Newbie Tip: The joys of incremental change.
- SEO |
Hi Gang,
I know that there are a lot of folks out there with a lot more experience than me (especially since I'm just starting out), but I just wanted to share a brief story that will hopefully save you a little grief.
We all know that we are supposed to make incremental changes and test, test, test... but there are times, especially shortly after your first pages go live and you start receiving your first real feedback that you realize there are a lot of things that you could do differently.
I put up a fairly basic page with what I thought was a pretty exciting offer, and drove traffic with adwords. It wasn't pretty, but it was working, and from the adwords feedback (specifically quality score and what keywords were active at my bid level) I changed stuff.
Lots of stuff.
I made the texted prettier and formatted it better. I added text to include more of the keywords I wanted to score well on, I added tables, I added a "tell a friend" button. I also used googles "ad analyzer" to get googles suggestions for more keywords, and added a slew of key words I never thought of.
For some reason after all these changes my impressions for the ad plummetted from nearly 9000 per day to barely 1000.
Since the first version looked so horrible, I never saved it, and now I feel like an idiot and have to try to peel off specific elements of those changes to figure out why I'm not getting impressions.
So, please benefit from my lessons:
- Always back up the old version of your files before a change.
- Always change 1 thing at a time.
The time you save may be your own!
- PsiCat
I know that there are a lot of folks out there with a lot more experience than me (especially since I'm just starting out), but I just wanted to share a brief story that will hopefully save you a little grief.
We all know that we are supposed to make incremental changes and test, test, test... but there are times, especially shortly after your first pages go live and you start receiving your first real feedback that you realize there are a lot of things that you could do differently.
I put up a fairly basic page with what I thought was a pretty exciting offer, and drove traffic with adwords. It wasn't pretty, but it was working, and from the adwords feedback (specifically quality score and what keywords were active at my bid level) I changed stuff.
Lots of stuff.
I made the texted prettier and formatted it better. I added text to include more of the keywords I wanted to score well on, I added tables, I added a "tell a friend" button. I also used googles "ad analyzer" to get googles suggestions for more keywords, and added a slew of key words I never thought of.
For some reason after all these changes my impressions for the ad plummetted from nearly 9000 per day to barely 1000.
Since the first version looked so horrible, I never saved it, and now I feel like an idiot and have to try to peel off specific elements of those changes to figure out why I'm not getting impressions.
So, please benefit from my lessons:
- Always back up the old version of your files before a change.
- Always change 1 thing at a time.
The time you save may be your own!
- PsiCat