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Posts Tagged ‘Ppc’

You spend the time to develop the right keyword list and write very targeted ads to help increase your traffic, click through rate and ultimately quality score. But that is only one piece of the equation – where are you sending those visitors once they click? Your landing page is the first visual introduction to your brand and it should bring a positive experience to the user. To help make sure you are getting the most out of your landing pages, I have put together a list of best practices.

Before optimizing your page, it is important to understand how users see your page. People read a landing page similar to how they would a book or magazine – they scan from left to right, then diagonally across and down the page and then finally back up to the top. That means you need to put your message across the top and the next most important piece on the right. Keeping this basic pattern in mind will help while you take a look at your copy, images and conversion form to help improve your landing page performance.

While these are a list of best practices, there isn’t a sure fire formula that works for everyone. As with all things in PPC, it is important to test variations until you find the right combination that works for you. The Google Website Optimizer tool is a great way to test different pages to see which elements perform best and are contributing to a higher conversion rate.

Make sure your headline is visible and relevant. Headlines should be relevant to the user, convey your key benefit and be located at the top where the user is going to look first. Try to work in your keyword into the headline to help a visitor confirm they clicked on the correct ad and improve your PPC quality score. Ask yourself if the headline reinstates the users potential problem or gives a brief definition of the service/product offering. If yes, then you are on the right track.

People don’t actually read landing pages, they scan. Think about it, when was the last time you read an entire landing page top to bottom? Keep your copy short, sweet and to the point. Give the important facts and experiment with using paragraph form versus a bulleted list of short statements. You might find that a bulleted list performs much better.

Design a clean, simple and visually appealing landing page. A few images can help bring a page to life, but keep images to a minimum. A landing page should lend itself to a quick and simple recognition of the ‘key message’ and should not be confusing. Too many images, callouts or messages create clutter and confuse a user. Keep in mind that visitors have likely been searching through several ads and landing pages before getting to yours, if they don’t quickly see what they are looking for, they are gone. You have 3-6 seconds to get your message across, make sure your visitors doesn’t spend that time trying to focus their eyes.

Strategically position your conversion form on the right. Going back to how people read landing pages, after scanning the headline, a visitor’s eyes are going to move to the right. If you have a conversion form, place it on the right-hand side to follow the behavior. If you have a shopping cart button instead, follow the same logic. Make sure any required fields are marked with an asterisk or similar notation. If you have a phone number field that won’t accept dashes or dots between numbers, explain this and provide an example so people aren’t discouraged if it doesn’t work correctly. They will not try to submit multiple times, so make sure it is as straightforward as possible.

Simplify your conversion form. Cut down the conversion or contact form to as few fields as possible to help minimize the visitor’s perceived risk of submitting information. Do you ever use the telephone number to follow up with customers? If not, don’t make it a required field as you may be funneling out valuable leads by requiring the information. Users consider what information is being requested and how long is it going to take to fill out the form before deciding which action to take next. If users feel you are asking too much based on what they are getting in return, they are gone. Sometimes it is better to get more conversions with less information than to get very few conversions but a complete history and profile on a person. Make sure you weigh what is important for your business strategy and adjust accordingly.

Keep the important stuff above the fold. Headlines, forms, and call to action should all be on the top third of the page in order to help guarantee a visitor sees it. Make sure you prioritize the elements on your page along with your content – if you don’t prioritize it for your user, they will on their own and may take away the wrong message or action.

Tell people what they are getting, in plain English. No one wants to submit personal information unless they are sure they know what they are getting. No matter what you are offering, whether it is a PDF whitepaper download, catalog in the mail or simply a request for a follow-up call, make sure you spell out everything a user is getting prior to them filling out the form. They want to know what the reward is before they hand over their contact info.

Keep quality score in mind along with user experience. Make sure you include keywords on your page to help improve your PPC quality score but also consider load time. Page load time is also a factor in quality score, and you have roughly 3 seconds – any longer and your quality score is likely being impacted. Avoid using flash animation, which can increase your load time and result in usability issues for some users.

Allow people another place to go from there. Include a logo that links to your homepage or other deep links within your site. A visitor may not be ready to commit yet but are still interested – give them an option to learn more about your products or company.

Try different messages, images, layouts and colors to find a combination that gives you the highest conversion rate. You may be surprised what a few simple adjustments can do for the performance of your PPC campaign.

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.

Finding good help: it’s like the great professional field leveler. No matter how good you are at doing what you do, it doesn’t really mean you’re gonna be great at finding someone else who is good at whatever you need them to do- and that’s an issue, because a terrifying percentage of important projects are contingent on everyone doing their business both correctly and intelligently. The problem, in terms of our industry, arises because whether you’re an expert PPC manager yourself or have no idea what I meant when I used the term PPC two seconds ago, finding the right person or team to handle your pay per click baby is complex. PPC managers can’t always see beyond their own methods to understand how others are successful. HR representatives from agencies needing a PPC manager don’t always understand the balance of technical skills and sales & marketing skills necessary to efficiently handle accounts. No one knows who they should be looking for.

After a good bit of time observing PPC managers, you can identify behavioral characteristics that are more likely to make your search for a good PPC account manager successful. Since everyone doesn’t have the opportunity, as I have been lucky enough to have, to observe lots of fantastic account managers, I’ve assembled a list of some of the personality characteristics they’ve shared.

Competitiveness

PPC is all kinds of a competition. It’s a competition against your…competitors. It’s a competition against yourself as you try to best your previous results. It’s a competition for your target audience’s interest and loyalty. You don’t have to be the kind of person who wants to punch someone in the face because your soccer team came in second, but really, it should annoy you to lose. That way when you log in and you only got 85 leads last week and you usually get 105, there’s something internal motivating you to whip that account back into shape. Thinking of the business you’re losing or the person who may yell at you for poor performance might motivate you a little, but it’s not going to be enough if you’re looking for real success. You’ve gotta want it just for the sake of the accomplishment.

Capitalism

Don’t be silly and think this isn’t important. We’re spending money to try to make more money. That’s what PPC is, and anyone who doesn’t think the idea of trying to increase ROI is inherently cool is going to lose interest in the whole PPC project, and soon.

Creative/Analytical Balance

I think people who are inexperienced with PPC are more likely to overlook this important factor than those of us who manage accounts. It’s a lot of spreadsheets and data analysis and there are lots of numbers. But that’s only the surface layer. What’s important is what you can DO with that data, and that requires the mental flexibility and creativity to see patterns and meaning within and then be able to translate that meaning into action. That’s a lot of abstract thinking, and we haven’t even discussed the traditionally “creative” parts of PPC, like understanding your audience and creating keywords, ad texts, and landing pages that will appeal to them. People who think in a strictly technical “x+y=z” way sometimes have difficulty with PPC management when things get complicated, because you need to have the intuition and flexibility to realize that sometimes x+y just equals x, or sometimes w.

Perfectionism

This is a bit of a double-edged sword. Too much and it’s completely inefficient and can become an obsessive quest to make things technically perfect without considering ROI in terms of time or money. At the same time, the little voice inside your head saying, “Do it right if you’re going to do it” can be a great asset when you’re tired and sick of looking at 38236 rows of Excel spreadsheet. Having a teammate with an internal self-disciplinarian is handy, because it makes it easier to rely on the likelihood that when you ask them to complete a task, it’ll be done correctly.

Courage

I’m naturally risk-averse, so I wish this wasn’t true. But it is: even though PPC is more easily monitored and maybe more predictable than some other forms of advertising, if you really want to further your account’s success, you’re eventually going to have to do something that makes you uncomfortable. Launch an experiment. Turn a campaign off. Start running content ads. Whatever it is, it will freak you out. And this is the only way to really see what works and what doesn’t: try it for your account. People who aren’t willing to risk a little to find greater return won’t be able to help grow business, they can only maintain the status quo. Of course the caveat here is: you don’t want a PPC manager who turns on seven new campaigns and leaves the country for three weeks with it on autopilot. That’s why attention to detail and dedication to the account’s quality are characteristics that need to accompany this trait in a good account manager.

Communication

Here’s a general rule: it’s good if people give you more info than you want. You can always ask them for less if you’re getting too much, but someone who is hard to get information out of from the outset is probably not going to get easier to get information from in the future. If you want to be involved in understanding what’s going on with your PPC account, make sure your manager knows how to communicate clearly and frequently.

Intellectual Curiosity

Anyone who isn’t a little bit excited when Google launches a new AdWords feature just won’t like managing a PPC account for long. You have to be the right kind of nerdy, and really be motivated both to continually learn and to think internet marketing is neat. A PPC manager with this characteristic will be able to keep your account current and take full advantage of new features and on top of upcoming changes, so you can stay ahead of the curve instead of developing a competitive disadvantage.

I know there are a hundred more characteristics that help contribute to success in PPC managers, but the above are some of those which are less apparently obvious, but have been threads that have run through successful account managers in our experience. If you have others, please share!

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.

As the end of the month nears, some of us have found ourselves running on a low budget. Unfortunately, lower budget often translates to low traffic. According to Jason Tabeling, this isn’t always the case. Check out these tips on avoiding lost impression share due to budget.

Take advantage of Google’s Ad Sitelinks in your campaign. If you aren’t already aware, Dan Friedman of the Inside AdWords crew reminds us that you can now turn Sitelinks on without waiting for your campaign to pre-qualify. Sitelinks ad value to your brand terms and provide for more relevant ads. The option is under your Campaign Settings tab. You should consider turning it on and keeping your ads relevant across the campaign.

Creating negatives can be an important part of maximizing your PPC. But sometimes coming up with a list can be a bit tedious. Try using the WordStream’s new free negative Keyword tool to help speed up the process. WordStreams Negative Keyword tool is a lot like the Google Keyword tool, except is has a simple interface, is easy to use, and is built with negative keywords in mind. Just type in your keyword and out pop the negatives. It also allows you to upload straight to AdWords, or email the list as an excel file, so go ahead and have the interns do the dirty work and just send it to you.

Proper set-up and management of your PPC campaigns is vitally important to ensure you have a profitable and high ROI PPC campaign. Without effective bid management and ongoing testing of ads and landing pages the campaign will soon be nothing more than an expensive traffic delivery method. Google AdWords is currently the prominent PPC resource available today. Understanding some of the ways to optimize your AdWords campaigns can cut costs, open opportunities, and increase profits.

Facebook wants to go one step further than Google, and as such has declared war. Though is this a war Facebook really wants to wage? One way in which content is ranked is via the like function. It’s an interesting concept but how far will this go. They may have the PPC side down but not the search.

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.

In my last post I discussed how to understand traffic trends in your PPC accounts. We went over looking at year-over-year data, utilizing tools such as Google Trends, keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing and staying abreast of the latest industry news. Now that you how to analyze what might happen to your traffic in the coming months, let’s talk about how to adjust your account to address these shifts in traffic.

Client Communication

First and foremost, client communication is key. If you know that your account is going to experience a shift in traffic make sure you let your client know beforehand along with an explanation. If you can tell that your client may see a surge in traffic, let them know so they can make sure that they have the resources to handle more orders or requests. If it’s bad news and traffic may drop they will appreciate the heads up. You can also add value, by presenting ideas on how you can head off a loss in PPC traffic.

Promotions

When you are managing a PPC account for a seasonal product or service, promotions are a great way to attract site visitors in your off-season. Make sure you promote the offer effectively in your ad text by enticing your audience with the details. You’ll need to work with your client to identify the right offer for the specific industry, but some ideas for promotions include providing a set percentage discount on your products or service, a tiered percentage discount (10% off of $100 or more, 20% of off of $250 or more) offering a package deal or a buy one get one free offer. This is a good short-term solution to offset a traffic drop.

Bid & Budget Management

When traffic is expected to go up due to a new industry development or for another reason competition for industry terms will increase as well. Make sure that you bid up on your priority keywords so they appear in higher positions.

Traffic for your core products might dip in certain months, but you can choose to promote some lower priority products instead. For example, you specialize in wedding gowns and there is less demand for wedding gowns in the winter. You may want to bid up on formal dresses keywords to regain some of the lost wedding gown traffic. It may make sense to pause your PPC account completely in the off-season and focus your funds on another marketing activity.

Dealing With Competition

As I mentioned in my last post, keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. You won’t be able to control what they’re saying in their ads but you can certainly set yourself up for success. Take a critical look at your ads and ensure that you are highlighting the unique point of differentiation for your product or service. Make sure that you are working closely with your client to continue reinforcing a consistent brand message both offline and online.

Account Expansion

If traffic is dropping off in your account it maybe the right time to expand your reach and cast a wider net. You can broaden your reach by adding in new keywords into your account. I especially like using the Google Opportunities tab which provides keyword ideas for your account. Be aware that the tool doesn’t always place keywords into the most relevant ad groups, so you may have to pull out the best suggestions from the tool and then decide how to distribute the keywords among your ad groups or even create new ad groups. If you stay connected to your industry through blogs and seminars you can also stay mindful of new industry terms and buzz words that you can add into your account.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are all important search engines, but don’t forget about the third tier search engines either. As traffic trends downward you might want to research search engines such as Business.com or 7Search and monitor results and see how your accounts perform.

Consider broadening the audience for your ads by testing whether the content network is right for your product or service. If Google doesn’t match you up with the most relevant sites try hand-picking sites and adding them into your managed placements. There are some niche products that are just not going to perform as well on the content network, but it might be worth testing in your account.

Another ideas is to dig around in Analytics and use the map overlay feature see if there are any concentrated pockets of where site visitors are coming from. You can then set up geo-targeted PPC campaigns to attract new visitors from those areas.

Bottom Line

The bottom-line is that there are ways in which you can identify traffic shifts early and there are ways to deal with these changes effectively. Just remember to be proactive and to keep communicating and setting expectations with your client.

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 great thing about PPC is that it is easy to track and measure. When you link your PPC account with Google Analytics or other data program, you can exponentially expand your wealth of data to really understand who your user is and how they are finding you. All of this is great, but the data doesn’t do any good unless you use it. Don’t wait until your account is in trouble, looking into data now can help you stay on top of small changes in your account and identify opportunities for expansion.

Compare performance history at the keyword level: Your account performance may not be poor but it is also not off the charts, or maybe your account is doing really well but you want it to do even better. No matter where your account is at, periodically dig into your keywords to look for patterns and changes at a granular level. Compare your top performing keywords this month to last month and even compare to the same time last year. Month-to-month comparisons can help you indentify little shifts in the industry as well as in your user and their behavior. I was recently digging into a client’s data and although the account was performing at a similar level as the past few months, when I looked at the keywords I found that the top performing keyword had dropped in impressions by 50%. When I compared the position and keyword bid month-over-month, everything had remained the same. After additional research using Google Insights and other tools, I found that search patterns had shifted in the last few months, and I needed to change my approach to gain back the traffic I had lost. On the surface it looked like the account was performing as usual, but really other keywords had just been making up for the traffic my top performing keyword had lost. If I could get that traffic back, I would then see growth in the account.

Review year-over-year account data: You have access to a lot of data but to get the big picture, pull out your key metrics by month and get it all on one page. Do this for the past two years and look for trends; you might be surprised what you find. For instance, if you plot the clicks, impressions, click-through rate, conversions and conversion rate for Google search vs. content network over the last two years, you may see that the content network has become a larger player in your account. If that is the case, you may want shift your optimization focus to either bring search back up or push the content network further. You also may see that every July your traffic tends to take a sharp drop, so you can help set the client’s expectations now that it is likely to happen again. Start thinking about how you might counter the dip as well as maybe increase traffic for June to help make up for it ahead of time.

Predict and Plan: Use the yearly comparison or month-to-month data to predict what is going to happen over the next couple of months, and adjust your campaigns in advance. Develop a calendar of events, promotions or offers you can promote for the months where traffic tends to decrease so you are planning ahead to try and minimize the natural decrease. If your brand isn’t one that relies on offers, look for other ways you can supplement a decrease in one search engine – maybe boost spend in another or consider adding a third tier search engine to help pick up some additional traffic. The key is to use the data to develop a plan.

Break down data into plain English: As a search marketer you know what every number represents and the lingo that goes with it, but as you report data to clients and other partners, make sure you are translating it into plain English. For instance, instead of just listing all of your campaigns next to their conversion rates and handing it over, cluster campaigns together and add descriptive category headers like “High Performers”, “Slow & Steady” and “Growers” to help tell a story about the campaigns. Think of the mindset of your users and what they might be like. Use the data along with any other consumer insights you have to paint a picture – literally. Visuals can help bring your numbers to life and make them easier to remember. Place an image of the Midwest if your “High Performers” are mostly from the Midwest or a photo of a middle-aged woman if you know the Slow & Steady, reliable campaigns are made up of mostly women searching at work.

Provide monthly recaps: Don’t keep your clients and team wondering how things are going. Take the time to pull together monthly stats and compare them to previous months, as well as year-over-year if applicable. Make sure you not only provide the data in an interesting way, but also formulate a summary to call out any trends or changes in performance. Use your monthly report to set expectations for the coming month as well as indentify areas for expansion and improvement.

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.

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.

One of the challenges of working in an agency environment is that, while it helps get the work done, multiple people touch an account, and you run the risk of creating inconsistencies. When you need to know that your data is accurate it’s nice to know that you and your team have taken a few minutes in the beginning to set up a system for URL building and tracking.

Once you have your Google Ad Words account linked with your Google Analytics account, you gain an immense amount of insight into the customer behavior and site interaction driven by your Ad Words campaigns, but what about the traffic that comes from your Yahoo! and Bing PPC campaigns, or your email campaigns? Why wouldn’t you want to know as much as possible? Especially when it’s so easy to get!

URL Tracking Parameters

Want to track your Bing PPC campaigns? No problem! Want to track the clicks that come from various links in your email campaigns? No problem! All you have to do is follow these simple steps, and you will be up to your eyeballs in data that will help you better understand your customers and get you on a path to making informed decisions about all of your campaigns (PPC or otherwise). The easiest way to get started is to use the Google Analytics URL builder, because it will walk you through each step, and automatically generate a URL with the additional parameters you wish to track. So let’s walk through what each parameter is for:

1. Website URL: This is where you enter the URL that you want to add the tracking parameters to. This can be any webpage; so don’t feel like you have to start directing traffic only to your homepage.
2. Campaign Source: This is required, and it represents the source where your visit came from. This is a high-level parameter; so think of Google, Bing, and Business.com when filling this section out.
   Be Consistent! When entering this information remember that capitalization DOES matter. If you enter ‘Google’ for one link and ‘google’ for a second link, you will end up with two separate sources in Analytics.
3. Campaign Medium: This is also required, and is used to define the type of marketing medium you are using such as CPC, or an email.
   Be Consistent! Like the campaign parameter, the medium is case sensitive. It is also important to note that Analytics automatically uses ‘CPC’ to define the ad words pay per click, so use it when you define ANY pay per click medium. This will help keep your reporting clean in Analytics so you don’t have to run multiple filters to gather your data.
4. Campaign Term: This parameter, while not mandatory, can come in very handy when you want to track your campaigns down to a keyword level. This type of granular data can be used to help you optimize bids in your PPC accounts.
   Be Consistent! If you are going to set up a keyword level parameter in one ad group or campaign, do it for your entire account. While the URL builder is a fantastic tool, don’t forget about using excel to create mass URLs. (Check out the second section of this post for tips and tricks.)
5. Campaign Content: This parameter is also optional, and can help you differentiate ads or set up A/B testing. This parameter should be used when you have a destination URL that can be reached through more than one link. Say, for example, you have two images on your email. If they both point to the same category page on your site, but you want to know which image is clicked on more often, you can include the content parameter so you will be able to easily identify each link in Analytics.
   Be Consistent! If you are going to use this parameter, think about your naming structure before you start. You wouldn’t want to pick names like image1 and image2, because when you see those later in Analytics you won’t have any idea what they are. Once again, you can use excel to help you lay out a naming convention for each type of campaign and/or medium you foresee using.
6. Campaign Name: This is the name of your campaign, newsletter, or email. This field is also required, and will need to be descriptive enough so you know what it was later on.
   Be Consistent! Just like the content parameter, it’s a good idea to lay out a naming convention that you would like to use. This will help everyone in your company understand how to create names that will be consistent and easy to identify in Analytics as time goes on.
   1. Define your URLs and the parameters you want to include. The most important thing you can do is make sure that your worksheet is set up in an easy to use, and easy to understand fashion. My sheets usually look something like this when I get started:

   

   You can see how I’ve defined my URL, all of the parameters I’m going to use, and I have a list of the keywords I will be including after the “utm_term” parameter at the end.

   2. Concatenate your parameters. So some of you might be thinking “concate-what???” But don’t worry! Even though it’s not the easiest thing to say, it’s a simple formula that helps you pull multiple fields together into one long string. Before you dive in, consider these few tips:
      • Start with a question mark. Before you add any parameters to the end of your URL, you must add in a question mark. From then on, each parameter will need to be separated with an ampersand (&).
      • Think of each cell as a thought in a sentence, and remember to separate them each with a comma in your string.
        Example: If you are concatenating cells A1, B1, and C1 your formula will look like this: =concatenate(A1,B1,C1)
      • Use quotation marks when adding text to your string. Remember that spaces count as text, so put quotes around your spaces, and you will be all set.
        Example: If you want to add spaces between each of the cells you concatenated in the first tip it would then look like this: =concatenate(A1,” “,B1,” “,C1) Notice that the spaces are a “thought” in your string, so they are also separated with commas.
      • Use a $ before each part of a cell that you want to remain constant. When you copy formulas across or down a worksheet, the cells will move with you unless you make them constant.
   3. Double-check your formula. Once you have included all of the cells, look at the end result of your URL to make sure everything is there. In order to create the URL for the first keyword in the screen shot below, I used the following formula in cell B11:

   =CONCATENATE(B1,”?”,A3,B3,C1,A4,B4,C1,A5,B5,C1,A7,A11)

   

   And it returned this URL:

   http://www.hanapinmarketing.com?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=New SEO Boy Blog Launch&utm_term=hanapin

   4. Eliminate spaces. When you are creating a URL it’s important to remember that spaces are not allowed, and it is a best practice to replace them with hyphens. There are two ways that you can make sure spaces are eliminated from your URLs:
      1. Find and replace spaces with hyphens after you have created all of your URLs.
      2. Include a nested substitution formula as you build your URLs.

   Nesting formulas is just the act of combining more than one formula. I wanted to replace the spaces in my campaign name with a hyphen, so I replaced “B5” in my original formula with a substitution formula, and the end result looks like this:
   =CONCATENATE(B1,”?”,A3,B3,C1,A4,B4,C1,A5,SUBSTITUTE(B5,” “,”-”),C1,A7,A11)

   5. Set your constants. Because we have a list of five keywords in the screen shot above, we need to make sure that all of the other cells in our formula don’t change. To do this I added a $ before each letter and number for the cells I want to stay the same. Note: I did not make the keyword cell constant, because I want that to change as I move down the list.

   =CONCATENATE($B$1,”?”,$A$3,$B$3,$C$1,$A$4,$B$4,$C$1,$A$5,SUBSTITUTE($B$5,” “,”+”),$C$1,$A$7,A11)

   6. Apply the formula to the rest of your sheet. Once you have verified that your constants are set you can pull the formula down the rest of the sheet, which in this case would be for the other four keywords.

   

   7. Test! Test a handful of the URLs you have created to make sure they go to the correct page, and they contain the correct information.

   For those of you who didn’t give up through this – CONGRATS! Working in excel can certainly seem daunting, but remember that you can always hit escape if something goes wrong, and the best way to learn is to keep trying. Taking the time to learn helpful functions like this will only shave time off of your account work later, so always keep your eyes out for ways to make excel (or any program for that matter) work for you.

Once you’ve entered all of the necessary information the tool will create a URL that you can copy and paste. Be sure to check it for any strange characters, and be sure to replace spaces with hyphens to follow best practices.

Advanced URL Creation: Using Excel

As I said, the URL builder is a great way to get started, but once you understand what kind of parameters you can use, it’s important to also know how you can create a mass quantity of URLs in a short amount of time. For these projects I turn to excel, so I wanted to also include a few tips and tricks on how you can do a larger scale URL project.

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 hate to admit it, but I probably spend more time surfing YouTube than I probably should. You know how it goes: A friend sends you a link to some funny or random video on YouTube, then you find another video to watch and then you’re hooked.

As someone who manages PPC accounts for a living, I wondered, why am I not on YouTube trying to grab a share of this captive audience?

YouTube introduced Promoted Videos late last year and I thought it would be beneficial to reintroduce this valuable tool and outline some tips and tricks on how to integrate these videos into your PPC campaigns.

What are Promoted Videos?

YouTube Promoted Videos appear on the right hand side of the YouTube search results page. Videos are triggered based on the match between your keywords and users’ queries. The position of your video is determined by the bid system and you pay each time a user actually views your video. If you have multiple videos on YouTube, you can opt to take users to the Channel page to watch your video as well as let them browse all your other videos.

Although you can set up a Promoted Videos campaign directly through YouTube, you can only get access to click-through and conversion data by setting up the campaign through Google Adwords.

Why Should You Care?

YouTube attracts millions of users per day. As I mentioned before, you can grab the attention of an engaged audience while they’re searching for related content.

The video format gives you more flexibility in highlighting the features and benefits of your product than a text ad. In essence, you can be as creative as you want.

Finally, videos have the potential to go viral…fast. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars or hired professional actors, if you make your content engaging you can get a lot of attention.

How To Set It Up?

1. Set up a YouTube account (it’s free) and upload the video(s) you want to use.
2. Sign into your Google Adwords account.
3. Choose keywords for your campaign and set your daily budgets and bids. You can use one video across multiple ad groups.
4. Select the “Create new ad” button under the Ads tab.
5. Choose the “Display Ad Builder” and select “YouTube Promoted Videos Template” and follow the steps. You will be able to enter in a headline and description lines (total of 70 characters) that will appear right next to your video on the search results page.
6. In your campaign settings, specify whether you want the ad to only come up on search or on both search and content networks. Remember, that you might have higher cost per leads on the content network.
7. Go back into your YouTube account and select a call-to-action banner (you can only do this through YouTube). This banner will appear as an overlay to your video. If a user clicks on the banner they are taken to a landing page that you specify.
8. Follow the PPC mantra…continually monitor and test!

Best Practices:

• Create a separate campaign for these video ads so you can better monitor and track results.
• Use few tightly themed keywords in each ad group, similar to your content network campaigns.
• You should include more generic and broad terms since that’s how users search for videos on YouTube.
• People want to know what they can expect to get when they click on your video. Use your headline and description to peak their interest. Sell the video!
• Include a strong call-to-action. Obviously, you want them to watch your video, but what else do you want them to do? Do you want comments on your video, do you want them to go to your site and fill out a form or join a contest?
• As I mentioned before, you don’t need to break the bank, but be creative and keep your audience engaged throughout the video. You don’t want them to click on it and then bail.

Having explained all this, you and I both can justify our YouTube surfing as market research. When your supervisor asks why you’re watching a music video at work, you can now respond with “Just doing some market research”! Good luck implementing!

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.

You know how sometimes when you’re doing a big spring cleaning, you find a cute pair of shoes you forgot in the back of your closet for a year? And they are suddenly cool again!

You know how sometimes when you’re doing a big spring cleaning, you find a moldy grape your cat batted under the fridge? And you realize: wow, there could be some special stuff under all of my appliances.

Though your PPC account doesn’t probably contain anything as amazing as sparkly shoes or as gross as moldy fruit, we might put some keywords in a junk drawer or throw an ad group in the basement and forget about them. Maybe they’re hard to handle, or maybe we’re just not getting what we want out of them anymore and newer ideas look more promising. And we’re probably all guilty of overlooking a few minor account problems in the interest of focusing on higher-priority areas. So in the interest of spring, I say we should all be getting things organized and cleaned up and finding awesomeness we’d forgotten about.

Especially if you have a very large PPC account, it can be very difficult to keep track of all of the things you’ve ever had active. You’re not going to magically remember that half a year ago, Random Ad Group A had decent lead numbers, but you needed a cost per lead of $6 and you struggled for months but it stayed at $8, so you paused it. Or that Random Ad Group B, which now has a cost per lead of $10, was at $5 all last summer.

Multiply this problem by hundreds of ad groups and thousands of keywords, all of which work or don’t for different reasons, and you have an issue that could be impacting your account’s performance. As such, it’s your job to go back and remind yourself exactly what was going on back in the day, and how it compares with what’s going on now.

One process we undergo for our accounts regularly is comparative past vs. present performance analysis. In AdWords you can do this at nearly any account level (campaign, ad group, keyword, ad), as well as segmenting by other settings such as distribution network. It can be extremely helpful in identifying areas of opportunity to increase your account’s profitability, and in addition it can help uncover and pinpoint the source of performance issues that otherwise can seem to be nebulously dragging your account down. The process can be time-intensive, but it’s useful enough that it’s worth undertaking.

When I approach this process, I like to be able to simultaneously compare what’s active in the account now and what used to be active but isn’t anymore, so I ensure my reports cover both paused and active elements. It would be lovely if AdWords made it more straightforward to do very in-depth account comparison, but it doesn’t for now, so using reports can get you the data you need.

The Process

• I generally begin at the ad group level, because it gives more detail than a campaign-level report without being completely overwhelming like a keyword report would be, but you can run the reports at any level. Run a report for whatever recent time range you’d like that includes all campaigns, and for the most detail, segment by ad distribution with search partners. Include all of the other advanced settings that you might want to know about, like conversions, cost/conversion, and conversion rate. Then, run the same report for a previous time range (that is similar in number of days- this exercise is not so useful if you compare the past 7 days to 9 months in 2008), or multiple previous time ranges.

• Export those reports to Excel! I generally color-code all data so each time range has its own color. Then, stick them all into one spreadsheet, and sort by campaign and ad group. Beforehand, I usually copy and paste all of the campaign and ad group names in their same columns, below the data and with no color coding, so that when I sort the data there are separations between each ad group to make scanning the data more straightforward. It is then easy to compare each performance metric for Campaign X for the individual date ranges. If a campaign is missing data in one color, you’ll know: it was off during that time. You can also graph the data in Excel to demonstrate significant changes to clients or others.

Click to expand

• Search for performance differences in each ad group. Has CPL gone up or down substantially? What about your average position? What do click-through and conversion rates look like? Performance can change for many different reasons, and this exercise can help identify which elements are most important for you to focus on for each different ad group. For example, if click-through rates have gone down in spite of similar position and impression numbers, consider ad text messaging. But if click-through rates have gone down and you’ve fallen from position 2 to position 7, you might have bid issues or quality score issues as a main concern rather than simply ad messaging. This is the main value of this method: it allows you to see many elements that may impact performance together and consider what they are doing in concert.

• Once you’ve identified a campaign or ad group with significant performance differences in two date ranges, it can be useful to run more detailed reports for just the campaign of concern and repeat the same process discussed above to identify which ad groups, keyword, or placements are contributing to the differences.

• Don’t forget that this is a great method to find stuff that’s no longer active in your account, but might work now. The best (or, safest) candidates for this are ad groups or keywords that had reasonable performance, but were scrapped for sudden CPL spikes, or constant slight overspending, or just for budget constraints that might no longer exist. If your landing page has changed, or your ad texts have become more targeted, or you have a new specialized ad group a keyword might work better in, and you have the time to monitor performance, try it again. You can re-retire if you still can’t work it out, but we’ve had much success in reintroducing things like this in our accounts.

One of the strengths of PPC is its progressiveness. The industry is constantly changing, and there are always new things to try and discover. It’s one of the most exciting things about PPC management, but in an industry focused on development and progress, it’s important to remember that paying attention to what was going on in your accounts in the past can be just as useful as being future-focused. You’re not the same PPC manager you were last year at this time. New ideas and capabilities have developed in the industry, and you’ve developed new skills and perspectives. Things that didn’t work for you in the past very well might when you start again with them and apply your current-day knowledge. So while you’re busy finding new ways to grow account profitability, take a bit of time to look backward and you might find opportunities right at your fingers.

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.