Tag Archives: Pay Per Click

5 Ways To Improve Your PPC Marketing Campaign on Google

Posted on by poonambhatt

Pay-per-click advertising can be very effective channel for increasing your brand’s reach but PPC branding campaigns are often cost prohibitive. Bidding to top positions for your industry’s core terms is an excellent way to expose your brand to new audiences but the “short term ROI be-damned” strategy is usually risky business. Below are 9 strategies to help you build your brand without burning through your spend.

  1. Start with the campaign structure and creatives. Separate your branded terms from your other terms so that your ads’ creatives can be more easily controlled. Searches for your branded terms should always trigger ads with strong brand-based titles and messaging instead of your more traditional ads for industry terms.
  2. Bid on your branded terms, slogans and all their variations. While most everyone bids on their own branded terms, few remember to bid on slogans, alternate spellings and typos. While correctly spelled brand searches may often lead to your company’s organic search listings, casting a wide net ensures you capture searchers who are actively interested in your brand but might otherwise not be able to find you. These bids are especially important for capturing word-of-mouth referrals.
  3. Bid on branded terms in your industry. Brand based search terms are a common method of navigation and often have very little competition. Even high-volume branded terms often have only a handful of competitors and are usually available with low minimum CPCs. Make sure you follow the advertising platform’s terms of service and avoid using anyone else’s branded or trademarked terms in your creatives.
  4. Bid on your domain name and variations. Domain searches are also a popular means of navigation and generally less competitive. Bidding on your own domain name makes it more difficult for your competitors to appear prominently and bids for variations of your domain name are a great way to ensure you capture all potential visitors. Just like misspelled branded terms, offering searchers easy access to your website, despite their challenges with typing or spelling, is a great way to start their visitor experience on a positive note.
  5. Bid on your competition’s domain name and variations. Select a few of your competitors whose products or services align closely with your own and present searchers your brand’s core messaging. Just like bids for your own domain, be sure to include variations like “domain.com”, “domaincom”, etc.
  6. Bid on tradeshow and conference names. If you company spends a great deal of time and money on industry events, reinforcing your industry presence via PPC is an excellent way to maximize your investment. Start by creating a nice landing page for each event that explains your company’s involvement and then tailor your ads’ creatives to include a summary. Ads appearing just before and just after each event are an excellent way to seed event attendees with your brand and reinforce your participation.
  7. Bid on the names of your company’s awards. Whether your company has just been nominated for an award or you’ve just won your industry’s most prestigious honor, drawing attention to your achievement is always beneficial. Be sure to create an informative landing page that also includes links to further background reading on the award or nomination.
  8. Bid on the names of your organization’s key employees. Running ads for the names of your key industry and customer facing employees increases the likelihood that a positive brand message reaches the searcher.
  9. Take the high ground. While it would be quicker and easier to only create a couple of groups to target several groups of terms, investing the time to create highly-targeted landing pages and ad copy is critical step that can not be overlooked. Don’t bother trying to run a pay-per-click branding campaign if you aren’t going to fine tune the details if you do you are just exposing your brand to more people, not building value.

Just as with any other channel you leverage for branding, PPC is also ultimately dependent upon the maturity of your message. If you can present searchers with a concise snapshot of your brand’s value, and then expand on their initial impression with , PPC offers a number of cost-effective opportunities to help you increase your brand’s reach. A wealth of 99 branding tips was recently published by Aviva Directory and is certainly worth a read if you missed it.

5 Ways To Improve Your PPC Marketing Campaign on Google

Posted on by poonambhatt

Running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing campaign on Google is one way to increase your visibility online. Having your website show up at the top of search engines means that your company will be seen by your target audience before your competitors.

Having your ads show up at the top of Google requires more than just money to bid on keywords. Google assigns each ad a Quality Score based on the keywords you are targeting. Google says it looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A high Quality Score means your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Here are 5 strategies to improving your Quality Score and your PPC campaign on Google.

  1. Get rid of ads with a low Click Through Rate (CTR) – Your CTR is an important part of calculating your Quality Score. Ads with low CTRs lower your Quality Score, which means it costs you more to run the same ad. Also, Google assigns Quality Scores to ad groups, so a low CTR can also affect future ads. Be sure to constantly test slightly different wording and pick ads with the best CTR to bring in more customers and lower your CPC.
  2. Remove keywords that aren’t helping – Bidding on highly keywords that are relevant, but very general, may hurt your keyword performance. Large companies may be able to outbid you on the more general keywords, so try to focus your keywords to be as specific as possible.
  3. Add content to your website and landing page – When creating a website or landing page for your PPC campaign, use extremely unique content and constantly update the information. One way to do this is to create a blog for your website that is updated regularly. It not only shows you at being an expert in your specific field, but it also creates new content that will help improve your Quality Score.
  4. Include information about your company – Having a clear “About Us” page on your website and a privacy policy for anyone who gives your company their information helps improve your Quality Score. Transparency is a key factor in calculating a company’s keyword Quality Score.
  5. Have fast-loading pages – A slow-loading landing page equals a bad user experience to Google. Things like large images, animation, and flash graphics can all slow down your page load time. Also, if your website goes down and Google sees that, then that will hurt your Quality Score as well.

Running a successful pay-per-click campaign on Google means paying attention to your Quality Score and improving it wherever it is possible.

Using Search Funnels to Grow Your Adwords Account

Posted on by poonambhatt

What is the new search funnels feature?

Search Funnels are a set of reports in Adwords that allow you to analyze ad impression and click behavior for campaigns, ad groups and keywords. So why is this important for advertisers? Adwords currently attributes conversions to the last click, but as we all know, few conversions are driven by just one click on one ad. There are usually many touch points with a customer, so the search funnels reports allow us to see the impressions and clicks that lead up to the conversion, which in most cases is just as important as knowing what finally lead to the sale.

What reports are included?

The search funnels reports are found in the Adwords interface under Reporting > Conversions. Click the link on the right hand side of the page, and you will be taken to the Search Funnels section.

Let’s first define the data that you will be accessing from these reports.

First click – The first time one of your ads is clicked.

Last click – The click on an ad that precedes a conversion. All conversions in Adwords are by default attributed to the last click.

Assist click – The click on an ad that precedes the last click.

Assist Impression – When an ad is shown preceding the last click, regardless of whether or not the ad was clicked.

Items to Note:

  • The number of conversions in Adwords will differ from the Search Funnels, because Adwords includes conversion from the Google Content Network, and the Search Funnels do not. They also exclude information on organic results, actual search queries, and competitor keyword information.
  • Cookie settings – search history is currently set at 30 days, and is not yet customizable.

Reports within the Search Funnels

Overview – Show how keywords and campaigns work together to create a conversion. Data is generated from conversion paths, or the sequence of ad clicks & impressions that lead to conversions. As mentioned above, content network, organic and competitive information isn’t provided.

Top Conversions – This report pulls together the various conversion types that you have set up through Adwords conversion tracking.

Assist Clicks & Impressions – This report is helpful when you need data that is not conversion focused. Assisted impressions are when your ad is shown, but not clicked, but these metrics are important in considering how many touch points you have had with the customer. Once again, you can see data for all conversion types together or individually, and you can drill down to the campaign, ad group and keyword levels.

Assisted conversions – This report shows both last click and assisted conversions. The drop down box allows you to view all conversions, or select one particular type. This will come in handy if you have different types of conversions set up (a sign up versus an ecommerce purchase), and you want to see if there is a difference in how each type conversion is reached. This report also gives you the ratio of Assisted conversions to last click conversions, so see below on the details of how to analyze this metric.

First Click & Last Click Analysis - First click and last click analysis reports allow you to focus on conversion paths that began or ended with a specific campaign, ad group or keyword. Once you are on the level you want, you can choose any other report in the drop down (while staying focused on conversions).

  • For example, you can choose the top paths report in drop down. Once you are there, the breadcrumbs will show you that you are in a subset of conversions. You will stay drilled in until clicking on a main navigation report.

Top Paths – Shows most common conversion paths, and how everything works together to create conversions. Choose keyword in the dimension drop down box, and you will see the most common path for keywords. If the same keyword is repeated, it represents two clicks for that keyword that then leads to a conversion. As with the other reports you can also view data on the campaign and ad group level. If you select keyword path (impressions) you will see the sequence of keywords that showed your ads, regardless of whether the ads were clicked or not. This data closely represents the breadth of related keywords people are searching for prior to converting.

Time Lag – This section represents the time it takes customers to convert. If it takes a lot of days before a conversion, you will know that your customers are in the research phase of the buying cycle. However, if conversions come on the first day, and the rest of your research shows that there was only one click and one keyword, you will know that your customers are coming to you on those terms when they are ready to buy. The hours data represents the first 24 hours in hour segments.

Path Length – This report is a high level diagnosis that allows you to see how many clicks it takes to get a conversion, and the type of conversions. As mentioned before, different conversions may take more clicks. You can also see how the value of your various conversion types changes by clicking the value link. The data represented here is the percentage of your revenue that is attributed to paths of different lengths. Additionally, if you change to the impressions view you will see how many times people saw your ads (without clicking) before converting.

The search funnel reports can be overwhelming when you first look at them, but it is important to keep in mind that the additional data that is provided is just one more way we can make educated decisions. Start with the overview reports and familiarize yourself with the broad data like understanding on average how long it takes before your customers convert, and identifying if your campaigns tend to have more assisted or last click conversions. From there you can dive deeper into the data, and ensure that you are benefiting from it, and not just spending time looking at more numbers.

Along with the tips above, remember the following:

  • Keywords play three roles in a conversion path. Last click (immediately preceding the conversion), assist click (immediately before the click that leads to the conversion), and assist impression (ad is displayed but not clicked).
  • The ratio of assisted conversions and last click conversions is a quick indicator of whether the keywords serve more in the role of last click or assist click. A value close to zero means they are last click, and a value close to 1 means they are equally an assist and last click. The higher the number, the more they are in the role of an assist click.
  • Some keywords in your Adwords campaigns may not show up in the reports because they only include keywords that play an assist or last click role.
  • Assist clicks & impressions report break out information in same way, but for clicks and impressions instead of conversions.
  • When possible, have FUN with this data. This is great information that will help you grow your accounts, and at the end of the day that’s the main goal, so enjoy getting there!