a downtown retailer, because it may take time to get used to thinking about the difference between your online customers and the ones that stroll in the store.

How are your online and walk-in customers different? Lets put on the shoes of a window shopper for a moment to find out. Lets pretend you’re hanging out with some friends for a long lunch and checking out a few shops downtown. You run across a darling hand-bag that’ll go perfectly with half your wardrobe. Do you run around the rest of downtown to see if you’ve got the best price? (Remember, you’re on a long lunch…) Or, when your friend elbows you and gives you the nudge, do you just grab it on the spur of the moment? And indulge in a bit of retail therapy?

How is this story different if you’re shopping for a purse online? Might you search first for a favorite brand? If the brand is even moderately popular, chances are there are lots of ads to choose from. How would you decide?

Scanning the ads, which look interesting? Free shipping might catch your eye; those ads are pretty popular. Did you search for a particular color? Chances are some of the ads will be “broad match”, and won’t reflect that you mentioned a color. Chances are you’ll skip over these to an ad that is clearly a closer match for what you’re looking for.

So now you’ve clicked on an ad, and get to the website. But wait - you’re on the home page? What happened to the red bag? Back to the search results… Now you want to see an interior shot of the bag so you’ll know if it has the right kind of pockets, or if the fabric texture is exactly what you were looking for. No close-up shot? Time to move on. Are the shipping costs disclosed? You might not want to bother signing up and putting it in your cart to find out. Next…

By now, you get the idea. Online shoppers are comparatively ruthless. If you’ve got a lot of competition online, running a pay per click ad simply isn’t enough. You must have a good price and competitive shipping. You need to write a compelling ad, target it well, and send it to the right page. You need to have good photography (and multiple pics), a shopping cart that’s not problematic, and a few other things… and then you might actually wind up with the sale.

Whew! There must be an easier way, right? Well, sort of. Most of that stuff you’re going to need to do regardless, but you can improve your odds by going where there is less competition. And frankly, that’s the place to start if you’re struggling to get AdWords off the ground. We’ll call this “guerrilla AdWords marketing”, and here are a few tips to get started.

• Find the products that aren’t already competitive and market those. Though I realize changing your inventory is easier said than done - understanding that your online competition is different is key. Some products that do really well in your store may simply not be candidates for AdWords because of this different competitive landscape. In other words, it may not be practical to change your inventory, but understand that it’s quite possible not everything you sell belongs online.
• Find words and phrases that describe what you’re selling that others aren’t using. Sometimes when you start poking around, you’ll discover your competitors bid on all the obvious terms and ONLY the obvious terms. That’s a happy day, because that means you have “everything else”, known in the biz as “the long tail”. The long tail is a term that describes the WIDE variety of lower frequency searches for any given item. If you’re a small retail businesses, you probably moved onto the web to expand the reach of your business. Chances are, you don’t need to sell huge volumes of any particular item, you just need to keep inventory moving. It’s quite possible the long-tail could do a very nice job of that for you - by creating low volume sales on a wide variety of items.

And now for the million dollar question - how do you find the stuff that’s not obvious? As Apple would say “think different”. Yes, that’s a bit of a trick, and a great topic for Guerilla Google AdWords Marketing, Part 2. Stay tuned!