Written By: Sujan Patel On September 20th, 2007 | No Comments
Pay per click advertising is a necessary evil, even for the most experienced search engine optimization professionals. From geo-targeted to advanced site targeting, paid search campaigns are becoming increasingly important to the success of marketers everywhere. Running a successful campaign is not enough. Running a successful campaign while eliminating useless keywords and pricing issues is more important now than ever.
Quality Score
Proprietary scoring systems like Google’s quality score cause headaches for many advertisers. Expressing your concerns with Google (or others) directly is a great way to get some one on one time on how to make the most of your paid search campaigns.
Turn Off Content Matching
If you’re on AdWords, be sure that you have opted not to use content matching. It tends to be used primarily for branding, and any clicks you do generate tend to cost a bit while also serving as unproductive traffic.
Use Position Preferences
If you’re trying to test out a campaign without breaking the bank, be sure to use the position preferences to your advantage. Find out what it’s like to be the fourth advertiser down in your market versus being at the top. You will not only save some money, but you may be able to reflect back on the information and decide which keywords and phrases performed best for you.
Don’t Rule Out Secondary Engines
Secondary engines like MIVA and ABCSearch are both great examples of how you can generate cost effective listings (usually $0.05 to $0.10 per click). Use these services to test out larger and more natural search terms that would otherwise break your bank on Google, Yahoo or MSN.
Have Quality Analytics in Place
While this should go without saying - it needs to be said. Quality web analytics, especially those that will interface with systems like Google AdWords, are key. Analytical reports and data will help you to see where people are coming from, what they’re interested in, etc. More importantly, if you can begin to identify keywords that aren’t producing results - you can remove them in pure confidence.
Written By: Sujan Patel On September 13th, 2007 | No Comments
Recently, Google released a feature in the Google AdWords members area that allows you to “optimize campaigns”. While search engine marketing firms claim to have been optimizing paid campaigns for years now - Google’s stepping up and providing the service to advertisers at no cost.
Of course, if you optimize your AdWords campaigns - you’ll end up spending more money, so Google’s happy to help out there.
Just what does this new optimization tool allow you to do though?
Optimizing your Google AdWords campaigns allows you as an advertiser to more easily reach your goals. Whether you’re out to improve your ROI, increase you click through rate - or simply get more clicks - Google is providing a seven step process for you to use in your AdWords campaigns.
Furthermore, the Campaign Optimizer tool makes proactive suggestions such as changing your daily budget, adding new keywords, changing current keywords, configuring matching options, altering the max CPC and finally revising your actual ads. All of these options could apply and help you out, but in some cases - they just don’t make sense.
Remember too, the Google AdWords Campaign Optimizer is a free tool that is being made available to you by Google. Taken with a grain of salt, these suggestions may do little more than help you burn through your allocated ad spend.
Finally, please consider Google’s recommendations on using these tools. On their site and in their help files, they offer the following information:
You can use the Campaign Optimizer as often as you wish. However, to receive an optimal proposal for your campaign, we recommend using it no more than once every two weeks. This allows the Campaign Optimizer to draw upon two full weeks of your campaign performance.
Written By: Sujan Patel On June 7th, 2007 | 3 Comments
To run a comprehensive search marketing program, you will need to use both organic search and pay per click advertising. Before investing heavily in either area, I’d like to show you how you can save time, money and effort by allowing these services to compliment one another.
Tip #1 — Record & Review Web Analytics Regularly
Run, don’t walk to get some analytical reports that record data on your site visitors. You will need to use your web analytics tool to locate the following data:
ï What pages convert the best?
ï What is the most common path through your web site?
ï How are visitors searching for you now?
ï What are your average conversion rates?
(There is other data that will prove to be helpful, but the above represent the standards that apply to all sites and all markets.)
Once you have access to this data, you need to make it a point to record it and review it on a regular basis. Doing so will open your eyes to critical trends in your visitor behavior.
Armed with this information, you can then monitor the effectiveness of future tests in PPC spending (like different keyword targets, ad groups and landing pages) while also providing insight to how successful your search engine optimization is performing.
Tip #2 — Smart Execution Requires Patience
Many of our clients come to us wanting to see an overnight success, but the truth is that results take time to develop. While we may stumble upon a needle in a haystack overnight from time to time — there is a wealth of work and effort that goes into each successful marketing plan.
In order to evaluate success with your SEO and PPC efforts, you must test a large enough sample of users and time ranges.
Never consider a PPC campaign a success by reviewing less than 1,000 visitors. Doing so will skew your data, and leave you susceptible to many potential oversights — including the following which tend to be the most common:
Time of Day
Users act differently during business hours than they will at night. Likewise, search based traffic on the weekend is much different in origin than during the week for some markets.
Origin of Traffic
Google AdWords by default can send you traffic from search based pages as well as from content-matched third party sites. The patterns that develop between each source of the referral are incredibly different.
Changes in Ad Copy
Subtle changes in your ad copy or the placement of the ad on a page will many times dictate how your users act and react once they arrive at your site.
…in all of these cases, sampling a small audience will result in data that provides a false sense of security for you. If your test only lasted through business hours on one day — we would strongly advise you to activate that ad full time on a much more conservative level. You can’t expect to set the ad spend through the roof and just let the ad run… because you could be wasting your money quickly and end up with nothing to show.
Tip #3 — Use PPC Success to Dictate SEO Goals
Once you have identified some strong areas of performance and conversion for your pay per click efforts, we recommend revising your organic search efforts accordingly. For example, you may find a dozen keywords that are converting into sales on your site like crazy — but you also know that PPC is the only vehicle you have to reach those potential customers.
Well, change things up! The beauty of SEO is that you are able to make changes, adapt your keyword targeting and test a number of items without ever spending more than your own time.
The end goal of this exercise is to rank well for the terms that you were once paying for. Once you can earn your way to the top, you can then refocus your ad spend and approach other markets.
Tip #4 – Scalability is Key!
The final tip we would like to offer up is the importance to keep things scalable. For many of our clients, successful search marketing campaigns result in a big time commitment on their end. Be sure that you have the manpower to accommodate more calls, emails and leads through your site.
Having a systematic approach in place will allow you to quickly get things done and continue to grow your business out using the engines to your advantage.
Conclusion
When you pay for traffic, you always feel more committed to the end goal of improving your ability to generate business online. Do not allow yourself to become complacent with your progress. The most successful efforts exist when you revise data regularly, adapt to your visitors needs, and minimize the amount of work that your visitors need to take before closing the process.
Written By: Sujan Patel On April 6th, 2007 | 2 Comments
Improving conversion on your pay per click campaign is more or less trial and error. The following are often overlooked tips that will help increase conversion for your pay per click campaign:
1. Competition
Look at your competitor’s ads and landing page, then compare it to your own. Notice anything different? By studying your competitors, you learn two things: what you are doing wrong and what you can do to stand out.
2. Relevancy
Use the right keywords. A lot of websites forget that the keywords that they are using might not be the keywords actually used by potential customers. Pay a professional to do keyword research, or do it yourself, but this is the most important step. You can have the best ad and most optimized landing page, however if you go after the wrong keywords then your ads aren’t going to convert. You don’t go to a shoe store to buy groceries and neither do your potential customers. Remember, there’s a reason why they are called Keywords.
3. Simplicity
Make your ad simple and your landing page user friendly. Do not pack your ads with all sorts of information, only have information that is going to compel searchers to click on your ad. Getting visitors to your site is only half the battle, now to make the sale. You turned searchers into visitors and now turn the visitors into customers/users. Use pictures and text on the landing page to describe your product or service. Be simple and focus on the conversion.
4. Target Audience
Which cities are most of your customers coming from? What time of the day do your ads perform best? When and where are your ads converting the least? These are questions you should be asking yourself. More and more search engines are offering geo targeting and day parting. Target your ads to regions that the majority of your customers are located. If there are certain hours of the day where your ads perform better, then use day parting. For example, a lot of people move to Florida when they retire and older people are generally up earlier. Therefore, if I’m selling wheelchairs I would geo target the Florida region and increase my spending during the earlier hours of day (also decrease spending during the later hours). This will increase your conversion rate and lower costs as well.
5. Call to Action
This is the last part of the sale, the call to action. Whether your action is buying a product/service or having the customer contact you via email/phone, it is important that this call to action stands out and is in clear view. Bolding and using distinct colors can help your call to action stand out. Have the call to action above the fold. Do not do make the visitor have to figure out how to contact you.
6. Test
Don’t just make changes and walk away. Track it and test it. Many people will read tips like these, make the changes recommended and walk away thinking there conversion is going to increase just because they followed a few suggestions. Wrong! If only it was that easy. Test different changes you make to your campaign. For example, if you’re putting your phone number on your text ad, then make that one change and wait, while carefully watching your analytics, to see if it improves your conversion. If it does, great…continue on with more improvements. If your conversion doesn’t increase, don’t worry, because what does well for some niches might not work for you niche.
Example: circuitcity.com
Keyword: Printer
This is the perfect example of what not to do.
Let’s say I was looking for a printer. I would search using the keyword “printer”. I scan the page and I see “Printers at Circuit City”, I know and trust Circuit City so I read the rest of the ad “Circuit City - Official Site Free Shipping on Orders $24 and Up”. Okay, that’s cool, if I buy a printer from here I’ll probably get free shipping so click on the ad. Good job Circuit City (so far).
I land on this page. I look at the site for about .5 milliseconds and I am lost. I did not find printers after another quick scan. Where oh where are the printers? I Ctrl + F the site and finally find printers down on towards the lower part of the page.
Now this is not what you want to do. I was searching for a printer and I liked Circuit City’s ad, so I clicked on it with hopes of finding a printer, but no…I landed on this page. This page is so cluttered that I lost interest immediately and they paid for a visitor, but lost the customer. I noticed HP.com also makes this mistake. So guys, fire your internet marketing company and give me a call. I’ll even do it for free.
