I often hear from companies that they don’t know how much money they should put into their Google Adwords account. But let me show you how you will get your perfect PPC budget. Step by step.
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Google AdWords is the alternative to search engine optimization, using advertising to bring in traffic instead of organic search results.
At first glance, the two methods have very little in common, but they can be used together to create a more informed and effective marketing strategy on both fronts.
From an SEO perspective, AdWords’ main value lies in its potential to find and test keyword phrases with quick results.
Instead of spending half a year optimizing for a promising query only to be disappointed, an AdWords campaign can collect the necessary information in as little as a month.
Performing Keyword Research
Most webmasters limit their AdWords usage to its Keyword Tool, which provides a number of statistics for any given search term.
The tool is free to use and simple to learn, though some terms are not immediately intuitive.
When a phrase is entered, the Keyword Tool returns the competition level for advertiser fees as well as an estimated number of searches per month.
More importantly, it also offers variants on the phrase, which may be more lucrative or at least spawn a few new ideas. It is not fool-proof, but the Keyword Tool is a useful starting point in any SEO strategy.
Collecting Demographic Information
Once you have some keywords in mind, you can choose to either walk away from AdWords or begin a campaign.
It costs money, but the information gathered is generally well worth the initial investment.
AdWords provides extensive reports based on performance, including a rough sketch of the people most likely to click the ad. This may divulge age, gender and location, all of which play a role in conversions.
Knowing your visitors helps shape content to better suit their needs, resulting in a better experience for everyone involved. At the same time, don’t get so focused on one group that other traffic feels alienated.
Determining Click-Through Rates
The click-through rate is the number of times an ad is clicked relative to the number of times it is shown.
A low rate indicates either a lackluster keyword or poor copy. Unless the first run is satisfactory, it may take several tries to get right. How does this help SEO?
Think of the title and description that appear on Google’s results page as an advertisement that runs without any fees.
Those few lines of text are all you have to lure in readers. Knowing what it most likely to get them clicking is a key part of business success.
Studying Conversions
Last but not least, the number of people you reach is only important within the context of conversion rates.
The conversion rate describes how many visitors actually go on to do a profitable activity, whether that is buying a product, signing up for a service or clicking someone else’s advertisement.
The right keywords and copy are essential in this. For example, someone searching for how to potty train a puppy might be interested in buying house pads, but they may just take the information and run.
An AdWords campaign is your first clue whether or not a keyword string is actually commercially viable, making it one of the most important pieces of research in SEO.
Author Bio – Paul Teitelman is a Toronto SEO expert who has been involved with the industry since its earliest days. He currently offers consulting and optimization services through his website at www.paulteitelman.com.
I am very happy to show you this Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2012 Q4. And it’s still free for all members of SeoCustomer.
This guide contains all the post and articles from 3. Quarter 2012 about SEO, SEM, Social Media Traffic and Link Building – 159 pages.
After a while the older articles are no longer visible here on www.SeoCustomer.com but you can still get a lot of tips and tricks from the posts.
So I have collected all the articles in an eBook (PDF) – so you can get a hot cup of coffee (or tea) and sit down and read about it all.
You can get the Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2012 Q4 here free after signing up for the weekly newsletter.
As a bonus you will also get the Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011, 2012Q1, Q2 and Q3. All together 5 ebooks now.
Have a great day out there.
Carpe diem, Henrik
Did you know that for over a year ago Google started to encrypting search by default for signed-in users?
I just found a study from Optify that shows that 39 percent of the search related traffic from Google to our websites now is gone. Google will show the search terms as withheld.
Qptify made a study with 424 websites with over 17,143,603 visits and 7.241.093 referring keywords. This way they could check out how seriously the “not provided” issue is.
What does it have to do with me?
So why should you care about all this? Well imagine you have a shop in a shopping center Normally you will approach your customers and ask them if they are looking for something special right? But then one day you are told you can’t do this anymore.
You are only allowed to approach customers if they are specifically forthcoming and request help. Now you have lost the ability to proactively help your customers right? You will also lost some valuable information and feedback about your customers.
Google has started to encrypt search queries about 1 year ago. So now you will no longer receive “referrer” data from Google when the user is sign-in.
So you don’t really know what your visitors was looking for. Was it cheap dresses? Or quality dresses? Secondhand dresses? Blue dresses? You don’t know. So you can’t tell if they found what they were looking for.
Maybe half of your customers from Google was searching for blue dresses – but you only have red dresses in your shop. Bad for you right? And now you will not know that your customer love blue dresses.
You have lost a lot of insights.
So a hot term now in search marketing is behavioral targeting. You will have to know what the customer was initially looking for.
But now you will need to rely on later user interactions. You can use log-in information, or cookie based personalized experience.
If you are in the B2B business you can still get a lot of great information from Google Analytic about who are visiting your website and which pages they are looking at. Check it out here. But its getting harder to know about the initial search term.
If you have a newsletter – which search term did they use in Google to find your website? This is a very usefull information. But now its getting harder to get.
Google’s concerns about privacy is driven by a bigger force than this search marketing industry. So we might as well get use to it.
All the best to you as always, Henrik
However interesting your online marketing campaign may be, at the end of the day, there’s only so much it can do.
It can certainly target your niche and bring in interested customers to your site, but it can’t convert all the incoming traffic into sales.
The reason is, regardless of the attractiveness of your website, people may not tend to come back to your site even if they were interested in your products initially.
The fact that barely 2% visitors purchase products when they visit a site for the first time is proof enough that every online marketing strategy needs to be thoroughly looked into.
The remaining 98% of visitors don’t make a purchase the first time they land on your webpage.
What can a marketing manager do to bring back these potential customers to the site once again to complete the purchase? How about a gentle reminder or giving them a cue that can turn these potential clicks in to concrete sales? That’s where Google AdWords remarketing comes in.
What is AdWords Remarketing?
Remarketing is a feature in Google AdWords that can help you reach out to those people who initially visited your site but left without purchasing anything.
With remarketing, you can connect to these people even when they visit any other site on Google Display Network.
You can send certain compelling advertisements that can encourage them in coming back to your site and buying the product.
How does Remarketing work?
Here’s an example of how remarketing may help in bringing more traffic to your site. Let’s assume you deal in the sale of antiques.
You know that 10% of visitors to your site will purchase your products. But the rest 90% visitors, although they were initially interested, leave your site without purchasing any product.
Now with remarketing, you can add a remarketing tag or a remarketing code to all your site’s pages.
Thus, whenever a visitor visits your site, he will automatically be added into your remarketing list.
You can now reach out to those 90% visitors who didn’t buy any product by showing them ads and offers’ that may entice them to come back to your site to buy even while they browse other sites.
How can AdWords remarketing bring in more traffic to your website?
• Creating and managing AdWords remarketing list is very easy.
• AdWords remarketing is a targeted advertising campaign that targets only those visitors who dint get converted into sales.
• As Google has a huge partner list, your remarketing campaign has the potential to reach millions of customers.
• It can target those visitors who were on the verge of making a purchase (those who discarded the shopping cart!) before leaving the site without completing it.
• Remarketing helps you connect with every visitor. It can also target those visitors who have completed a sale by offering them other products and special offers.
• It helps you get in touch with customers within a period of time.
• It helps bring in higher and faster return on investment.
• You can create attractive and relevant advertisements and follow-up messages to target customers.
• You can also control where your advertisement appears by limiting or increasing the number of advertisements depending on that particular sites performance.
Tanya Hansen is a Freelance writer, she currently writes for www.homesecurityreviewsite.com – offers full home security to help protect your family, assets from burglary and other crimes. home security systems
Most of the small or medium sized businesses (SMBs) that spend money on Google Adwords don’t optimize their Google Adwords. So for all of you I have made this checklist.
When I did some research for this article I found out that over half of the Adwords users haven’t checked their account in the past month and 25 percent haven’t logged in once in over 90 days. Amazing right?
SMBs marketers are often working with much smaller budgets and they often have a lot of different tasks to perform, so maybe they don’t think they have time for Google Adwords in their daily routines. But I will show them that it’s worth spending some few minutes every day, week and month.
They don’t check their keywords, they are not changing their ads – it’s all on autopilot. But on the other hand this is good news for the businesses which are checking their Adwords. It is much easier to beat a competitor who doesn’t check their account regularly.
You don’t have to spend hours optimizing your Google Adwords, just a few tips and tricks will do magic for your Adwords. So are you ready? Do you have coffee in your cup?
# Daily routines with Google Adwords
Every day I will log into my Google Adwords account for just 5 min. Is everything working well? You will have to check if everything looks normal.
If you normally have 100 clicks from Adwords and one morning you found that you only have 5 clicks – something is wrong, right?
This should only take 5 min.
# Weekly routines with Google Adwords
Check your keywords
You should raise your bids on the keywords that are doing a good job. A good job means converting clicks to conversions. (You do have some goals for your Adwords right? If not – make some right now).
You should lower your bids on keywords from which you don’t get any conversions. If you don’t have too much time to spend every week on this, you might find that Adwords automated bidding will help you. Remember that you need to give your keywords some time. You can’t create a keyword on Monday and raise or lower your bid the next day. You will need some clicks to be statistic sure how great/bad it is performing.
Every week I will look at the Negative keywords list. You will find it when you click on your campaigns/keywords at the bottom. Go through the list and exclude the word phrases which are a waste of money. This could save you a lot of money and raise your quality score.
Check your ads
You need to have at least 2 ads for every keyword. This way you can test which ads give you most clicks or conversions. You need to give the ads some time before you can tell which one is the winner.
To give you an idea about how many clicks you need to take a good here at www.SplitTester.com. Maybe you shouldn’t do this every week but only once a month – it all depends on how many clicks you are getting.
Make sure that your ads have a benefit statement and a very strong call to action. When you are sure about the statistic you should throw away the bad performing ads and replace it with a new ad. This way you will continually get higher and higher CTR and Quality Scores over time.
# Month routines with Google Adwords
Check your Quality Score
Google calculates your Quality Score every time somebody does a search that triggers your ad. Quality Score is very important to you because of several factors.
Your keywords cost per click (CPC) – higher quality scores leads to a lower CPC. Yes you actually pay less per click when your Quality Score is higher. It also affects the first page bid estimate – a higher Quality Score leads to a lower first page bid estimate. So it will be much easier for you to get your ad on the first page with a higher Quality Score. Your Quality Score also leads to a cheaper top of page bid estimate. In general your ad position will get higher with a higher Quality Score and lower with a lower Quality Score.
The reason is that Google wants to show the most relevant ad to the user looking for something special. So a higher Quality Score makes Google happy because the user is happier. So if there are a lot of businesses out there who never check their Google Adwords account, they will properly have a low Quality Score on some keywords and because you are working with your quality score you will beat them.
Google calculates your Quality Score with a large number of different factors related to your keyword – Your keyword’s past click through rate (CTR), your display URL’s past CTR, your account history, the quality of your landing page, your keyword/ad relevance, your keyword/search relevance, geographic performance, your ad’s performance on a site, your targeted devices
If your Quality Score is below 5 you should do something about it. So increase your Quality Score by mention your keywords in the title and text on the landing page and in the ad text. If you have too many keywords in an ad group you should split up the ad group to 2 separate ad groups.
If you have some keywords below the average ROI and below your average Quality Scores – theses keywords are costing you money. If you don’t work to increase your Quality Score you should delete them. I have heard the term “Band-Aid Solution”. So you have a choice – optimizing your low performing keywords or put them on pause.
Keyword Research
Your keywords are the backbone of your Google Adwords. The Quality of your keyword research can make the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful campaign.
So you should expand your keyword research to increase your reach. Try some other keyword match types such as modified broad, phrase and exact match. In the end you should have a keyword database that is both deep and broad and highly targeted.
Give me a comment – did I forget something?
I am sure you guys are doing this Google Adwords routine in a different way – because not one way is the ultimate way.
So I will love to hear from you – give me some tips – what are you doing daily, weekly or monthly? Did I forget something here.
Give me a comment and show me you are alive.
Many companies are spending tons of money on their PPC (Pay Per Click) on Google Adwords, Yahoo, Bing or even on social media like Facebook.
So we have to give our PPC budget a review from time to time.
How effective are our campaigns? Are we getting the maximum return of our investment?
Have you identified your metrics and your key performance indicators (KPI) so you can measure the effectiveness of your PPC campaign?
Let me give you a step by step approach to do a PPC audit.
The analyze consist of 4 steps. First you have to “Analyzing Account and Campaign Structure”. Then you will have to “Analyzing Ad Group / Ad Copy”. After that you will have to do an “Analyzing Keyword and Landing Pages”. Finally you will have to “Identify quick opportunities for optimization”.
Okay are you ready? Coffee in your cup?
I will talk about Google Adwords in this article – but you can use the same kind of audit in all your PPC accounts on the Internet.
1 – Analyzing Account and Campaign Structure
First you will have to start looking into your existing PPC account and campaign structure. You can waste a lot of good money if your structure is wrong.
Check whether the account includes categorization for different campaigns. You can start by checking your campaign structure – start checking whether it includes a categorization of different ad groups or not properly.
When do you need to create a new campaign?
Staying organized – you might have to create a new campaign to stay organized. You could be selling shoes in one campaign and footwear in another campaign. This way you will stay organized and not just having one huge campaign folder.
Setting the drive campaign structure – this is the main reason for setting up different campaigns. You are controlling some of the structures at the campaign level. This could be the “search and display network”, “Search Network only” or “display Network only”.
You can also choose the location and language settings. If you are selling shoes in Denmark and in the USA – it will be advisable to create a campaign for each of the two countries.
You can also choose your device targeting options on the campaign level. Here you can text and image ads either to desktop and laptop computer, or to Smartphones devices with an internet browser, or to tablet devices.
So you might create a new campaign specific to a mobile campaign instead of mixing it into your normal campaign. This way you have more control over your different type of campaigns.
If all your ads are collected in one campaign if will be a good idea to start splitting into different campaigns.
Okay – ready for next step in our audit?
2 – Analyzing Ad Group / Ad Copy
Now it’s time to check the ad groups.
First we will check the settings. Is your campaign split into locally ad groups? Let’s say you are selling Shoes – then you might want to make an ad group for your “party shoes” and one for more “Formal shoes”.
The reason for this is that you need parameters like keywords, relevance, landing pages to be focused on party shoes. And it will be different parameters for the formal shoes.
Remember to check into your ad scheduling, the Geo location targeting and the language settings.
When you check your ad copy – remember to check whether you are using your keywords in the copy, prices, special offers, do you copy some unique selling points and do you have some strong call to action?
Depending on how many clicks you have – you should at least have 2 variations of your ad at a time. Read more here about – how you can decide which ad is the winner.
One little trick is to automatically insert the search phrase into your ad copy. You can read more about the dynamic keywords here.
That was step number 2. Take some more coffee before we start again.
3 – Analyzing Keywords and Landing Pages
Now it’s time to check out our keywords and landing pages. In this section we will look into how the keyword is performing, the quality score, keyword match type, bid rate and conversions.
Keywords – start to think you are the customer. If you are looking for shoes how do you want to search? If somebody is looking for shoes – the person might look for “red shoes”, “high heel shoes”, “tennis shoes”, “women shoes”, “cheap shoes”, “casual men shoes”.
Often you will get a much higher CTR for keywords phrases contain more than one word.
Remember to review your keywords periodically and remove non performing keywords which are not providing any revenue for the company.
Keyword Match Type – check out your keyword match type.
There are 5 types of keyword matching. “Broad match”, “phrase match”, “exact match”, “broad match modifier” and “negative”. The most normal thing is to use phrase match, exact match and broad match modifier as the match type.
If you have the word “men’s shoes” as a keyword and uses a broad match – they your ad will be shown if somebody is searching for “men’s” and “shoes” in any order of the search query. Your ad will also be shown for both singular and plural forms, synonyms and other relevant variation. So this way your ad will be shown for “men’s shoes”, “cheap men’s shoes”, “men’s shoe photos”,” running shoes” and more.
If you are using the phrase match – then your ad will only be shown for a keyword search query in the same order of words. It will also show your ad like if you have used exact phrase. Your main benefit is compared to broad match is that the ad will not be shown for searches like “shoes for men”, “men shoe”, “men’s sneakers” and more.
If you pick out the exact match – then your ad will only appear when a user is looking for your specific term “men’s shoes”. The user will have to search for the exact word and with the exact order. Your ad will not be shown for “cheap men’s shoes”, “men’s shoe”, “buy men’s shoes” and more.
Let’s say if you placed +men’s +shoes as a broad match modifier type then your ad will appear only when a user searches for terms like discounted men’s shoes, stylish men’s shoes and so on.
Negative keywords is a great way to get a higher CTR. When you add some negative keywords it will help not to show your ad when it’s really unwanted or irrelevant. If you are selling men’s shoes – then put “women’s” as a negative keyword. If you’re selling expensive shoes – a negative keyword could be “cheap” and more.
Next check out the landing page quality. In a PPC audit it is also important to check out the landing page of your ad. When you are doing landing page analysis – remember to look for factors that could improve your quality. Are you using an appealing tag line, do you have a strong call to action button above the fold, do you use testimonial, videos and demo of your products? Benefits in bullet points?
Get some more ideas here with 13 elements your home page must have.
4 – Identifying Quick Opportunities to Optimize
This is the last step in our do it yourself PPC audit.
First you will need to take a look at your quality score on each keyword.
If your quality score is 7, 8, 9 or 10 it will help you to get a higher position on Google Adwords. So you are doing a great job.
If your quality score is 5, 6 you have a medium level quality score.
If your quality score is 1, 2, 3 or 4 your keyword has a low quality score and you will need to work with it. Import your landing page or delete the keyword. A low quality score will increase your cost and lower your ad position.
You could also split the keywords into different ad groups, with a more specific ad copy relevant to the keyword with lower quality score. Try also to change the title and the Meta description of the landing page and the content of the landing page. This will all help you to increase the quality score of the low ranking quality score keywords.
Check out the conversion rate of your website. Whatever your goal is – email subscribe, purchase, Sign-up – you will have to check it out.
What is your cost per lead? What is your cost per conversion?
And how much money is a conversion worth for you and your company?
Get more ideas how to optimize your conversion rate here.
Well time for me to do an audit now.
Have a great day out there – take care.
Henrik
How Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads are taking over Google’s search engine results.
Give us something to think about right?
(click it a couple of times to see it larger)
Source: clickfactor.gr via Baris on Pinterest
Digital marketing is essential to bring your website in front of your targeted audience.
When you understand what Pay Per Click Search Engines are and what the advantage is of using the right ones for you and using them wisely, you’ll see why they are now a crucial part of any successful digital marketing plan.
As a business owner, you want more business. Digital marketing has a number of different categories, each with their own strategies, and they all work together to meet similar goals.
Regarding people using the search engines to find products and services, what is most important to you is that the right type of potential customers, and lots of them, see the link to your website and want to click on it.
You want a targeted, focused customer base, who spot your link easily, click on it quickly, and stay on your web pages for a long time.
Fast
Every business needs to make pay per click part of their digital marketing campaign.
The more you are in a hurry to skyrocket your business on the fast track as soon as possible, the more you need to look at pay per click options. Why?
It takes time, at least a few months, before most major search engines can index a new site and then you can move up in the search engine rankings for major keyword terms in your field. (Of course the more you use search engine optimization techniques the quicker this will happen but there are many factors involved.)
In the meantime, pay per click search engines have multiple benefits including that they can jump start you right way, attracting searches to your new website before it’s fully indexed and optimized completed for the major web search engines.
Take me to the top, Baby
In this day and age, when nobody looks past the first pages and often people only look at the first six or seven listings, every listing you go up can mean more customers, and more reoccurring dollars in your pocket.
So you need to do everything in your power to take your listing up to the top. Pay per click strategies will help you do well in the organic searches as well when used as part of a well thought out, strategic marketing plan. Which is why it is an essential part of your “see you at the top” goal.
Besides the fact that pay per click search engines are fast, easy, and help you rise in the search engines, some other benefits are that:
- You only pay when someone clicks your site
- They are extremely cost-effective because you can decide on the rate that you are willing to pay for each click for the keywords that you chose. Some rates can be as low as a penny per word.
- You are going to get a huge return on investment. You will be able to visibly track your progress and see your returns.
Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN/BING PPC, and Facebook PPC are the biggest Pay Per Click Search Engines.
They are going to be more costly but worth the expense. Less well-known pay per click search engines generally offers a much lower cost.
Author Bio:- Sunny Popali is SEO Director at tempocreative.com, TempoCreative servicing Inbound Marketing in Arizona. For more than 10 years many big brands have benefited from Tempo & Team for digital & internet marketing needs.
If you have been doing Google Adwords or other PPC ads, you know that you have to test your ads so you can get the right winner.
But are you sure you have the right winner? Which metric should you use?
Before starting we will have to sure we have enough data to declare a winner. So I will go to www.splittestcalculator.com.
This is a A/B test calculator.
Really awesome if you have a split test with 2 ads.
I have made this example to show you how to declare a winner of the split test. I have 5 ads competing against each other.
Impressions first
When creating an ad – you are also creating a keyword. When somebody searches for your keyword, your ad can be displayed.
So you will have to have the right keywords. With no impression you will have no display and therefor no sale.
So your measurement should always start with the impressions.
In my example here the ads all got 10.810 impressions.
Clicks and cost
Next measurement is the clicks. How many people are actually clicking on your ads? In my example ad 1 got 536 clicks, but ad 4 is leading with 1063 clicks.
You are only paying when somebody is clicking on your ad – so you will have to check out your costs too. Ad 2 is the ad with the lowest cost (182 dollars).
With cost and clicks you have now the possibility to calculate the CTR (Click Through Rate) and the CV (Conversion Rate).
But now you will have a problem. If you are using the Conversion Rate what about the impressions, the click through rate or the average sale amount?
What is the best scenario – to have a high CTR and a low CR? Or a low CR and a high CTR? Or maybe a mid-range CTR and a mid-range CR? You see the problem? Which ad is the winner?
The ad with the highest CTR is ad 4 with 9.83 percent. So maybe ad 4 is the winner. The ad with the highest CV is ad 2 with 10.95 percent. Well ad 2 might be the winner too.
Conversions – lets get some sale
We are not really interested in impressions or clicks right?
I would rather get some sale – so we have to find out how many sales or conversions we get from our ads.
In my example ad 4 get 62 sale and ad 3 is only getting 38 sales. So now we can calculate the Cost Per Acquisition. The winner in my example is ad 2 – because we want the ad with the lowest cost.
So maybe ad 2 is the winner?
When using the cost per acquisition you don’t take into account the volume (that’s the impressions and clicks) or your average sale amount.
We will have to use a metric that incorporates your CTR, your costs, your conversions and the average sales amounts into one metric.
So I will like to introduce you to Profit Per Impression (PPI).
Profit Per Impression (PPI) – a much better metric
To use the PPI you will need to calculate your revenue and your profit.
Revenue can be a little difficult to calculate if you are selling a lot of different products. My revenue is highest at ad 5 with 784 dollars.
Profit is your revenue – cost. In my example I get the highest profit using ad 1 with 438 dollars.
Now you can calculate your PPI. You just divide your profit with your impressions.
With ad 1 I get the highest profit per impression with 0.041 dollars. So ad 1 is my winner.
Well what about the Quality Score?
We just found out that ad 1 is the winner – but you will have to think of the Quality Score too (if you are working with Google Adwords).
“Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.
Having a low Quality Score, on the other hand, means that your ads, keywords, and landing page probably aren’t as relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad” (taken from Google Adwords).
If you pick an ad with an overall low CTR – it will hurt your Quality Score. A lower quality score will give you a lower average position of your ad, and a higher CPC.
So if you have 2 ads with almost the same PPI, you should pick the one with the highest CTR.
Well I will still pick ad number 1 in my example here. If you are in doubt you can make a test between the 2 last ads.
Conclusion
Always do a split test with your ads and be sure you use the right metrics.
First of all be sure you have enough data. Without enough data you might pick the wrong winner.
Next time go and use the PPI metric to get your winner.
Free giveaway
Go and grab my free Complete SeoCustomer Guides 2011 and 2012 Q1 – full of tips and tricks about SEO, SEM, Social Media Traffic and Link Building
Have a great day out there…
Carpe diem
Henrik