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Why Google Adwords?21 Oct

Google Adwords isn’t only Pay Per click service available on the net however it’s certainly one of industry leaders and has now many specific benefits more than the majority of its competitors. Let me enumerate a couple of advantages of Google Adwords PPC:

Search Visibility

Google rules the search industry. In lots of international locations it makes up no less than 80% of the queries on the internet. This particular one fact alone is a convincing motive to make use of Google Adwords as it is the Pay Per click service for Google.

Statistical Analysis

One of the secrets of providing success with any kind of advertising is being able to determine response. Without the proper data, you are unable to know if your campaigns are generating rewarding traffic to your site.

Adwords delivers plenty of data!

The statistical information that Adwords supply is incredibly remarkable and I’ve dedicated an entire part at the back of this article series on the Adwords reports.

Using the information they offer you can examine each and every keyword and key phrase to determine how it is performing properly.

This is certainly  essential when you begin to evaluate variations on your promotional initiatives since you need to be aware of if the modifications have improved result.

Scheduling

Many businesses does not have to sell Round the clock every single day. Their potential customers will often have certain times which they can be looking for their products.

For instance, most B2B businesses only have to promote over the working week. Promoting at the weekend is not likely to get a similar responsiveness from the consumers.

Adwords incorporates a very versatile scheduling capability that lets you display your advertising campaigns at different times for each and every day of the week.

For quite a few companies this scheduling function can make a big difference to an advertising campaign. It can mean the real difference between success and failure.

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The Effectiveness of Pay Per Click Advertising21 Oct

Just before we start, it’s essential that you genuinely be aware of the true strength of Pay Per click.

Pay per click marketing is amazingly impressive as a consequence of two particular benefits it has above almost every other types of marketing and advertising.

Results Centered

The particular dynamics of Pay-per-click is undoubtedly that the marketer simply will pay for virtually any qualified prospects that the advertising produces (i.e., a marketer simply will pay whenever somebody clicks on their ad to visit their webpage).

Therefore it is in each and every sense results based advertising. As opposed to the majority of advertising in which you pay for your advertising campaigns to be shown, with Ppc you are only spending money on the leads that it offers.

This one difference by itself is sufficient to make Pay per click marketing an hugely appealing marketing medium. But if you combine it with its other distinct benefit then you have one of the most effective types of marketing currently available.

Qualified and Responsive Leads

When people are searching on the web they have a need that they would like fulfilled.

Your current ad will only show up when they type in the key phrases that you have selected,  keywords that relate to your goods so that your adverts only appear to a focused viewers. The search phrases they are searching with are qualifying them as someone interested in anything you are offering.

Using the best keywords, a profitable business should expect to get a flow of very responsive site visitors.

So as you will observe, Pay Per click wins because a) you only pay when leads are generated on your website and b) those leads are usually highly qualified and responsive.

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PPC Paste In Ratio, The Open Marketing Secret06 Jun

OK, you may think about Italian pasta when reading the title, however this is something a lot more important than pasta and mozzarella on PPC. This might be a kind of “open secret” of publisher’s networks, it’s hard to guess why they didn’t take any measure to prevent this paste in ratio (PIR). Probably because most advertisers are not quite aware of this feature, which is not as much a fact as it is a user behavior.

I’ve recently heard a site owner complaining about the gap he had between AdWords reports and the real data, in the sense that he couldn’t explain the extra-traffic he had. In fact, it wasn’t bad at all for him, as there was substantially activity on his site than he was paying for. The truth is that if that guy had known what PIR is he wouldn’t have been complaining because of that. He actually was rather concerned about the accuracy of his tracking tools :)

Many PPC advertisers on search networks think it’s cool to dynamically insert the keywords after the target url of the add, which often happen to be domain name, so they write something like www.myurl.tld/searched_terms. Well, this is a good practice when the url is really pointing to a working pagek, otherwise, the users will get a 404 page.

On an Apache server is simple, they should add a rewrite url on htaccess file and redirect properly the traffic. Otherwise, all that traffic it’s lost.  You probably are wondering why should you be concerned about the displayed url when the add itself has a valid target url. Well, this is it, you just named PIR.

Experience shows clearly that an important percentile of users just copy and paste the ad url into the browser instead of clicking on it. It is a cool way for you to save money, isn’t it? Why some people do that, I let you find the answer,  I am only presenting you the facts.

In conclusion, Paste in Ratio is the % of direct visits I get to your site versus the people that click on the ads. Suppose you start a new campaign. Let’s say the Ad displays 10,000 times and you have a %0.50 CTR, meaning that I get 500 clicks. If you have a Paste in Ratio of %10, that means that another 50 people will have copied and pasted my URL off of the Adwords sidebar and came to your site directly.

So, next time when you try to compose some cool PPC ads, try to point the display url to some working pages, either by dynamically generating them or redirecting them with Apache server.

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AdWords PPC: Incremental Cost per Click – ICC13 Apr

Since Adwords has introduced the bid simulator, there was the possibility to predict the cost/ clicks ratio at different bid values. A well-built campaign will have in view the minimum parameters:

1.       Selling Price

2.       Acquisition price

3.       Profit (resulting from the difference of first two)

ppc 4 stepsThe revenue may also be called maximum profitable CPA.

The cost/ clicks number variation may be predicted as well on empiric basis, which is adwords records.

Next step is to calculate the conversion rate:

Conversions/ Clicks = Conversion Rate (%)

This is usually known from adwords statistics or analytics but it is important to understand the way it is calculated.

A very important step, often overlooked by most advertisers is to calculate the value per click:

icc formulaMax. Profitable CPA x Conversion Rate = Value per Click

Due to the difference between max CPC and avg CPC, the avg CPC may vary according to several variables, mainly competitions’ bids. But each variation in max CPC will result in a proportional fluctuation of clicks volume, revenue and avg CPC.

Cost of Incremental Clicks (CIC) / Number of Incremental Clicks (NIC) =  Incremental Cost per Click (ICC)

icc table

If avg CPC is  lower than ICC, then you should lower the bids.

If avg CPC is higher than ICC it’s recommended that the bids be raised:

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Improve Adwords Quality Score Simple Technique21 Jan

Google, as usual, require you to read between the lines regardless you try to understand SEO or PPC. Same with quality scores, introduced back in 2005, covering various data points, including the ad text and click through rates, and helps ensure the users find what they’re looking for, at least this is what Google tells us.

If you do a research on adwords quality scores you may learn interesting things from the internet. However I assume nobody is willing to fully disclose all his secret in this matter. Some folks say that conversions at the site is a better measure of quality, and it is for sure when it comes to selling volumes.

I am going to point out to a simple technique that may increase a little bit your QS. Remember always that QS is mainly a combination of CTR, landing page quality and ads relevance to the landing page. If you have some monster keywords with high search volume but low CTR, they can pull down the quality score for the more targeted keywords in the group and CTR is said to have more than 50% weight on QS.

So, you must judge keyword expressions related to (1) the ad itself and (2) the landing page. Here is a simple way used by many pro advertisers to tune up landing page quality related to ads relevance:

You must add to the target URL a parameter with a key at your choice (e.g., “param”) with the value injected from DKI, will have then http://your_site.tld?param={keyword}.

On your landing page you get the value of param (am going to illustrate this using PHP but the example can be applied using any server side script:

$param = $_GET['param'];
//filter, tough in this case it's not essential

OK, I think you already got the idea. You may dynamically inject the keyword in your page title and/ or description and having it displayed on your title, preferably a H1 or H2.

You may check it using switch function, an array (like in_array() ) or simplest:


if (isset($param)) {
$display = $param;
}
else {
$display = "topic";
}

and then HTML:

	<h2>Get help on 	<?=$ display?>	</h2>

Sure, preferably to have customized landing pages for each keyword but on a high keyword volume that”s very difficult and the presented approach may work just fine. Even if the QS wouldn’t improve, the conversion rate will do for sure!

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How to Avoid Competing Against Yourself09 Jul

Negative Keywords

Although your campaign is equipped with keywords to specifically describe an item or a service, think about the variations on the broad match keyword that may not apply to what you sell, I will explain you immediately why and how.  Use a keyword tool to find negative keywords. Once you generate an overall negative keyword list it can often be applied to several campaigns or to ad group level.  List out those keywords that do not apply to the item you’re trying to drive traffic to and add them as potential negative keywords.

The 1st place to look for negative keywords is in your Google Adwords campaigns, sounds logical, right?  Google keywords tool is a free tool to ideas for keywords to advertise and negative keywords which aren’t to be advertised but actually it’s more than that.  As I’ve already mentioned, negative keywords can be added at account, campaign, ad group and keyword level and they differ based on search engines.

Please notice that negative keywords are one of the most powerful ways to increase the CTR (and so your position) on AdWords for broad and phrase keywords.  I assume you already know the difference between the 3 basic match type (exact, phrase and broad).

You can easily track which keywords your are showing impressions on, you can also see on the content match which sites you are showing up on and which are getting clicks and you can negative right from the interface.  Be aware that there are several, in fact 3, negative type keywords. Negative broad  is  the default negative match type, usually just called “standard negative keyword.  The question is: how can you come up with the perfect list of negative keywords.

By taking a look at the report you created from Google AdWords, you can see the actual search terms that trigger your ads and put the budget-killing words on the negative keywords list. For instance, at the beginning of my work as a PPC manager, it was a dream come true when on a particular campaign I have discovered this new technique (for me at that time) to increase profits, namely by using negative keywords effectively.

Correctly using negative keywords is critical to the success of a keyword campaign and most overlook it.  Negative keywords are a valid part of any successful PPC campaign.  Adding negative keywords to any pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is a necessary ingredient for success.  Whatever analytics you use, find what keywords that you’re getting traffic for that does not provide quality traffic and include them as negative keywords.  What if you are happy because you are listed in Google with the keywords you wanted, but those keywords are seldom used by your real buyers.

Summarizing:

An efficient Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign will drive qualified traffic to a website, helping to gain exposure and increase sales.  Negative Keywords can save you a lot of money, or if you are willing to keep your PPC spend the same, can make you a lot of money.  Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most cost effective (and just plain effective) ways to get laser-targeted traffic to your website.  Obviously, a higher budget allows you to do more, like bid on more keywords and place your ads on contextually relevant sites, but without knowledge of PPC techniques your budget is the least of your problems.

The main point of this post:

Sometimes you may use several match types for the same keywords, which may be a good thing if understood correctly. Some PPC management tools will only issue a warning for duplicate keywords, they will not trigger an error, but only when those keywords belong to the same ad group!  I often could see in my clients campaigns how there were hidden duplicate keywords, which obviously led to a first page bid estimate increment.

But the most obscure way to compete against yourself on PPC campaigns is when you set up different campaigns or ad groups with the same keywords but different match types: you might not be aware that the exact match will be competed by phrase and broad match and consequently you will pay more for the same click!

Therefore, if this is your case, don’t forget to add to phrase and broad match your negative exact and the opposite match types (broad to phrase and phrase to broad).

A brief example:

Find friends – broad – campaign A

“Find friends” – phrase – campaign B

[find friends] – exact – campaign C

Campaign A doesn’t need any negative related to other campaigns in this case.

Campaign B has:

-[find friends]

- Find friends

And Campaign C:

-[find friends]

- Find friends

“-“ (minus) stands for “negative”.

I hope you got the idea.

The article was provided by best seo.

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Google New SERPs and Adwords PPC06 May

Google changed its algorithm recently and redesigned result pages. This may have SEO implications but it wasn’t mainly about that I wanted to talk you about but about PPC adwords implications.

In terms of search market this change wouldn’t seem to have much effect, in the sense that google increased its domination during last month. But what’s going to be affected will be the rankings on serps, as since now users have a faster shortcut to different categories. Adding the left-navigation bar would leverage the power of some sites while will might affect others. Ranking well on overall search will still be a doubtlessly advantage and will allow certain type of sites to get more clicks as they did before.

Real time search has become since now very important and should be carefully considered on SEO.

But what I actually wanted to bring you in attention wasn’t seo, but implication for adwords ppc. Please notice that there were clear studies showing what were the best ads places for CTR and for conversions: the higher was the ad position, the more increased CTR but with lower conversion rate. There was an optimum place for conversions, I think this is about to change now, but we are going to see.

This was just a quick note for all our SEO clients.

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Google Adwords can Make You Reach04 May

Google

Yes, angel and demon, love and hate of many web site owners and developers. Probably trying to stop spam, Google developed a system starting from internal PageRank formula that makes a lot of people feel aggrieved. Having at this point a lot of experience in SEO and adwords, I will try to share some basic facts I encounter within this field, even if that means for me putting my neck directly on the wolf’s mouth.

I run into several cases where Google misinterpreted SEO factors and penalized sites that had not any guilt, this is the side effect of hyper-controlling the Web.

Adwords

I could feel it on my own skin, that if your keywords are not targeted adequately on PPC,  Adwords will crush you.  Some guys suggest that instead of joining Adwords to do SEO for your website, which allegedly it will give you traffic for long time.  This is partially true, because at a certain point Google will change algorithm and take you out from a good SERPs positioning. Besides, if your site is new you are like doomed, because even if denied, the google sandbox exists and it might keep you there until it take the crap out of you.

It is true that if you have a decent new site Google would send you traffic on long tail keywords, but wave goodbye to 2 keywords search phrases before you site get a decent internal PageRank (which is told to be applied to pages, but this is a myth, the domain name bear the weight).

If you apply some methods to Adwords properly, it can be a huge boost for your traffic and referral success.  Adwords can bring instant traffic to your website, which can be very advantageous if you have a brand new web site and you are not getting enough traffic yet.

For beginners especially I don’t recommend marketing the index page (home page), but they may want to consider advertising some other purposely built pages. It can be very profitable if you are advertising a product or service that converts well and you have a good comprehension of how to use Adwords.

ROI

The formula for ROI is as follows (keeping in mind that the “revenue minus cost” in the top line equals profit): Profit/Investment. For any campaign where the advertiser’s goal is to get a conversion, whether it be a sign-up, a sale, or something else, the ROI should be greater than 100% – which simply means that for every dollar spent on adwords, they’ve made a profit.

Adwords offers a free ROI calculator, which allows you to determine the optimal spending level and return on investment for running an PPC advertising program.

There are several ways to calculate ROI, but for PPC probably the best way is to start from CPA (cost per acquisition), which allows to get some figures to be transformed in percentage. Based on this percentage, you may calculate how much each click brings to you.

If your goals don’t have values, you won’t be able to calculate the return on your investment.

Keywords

Keywords are very important in adwords because they are ad triggers and they may determine the relevancy of the ad related to users search query. Keywords have an impact on landing page quality, through a relevancy score that’s assigned. CTR, landing page quality and ads relevancy are the main factors determining keywords QS. If you don’t understand very well the importance of QS, you better give up advertising on google. Roughly saying, QS is google finding for keeping out unprofitable ads, a kind of PR for ads, which is expressed in AR (ad ranking). AR will determine ad position on the page.

As a general rule for QS, delete poorly performing keywords and optimize keywords to bring in convey more qualified leads. Identify which ads are performing and which aren’t. Refine your Keywords. Use word combinations and phrases that describe your business. Utilize exact and phrase keyword matching options. Use the AdWords Keyword Tool to generate negative keywords. Eliminate unrelated keywords, broad keywords (here are some tricks, because broad match has its role), one word keywords. Use brand names and product parts. Add misspellings. Create new Ad Groups to improve exposure CPC Adjustment & Conversion Results  Fine tune your bidding strategy. Higher bids for converting keywords. Lower bids for general & non-converting keywords (or better, take them out). Check your keyword’s ad position.  After a new campaign has been running for about a month check the percentage of (CTR) of all expressions of keywords in each ad group in the tab “Tags” index.  Your income is determined by the interaction Alternative fruitful between keywords of the ad and landing page, all three work together in a good relationship.

These are general rules, but in fact, if you don’t know how to maintain or the heal QS for some keywords, you better find some others. Remember that you can lower QS for any keyword, which will lead to about 300% increase of the first page bid for each QS unit.  You see, here only the experience might help you to keep it on the right track.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are perhaps the most important part of your online marketing strategy and now that Google is factoring in the relevancy of your landing pages into the Quality Score of your Google Ad Groups, creating landing pages is more important than ever.  An effective landing page is a crucial component to help you convert browsers into buyers and to get your pay-per-click ads in Google to rank above your competitors.  Each new landing page has a unique URL so that you can point all the traffic from each of your Ad Groups in Google for example to the respective landing pages you have just setup.  You can use Google Analytics custom reports to segment data in many way..

Conversion

In my understanding there no direct relation between CTR and clicks and conversion rates.  For higher positions, there seems to be higher CTR, as well as lower conversion rates for these upper positions.  For inferior positions the CTR rates drop, but the average conversion rate goes up (this is very important!).  Also you may find that in a lot of cases the clicks have nothing to do with actually displaying content to the clicker so conversion rates have no direct correlation to clicks, clicks are only directly related to fees you pay google.  Compare keyword conversion rates and ROI and see how different search result positions perform for each keyword.

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PPC Campaigns Tightly Related to SEO13 Apr

A deeper look into PPC advertising

PPC is often known as search engine marketing, IMO the most powerful web marketing tool. In one of my previous posts I presented some figures related the advantages of paid search. I’ve noticed there are lots of users seeing PPC as being somewhat isolated of SEO, which am going to point out it’s not true at all. Actually, successful PPC campaigns are tightly related to SEO, especially on Adwords, where the variable Quality Score comes in place.

I want you to understand that the presentations on this blog are not merely theory, but insights given by practice on the most complex PPC campaigns and SEO you can imagine. The author has a deep knowledge of web marketing theory and his prospective doesn’t aim to simply throw some words on a blog – as you can find a lot on the web – but to share some important facts with you.

Why PPC depends a lot on SEO?  First of all, for 2 simple reasons: (1) the quality score (QS) is related to (a) ads’ relevancy plus (b) landing’s page quality and (2) QS is the most important factors influencing your campaigns’ cost.

BID RANKING determines the position of your ad on the page (AD RANKING) and is calculated from Max CPC x QS. Please keep in mind that a high quality score may determine an ad to have priority against a higher ranking ad, if the ad ranking is a result of higher max CPC and lower QS. You may better understand this if you look closer to the formula:

Actual CPC = (ad rank to beat / QS) + $0.01

Let’s assume that you are on the fist position with ad rank = 20 and QS = 5  (this means max bid = $4.00) and the second position has an ad rank = 12 and QS = 6  (hence max bid = $2.00), you have to pay ( 12/5 ) + 0.01 =  $2.41 (CPC).  But you may have the same ad rank with a higher QS, for instance:

Ad rank = 20, QS = 10, therefore max bid is $2.00, but in this case your actual CPC would be:

(12/10) + 0.01 = $1.21 !!! which is basically half of the money for the same first position!!! You can easily imagine how this does reflect on  your budget: you cut to half your advertising cost!

Conclusion

This is a brief example pointing out the tight relation between PPC campaigns and SEO. All 3 main factors determining the QS are related to SEO: CTR (apparently not that close), ad relevancy (which is connected to landing page content) and landing page quality (how your landing page is organized).

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Effects of Listings in Paid versus Organic Search03 Jan

As you may noticed in my previous post, the organic search dominates the landscape :) – 85% of searchers click on natural results. The benefits of natural search are obvious and we will learn more about it during our next researches, this is why we will try to focus rather on paid search this time. It is clear also that we are talking about PPC campaigns oriented on direct user response, as somewhat opposed to CPM branding campaigns.

No matter how strange might sound but in spite of the 85% share PPC campaigns may often prove to be more efficient when it comes to well defined marketing objectives. What Google states for adwords may be easily extrapolated to paid search in general:

Paid search offers precise targeting and measurability, as well as pinpointed reach, making possible to achieve a high ROI (Returning of Investment) on a large scale. There are 3 main characteristics that synthesizes these advantages:

1. Relevance

One of the biggest benefits paid search offers is the ability to precisely target ads to users based on their interest, as well as a number of other factors like location, language, and demographic.

2. Return on Investment (ROI)

Online advertising is thoroughly measurable, making it easy to tell whether or not you’re meeting your advertising goals. Every user’s click is tied to a particular ad, keyword, and search query, all of which you can track and decide to improve whenever you like.

3. Reach

Every day, Internet users conduct millions of searches on SEs. By using paid search, you have the opportunity to capture any segment of that broad worldwide audience that’s actively looking for products, services, information, and websites.

The ROI and PPC can be tracked and proved more reliably than SEO, therefore it has been considered a more accountable marketing channel. It also seems like when the budgets are tightening and the focus is shifting to the highest ROI search investments, the SEO strategies take over.  But results are better when the natural search ins incorporate into a existing paid search campaign. The CTR goes up and conversion rate also.

The idea is that a search page provides you with more than one opportunity to put your name in front of the user. For an experimented marketer it is an easy task to take advantage of this. Though some users don’t make the distinction between natural and paid search results, it is generally thought that the majority of users are able to recognize paid search listings. Plus, this doesn’t influence dramatically the results of SEO or paid campaigns.

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