Embarking on a paid search campaign for your business is a great way of quickly generating sales and leads at an effective cost. You’re able to have (almost) complete control and visibility over what you spend, where you spend it, etc., but are there any other benefits to running a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign?
What a lot of advertisers may not realize is that PPC data can give you a huge amount of insight into your business and industry in general, and the more knowledge you have into your business, the better placed you will be to make decisions that can determine whether you succeed or fail.
Below are 5 things which PPC data can tell you about your business:
In my last post here at Search Engine Journal, I covered some points on how to effectively run an AdWords display campaign. In this post, I mentioned that even if you had the best display campaign setup possible, this traffic is still a lot less likely to convert versus search traffic and sometimes should be considered more as a branding exercise. Search can help you measure the impact of branding exercises with a surprising degree of accuracy.
One of the best indicators in today’s online landscape is the amount of brand searches a website receives on Google. To take advantage of this, simply create a brand-specific campaign within your AdWords account that records exactly how many brand searches are made each day. To ensure that your brand data is as accurate as possible, be sure to only use exact match, phrase match, and broad match modifier match types as these will ensure that no adverts within this campaign are triggered by generic searches.
By running a brand-specific search campaign, you’ll be able to quickly analyze daily search trends and determine whether particular brand marketing campaigns have resulted in an uplift in your brand searches on Google.
Have you done everything possible to ensure that the traffic you’re sending via PPC is highly targetted? Is your ad messaging accurate at describing your product/service? If the answer to both of these is yes and you’re still experiencing an extremely displeasing conversion rate, then the most likely cause of the poor performance is your website or landing page.
Paid search is a great way of identifying website issues, as the traffic you’re sending to the site via PPC should primarily be people that are extremely interested in your product/service.
Because of this, if you can’t convert PPC traffic, then you’re going to have a very hard time converting traffic from other marketing channels.
Your USP can be any feature of your business that makes you stand out from your competitors. Many online website owners will use USPs as a way of adding additional value to customers as an incentive to choose to deal with their business instead of a competitor, but the question is, what kind of USP will your audience respond to best? Well, you can use your PPC campaign to find out!
Test different advert variations against each other, highlighting different USPs in each ad. For example, you may be offering free delivery worldwide, but also have a “10% Off” sale running and be unsure what to highlight in the header of your website. To see which USP your audience likes best, highlight these points in one advert each, run these adverts against each other for a period of time (I’d recommend somewhere between a week and a month depending on volume), and then see which performs best in terms of CTR (Click-Through Rate) and conversion rate.
After this quick test has been completed, you’ll then have valuable information that can be used to dictate what content you highlight on your website, as well as other marketing campaigns. (More on optimising adwords ad text here, if you’re not familiar with the basics.)
There is a particular report under the Keywords tab within your AdWords report called a “Search Query” report (found by clicking the “Keyword details” button and then clicking “All”). This report gives you the ability to see exactly what users are typing into Google to trigger your PPC adverts.
You can use this data to gain insight into the most commonly used language and terminology by people who are looking for information on your product and/or services. Mimicking commonly used language and terminology onto your website could increase your website’s relevancy for users, and this can only be a good thing for your conversion rate!
Great article from Searchengineland.com about making sure you have complete coverage on any given SERP.
When marketers have scrutinized Google’s research on how organic and paid search results work together — the search giant concluded that nixing the paid ads would result in a 89% drop in clicks — it’s been clear there’s more to the story. What happens if your brand is the top organic result for the keyword? Surely the results would be different than if your organic result was on the second page?
“When we released the first paper, we had a lot of questions coming back, asking more more details around incrementality and under what situations can you expect different numbers?,” said David Chan, Google’s lead researcher for this study.
So, Chan set out to research more subtleties in the interaction between organic results and paid search ads, and today released new results.
The 89% number makes more sense now that the new results show that paid search ads appear without an accompanying organic search result on the page 81% of the time, on average. Only 9% of the time does a search ad show with an organic result in the top rank. An organic result appears in ranks 2 to 4 5% of the time, and in lower ranks (below 5), about 4% of the time.
Though the researchers didn’t specifically look at branded versus generic terms, Chan said,the ranking is a good proxy, in certain cases, for branded versus generic terms. In other words, the brand’s organic result is likely to appear higher, if it’s a branded term.
Surprisingly, even when brands’ organic terms are ranked number one, they get 50% more clicks, on average, when there’s an accompanying paid search ad.
“It is a very surprising result, and, I think in some ways, it runs counter to what people would think but the data speaks for itself,” said Chan.
The study found that 82% of ad clicks are incremental when the associated organic result is ranked between 2 and 4, and 96% of clicks are incremental when the brand’s organic result was 5 or below.
If you have spent any time on my website reading about PPC or pay per click marketing and would like to try your hand at running your own campaign, shoot me an email, and I will give the first 30 people a $100 Google AdWords credit. You can use this credit to run your own PPC campaign online.
The reason that I am offering this to you is because most business start with attempting to run campaigns on their own before every contacting me about doing it for them. It’s only after many failed attempts that I receive a call asking for help, or even to take over their accounts.
Setup of an AdWords campaign is so simple on the surface, but once you get into the program and start building out all your creative, choosing keywords, and destination pages…most people decide to hire a professional.
Again, no strings attached $100 credit for any new (have not attempted AdWords before) account. My only request is that you have a five minute conversation with me about your business.
Call me at 720.427.3707 or email me at Chris@onlinemarketingdenver.net
I suppose I need to take my hat off to Google once again. Don’t get me wrong, I love capitalism, but Google has got the market cornered in so many ways. We, as people, love things for free. Once something has been given away for so long that it becomes a part of our daily life and then a small price is all the sudden associated with it, shock comes over people. This one shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, Google has paid it forward in so many of the services they provide for so long, it’s time to figure out how to monetize it.
Google’s Local Extensions in AdWords have been a favorite paid advertising technique for small business owners since it was released in 2009. With Local Extensions, business owners are able to attach relevant business information (like their address, phone number and a link to directions) directly to their ad, making it easier for searchers to take action after seeing the business appear in the search results. During this past holiday weekend it was announced that Google would be making a small change to the system. Business owners will now be charged when a user clicks on the directions link in their ad, the same way they’re charged when a user clicks on their headline or on their phone number.
Search Engine Watch posted a great article about getting back in front of customers. Remarketing is a product that I think every business should consider doing.
Google recently mentioned that “97% of new visitors do not convert the first time they arrive at your site.” While you never get a second chance to make a first impression, you have limitless opportunities to make that critical second impression, thanks to remarketing in AdWords.
Google AdWords’ robust remarketing feature can enhance and expand your PPC campaign. This article will focus on seven high-level strategies that you can employ to bring users back to your website using remarketing after they’ve made their initial visit.
Remarketing: Definition & Basics
When someone visits your website, you can drop a tracking cookie onto their computer. Later, when that individual is viewing other websites that utilize Google AdSense, you can display your PPC ad in front of that user again via the Google AdWords Display Network (GDN).
The objective of this type of targeting is to encourage the user to return to your website – and hopefully convert!
Target Segment Strategies
Remarketing is extremely flexible and you can get tremendously precise with your targeting. You can target users who visit specific pages on your website.
For example, consider this list of targeting strategies:
Search marketing objectives may vary, but all search marketers share a common goal: top placements on page 1 of search engine results.
Unlike paid search, which lets advertisers simply buy top position, search engine optimization (SEO) earns marketers premium page rank through careful website optimization on select keywords. Because SEO can take days or even months to increase natural page rank, marketers must be more selective and deliberate in choosing which keywords to optimize.
Findings from Optify suggest one way for marketers to prioritize SEO efforts is by considering the value of each keyword in Google AdWords, then using the average CPC to determine potential organic listing clickthrough rate.
The study looked at terms that were both expensive (keyword phrases costing more than $1.50 per click) and cheap (phrases with CPCs less than $0.25) for Google AdWords advertisers to determine whether paid search CPC had an impact on organic listing clickthrough rate.
For terms that had low paid-search prices, the organic clickthrough rate for page 1 placement on Google was 87.5%, compared to only 37.3% for organic results tied to more expensive keywords.
In fact, the average rank 1 clickthrough rate for organic results tied to cheaper terms was 31.8%, almost double the 17.1% clickthrough rate at rank 1 for natural results tied to more expensive paid search CPCs.
Crunchbase: Optify is a company (Software) based out of Seattle, WA, founded in 2008. →
This is a good article about knowing the benefits of PPC advertising with Adwords. If you have chosen to do your own campaign, this might be something helpful. If you have tried to run your own campaign with minimal results…Call ME. I can show you like business that I run, and we can use it as a yard stick for comparison.
When you have a traditional business, what would you do to increase your brand’s profile? Advertise!
Advertising online can be extremely complicated, or can be kept extremely simple. The best part about internet is that advertising efforts immediately can be measured. You can immediately track how your advertising dollars are converting. In traditional advertising this a lot harder.
Google vs Other Online Advertising Platforms
Google is the largest advertising company in the world, with merely $20 billion annual sales. There are other players big and small in this market too. Bing, Yahoo Ads Network, Facebook and other all aim for a piece of the same pie. But if you cant do it with Google, then you definitely cant do with the others. Google first then the rest.
What is Google?
Google one of the most popular search engines has be come the most intensive online advertising network in the world. On one side Adwords, where you can place ads, and on the other side Adsense, the network that publishes all the advertisements placed with Adwords.
Adwords is one of the most sophisticated advertising systems in the world. You can set up an account within minutes and you can have a campaign up and running within 15 minutes. But is your advertising campaign effective? You need some tools to have an effective campaign.
This a a good article from Search Engine Land about how social is affecting search and speaks to how Google is pushing the social aspects in SERPs.
The recommendations of our friends and colleagues have always been one of the most influential drivers of sales. The same is true online. Consider the research:
- When asked what sources “influence your decision to use or not use a particular company, brand or product,” 71 percent claim reviews from family members or friends exert a “great deal” or “fair amount” of influence. (Harris Interactive, June 2010).
- Ninety percent of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know; 70 percent trust opinions of unknown users. (Econsultancy, July 2009).
- Fifty-three percent of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or products in their tweets, with 48 percent of them delivering on their intention to buy the product. (ROI Research for Performance, June 2010).
We all have limited time. Relationships are a way to help us quickly figure out what is most relevant and trustworthy. Our friends and the online community are helping us make decisions.
Just as you’re more likely to buy from a trusted merchant, you’re also more likely to click on an ad from an advertiser you like or your friends like.
Google took their first step toward monetizing relationships with the addition of the +1 box on text ads:
This is a natural evolution of AdWords. But, it’s only the tip of the iceberg of how social media will impact paid search advertising.
Google is starting to monetize not just what you do, but who you are.
