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#). →
Not long ago, online marketing was a limited affair and was explored by already successful or adventurous businesses. Likewise, search engine marketing(SEM) was restricted to an elite few. However, things have changed now to a considerable extent and these two marketing mediums are no longer restricted with some few.
Search engine marketing, in particular, has seen triple-digit growth by gaining access to marketers as well as rewarding, serious streams from billions of users. It is a continuing and a bit complicated process in its entirety. However, these complications can be resolved by seeking expert services of an internet marketing agency. Search engine marketing is like an efficient way to bring in sales leads. It is almost a collective form of newspaper ads, yellow pages, direct mail, and classifieds rolled into a single pinch.
Search engine marketing is concerned with finding and submitting the most sought-after keywords to search engines such as Google and Yahoo! This is because by using these keywords, a business website can prominently figure in the search results, leading to credibility, market exposure, more customers, quality leads, customer satisfaction and better sales.
SEM can help a business to enhance its brand profile, acquire new customers, retain existing customers, gain industry exposure, increase web traffic, and generate quality leads and increasing online sales.
However, a business must ensure that its objectives are not killed with keywords by slicing and dicing. It is also important for a business to realize that managing rankings is a full-time job. Furthermore, it must also realize that a combination of search engines to successfully reach customers is the best way for it to gain market exposure in the long run.
Once a business realizes these facts, there is nothing that can come between it and success in the online world.
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
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#). →
I found this article today when i was looking at the ZMOT approach to looking at online marketing. It really is something that I talk with business owners about every day, yet don’t make any special points about it at all. The education process has become so short in many aspects that while the information comes up in conversation, I never really hammer the point home about how much goes into each program.
The online world can be tough to navigate sometimes, especially if you are trying to sell or market a product or service. There are so many websites, tools and strategies out there that promise you customers and sales contracts. Sometimes they work, but the truth is, there’s more to online marketing than simply having a Facebook page and creating some Google Ads.
Online marketing at its core is about creating great brand recognition, so that even if a customer doesn’t make a purchase in a given moment, they are well aware that your products exist. For a marketer, that is often more than enough. To build brand awareness, here are a few tips:
Generally, online marketing is similar to greeting your customer when they enter your store. You want to give a pleasant smile and introduce yourself, but you do not want to bombard them with questions and follow them around; you want to leave a good impression even if they don’t make a purchase. Marketing has transformed over the years and we as entrepreneurs need to remember that with this online revolution we can no longer rely on brochures and billboards. Word of mouth has become the “ word of the web,” and customers are creating our marketing strategies without us realizing it. We must learn to adapt and accept the fact that online marketing is going to be a new phrase on our yearly budgets.
Search Engine Land has published a great article that I have been preaching for years. Often times it’s not the SEO or SEM that isn’t working…it’s your landing page.
Landing pages are frequently pushed to the back burner when creating digital marketing campaigns even though they can often have the single greatest impact on the campaign’s success. This is particularly surprising considering landing pages have been a frequent topic that’s been written about and discussed for years.
Whether due to a lack of understanding about how to measure landing page performance, a lack of knowledge about how to create and test landing pages, or a general lack of awareness of the benefits of good landing pages, the fact remains that many marketers are running campaigns that are performing significantly below their potential.
Even when marketers are fully aware of the importance of landing page testing, the testing plans that get implemented are often lacking. A main reason for this is the narrow scope of testing that occurs.
When a digital marketing campaign launches, it often includes search advertising, display advertising, and social advertising – yet each medium tends to use the same landing page. Unfortunately, this leads the landing page testing down a path that will optimize for the largest segment instead of optimizing each segment individually.
The result is a campaign that doesn’t maximize the return on investment.
In order to have a robust landing page testing strategy, each segment that is targeted in the campaign needs to be accounted for and a testing plan needs to be implemented for each. The reason is that the behavior and needs of each segment are not the same, so focusing on one segment essentially ignores the needs of the others.
In the campaign example given, the three mediums used as part of the campaign are search, display, and social. Given the different types of activities being performed by users when they are exposed to each type of ad, you’d expect the behavior and response rates to differ.
For example, when a user conducts a query on a search engine, they are actively looking for information that your ad and subsequent landing page should be able to provide. With display advertising, you only know that the users may be interested in your offering based on how you’ve targeted the ads. They are not likely, however, to be actively looking to make a purchase at the time of their exposure to the ad. The same is true for social ads that drive users to your site with the hope that they will convert. They tend to be engaged in other activities and so a purchase decision may not be an immediate step that these types of users would take.
The calls-to-action tested for each segment should vary.
Even within a particular target segment you will likely see significantly different user behaviors. Search, for example, will likely have early shopper keyword groups as well as keyword groups that tend to close the purchase. Having a single landing page for both groups will not allow you to realize the maximum return on investment.
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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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.
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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.
Orthodontics was the first recognized specialty field within dentistry. Orthodontists are dental specialists in the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of orthodontic problems who have completed a minimum of two academic years of study in an accredited orthodontic residency program. Only those dentists who have completed this training may call themselves “orthodontists,” and only orthodontists may be members of the American Association of Orthodontists.
Specializing on one focus is a major advantage to a patient with a very specific problem. That stated, orthodontics often struggle with how to best market their practice. Often times the old faithful yellow pages is the extent of the marketing that they do, after all that is how most practices where established. The market penetration in any given area (like above) shows a need to set your office apart from the competition.
Times have changed and firms that specifically market orthodontics have popped up all over, the two that most Doctors recognize are Orthosesame(TM) and Televox(TM). An amazing website is only the start.
SEM will allow you the ability to qualify your potential patient based on many different criteria, you can use keywords that define a specific vertical of your business that you want to be more aggressive in, you can use geographic locators or radius’s just to pull customers from certain areas of town, or you can choose specific engines to further refine the demographic you are looking for. Search engine marketing is a great fit for a orthodontic practice.
Applying a search engine marketing campaign to your already “conversion friendly” site will allow your orthodontic practice to reach new levels as far as new patient acquisition. In the Denver area, orthodontics offices don’t saturate the area as much as dental offices, but then again, the client base is much smaller. This makes it even more important to make sure that your orthodontic practice is an available option to EVRY new patient looking.
