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Posts Tagged ‘Conversion Rates’

Getting the consumer to your site is only half the battle. Check out these 5 Tips To Improve Conversion On B2B Landing Pages, and start reaping the benefits. *Side note: don’t be deterred by the title, the tips can be applied to your B2C clients as well!

Mike Fleming dropped his third installment on using ad testing to reach your marketing goals. This final article helps us know when to conclude our tests so we can analyze our results. These tips will help you get the most out of your tests and will make sure the time spent setting them up is well worth it.

Head over to the PPCBlog for an interesting read on the importance of headlines in PPC advertising. To an expert, this little fact might be nothing new, but this post is a must read as it goes into depth about the role of headlines, not only in PPC campaigns and traditional advertising, but also in our overall media culture. Brevity, relevancy, and simplicity are the keys to success for higher CTR and conversion rates.

Josh Dreller over at Search Engine Land has come up with a list of 11 Inventory Sources for Keyword Marketers. From Twitter and Facebook to the Internet Yellow Pages and Shopping Engines, this list includes some of the top ad inventory for search marketers.

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.

There have already been some compelling statistics that video increases conversion rates on emails by 200% to 300%. Video is beginning to play a major role across all marketing channels. Imavex is a web development firm named one of the top search engine marketing companies in the country.

I was speaking to Ryan Mull and he mentioned that they have noticed a marked improvement in their clients’ pay-per-click conversion rates when they include high quality videos on the landing page.

The good news is, the data is pretty clear, and the dataset is large enough to show real results. By adding video to a SEM/PPC landing page, the client saw a 130.5% increase in leads generated from the campaign. per Ryan Mull, Imavex

Imavex has rolled out a video hosting platform, Streamotor, that they are utilizing to host and serve these high quality videos. Here’s a great sample:

Costs for a nicely mixed web-based videos can vary in pricing. There are quite a few local video resources that can do videos for under $1,000 each. More professional videos can cost $2,500 and up – but if you’re increasing conversions by 130%, it doesn’t take much to realize a positive return on investment!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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Note: This post was authored by Amber, a prolific blogger at PPC Hero and one of our long-time PPC managers, who welcomed her gorgeous son Jacob on April 29th!

Over the course of the past several years, many old PPC tactics have become dated and are no longer considered best practice. There have also been many PPC strategies that have been developed bloggers and so-called PPC advertisers without solid evidence of increased ROI and, to no one’s surprise, may damage your account’s profitability rather than help.

After reading Search Engine Land’s excellent take on 36 persistent SEO myths we were inspired to create a similar list for PPC- check them out, see if you’re falling prey to any, and figure out how to get over them if you are!

1. Being in position #1 will make you most profitable. This is absolutely not true. Sometimes being in position #1 will be profitable, but most of the time you’ll end up spending more cash than what you’re generating. Being in position #1 gives you great visibility and is great for branding purposes. However it also draws in a lot of ‘searchers’ who are not yet ready to buy, but are still researching. Experimenting with ad position will allow you to determine the positions in which you achieve the right balance of cost vs. value.

2. Turn off your account at night, no one is searching or buying then. There are actually several reports that can show you how much traffic you get during all hours of the day or night, as well as click-through rates. Using Analytics, you can also determine your hourly conversion rates. Consider all of the different time zones you’re targeting, and remember that if you do turn your account off before doing the proper research you could be eliminating qualified traffic.

3. Dump as many keywords into your PPC account as possible to get the most traffic. While in theory you may get a ton of traffic from doing a keyword dump, it won’t all be qualified traffic. You really want to only target the most relevant keywords for your PPC account. If you do a dump you’re likely to blow through your budget quickly without generating much return on your investment.

4. Turn on only your best performing ad. Having only one ad text running can be detrimental to growing your PPC account’s performance. Ad text testing is a great strategy to help increase your click-through rates and conversion rates. If you stick with only running one ad, you’ll never be able to truly grow your account.

5. With PPC you can set it and forget it. A lot of small businesses think they can load in their keywords and ads, set a budget and walk away. PPC is not set it and forget it if you want to make the most of the money you’re spending. It takes constant monitoring, testing, bid lowering & increasing, turning off, and turning on in order to get the biggest bang for your buck. It is for this reason that many businesses choose to outsource their accounts to a PPC agency which can dedicate time and expertise to these tasks.

6. You should always run the content network. The content network can be a great source of extra traffic and leads. However you should research content network best practices before just turning on the content network and letting it run, and always make sure you monitor it very carefully. The content network has been known to drive a lot of unqualified traffic at very high costs when left uncontrolled.

7. You should never run on the content network. Again, the content network can be a great source for extra traffic and leads. Always try the content network, tweak settings as necessary, and give it a chance to work for you before you write it off.

8. Bid on only long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are very specific keywords that relate to the product or service you are selling on your site. However, there is minimal traffic associated with long-tail keywords at times and this traffic also revolves around searchers who are now in their buying phase. If you don’t bid on some general keywords, your ad may never appear and you’ll never be in front of your target audience when they’re doing their initial research, which will strip you of important brand recognition opportunities later in the customer’s buying cycle.

9. Quality score is calculated on click-through rates only. Quality score is heavily based on click-through rates, but it is also impacted by landing page quality, among other factors that Google doesn’t want to define too closely

10. Good conversion rates will help improve your Quality Score. No, in fact Google says conversion rates are not calculated into your overall account Quality Score.

11. Opening up a new PPC account will re-start your Quality Scores. Technically, if you open up a new account your Quality Scores will reset. However, if you keep the same account structure, landing pages, ads, keywords, etc., then you’re going to end up with the same Quality Score as you had previously. In order to improve your Quality Score, you need to re-structure your account and organize your Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords to reach the most targeted audience possible.

12. You should only have one keyword per ad group. While some advertisers live and die by this (so I’ve heard), this is not necessarily true and you could be spending a lot of time over-optimizing your account. The best practice here is to have a small list of keywords in your ad groups so that your ads match the keywords as best as possible. With this strategy, the more your keywords match your ads, the more likely your ads are going to be more targeted to the user, and the higher your click-through rates will be.

13. Never put phone numbers in your ad texts. We did a test on this a while back, and honestly it depends on your account and your target audience. If you’re reading in some article that you should ‘never’ or ‘always’ do xyz, then you need to test it for yourself first before making the final decision. We found that putting the phone number in our ads actually increased our click-through rates as well as increased the number of calls/leads we got from the website.

14. Copy your competitor’s ads. It’s okay to look at your competitor’s ads for ideas, but do not copy them. Putting aside the legal issues, your ad will not stand out from your competitor’s ad, and you’ll only confuse your potential customer. Find a way to make your ad different and enticing enough to make the customer want to click on your ad over your competitor’s ad.

15. Test your ads every week no matter how many clicks they have. Wrong! Be sure that when you’re testing ads and deciding on when to pause or leave an ad on that you give yourself a longer date range to look at – also be sure each ad has at least 100 clicks, the more the better before making any final decision. This will allow you to get a true perspective on which ad is performing best over time. If you get too anxious and pause an ad too early, you could be pausing a potentially great performing ad.

16. Your PPC agency is there to drive traffic to your landing page only. No, your PPC agency is there to help you meet your bottom line, period. This includes managing your PPC account, giving recommendations on your website, and optimizing your PPC landing pages, among many other things.

17. PPC is mainly click fraud serving your ads to invalid traffic. Actually, Google, Yahoo and Bing are very good at keeping track of fraudulent traffic. The search engines can actually refund your click money if they determine some of your clicks are invalid.

18. Google Adwords and Analytics reports different traffic numbers, therefore they’re not very accurate. Google Analytics and Google Adwords report on traffic numbers differently – Google Analytics reports on the number of unique visitors to your site from PPC, whereas Adwords reports on the total number of clicks your PPC ads get, therefore some discrepancy in visitor number is to be expected. Lead numbers given by each source should be very similar.

19. Google is the only search engine worth advertising in. This is absolutely a myth! Yahoo and Bing, together with a few other second tier search engines, are well worth advertising in. For certain accounts, sometimes Yahoo and Bing actually work better than Google when it comes to conversions and ROI.

20. Google is more for young, college-aged kids, where Yahoo and Bing are more for older people. These kinds of studies have been going around for a while. And while some people truly believe these search engines have such specific demographics, there is no definitive study – just opinions.

21. The search engines know best. While they certainly aren’t’ trying to defraud you, they won’t catch every instance of nefarious activity that may happen to your PPC account, and remember: their goal is to make money for their company and yours in the process, not JUST for yours. You need to be responsible for your own ROI and watch for any suspicious activity in your PPC accounts.

22. There are many special targeting options Google has that Bing and Yahoo do not. Recently, Yahoo and Bing have made big strides to give you the same level of targeting that Google provides, including geo-targeting, demographic targeting, etc. This is likely to increase in the future, so don’t write off possibilities for local targeting and demographic targeting in these other search engines.

23. If you want a good keyword research tool, Google is the only way to go. There are so many good and free keyword research tools out there you can use. I would recommend that you use as many of these free tools as possible when performing your initial keyword research. Google may give you a nice comprehensive list, but expanding your search among multiple tools can give you many more keywords to bid on or add in as negatives.

24. You should never use broad match keywords. Again, this is one of those things that you need to test in order to see what works for you. I use all three match types in my campaigns, initially to see which ones perform the best over time. Then I may only use one or two of the best performing match types. By excluding broad match, you could potentially be excluding additional keywords from showing your ads that could be very profitable. Broad match keywords, with proper bids and cost management, can also be an excellent source of information (via search query reporting) about longer-tail keywords that may work in your account.

25. Don’t worry about adding negative keywords, the search engines don’t really use them anyway, especially on the content network. Negative keywords are a must for every PPC account. All search engines use them as effectively as you enter them, and using search query reports you can determine negative keywords which may be driving substantial unqualified traffic to your ads.

26. You don’t need a PPC firm – you can easily manage your account on your own. Well, I can’t speak for other PPC firms, but for the same reason that you can’t ‘set it and forget it’, if you don’t have time to manage your PPC account at least weekly (at a minimum) you should probably hire someone to manage it for you. With all technology, things are constantly changing. Like previously mentioned, keywords can become inactive due to quality score issues, ads can be declined due to editorial issues, etc. Not to mention that if you’re putting money towards your PPC account, you probably want to maximize your traffic and revenue potential. Having someone manage your account and make the best changes and keep up-to-date with new features can really help grow your traffic and revenue.

27. You don’t need to use pay-per-click if you’re already ranking high in organic listings. Ranking well on the organic side is great, but also having paid ads can really help increase your branding efforts and can also increase traffic and revenue to your site. Obviously, free is better than having to pay to display your ads, but it’s important to get your name in front of your audience searching the web. PPC also allows you to target a broader range of keywords than you may rank well for organically, widening your audience and exposure. The average user needs 7 exposures to a brand/product before it really sinks in, so paid search can help shorten this gap. Having organic listings and paid ads is the best way to go.

28. You should not have to spend a lot on your keywords if there are no other advertisers. The problem with this is that just because there are no other advertisers in your area doesn’t mean they won’t pop up, or just aren’t advertising at that time of your search, or that there aren’t other advertisers showing in areas nearby. Google will charge you based on the competitiveness of showing for a keyword over time as well as on your Quality Scores, not necessarily the level of competition at the moment and in the location you decide to run your ads.

29. The higher you bid on your keywords, the better your Quality Scores will be. No, as previously mentioned, Quality Scores are based on click-through rates, landing page quality, and more. It is not based on how high your ads are placed or how much you’re spending.

30. If it works in Google, it’ll work in Yahoo/Bing/etc. Just false. They’re not the same- the algorithms with which they show ads and determine keyword and ad quality are different, and in Google and Bing vs. Yahoo, the match types work completely differently. You can import your Google structure into Yahoo and Bing in order to save some time setting up accounts, but you better believe you’re going to have to think through how your settings and keywords are going to show in one search engine vs. another.

31. The search engines default account settings are just fine, you don’t need to change them. Whether or not the search engine’s default settings are fine or not depends on your goals for your account. Always check your ad rotation settings, and set to rotate evenly if you’re testing ad texts, distribution settings if you want to run on search or content only, and geotargeting settings if you want to only show ads to a certain audience.

32. You should delete keywords that don’t convert. This is a huge myth, especially when you have assists in Yahoo telling you which keyword someone typed in the search to get your ad that ultimately assisted in the conversion of another keyword. Hopefully, in the future, we will have more visibility in all search engines regarding first click and last click metrics to help make more accurate decisions about keyword performance.

33. You should delete keywords that don’t have any impressions. While this is a common practice among search advertisers, our search engine reps have never told us it will improve our Quality Scores. What IS a good idea is to keep track of keywords that gain impressions, but not clicks, as they are decreasing your click-through rates and quality scores. They need to be improved if possible with better ad group structuring and ad texts, or they need to be removed.

34. Negative keyword match types work just like normal keywords. No, they don’t, and if you think they do you’ll either miss out on a lot of opportunities to eliminate irrelevant traffic in your account or unintentionally exclude a lot of relevant traffic.

35. PPC is the cheapest form of online advertising and brings the biggest ROI. Boy, I wish I could say this is completely true. Although I do believe you can get a great ROI from PPC, it’s not always the cheapest form. Running PPC ads can cost you a pretty penny if you don’t know what you’re doing right off the bat. Having a PPC agency or someone who has PPC experience help you run your account will definitely save you a lot of money in the long run.

36. PPC advertising is a must for all businesses. This is only a myth because I don’t believe PPC works for everyone. I think all businesses should try it, for a period of time, put all they have into it (effort wise) and see if it works for them. I’ve unfortunately had some clients where it just doesn’t work.

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.

Do you pause keywords solely due to low conversion rates? In his post, Valuing Keywords Based On Their Role Search Engine Land’s Adam Goldberg challenges us to analyze keywords in a different way using an attribution model. You may discover that you need to start unpausing some of your keywords.

It’s important to pay attention to click-through rate in your PPC campaigns, as it’s a factor in Quality Score and can be an indication of the general quality of your keyword structures and ad messaging. But it can change over time, and it’s not always something to freak out about- the RKG blog explains why.

Did you find something in your ad group that’s really working? Now that it’s really working have you tried to replicate it within the ad group and across all of your campaigns? Perhaps your ads are over optimized. Matt Wagner takes a moment to explain why he thinks a diverse group of ads are better than highly optimized.

Once you’ve completed your keyword research and created your target list, it’s important to take some time to understand how you should be conversing with audience. As this post from PPC Blog explains, you can utilize Google’s related search function to help you discover the language patterns of searchers so you can attract your target audience, and communicate with them more effectively through your ads and landing pages.

Stop spending your daily budget if you want to get more clicks! This may sound counter-intuitive at first, but after reading this post from E-Marketing Performance, you’ll understand how spending your daily budget could actually be preventing you from getting your full potential of clicks. The goal is to find your spend sweet spot so you gain the most PPC visitors for your money.

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.

Each day, The Marketing Technology Blog sends out an email via MailChimp that automatically converts the blog’s feed to nicely formatted HTML email. There’s only a couple hundred folks that take advantage of it – a fraction of the readership of this blog on a daily basis. That’s okay… it’s a niche and feeds those who want it. I don’t try to artificially grow the list, it’s got great retention and does the trick for those who want my blog in their inbox.

Email is a push marketing channel. I’m a huge advocate of permission-based email marketing but I believe the majority of companies utilize email ineffectively.

• Email marketers don’t measure their email list retention, they only pay attention to how many are on the list at any one time. Your list acquisition may be outpacing your retention. If you’re getting a lot of unsubscribes, you need to fix something sooner rather than later.
• Email marketers believe that incredibly low open and conversion rates are good when they’re above industry averages. Folks, a 4% click-through rate off of an email is a 96% failure rate and not something to celebrate.
• Email marketers often have a calendar that requires them to publish, regardless of whether or not the content is crap or not. I get emails in my inbox every week and I seriously wonder how the company possibly thought there was something intriguing enough to send it.
• Email marketers believe in email math: If 10 people purchased from my list of 1,000 on my weekly email, I can double sales with 2 emails per week. It’s like printing money. No… it’s not. More lackluster emails may initially provide an increase in sales, but ultimately you’re going to lose valuable subscribers.

Although the cost of email marketing is plummeting, it still costs companies a lot of time and some money to send email. I haven’t tried to push my email or dress it up because I’m not sure it will do well with readers. Perhaps if I can have dedicated content in the email down the road – but I’m not going to send out crappy emails for the sake of trying to get a few more eyeballs.

The best thing you can do for a company who sends a crappy email is to unsubscribe. Don’t wait for the email to get better – send them a message today. Clean up your inbox.

Related articles by Zemanta

• HTML email campaigns – is sending them a waste of your time? (inklingmarkets.com)
• How to get the attention of inactive subscribers (b2bemailmarketing.com)

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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One thing we do regularly for our clients is run search query reports from Adwords and MSN, pull all queries that are resulting in unqualified impressions or clicks, and add those in as negatives.

Doing this can really help narrow down your keyword list and prevent unqualified traffic from seeing your ad and not clicking – which prevents your impressions from skyrocketing and therefore lowering your click-through rate. But negatives also can prevent people from clicking on your ads, costing you money and lowering your conversion rates.

However, if you’re only relying on the search query reports you’re really only being reactive in preventing your ad from being shown and clicked on by irrelevant traffic.

Before you even start a PPC account, you should be running basic keyword research reports to find potential keywords that could cause irrelevant traffic from seeing your ads and/or clicking on them before it even happens. This is a more proactive approach in keeping unqualified traffic out and therefore increasing click-through rates and Quality Scores. For example, you could be doing PPC keyword research on ‘vacation in Paris’ but find keywords that have search volume for, ‘weddings in paris’, or ‘paris movies’. At this point you would want to add in ‘weddings’ and ‘movies’ to you negative keyword list to weed out that irrelevant/unqualified traffic.

You can run keyword research reports in Google, Yahoo, MSN and several other free keyword tools to find potential negatives.

Every PPC firm should have an on-going list of potential generic negatives that could be used across all of their accounts. Some of these terms can include:

Free

Sex

Comparison

Reviews

Diagram

Pictures

Career

Job/Jobs

Bargain

Discount

Cheap

And much, much more. **Note that some of these generic keywords may be relevant to your business.

Really, the search query reports are for finding negatives that you miss from your initial keyword research. Get in the mind of searchers and find those negatives before they find you!

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.

Last week we talked about the Google content network and automatic placements. I completely ignored the fact that managed placements exist because they didn’t fit in with my description of the ways in which targeting automatic placements is just like riding a flaming motorcycle, but I’m fixing that this week with an even more convoluted metaphor for the content network.

So play along with me for a minute. You are a lion! There are lots and lots of cute little bunnies hopping around your savanna. Whenever you come across one, you can probably reach your paw out and swipe it without much investment. But you have to catch so many to eat well. You might have to spend your whole day munching on rabbits just to feel well-fed. It’s one of nature’s balances: low risk, low reward. Automatic content placements: they are the rabbits of the search marketing world.

But what if you look up and see: a wildebeest? Now that’s 600 pounds of respectable animal. Those things are scary. They can hurt you, and it’s an enormous energy expenditure to try to catch one. If you’re unsuccessful, it’s has the potential to be a huge loss for you. But if you succeed: Wow! 600 pounds of meat! Your whole family can eat for a week. Managed content placements: they’re our wildebeests.

When you launch a content campaign and ad groups based on keyword themes, it’s like waking up in the morning surrounded by delicious bunnies. Google automatically matches your ads to sites they think are contextually relevant, and you’re supposed to start converting! But Google knows a few things. There are millions of sites in their content network. Some of them convert well, some of them don’t. They try to balance this out for advertisers and improve our ROI with a system called smart pricing, which basically boils down to: on sites Google thinks will have lower conversion rates, you pay less for your clicks. You don’t have visibility regarding what sites you’re getting smart pricing on, but overall, it can help lower your cost per lead for your automatic placements. For advertisers with a lot of traffic on the content network, this can be a great advantage because if you have a lot of automatic placements, you will sometimes convert on the very low-cost smart priced sites. With aggressive elimination of non-converting, high-spend sites, this can help generate a lot of conversions at a reasonable cost; but as I said last week, it can be a time-intensive process to turn all of those one-off conversions into a viable long-term lead generation strategy.

So you might think: can’t I just find a couple of wildebeests and stop messing around with all of these little guys? Wouldn’t that be nice, to just target a few high-conversion sites with managed placements and simplify your life? It’s possible…you might stumble upon a site and know this is just the audience that will convert for your ads. Or it might be hiding in there with the rabbits, the page Google automatically matched you to that has a CPL 1/3 of your goal and has converted 52 times this month. It’s tempting to want to grab these up, add them to our managed placements or create a site-targeted ad group for them, and let the leads roll in. Which is a great strategy, except for that it doesn’t always work.

Do you know why? Well, because targeting a placement is just like telling Google: this is high value for me. You’re not going to be getting any kind of discount on your advertising for that site. If the conversion rates on a site are really so high that you can afford to pay more per click, then by all means, try to add a managed placement for that site or page. But be sure to increase your bid- you’re probably not going to get away with using the same bids as you use for your automatic placements on your managed placements. You’ve declared the value of that site, and you will have to take on additional risk to obtain that value. It might not work: if your bid isn’t high enough, your ads won’t show often, and traffic on the site will decrease enough that you’ll lose leads rather than gain them as compared to the site’s performance as an automatic placement. Also, if conversion rates on the site aren’t high enough to counteract your increased bid, it’s possible your CPL could go up once a placement is managed as opposed to automatically matched.

Like the lion’s decision about when it’s wise to chase down a wildebeest, you can’t just be adding managed placements without carefully considering your potential for success and expect to win every time. If you’re getting a high number of low CPL conversions on a low conversion rate site because your clicks are high but your CPC is very low…probably not a great candidate for managed placement. A high conversion rate, coupled with a reasonably low cost per click and low potential competition on the managed placement you’re considering (you can go to the page and see who’s competing for that space) are probably the best indicators of potential success. But as always, there are no guarantees in life. You need to follow the data carefully, modify your bids to gain more traffic or lower CPL as necessary, and understand when to give up the chase. Sometimes managed placements you would really like to make work don’t. Delete them, eat some more bunnies, and keep an eye out for the next big one.

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.

Anyone who has been working on a PPC account for a while- whether it be your own or a client’s- probably reaches a point of inspiration deficiency. A new PPC account can be like a new toy (if you’re not as nerdy as us, as I’m assuming you are, and this does not hold true for you I apologize); it’s fun setting it up and seeing what it does and how the world responds. But after a while, you have other new accounts to play with. Or you don’t, and this is the one account you’ll be handling forevermore. Either way, boredom can lead to neglect, and neglect will eventually damage your account’s profitability. So what to do? Get a little creative and find new ways to improve your accounts:

• Use your colleagues! It really doesn’t matter if they do PPC as well (though that helps)- anyone with familiarity with your product or service can give a new perspective, which can be very helpful when your ad texts all start to look the same and you can’t think of one more benefit for your landing pages. If you do work with other internet marketers, you can take this one step further and ask them to review your accounts for anything you may be overlooking, and for new ideas. This works beautifully and I think you should try it. Aside from actually having coworkers review your accounts, if you have access to theirs, you can also get ideas for settings or account structure changes by looking at what works for them and then applying relevant findings to your own clients.

• Remember there’s a world outside of your PPC account. It’s not all keywords and ad texts- don’t overlook landing page testing! Clients, even if wary of website redesigns, often will allocate budget for one-page design projects if you can adequately justify the increase in conversion rates they’re likely to see as a result.

• Think outside the PPC box- luckily, at Hanapin we have both PPC and SEO clients, so we have a bit of an advantage in this area, but if you don’t, you can still look at your website from a non-PPC perspective. Improvements to your site’s structure, updated content or products, and social media integration can all translate into new PPC opportunities. Updated content can give you ideas for new ad texts and landing page messaging. New products translate to keyword targeting opportunities. Understanding who your customer is and what they want from you via social media can help your messaging become more targeted as well. Meeting your visitors’ needs and expectations is paramount to success in all areas of internet marketing, and exploring how you’re doing that outside of PPC can open your eyes to a lot of possibility.

• You can ask search engine reps for help and ideas, particularly if you work at an agency and have dedicated reps for this kind of thing. I’ll just say a) they are extremely helpful, and sometimes have great ideas and b) you should always take their ideas with a grain of salt, because ultimately their first job is to increase their employer’s profit…not yours. If you choose growth avenues wisely, you can find a balance that does both simultaneously: lovely!

One last note: don’t let your desire to try something new win out over your ROI’s best interest…some ideas are more likely to have a substantial impact than others, and you know your account well enough to understand logically what’s most likely to be useful and what is just a pointless waste of time and money. Trust yourself, do your research, and get inspired. Everyone will be better off for it.

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.

There are some great benefits to the content network like lower click costs, and a large audience base, but like any campaign you need to make sure expanding past search will help you meet your business objectives. Once you’ve done that, it will be easy to get started if you follow this step-by-step guide from PPC Blog.

In his post Review Your PPC Keywords, Jason Tabeling from Search Engine Watch, reminds us to pay close attention to the keywords and match types we have running in our campaigns. Understanding how Google is serving up your ads based on users’ search queries can ultimately be extremely valuable for your account.

Here is a helpful post from Search Engine Watch on Managing Client PPC Campaigns on the Go. This definitely a must read before you book your next business trip! Remember transparency equals trust with client relationships and always have a backup manager in case of an emergency.

Small Business Search Marketing posted a list of the 3^rd annual SEMMY Award winners this week. Be sure to check out the winning post for PPC – oh, hey, look at that, it’s a PPC Hero post! Check out the SEMMY’s Homepage for a breakdown of all the votes.

The RKG blog has been talking about how people shop, and what that means for your conversion rates, this week: the type of shopper your keywords, ads, and landing pages are targeting could make all the difference to your conversion rates. Like George Michie says in the post, he’s not offering data-based classifications, just logical assumptions, but they’re good to think about for your websites in either case.

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.

Tonight I received an email from Panera Bread. Like so many email programs nowadays, my email application automatically blocks images. As a result, here’s what the email looked like:

Not too compelling… especially for a beautiful email that actually looked like this:

I can’t imagine how many people deleted the email without reading it because… there was nothing to read if you didn’t download the images. This is a real problem with HTML emails… but it’s very simple to avoid.

Two Best Practices to Help Open Rates on HTML Emails

• Don’t display text as images… display it as text. Sure it’s not going to be quite as beautiful, but it will be readable – a huge difference. Panera should have broken up the imagery and text in the email.It probably would have taken their designer a few more minutes, but they could have sold a lot more bagels!
• If the designers were absolutely set on utilizing a 100% image-based HTML email, they could have utilized alt tags on each of the images to add compelling text. For the percentage of readers that have programs that block the images, they could have at least read about the new Mediterranean Salmon Salad, Asiago Bagel Breakfast Sandwich, Black Cherry Smoothie and Morning Bagel packs from the contents of the alt tag.

Spending an extra few minutes and filling out your alt tags (alt is alternative text and is displayed when images are not) will improve your open rates and conversion rates on an HTML email like this. It appears these emails were developed with Fishbowl… my understanding is that they have an advanced email editor in all versions of their application that support this.

Food commands imagery… and no doubt that some compelling text will draw more subscribers to download the images and add the email address to their safe list.

As well, I believe many Internet Service Providers flag emails that lack any content and are all images because it’s a means for spammers to send through crap. Panera can probably improve its deliverability rate as well by using more text within the email.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

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