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Posts Tagged ‘New Perspective’

Keywords are the basis of any solid PPC campaign but sometimes finding the right keywords is easier said than done. The Giant List of keyword Tools is a valuable addition to any PPC toolbox, making keyword research a little less daunting and a little more productive.

As you probably already know, Yahoo and Microsoft are making plans to integrate. Naturally, many advertisers are wondering how it will impact campaigns. This q&a post helps users anticipate changes and plan accordingly.

Internet users are engaged and it’s a marketers dream. The willingness for consumers to share their affinities in the virtual space is providing a fresh new perspective in online marketing. With Facebook privacy concerns in the spotlight, Marty Weintraub insightfully evaluates the new potential for online marketers in contextual advertising. Learn how to get creative with demographic profiling and realize the future in radical user intelligence.

If you haven’t tested the new Adwords feature Search Funnels, Search Engine Guide has a helpful guide on which Search Funnel reports you should pay attention to. Assisted conversions, top paths and time are at the top of the list.

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.

The reasons a user will abandon your conversion/sales funnel are endless, unfortunately. Today, I’ll explore one case where not only did our online leads decrease but offline leads (phone calls) decreased too. And I had to find out what was going on and some possible solutions.

I am working with a client who sells high-end, custom office furniture. Over the past few weeks our conversion rate has been down so I started analyzing our ad texts, keywords, bids, ad positions, search query reports, and the other usual suspects that could cause my performance to fluctuate.

After running numerous reports within our paid search campaigns we didn’t discover any major performance problems. Our impressions, clicks and click-through rate all remained steady. There were not any specific campaigns, ad groups or keywords that were well below the others. Also, our bounce rate, pages-per-visitor, and time-on-site stats had actually increased. Overall, conversion rate was down and there was no smoking gun in our paid search campaign to blame.

Of course, we conducted ad text optimizations, we adjusted bids accordingly for keywords have historically under-performed. So, we were able to make some changes in or to optimize the account. But I was thinking that there was something else going on.

I was reviewing our lead reports and noticed that online leads and inbound calls were down, and their decline was parallel. This lead me to believe there was an issue that was on a more macro level. After talking with the client, he had mentioned that this time of year may lend itself to users who are conducting more research for these products, rather than actually taking action (but it was just a gut feeling).

I set out within Analytics to see if this is true. Keep in mind, I’m still looking into this issue, but I thought I’d share my findings thus far and maybe it will help you to get a new perspective on your conversion funnel.

Within Google Analytics I reviewed our exit pages from our contact form. Basically, I wanted to see if someone hit our contact form, where did they end up after that (instead of converting)? Here is sampling of my findings thus far (see below).

So, what are you looking at here? In the red box is my lead confirmation page (”/thankyou.php”). I noticed that the number of people who went from the contact form to the confirmation page decreased by 8%. However, the number of people who are going to all of our other products (that are included in the navigation) have gone up. See below:

This initial report was telling me a few things:

1. That gut feeling may be right. People were leaving the contact form in order to view other products. This could mean that they are not ready to make the commitment and take that next step (i.e contact my client for a quote).
2. Also, this indicates that perhaps we need to review our contact form in order to gain user’s attention faster and at a deeper level, and provide more reasons for them to convert right now.
3. During this time frame, inbound calls also went down. This could also indicate the users are doing more shopping than buying as well.

We have not exhausted our analysis and there other strategies we are reviewing in order to get our conversion rate back up. But this is a start. We still have much work to do!

What can you take away from this?

• Seasonality can play a big roll in your PPC performance.
• If there isn’t a smoking gun in your PPC campaign, review your website to see if something has shifted.
• When your conversion rate is down, it’s always a good idea to review your abandonment rate within your analytics tracking (it helps to set up goals in Google Analytics). This can show where people are dropping off and how you might be able to pick them back up again.

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.

I read “Trust Agents” this weekend. Before you read further, please know that both authors, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, are people I consider friends. Their publisher sent me a free copy of the book to read and review. I’m not unbiased here, nor do I intend to fake it.

But you can trust me when I tell you that even if these two guys weren’t my friends, this book is well worth reading. In fact, it’s well worth buying a few copies to give to friends, business associates, clients or potential clients and so on.

I can give you a synopsis of the book. I can tell you the five or six really good nuggets of thought and overall themes that Brogan and Smith illustrate and nail. I can promise you it will change the way you look at business and will give you a new perspective on the world. But a lot of other people will do that.

Here’s what I want you to know about this book more than anything:

It will empower you.

Regardless of whether you are a marketing or social media expert, a brand manager, an agency-side thinker, an independent consultant, a public relations person new to social media, a developer or programmer or just someone who wants to know more about this Internet marketing thing, this book will provide you with the tools needed to become a trust agent — someone trusted and influential on the web.

The empowerment comes not just in practical advice and street-level knowledge Brogan and Smith bring to the table, but from a perspective only these two can bring. Their message and explanation isn’t just rooted in marketing principles and brand work. It finds its evolution from game theory, psychology and even the inner confines of the lone comfort zone of most technologists: mom’s basement.

I won’t say it’s a blueprint. But it is. I won’t say it’s the best book to read to “get” social media. But it might be.

I just hope that you know me well enough to know if the book was crap, I would at least not say anything about it.

Buy it. Read it. Tell me if you disagree.

And to start your road to becoming a trust agent, help pass the word about the book.

IMAGE: Flickr Photo by J.D. Lasica.