The exciting thing about search marketing is that people’s search behaviors are always changing; this can depend on the time of year, trends or new developments in the industry. But how do you stay ahead of these changes and more importantly, what do you do to counteract any negative effects in your accounts? In this post, I’ll focus on understanding traffic trends in your PPC accounts and in my follow-up post I will talk about how to effectively leverage your findings to benefit your account.

Digging-in To Your Account

There are many tools out there to help you understand traffic patterns for your campaigns. However, the first place you need to look is in your PPC account. Start out by running a campaign report for the last few years. Under settings choose “monthly” as your unit of time. Alternatively, set your time range and look at a graph for impressions and clicks in the interface. Either of these tools should give you insights into when traffic drops or spikes occurred. Are there any patterns in your data? Now start thinking about what events (good or bad) happened during those time periods:

• Did you make any significant changes in your account during those times? The “View Change History” tool can be very insightful.
• Did something big happen in the industry?
• Is seasonality a factor for your product or service?

Drill down even further by pulling keyword placement performance reports. Some keywords might be affected by seasonality as well. Certain keywords may have been star performers for a few years, but have dropped off in performance even if their average position hasn’t changed much over time. Pull out these keywords and use Google Trends to further trouble shoot. Searchers might be using different search terms than they did a year ago. Along with Google Trends, your Google Analytics can also help you identify search patterns based on geography.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

Keep an eye on your competitors – know what they’re doing, not only in the PPC space, but other marketing efforts as well. It is easy to get sucked in to the PPC world, but take those blinders off. Your competitors maybe running compelling awareness-building offline campaigns that are driving searchers to click on their PPC ads as well. Your traffic might be directly impacted by what your competitors are doing.

What Is Going On In The Industry?

You may want to set up Google alerts for your most important keywords and try to catch-up on some industry news on a weekly basis. Traffic may spike if there is a huge surge in your industry or tank if there is some bad publicity, so keep on top of what’s going on and think through what that might mean for you PPC account.

I’ve recapped several ways in which you can start identifying changes in your PPC traffic. In my next post, I will discuss how to utilize the knowledge that you have about search patterns to maximize your account performance.

What is JavaScript?
JavaScript in the simplest sense is a scripting language that uses browsers to do the work for a command. For example, you may have a landing page that highlights a phone number at the top. However, for tracking purposes, you may want to show a different phone number to any visitor that comes to your landing page from a PPC ad. You can use JavaScript to automatically show the second number to anyone visiting from your ad, and show the first number to everyone else.

How JavaScript Can Affect Your Tracking
Though few people know how to, it is possible for an end user to turn off their JavaScript, and this will certainly affect the accuracy of your tracking. One of our clients uses a click-to-call strategy, so they have landing pages that show dynamic phone numbers based on the type of visitor. During a recent data review, we realized our PPC campaigns were not creating the expected amount of calls for this time of year. After running a few tests on our ads and landing pages, we were still unsure of the reason, so we turned to our analytics data.

Within Google Analytics the Visitors section holds a plethora of information on not only who your visitors are, but how they see your site based on browsers, operating systems, and so on. Also included in this section is Java Support where you can see how many visitors don’t have JavaScript enabled.

In order to see if this was the cause of the lowered PPC driven calls, we first changed the Default Segment to Paid Search Traffic only so we could be sure we were analyzing the correct visitor segment.

Remember that we were looking for a reason why the number of sales calls attributed to PPC had fallen. From the graph below, we were able to quickly see that the percentage of visitors that had their JavaScript disabled matched very closely with the decrease in sales calls, so we were ready to do another test.

After turning off our Java and JavaScript capabilities within our own browsers (usually found in the tools or preferences section of your toolbar), we were able to test our ad landing pages again, and instantly found the issue. No matter what ad we came to the landing page from, the phone number shown was generic, and would therefore not attribute a call to our ad.

If you find that you are having tracking issues due to a lack of JavaScript support, there are different solutions you can come up with, depending on your time and budget. Making individual landing pages would help, because you eliminate the need for dynamic content. If using JavaScript is the most efficient solution for you or your client, make sure that the default landing page is unique from all other pages so you can still gather usable data.

No matter what type of campaign you run, it’s important to understand who is seeing your ads, and reacting to them. Using your PPC data in conjunction with your analytics data will help you gain a better understanding of the full user experience, and help you effectively track customers while fulfilling their needs.

If you haven’t seen a 2010 prediction post in the last two weeks, welcome back from your coma. If you don’t see a wad of New Year’s resolution posts this week, we hope you come out of yours soon. Nothing against those who have produced such entries. There’s some search and link value to those types of posts this time of year. I guess I just prefer to think of the topics everyone will be writing about, then write about something else.

I’ll stray from my chosen path a bit today and share with you some of my goals for 2010, But these aren’t resolutions for the New Year. Rather, they are focal points for my professional and personal success in the year to come. As social media thinkers and tinkerers yourselves, I encourage you to consider the following as what we should all do in 2010.

Don’t Follow The Crowd

Photo by Adrian Hughes on Shutterstock.com. Used with permission.

The “me too” syndrome is almost an epidemic in social media these days. Few people have the wherewithal to push the thinking. Maybe we’re afraid we’ll piss someone off. Maybe we just want to do what everyone else is doing so we don’t get in trouble. Blog comments are full of, “Well said! I agree!” echoes and companies are demanding Facebook pages without having a single clue as to what to do with them. For some, it’s natural to follow the path of least resistance. I prefer to take a machete to the kudzu and see what’s ahead. It wins you more respect than it does friends, but that’s not always bad.

Look at your strategies and tactics for your company or clients. Are you just playing it safe and following the best practices or are you really thinking about your audience and how you blow them away with awesomeness? Remember, we don’t all have to be sheep. (Reference to my favorite The Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson. See it at the bottom of the linked post.)

Have Laser Focus

I’ve been scurrying to build my own business for the last three or four months. In that frantic race to meet payroll (namely make my wife stop being nervous), I lost focus on a couple of projects, one for a client and one for myself. That won’t happen in 2010. I’m going to be laser focused on my clients and their success and on building a more long-term revenue stream for Social Media Explorer. If I fail, I have only one person to blame.

Think about your social media strategies for 2010. Write them down on a note card or the back of a business card and carry it in your wallet or pocket. If it frays, make another one. Or perhaps laminate it. Pull it out every day and remind yourself what you should be focused on. Dismiss the rest. No excuses.

Move The Needle

I’m going to take each of my client’s primary goals for my work and put it on my white board. I’m going to benchmark, then measure the indicators that supply that needle’s direction. If I don’t move it in the right direction in a reasonable amount of time, I’m going to advise them to find someone better suited to do so. Hell, I might even refund some of their fee. (No promises. Man’s gotta eat, ya know.)

You should too.

Flee The Bubble

I’ve argued before that people in the social media space are a bad measuring stick for the rest of the world. Sure, the mainstream is consuming blogs and sharing information on social networks, but they don’t know or give a shit who Chris Brogan is, they don’t want 50,000 Twitter followers and traditional marketing doesn’t make them run and hide. If it makes sense to develop a client initiative that makes mommy bloggers happy, then I will. If it makes sense to focus on all moms, then I’ll filter my work differently.

If you think relying on your Twitter followers to drive engagement on your company’s project is all you need, then expect low returns. Focus on integrating your social efforts with traditional marketing strategies so you serve all of your target audience, not just the ones who don’t think RSS is the radio station with the dorky morning show.

Remember Why You Do It

Professionally, I do what I do to help my clients achieve their goals. Getting sucked into doing something cool on Twitter or poking around with my hobby side projects is easy to do. But without happy clients, I can’t afford the hobby side projects. Personally, I do what I do to provide for Nancy, Grant and Katie – by far the more important reasons I was put here. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and lose site of why. I plan on reminding myself daily.

Perhaps you too get caught up in the daily routines of meetings and paperwork and fiddling around with Facebook or Twitter. But just like the advice in the Have Laser Focus section, remind yourself everyday why you do what you do. Your clients, your company, your cause … do the tasks but stay focused on the goals and you’ll be successful. And don’t forget why you do it personally, too. We take far too much time away from our loved ones in our business world today. We should start taking a bit of that back.

Final Thoughts

My 2009 was spectacular. I imagine my 2010 being even better. I learned in 2009 that it only happens if you make it happen. Nobody is going to give it to you. Five years ago, I was a nobody PR guy working in a dead-end position in an industry with the most asinine business model known to man. I was making $30,000 a year. Today, I own my own business, am financially successful (knock on wood it stays that way) and know the future is what I make of it.

Those ideas above are what will help me make the most of it. The other point in that thought is that if I can do it, you can too.

Let me know how I can help. And thank you for helping make Social Media Explorer successful and fun.

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.