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Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

If you’ve read the Google blog recently you’ll see that there are quite a few new tools being introduced to help us do our jobs better, and work more efficiently. So how can you tell which tools will help the most, and how do you find the time to learn about them all? While I can’t help you learn about everything right now, I can share some insight into a few of the tools we use most for our clients.

Google Website Optimizer

What is our motto? TEST! And how do we do it? With the Google Website Optimizer tool, that’s of course free, and very easy to use (typical for Google, I know).

What it does: Google Website Optimizer (GWO) allows you to test different versions of a page and select the elements/design that persuades more of your visitors to convert (or complete your goal whatever it is).

Types of testing:

• A/B: this allows you to test two entirely different pages (or more) against each other.
• Multivariate: this allows you to test multiple elements of a page at the same time. You are then able to distinguish which combination of elements worked best.

Tips for using it effectively:

1. Think through your test before starting – the more thought you put into it, the better off you will be. Think about the following:
   • What are the business goals you are trying to achieve?
   • What is the best strategy to test that goal?
   • What page(s) are you going to test and where should you start?
2. Determine which type of test (A/B or Multivariate)
   • A/B tests are a little easier, require less time and are used to test major design decisions.
   • Multivariate tests are more complex and will take long to come to a conclusion. If you choose multivariate – make sure you have enough traffic to the page to support it.
3. What elements do you think are impacting visitors who are converting?
   • Images
   • Copy
   • Offer
   • Headline
   • Layout
   • Call to action/buttons
4. Choose your pages:
   • Choose the page you will be optimizing.
   • Choose your conversion page.
5. Plan on taking more than 5 minutes to set it up correctly – especially the first time. Set aside an hour or so to go through the steps and make sure everything is correct.
6. You will need to install tags on the pages, so make sure you or your programmer know how to properly install code snippets. Don’t worry, the tracking code will be given to you as you set up the test.
7. Don’t run tests that will take several months to complete – there are other factors that go into play, seasonality, major news, competitor sales, etc. Aim for no longer than 4-6 weeks.
8. The key is in analyzing the data, and moving forward. Anyone can set up a test, but interpreting it is more important. From there you may need to do additional tests, but you first need to get some data to decide where to go next

Ideas of what to test:

1. Call to Action -
   • Language
   • Button vs. hyperlink
   • Button colors & shapes
2. Fonts
   • Choice of font
   • Readability
   • Color, treatment (bold, etc.)
3. Headlines
   • Different language
   • Formatting: bold, color, etc.
   • Number of words
   • Quote vs. question
4. Page copy
   • One vs. three column layouts
   • Actual copy on pages
5. Images
6. Forms
   • Long form vs. short
   • Drop downs vs. fill in
   • Language around form
   • Placement/language of call to action button
7. Shopping cart
   • Process/pages
8. Incentives/offers
9. Site wide test
   • Navigation
   • Shopping cart button
   • Tagline
   • Search box
   • Location of authority & trust seals
10. Home page
    • Main image
    • Flash vs. images
    • Headlines
    • Best sellers, featured products, new arrivals (placement as well as adding these in)
    • Copy
    • Product displays
11. Ecommerce
    • Shopping funnel
    • Check out page
    • Image of product on product page
    • Product descriptions
    • Reviews
    • Add to cart buttons
    • Cross sells

Day Parts Report

The day parts report is a new analytics report, and it is found in Analytics under Traffic Sources > Ad Words > Day Parts. This report is used to find out what time of day your campaigns are most effective, but right now it is only for Adwords campaigns. From here you can see your ad performance broken down by day of the week and by hour of the day. The Day Parts report can help you find the most profitable times of day for your ads. Then pair it with the Ad Scheduling feature in AdWords to automatically adjust your bids to capture the right traffic at the right time.

Looking at the Data:

You can view your data in the table, or by time of day. The table lists each hour of the day. Click an hour to drill down and compare each day of the week for that hour of day. Clicking an hour in the resulting report takes you to the detail report for that day and hour (for example, Saturday 10:00).

You can also replace the ‘None’ dimension on the detail report with another selection such as Keywords so you can compare keyword performance for that day and hour.

By graphing visits against transactions you are able to see how transactions increase or decrease relative to visits. To access this information, click the tab at top left of the graph to select up to two metrics at a time. View the data hourly, so you can determine the best time to increase or decrease your bids.

Important Notes:

1. You must have enabled Destination URL auto-tagging in your AdWords account in order to see data in this report.
2. The above information is applicable for ecommerce sites. If you don’t have an ecommerce site, you will need to set up lead goals in Analytics. Once you have your leads goal running, you will be able to assess the days and times that your campaigns convert the best, and make day parting decisions based on that information.

Using the Data:

Once you know the days and times that your account converts the best, or when revenue and visits increase together, you can adjust your Adwords account accordingly.

Google Conversion Optimizer

The goal of the Google Conversion Optimizer is to increase conversions, decrease CPA (Cost per Action) and improve ROI.

How it works:

Your conversion tracking data is complied, and a prediction model is generated based on that data. From there your bids are optimized, and it selects the best auction scenario based on targeting. Your bids are also adjusted to a price that will put your ad in the best situation to convert.

In order to implement conversion optimizer you need to have a minimum of 15 conversions in the past 30 days, and the conversion level needs to be consistent over recent days. Google recommends having conversion tracking running for 2 weeks or more, and from our experience, the more data you have, the better, so don’t skimp here. When setting up the optimizer functionality you will set either a max CPA or target CPA (target is the average you want to pay per conversion).

Best practices:

1. Use the optimizer with existing campaigns
2. Leave it running. The longer you have been running conversion tracking the better it’ll work.
3. Don’t make large changes when it’s running (deleting or creating ad groups). Make small adjustments only (changes in keywords, creative, or landing pages).
4. Don’t move or remove the Google tracking codes.

Advantages:

1. It will automatically adjust your bids in real time for each auction.
2. Your click value will be determined based on specific criteria (user location, user query, content site, etc.).
3. It can be a great tool for managing cost within a campaign.
4. It has the ability to improve campaigns with minimal management.

Disadvantages:

1. Some control is taken from the user.
2. Tracking needs time to adjust to major changes.
3. It could create complacency on the part of the account manager.

Recommendations:

1. Try it on seasoned campaigns that are already performing well
2. Enable tracking for a minimum of 1 month for a better performance snapshot.
3. Do not try it with campaigns that are still a heavy work in progress.
4. Make adjustments to your CPA to find where the campaign will ideally perform.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I don’t know about you, but I feel busy: all of the time. I can’t recall the last time I looked around at work and thought, wow, I’m done, I’ll have a Kit Kat. Mostly it’s all right, that’s okay for now, next please. While I like staying busy, there’s a serious danger in this constant engagement: if you move too quickly, and think about too much, you’ll forget what you’ve done. Maybe you have a superhuman internal organizer, but I don’t. Often I can’t recall the clients I’ve worked on since 8 when 5 shows up, let alone the details of what I’ve done for them. Not a big deal, since I can consult my to-do list, or Basecamp, or the emails I’ve sent documenting what I’ve done, and make recommendations or further changes based on that evidence of the past.

But really, it can be tempting when you’re busy to make a quick change and move on. Who’s gonna know! One tiny change! What does it matter! It can become a bad habit quickly, and there will come a time when your lack of information organization damages your ability to affect useful change for your clients. This danger only multiplies if you work with other parties on one PPC account. If you’re disorganized by yourself, you may be able to make educated guesstimates as to when you did this, or by how much you changed that, because your actions are based in your own PPC theory, but anyone else is going to be completely in the dark as to your reasonings and consequent actions. Working without recordkeeping on your own in a PPC account can be inconvenient, and can certainly hinder management, but working while disorganized with others is just downright dangerous. With that in mind, here are a few tools you can use to help organize your own activities and those of your team, so you can complement each others’ work rather than hindering.

AdWords Change History:

Google will help you out a bit and give you your change history. This is a fabulous tool, but it has its weaknesses: I deleted an ad? Good to know. Um…which ad? There is some info that it just doesn’t provide, and you can’t rely on it completely. It is however handy if you have multiple logins to the same account, as it will indicate which username created a change, allowing you to track activity of your coworkers and clients as they modify the account.

Basecamp:

It’s great. You should probably use it, if you have any joint projects at all. You can create shared timelines, to-do lists, upload files, send public or private messages to a selection of team members or all of them, and just generally communicate what you need to on a joint project with ease. A few tips about I have about Basecamp: you do have to use it. It’s tempting to send a one-off email to Amanda about the project, but if anyone else ever might need to reference the information in that email it’s smarter to send it via Basecamp. And once again, it might be tempting not to document a tiny change, but you kind of owe it to your coworkers not to keep them in the dark. Just write a note. Finally, it might make me sound kind of obsessive, but Basecamp can get really messy if you don’t have a standard naming convention for your posts and files. Dates and descriptions of file or message contents can make everything so much easier to find later, and make it easier to quickly scan Basecamp posts to see what’s been going on recently. Decide on a naming convention with your team and stick with it.

Google docs:

Free! It can be helpful to use a service like Google docs to allow you to modify your record-keeping documents simultaneously and share them without emailing back and forth a million times a day. It makes documenting and sharing easier, and that makes everyone more likely to actually do it.

Spreadsheets:

Excel is your friend. It’s easy to keep track of all kinds of changes in a spreadsheet, from keyword research and ad group structure to bid changes and ad reviews. You can paste pretty much anything into a spreadsheet and make it make sense, send that file either via email or a service like Basecamp and it’ll still make sense when it gets to your coworker. Word docs are terrible for this, and getting accustomed to documenting data and changes in Excel will make it so much easier for you to identify what you need and manipulate data later. And remember, there are search engines outside of Google, surprisingly, and they don’t have the handy change history. You’ll have to document your changes somewhere for these search engines, and finding a way to do it via Excel (see how we set this up for bid changes?) and standardizing the method will make everything easy to keep up with, once you’re accustomed to it.

With a little work up front and prioritizing information sharing while you’re in the midst of your day, you can make a project run more smoothly both for your own tired brain and the rest of the people you work with. Set your team up for success: let them know what you’ve done, why you’ve done it, what you expect the result to be, and how you’ll be following up. It sounds easy, but sometimes we all get so busy that we forget to use the simple tools we have available to us to improve our effectiveness.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

The success of your PPC campaign depends upon finding the right combination of keyword, ad copy and ad position.

The process usually starts with researching and compiling extensive, wide-ranging keyword lists. Next, comes building and launching campaigns with those keywords. The goal of this phase is to get a sense of which keywords have potential. The final, and ongoing phase is optimizing the campaign, which includes: trimming the unprofitable keywords, expanding the profitable ones, adjusting ad-copy and keyword bids until you find a profitable combination.

Once you’ve found your profitable keywords you need to guard them like a hawk, because they don’t come easy.

To build a successful PPC campaign, you need to have a “marathon” mindset, instead of a “sprint” mindset. It is an ongoing loop of: analyze-adapt-get results-analyze-adapt-get results. This process is certainly much easier if you have the right tools in your tool kit. At iSpionage we have designed a unique tool that helps you with this process. Our tool kit contains:

1. Keyword & Domain Research
2. Keyword Monitoring
3. PPC Campaign Builder

1: Keyword & Domain Research Module

Using iSpionage Keyword & Domain Research, you can leverage your top competitors’ keyword research and campaign optimization efforts.

With just one click, you can learn which keywords your competitors use. With that same click, you will receive access to all of your competitors’ keywords, as well as estimates of the keyword search traffic, ads, ad positioning, and CPC data.

Below is a screen shot of what you get when you enter the domain “Godaddy.com” in the search bar.

With the advertiser summary, you will get:

• An estimate of their PPC budget
• # of clicks per month
• Google & Yahoo PPC keywords
• Working ad-copy associated with each keyword

Here is a screen shot of the advertiser’s ad copy history with first seen and last seen dates. This information lets you see which ad copy was effective for which keyword.

If you are interested in generating more keywords for your campaign, you can just type in a keyword and iSpionage will give you the top competitors in both Google and Yahoo.

Additionally, you will also get a list of strongly related keywords that you can further expand upon.

Screen shot of keyword results: web hosting

The nice thing about iSponage’s keyword research tool, is that you have access to data from Google as well as Yahoo.

To have an optimal PPC campaign, you should understand the competitive environment. This tool can be used to analyze competitors’ keyword-ad copy-landing page strategy, so you can out-strategize the competition.

2: Keyword Monitor

Whether you are entering a new market, or you want to monitor certain keyword groups like your profitable keywords, you will find the Keyword Monitor from iSponage to be your best friend.

With Keyword Monitor you will learn:

• Who are your top competitors are in each keyword group.

• The impression share that goes to your website, and your competitors’ websites. Which you can use to measure your ad coverage compared to the other advertisers.
  

• Competitors’ ad copy tests and results.

• 

You can also set email alerts so that you are notified when your competitors change ad copy, add more keywords, or when a new competitor arrives on the scene.

Keyword Monitor allows you to zoom into other advertisers’ PPC campaigns, allowing you to analyze: how they structure their ad groups, ad copy history, ad positioning, landing pages, etc.

With this intelligence you put your business into position to grab the market from your competitors.

3: PPC Campaign Builder

The PPC campaign builder helps the user create a PPC campaign, starting by generating keywords, continuing to creating keyword groups and writing ad-copies, and ultimately finishing with launching campaigns onto Google, Yahoo, and Bing in a quick and effective fashion.

Start by typing in your base keyword and let the tool generate the list of related keywords. Your next step will be to select those keywords you want to focus on (like in the previous steps, average search volume and advertisers’ competition will help you to choose).

Clean Up Keyword Lists

You can now go to the “Keyword Clean Up” tab to sort and clean up the list:

• Sort the list & Remove duplicates
• Keep / Remove lines containing any specified word
• Remove the specified characters (e.g. @$#/%^&*~_=+)

Group the Keywords

Start by giving a name to your campaign for further reference. Then, provide the grouping criteria:

• Create a group by base word (Keep lines containing this word); AND / OR
• Create a group by excluding some words from the list AND / OR
• Create a group based on the number of words in a phrase (Keep lines with the number of keywords).

Don’t forget to give each group a name (I suggest giving each a descriptive name based on the grouping criteria: e.g. “3-word”, “no-stop words”, etc):

Build PPC Campaign

When you are done grouping your keywords, you can go to the “Campaign Builder” tab to create your PPC campaign:

First, set up ad group pricing:

Then, go to the “Ad Setup,” where you will write and create your ad details (each ad headline, text and destination URL). You can also populate the same ads to your other ad groups and make minor edits to differentiate them. These are all nice features and designed to help the user save time when creating PPC campaigns.

Once you are done, generate the output and you can upload it to Google, Yahoo or Bing directly.

This module streamlines all aspects of your PPC campaign building process, from keyword research, grouping and ad copy writing for all 3 search engines. What used to take hours, or even days, now can be done in just a few minutes.

iSpionage is a useful tool for search marketers looking to get competitive intelligence data to improve or optimize their campaigns. It will also shorten the time it takes to create campaigns, especially for keyword research and launching campaigns in the three major search engines.

By using it you, can spend more time developing a better PPC strategy that will save money and time, and increase ROI of your PPC campaigns. Anyone who is serious about PPC advertising needs to check out this tool.

Click here to learn more about iSpionage Keyword Research tool

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Wouldn’t it be great to know what keywords your competitors are using with just one click? What if with that same click you could also find estimated traffic and ad positioning or even see a list of your direct competitors?

If you aspire to optimize your site without spending a lot of money and time, SEMRush.com is the first and steady step to your success.

Developed by the creators of SEOquake FireFox extension and SEOdigger tool, SEMRush allows you to check the rankings of a website in Google and compare to your competitors. Using a database with 35 million of the most popular keywords, SEMRush is the fastest and easiest way to reach the best results. The database spans across more than 13 million domains to analyze Google search results and shows related keywords for any domain that ranks high enough to be in the top 20 search or AdWords results.

Digging a little deeper we can find:

• list of Google keywords for any site

• list of AdWords keywords for any site

• list of your competitors in organic and paid Google search results

• estimated SE and AdWords traffic for any domain

• hidden related (and low-cost) keywords to optimize your AdWords campaign

Start by typing in any domain and you can find those sites that are directly competing with it for search engine traffic on the organic side and the Adwords side of the equation.

Competitors in organic search

Competitors in AdWords.

SEMRush also shows an overview of AdWords texts for each domain.

Click on «Common Keywords» next to the domain-competitor you are interested in and you will receive the report on common keywords for the both domains compared in Organic search as well as in AdWords.

Besides these reports SEMRush.com also gives information on:

• Potential ads/traffic buyers – sites that buy AdWords through domain organic keywords.

• Potential ads/traffic sellers – sites ranked in the top 20 in the Google organic search through keywords common with domain advertising in AdWords.

You can just type in a keyword and SEMRush will take that keyword, give you the top competitors in both the organic Google results and Adwords. You can push this data further and also get a list of thousands of related keywords or do research on the top ranking domains or urls.

The service updates its data once a month, the price starts at $19.95 a month with a 33% discount for paying 6 months in advance. You can also test SEMRush with their FREE limited two weeks trial and later on upgrade to the license version. To use this trial just enter this promo code P862-07F2-0WKF-G3W2 in appropriate field while your registration.

When used properly, all of this gained information could easily increase your site position – it certainly makes keyword research much easier! Get more traffic and save money with SEMRush.com.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Whenever a new PPC tool is released, we try to do a quick review to let you know how it works and if it would be beneficial for your PPC campaign. Today, I’m going to explore the new Free Keyword Tool from WordStream. Overall, the tool is quite easy to use. Even upon your arrival to the site, your greeted with straightforward, uncomplicated instructions and user interface. As you can see, all you need to do to get started is insert a keyword. Pretty simple.

The next step in the keyword research process is also easy to navigate. There are three columns to look for in this screen shot below. First, you can add additional keywords on the upper left side within the “List Keywords” box. This way, you can add different terms to your initial list. On the bottom are the results of your keyword search. The free tool provides the top 100 matches. These matches can be sorted by relative volume. Also, on the upper right, you can add ‘related keywords’ to your results as well. The related field is useful because these can be different keyword groups or categories that you can explore outside of your original keyword scope.

You can email the list when you’re done. Before you email your keyword list, you should spend time refining your list by removing irrelevant terms as well as adding and exploring the related terms. When you choose to email the list, it will be sent to you via linked Zip file. Pretty easy to use and understand.

Also, you’ll notice the gray box on the bottom left side of the screen that reads, “Click to copy keywords.” This is also a helpful way to snag your keywords. This button will automatically copy the keywords within your results. Be mindful, when you click the button, nothing visible actually happens. I was a slightly confused as at first. So, I clicked the button and nothing happened. However, I clicked again (nothing happened) and I opened Excel and hit the paste function – and there are my keywords! Very handy but don’t get confused.

And that’s how the tool works. There is one feature/section that doesn’t appear to function properly – or at least I couldn’t get it to work. On the site you can create free keyword tool account. I filled out the form to open an account; received the account activation email; I clicked on the “click here to activate your free account” link – but I was redirected to the site with no other instructions. I clicked on the link in the email as well as pasted in the URL but nothing happened. So, either the free account set up wasn’t working when I tried (it may be fixed by the time you read this), or I did something wrong. But you don’t have to create a free account to utilize the keyword tool so don’t let this stop you from using it!

When conducting keyword research, you should give the WordStream tool a try. It’s easy to use, it provides pretty good results, and it’s free. And no, I wasn’t paid to say this. Good job guys, and thanks for building a free quality PPC tool.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.