This is a great article from Search engine Land about a topic of conversation I have with customers daily. A Must read if you are running your own PPC campaign.
When it comes to AdWords quality score, everyone knows from best practices that increasing this magic number is not only beneficial for rankings, but could lead to significant savings as well. But just how much savings would that be? And would it be worth dedicating your efforts to increasing it, or would it be more worthwhile to invest in other aspects of your account?
Ideally, you’ll want your keywords to have a quality score of 7 or higher, so anything with a score of 6 or below would be considered low. Find out what percentage of your keywords have a score of 7 or higher and which have a score of 6 or lower. Then, visualize this information in a pie chart where 7 or higher is “relevant” and 6 or lower is “irrelevant.”
Continue creating this chart on a regular basis to see whether you’re becoming more or less relevant. It’s a great way of visualizing the changes in your account and really simplifies the concept of quality score in a “black or white” kind of way.
Understanding whether you’re relevant is great. But even greater is finding out how much your “irrelevance” is actually costing you. I absolutely love this chart from ClickEquations, where you can see the impact of quality score on your Cost Per Click:
You’ll notice that at a quality score of 7, there is neither a discount nor a penalty. Discounts start above 7 and penalties, or CPC increases, start at 6 and below.
Notice the dramatic difference in increase between QS 4 (75 percent) and QS 3 (133.3 percent). Or even more dramatic, the increase from QS 2 (250 percent) to QS 1 (600 percent).
So what we’re seeing here is that you would get the highest impact from focusing on increasing the quality scores of 6 or below. Please note that this doesn’t mean you should ignore anything above 7. But you should start by getting those low quality scores to a healthy level first, so that at the very least you aren’t being penalized.
Here’s a list of 6 tips that could help you optimize and increase your quality score:
So, with these things in mind, is your quality score costing or saving you money? Do you actively work on improving it, or are you getting more value from other aspects of your account? Share your thoughts and comments below.
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!
Microsoft adCenter came to being in the summer of 2006. Generally speaking the advertising platform was greeted with open arms, but there were a few areas that were lacking.
One specific area of concern was how adCenter handled PPC ad rotation. There were no options, just a default “optimized” setting that displayed the ad with higher CTR more frequently.
Thanks to AdWords, savvy PPC advertisers already knew the benefits of being able to rotate ads evenly in order conduct genuine A/B tests for ad copy and to test KPIs other than CTR. Over the past six years there has been an overwhelming chorus of dissent towards adCenter for the lack of an ad rotation feature.
Finally, those voices have been heard. Even ad rotation is here!
The ad rotation feature is only available in the web interface or through version 8 of the adCenter API. That being said, it functions much as you would expect. At the ad group level, you have two options:
GitHub: Software description: a software to manage books in the computer (C#). →
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.
For many years, I’ve been participating in sessions/panels where I comment on PPC ad copy volunteered by an audience. As crowds tend to go wild for this type of session, in this article, I’ve decided to focus on some bad PPC ad copy and provide several fixes to improve it.
In this ad, I wouldn’t have focused on the company’s brand in the headline especially as it’s not a brand that’s well known. In this case, I would have let bigger names highlight their brand and focused my ad on the additional reasons to do business with my company like fast implementation, 24/7 phone support, etc.
For extra conversion bang, I’d ensure my ad benefits are reiterated in bullet point form on the landing page. Personally, I like 3-5 bullet points that are 4 to 7 words long. At least one of the benefits should be unique to your company/product/service (unique selling proposition).
It’s important to focus on the features and benefits that resonate the most with your target audience. In this ad above, the company (Disney) encourages people to share baby pictures online. Many of the other ads for the same phrase (baby clothes) focus on discount offers, shipping options, etc. While it’s true people want to share pictures of their babies, they are probably not looking to paid search ads to do just that.
PPC’s sweet spot is toward the end of the buy cycle when shoppers are about to pull the trigger and buy. The offer in the ad above is geared towards the beginning of the buy cycle when stores are maybe trying to engage/establish trust with buyers. The folks at Disney should use this channel effectively and attempt brand advertising elsewhere.
Here are some quick ways to figure out if your company is targeting the right features/benefits:
In this case, the advertiser is trying appeal to many groups of buyers with generic ad copy. I typed in baby clothes and an ad for a company that “specializes in custom made graphics, clothing, unique gift ideas” came up in the PPC search results.
In general, ad copy that is specific to products and/or specific groups of buyers tends to convert better than generic ad copy. And the more specific, the better ads tend to convert. A big reason for this is that it’s easier to hone in on relevant keyword terms and include them in ad copy headlines and descriptions.
A good tip is to structure your ads along the same lines as your sites navigation and/or category or product pages.
GitHub: Software description: a software to manage books in the computer (C#). →
These days, most business owners and entrepreneurs are aware that they need to incorporate the internet and its associated strategies to remain competitive and indeed, simply to remain in business at all. However, after years at the cutting edge of internet marketing and assisting clients from small business to multi-national corporate organisations, I am still surprised just how many of them consider their internet strategies to be separate from their business’ marketing strategy and, indeed their overall business plan.
Internet marketing does not exist separately to your other business lead generation and customer service models. It should co-exist and complement every other marketing exercise you do. Similarly, there is little point having a fantastic and highly effective lead generation strategy to your website, if you fail to pick up the phone when all your new clients call to buy from you. Believe it or not, I have seen this happen.
When it comes to devising your business plan and incorporating internet marketing as part of it, it pays to go back and revisit the basics in business, as these indeed are important. Revisiting the basic business formula will help you determine which online strategies to use.
The most basic aim of business – any business – is to make a profit. If yours doesn’t aim to make a profit, then it’s not a business, it’s a hobby or a charity. Simple as that. Notice I said aim to make a profit. Obviously not all businesses do make a profit.
I like to consider that business consists of five main elements:
As long as you concentrate on these five elements to your business, you should expect a profit at the end of the month. When we put them together, what we come up with is in effect the formula for running a successful business.
If we take the number of leads we get each month and multiply that by the conversion rate, we get we get the number of customers we have. Then, by multiplying this number by the average number of transactions they each do and multiply that number by the average number of dollars they spend, we arrive at our total average turnover. Then, by multiplying that number by the margin, we get our profit.
This is what that formula looks like:
Leads x Conversion Rate = Customers x No. of Transactions x Average Dollar Sale = Turnover x Margin = Profit.
By concentrating on and improving each of the elements to this basic formula, you will dramatically improve your eventual profit. How you go about doing that depends largely upon your own personal desires as well as the industry you are operating in. For instance, you may not enjoy door knocking, so don’t use this strategy to gain more leads. Similarly, you wouldn’t use TV advertising if you wanted to reach dog owners in your suburb. Nor would you consider using Google AdWords if you wanted to reach pensioners who played Bingo in your neighbourhood.
This is the formula you need to always keep in mind when planning, carrying out and monitoring your internet marketing strategy, that forms part of your business plan. Ask yourself how your internet marketing is affecting the number of clients placING enquiries, whether they buy from you and the amount they spend each time.
This is exactly what I did when I first become involved in the world of internet marketing to grow my own business. My first experience with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing was during my efforts to ramp up bookings for my corporate magic business. At the time, I was using the traditional methods to market my business and reach my target market, such as the local print directory for Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, visits to agents, sending out flyers as well as anything else I could conjure up to generate bookings so I could feed my family and pay the bills. My marketing efforts were having a small impact on my bottom line, so much so that I wasn’t able to survive. Then I came across the Yahoo Search Marketing Platform and everything changed. Within a month of putting ads up on the search engines my business was profitable! Almost immediately I began generating a steady flow of enquiries and bookings and best of all I didn’t need to knock on doors or lick stamps. All I needed to do was wait!
GitHub: Software description: a software to manage books in the computer (C#). →
Another great article about the nature of PPC advertising being far more important than just getting new consumers into your website.
Ten years ago a business could thrive by focusing on organic search engine optimization. My rule of thumb then was that organic rankings garnered roughly 80 percent of the clicks on search result pages while paid listings garnered less than 20 percent. A smart SEO strategy seemed to outweigh a smart pay-per-click advertising strategy.
A lot has changed in 10 years. Google’s propensity for changing organic search results has hurt many smaller retailers that relied exclusively on SEO for traffic and revenue. As a result, many of these retailers have started shifting more of their marketing dollars to PPC as they seek a controllable flow of traffic and revenue.
At the same time, Google has implemented a brilliant strategy — called “Quality Score,” which I addressed at “Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Six Metrics that Drive Performance” — to reward retailers to make their ads increasingly relevant to shoppers. Furthermore, Google conducts many of its own tests to find the optimal layout, formatting, and labeling of its paid ads to blur the line between organic listings and paid listings.
The result is that while retailers should still be able to generate more total clicks via their SEO efforts — versus their PPC efforts — PPC is rising dramatically in its importance. The traffic and revenue retailers can generate by optimizing and scaling the performance of their PPC marketing is higher than it’s ever been, and that’s a big deal that no retailer should ignore.
I recently asked several of my pay-per-click managers to analyze Google’s “top vs. side” report — I wrote about that report previously, at “For Google AdWords, It Pays to be on Top” — to calculate an average click-through rate for PPC ads when they show on the top of the search results page. Here are the results from six merchants they surveyed:
Those click-through rates are likely as high as a merchant would expect from many of his or her organic, page 1 rankings. By the way, they are for non-branded search queries on campaigns that are well run and profitable over many months.
Clearly, PPC can send a lot of traffic relative to organic listings. But is it profitable traffic? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. When it’s not, many retailers blame the inherent nature of PPC for campaigns that they perceive to be unprofitable. But I always advise to check your perceptions.
Since PPC has the potential to send a lot of traffic quickly, it can expose fundamental flaws in an online retailer’s business or marketing strategy. If your prices are too high, your campaign isn’t managed well, your website’s usability stinks, your products are out of season, or the buying cycle for the products you sell is long or complex, then of course PPC won’t perform optimally. Try addressing those issues before deciding that PPC can’t work for you.
In addition, there are circumstances when smaller retailers should consider adjusting their expectations for their PPC campaigns. Quite often the expectation for a PPC campaign should be a steady flow of profitable traffic that results in a high return on ad spending. There are times, however, where retailers should think more like bigger retailers — if they hope to become one.
Larger retailers treat the first sale they make to a new customer as an invitation into their customer’s home. Once they get that first sale, their marketing machine goes to work, and they focus on increasing the lifetime value of that customer. They use a combination of email marketing, loyalty programs, and on-site personalization to generate repeat business from their customers in a way that changes their economic model for PPC.
If smaller retailers pay $30 in PPC advertising fees for every $40 in related PPC sales, they may conclude that PPC cannot be profitable for them. If over the course of a year, however, they can generate an average of $500 in sales from customers acquired through PPC, the entire profit picture would change drastically. Suddenly the retailer would be in a position to throttle up its PPC budget in a way that could support significant ongoing revenue growth.
Ever wonder what the most expensive PPC keywords are? The graphic below seems to answer that very well.
The most affordable promoting accessible nowadays is PPC, shell out per click on, and search engine advertising. As a flourishing organization PPC search engine advertising was anticipated to $eight billion in revenue by 2008. The complete concept guiding PPC search engine advertising is producing sales opportunities. When carried out proficiently creating leads aids buyers in locating the specific site that delivers the products or service they are seeking for.
That is not to say that PPC advertising is the conclude of the method. While research engine advertising and marketing will deliver a site prospects these folks must discover some thing of use on the website when they get there. Good info is a essential part of PPC search engine advertising and one particular that is disregarded typically by web site builders. Remember people are more inclined to purchase merchandise or service from a web site that offers them at minimum the pertinent details they have been searching for in the initial spot.
Convertible Targeted traffic from Search Motor Advertising
Maybe the greatest benefit of PPC advertising is the simple fact that the visitors is specified. The people clicking on the ads are these who are actually searching for a product or services associated to the lookup. This does away with random clicks from individuals who are not intrigued in the products, reducing costs and growing profits. PPC promoting is a fantastic way to get a return on your expense.
The price of a specific key phrase is established by means of a bidding process. PPC search engine advertising budgets can variety from $a hundred – $a hundred,000 relying on the phrase and number of search phrases searched. The value for a certain keyword or search phrase can rapidly improve and a lot more companies bid on them.
Shell out per click adverts are exhibited with related research motor results, which are appropriate to individual searches. The person willing to spend be
st bid for a term or phrase will have their ads displayed at the leading of the results page. This placement puts the advertiser in the greatest position for obtaining the PPC advertisements clicked by an fascinated searcher.
PPC Search
There are three fundamental factors concerned in lookup engine advertising and marketing these are constant monitoring, refinement and response analysis. All these components are crucial to the campaign. You will only see huge revenue when you effectively control PPC search engine advertising.
You will be capable to keep an eye on the productiveness of all your PPC adverts. This is useful simply because you will have the alternative to discontinue any ad that is not returning on your expense. This is 1 of the good reasons PPC search engine advertising is a extremely value successful way to promote on the internet.
The amount of clicks you obtain on a Pay Per Click advertisement establishes your value from PPC search engine advertising. These clicks will be totaled and subtracted from the original amount you compensated to the research engines for advert placement. You will have to frequently check these numbers for each and every PPC search engine advertising campaign you launch in buy to reduce price and maximize your revenue.
Search engine advertising or pay per click is something that every business can and should do. Even with terrific organic placement on searched that make the most sense to your business, 40% or greater (depending on the study) still buy from paid inclusion.
Looking at the search engine results page as a piece of virtual real estate puts you in the right mind set to see the advantages of search engine advertising. In a best case scenario, you are listed on the top in the paid area, listed in the local maps position, and your site shows up in the organic position, followed by a blog post that belongs to you as well. The fact is most customers will make their decision from the first page, showing up as many times as you can on the first page removes positions for you competitors websites to appear.
Dell, Pizza Hut, Dr Martens, and many other big companies have realized the value of search engine advertising and even on searches that they dominate the entire page will pay for placement in the paid inclusion. The red box shows the search engine advertising, and the highlighted yellow shows same site in organic placement.
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Click to enlarge
Dominating the search engine results page allows for many benefits:
Just about every SEO expert will tell you that you have the ability to dominate on approximately five to 10 keyword strings, that said, think of how many ways a person could search for your product offering. Let use an example of a plumber in Denver Colorado. I might search for plumber in Denver, or Denver Plumber, it might be more pointed like toilet plumbing, or toilet plumbing in Denver or Denver toilet plumber. What I’m getting at is search engine advertising in paid inclusion allows this plumber to ensure that he shows up regardless of how the search is done. The same plumber with organic placement or SEO would be lucky to show up on the first page for all searches.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
If a searcher doesn’t qualify their search with a geographic location like “Plumber Denver” and only enters “Plumber,” the natural or organic search results show nationally. The local Maps & paid inclusion results will rely on the location of the physical computer to show local results, but the organic changes to national. You can see in the example below how the amount of search results changes.
With search engine marketing a business can have more complete coverage as it relates to keyword terms, locality, and predictability in frequency of exposure.
