Category Archives: Pay Per Click marketing

How to Prioritize Your PPC Analysis for Awesome Results

Where do you start the analysis process when you detect an issue with your PPC account? How do you determine the root cause of a performance downturn? Answering these questions incorrectly could you lead down a rabbit hole of aimless stats that provide no real solutions.

Once you have established a hypothesis on what has happened to performance, then you need to dig into the stats. Diving straight into the minutia (such as keyword level data) can cause confusion, slow down your ability identify the issue, and cause you to miss other (more important) issues within the account.

Analysis prioritization is critical when diagnosing an ailing account. Knowing where to look within an account for optimization opportunities is just as important as knowing what to do when these opportunities are discovered.

Start at the Top

Initiate your analysis at the highest level of your account. Normally this means at the campaign level. For example, if your CPA is over goal, then you need to concentrate on the campaign that is hindering your performance most.

You should focus on the campaign with the most volume that is providing the weakest returns. Optimizing a campaign with a high CPA that only generates 3 percent of your volume isn’t going to influence your account, but focusing the campaign that produces 24 percent of your volume makes more sense.

Work your way down from the campaign level, into ad groups, ad texts, keywords (for search network campaigns) and placements (for display network campaigns).

campaign-network-ad-group-ad-text-keyword-site-inverted-pyramid

Review the Trending

Don’t base your analysis on a handful of clicks or conversions. Any campaign/ad group/keyword can have a bad day or even a bad week. There can be external factors that influence performance such as seasonal cycles or shifts in the competitive landscape. Determine if the lagging performance looks temporary or if it’s

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2161612/How-to-Prioritize-Your-PPC-Analysis-for-Awesome-Results

How Can PPC Help Your SEO?

For small to mid-sized businesses that don’t have $10k to drop on PPC every month, there is still some search marketing value to be had from launching a PPC campaign, even if you can only spend a minimal amount. In my experience, organic SEO produces much more long-term results than PPC, but certain elements of PPC can actually enhance your SEO.

Keyword Research
The nice thing about launching a PPC campaign is that you can get a lot of useful data very quickly that can then be applied to your SEO campaigns, including keyword research. Site owners can test the effectiveness of certain keywords with a PPC campaign and then slowly incorporate those new keywords into their SEO. Instead of waiting 3-6 months to find out if you targeted the right keywords, you can make faster headway and start your SEO off in the right direction. SEO is a long term process, but cutting out some of the uncertainty about choosing the right keywords can definitely give your SEO a boost.

Online Branding
I have found that PPC ads work best for branded searches. When someone is searching for your site directly they are already one step closer to conversion. I’d rather pay the few dollars for that click when I know that someone is actively looking for my company, and not just checking out their options. The further they are in the buying cycle the more worthwhile that PPC ad is.

Search Presence
Having a strong, branded presence in both the organic and paid search listings really enhances your overall online brand presence and helps build your trust factor. The more touch points you create with your website, PPC ads, social profiles, blogs and so

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Article source: http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/how-can-ppc-help-your-seo-0126609

3 Keys to Optimizing Your PPC Campaign Structure

Campaign structure remains woefully undervalued. When you have the right campaign structure, Google will reward you with a better quality score. You’ll also be rewarded through improved downstream results.

Campaign structure optimization is critical. Let’s look at the three main areas you should focus on when creating the structure of your account.

Improve Your Relevancy

Search engines want to see tightly themed ad groups. This means that your keywords are all related, and they match your ad copy and landing page messages.

For example, if you’re selling motor oil, you would want to keep all your auto branded keywords in unique ad groups so you can write copy that aligns to that auto brand. The example below shows how the existing structure of an account might be re-mapped into tighter campaign structure.

brand-oil-structure-example

What is the right number of keywords per ad group? Well, the number of keywords isn’t the correct metric to monitor.

Below is some performance data from retail clients that shows there isn’t a correlation between the number of keywords in an ad group to CTR, or quality score.

retail-performance-keywords-ad-group

Focus on the downstream metrics, and how your structure can be improved from a customer experience standpoint versus the size of the ad group.

With SEO, if you write for the user, the rest will take care of itself. Here, if you build your campaign structure to be the most relevant to the user, the results will come.

Better Budget Control

One of the biggest reasons to create a new campaign is budget control. Since this is a campaign level control, you should leverage a new campaign when there is a specific budget control item to be addressed.

You need to be aware of a keyword’s percent of total spend per campaign. If any one keyword is eating up too

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2142426/3-Keys-to-Optimizing-Your-PPC-Campaign-Structure

3 Ways Local Small Businesses Can Use PPC

Local small businesses rarely use Google’s AdWords program to its full potential. Want to learn three cool ways to use AdWords, even if the local business doesn’t have the world’s most robust online presence? If you help local businesses with their online marketing, these strategies will be very useful arrows in your quiver.

1. Straight-up AdWords for Traffic and Leads

First, there’s the obvious reason for setting up an AdWords account for a local client: nearly instant traffic. AdWords is now more important than SEO for local searches, since between ads, maps, and local listings (the “7-pack”), the top organic listing is often below the fold, as this screenshot below demonstrates:

google-local-dentist

A compelling ad can start generating traffic right away. Notice the uninspiring headlines in the above screenshot? “Dentist.” “General Dentistry.” Dental Care Provider.” “Find a Local Dentist.” Wow, talk about “Mad Men”. If you’re advertising a dental practice, use the headline to differentiate your ad:

  • Big Benefit: Gentle Dentist for Cowards
  • Social Proof/Story: “I Woke With a Toothache”
  • Great Offer: Get $300 Whitening Coupon

In conjunction with a prominent Google Places listing and lots of favorable reviews, AdWords can produce a prominent presence on the search results page.

Unlike national campaigns where keyword selection is a complex job, local markets don’t require hundreds or thousands of medium- to long-tail keywords. Instead, if you geographically limit the campaign to a city or metro area, you can successfully bid on broad match short-tail words like “dentist” or “oral surgeon.”

As a bonus, Google rewards this sloppy bidding strategy by letting you know the exact search phrases that triggered your ads. You can add those keywords to you AdWords account, optimize just those phrases for organic SEO, and make sure the pages that receive this most targeted traffic contain specific, relevant, and compelling content.

2. Test Messaging For Other

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2141107/3-Ways-Local-Small-Businesses-Can-Use-PPC

Outsmarting Your Competition in High-Stakes PPC Markets

Are you competing in a high-stakes PPC market with bids in the $25 to $40 range? If you are, don’t simply fight your competition head on; if you do, you’ll end up paying premium prices for clicks you might capture for far less. There are several shrewd approaches you can employ to side-step your less-vigilant competitors. We’ve learned a few valuable tricks that can earn you valuable clicks for less-than-premium prices. The techniques begin with carefully monitoring PPC activity throughout the day to discover low-competition time slots in the PPC bidding and striking while your competition snoozes.

Getting Started

The types of campaigns for which these techniques will work will be high bid environments with smaller but determined competitors. You want to look for competitors bidding for terms in the $20-and-up range, but whose campaigns are not fully budgeted to run at the maximum number of available clicks. Specifically, we want to look for competitors’ ads that don’t appear consistently or whose ads disappear later in the day. Smaller competitors tend to fit this model fairly often. An illustrative keyword example we see in our local market of Austin Texas is “Personal Injury Lawyer”. We know the bids in that space are $24 to $30 depending on the time of the day–but we see some advertisers drop out at various times of the day. For illustration, we’ll examine Google’s Adwords system, but these principles will apply to any PPC program.

Identify Your Competitor’s Ad Schedule

Google’s Adwords system has a scheduling feature that allows advertisers to run ads during particular times of the day, and even enter positive or negative bid adjustments based on times of the day.

Here’s the catch: the Adwords system only allows the scheduling to be made in increments of 15 minutes, as shown in the screenshot below.

Adwords<p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> To read the full article: <br /> Article source: <a onclick=http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/a14twcV1OrE/outsmarting-your-competition-in-highstakes-ppc-markets

7 PPC Resolutions to Keep You Focused and Inspired

road-to-2012Many of the resolution-focused articles that touch on PPC this time of year are geared toward specific account tactics. You may expect to see goals such as, “build out long-tail keywords,” or “conduct more/better landing page testing.”

While these are important resolutions, it’s also important to focus on higher-level strategy. How do you and your team stay focused, innovative, and passionate about your PPC campaigns? These seven resolutions will hopefully help you energize your entire approach to PPC in 2012.

Improve Client/Supervisor Communication

Communication is mission critical for PPC success. This goes for individuals working at an agency and reporting to clients, or in-house folks reporting to their direct supervisor. When in doubt, you should strive to over-communicate. Think about how you have communicated with your clients and/or supervisor over the past year, and how you can be more clear, direct, helpful, and insightful.

Also, think about the reports that you provide to your clients/superiors. You may think that stats, trends and charts keep everyone in the loop – and this is true to a certain extent. However, you should strive to provide not just numbers – but also expert analysis and meaningful insight so that you position yourself as a leader and resource.

Anyone can provide charts and graphs. A rock star can tell people what the trends mean, why they are important, and how this information will help optimize your PPC campaign.

Create a Strategy Manifesto

When you have a team of people managing PPC campaigns, you need to make sure that everyone is implementing the same overall strategy. Sure, certain accounts will need specific optimization tactics in order to achieve your KPIs, but your overarching campaign structure strategy should be unified. If this is neglected, all your accounts may

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2133551/7-PPC-Resolutions-to-Keep-You-Focused-and-Inspired

How to Avoid Targeting Paid Search to the Masses in 6 Steps

marketing-to-the-masses

From SearchEngineWatch.com

It’s the norm for consumer packaged goods (CPG) traditional media marketers to create campaigns and initiatives specifically targeting their desired demographic within traditional media. Whether it’s a sporty advertisement for a product in Sports Illustrated or emphasis on the health of a product in SELF magazine, the personalized effort is there.

However, in paid search, this approach is much harder to target in the same way. Reason being: Google and Bing aren’t privy to just one type of user demographic.

Despite the ability to target specifically at the engine level, there are several ways that savvy CPG marketers, and digital marketers altogether, can target their paid search campaigns for a specific demographic to boost their overall brand and online performance.

Most consumers are lumped into several different niche markets – from technology buffs and the technologically impaired, to health nuts and runners, to new parents and empty nesters. These are the exact demographics search marketers need to identify in order to deliver the best online experience for consumers. While the niche markets are an important growing sector of consumers, in order for search marketers to further capitalize on the personalization of their brand they need to remember key demographic variables such as ethnicity, income, and age.

Currently, most search marketers are targeting the masses with their paid search campaigns. The focus is more on a call to action or trying to best differentiate a product within the character limit.

While a call to action is important, a savvy search marketer should seek out more unique opportunities to directly speak to their consumers. By incorporating consumer’s interests and values, they will not only improve the click-through rate (CTR) and more actively engage the target demographic with the brand, but this integration of brand and culture will end up being the differentiator amongst competitors.

If search marketers don’t necessarily think they need to target specific niche markets or appeal to their consumers by engaging them in a message they already believe in, the bottom line will only begin to suffer. In an age when Facebook serves personalized advertisements and iTunes technology chooses music based on individual music taste, brands are likely to be left behind in the consumer’s mindset if they stick to the one-size fits all mentality of paid search advertising.

For example, Brand X, a hairstyling products company, has just completed the Spanish version of their U.S. website and wants to begin driving traffic as soon as possible. They ran paid search campaigns in the past by translating their English ad copy directly to Spanish but had very little user engagement. To solve this issue, Brand X began doing some research:

  • What is the Hispanic market looking for?
  • What’s important to them?
  • What type of content are they reading online?

By asking these crucial questions, Brand X was able to determine that the Hispanic demographic they were trying to reach holds their family as number one priority. To capitalize on this, Brand X developed ad copy for their hairstyles with using family as a call to action. “Find a New Hairstyle and Impress Your Family!” and “Need a New Look for the Family Party? Get Tips from Brand X Today!” By incorporating the message of family into the ad copy, Brand X was able to increase their CTR and on-site user engagement metrics dramatically.

To help begin the process of targeting paid search campaigns with a specific demographic or niche market in mind, below are a few steps to get the ball rolling to personalize a brand.

Identify

Identify the niche markets and demographics that are likely to have an interest in your brand. Start by asking yourself which sectors you could play in. Are you an eco-friendly company? Do you have a killer iPhone app? These could be great ways to edge your way into the environmentally conscious and technology markets.

Research

Once you’ve identified the demographics that are aligned with your brand or products, research the values, interests, or pain points that these consumers struggle with. You can use this in your messaging to persuade them to learn more how your brand can relate.

Message

Ad copy is the first avenue where you can insert your personalized message for the targeted demographic. In just a few words, you can portray your brand as knowledgeable on what is important to them and how your brand can make a difference.

  • In the example above, the Hispanic market’s biggest interest is with their family. Using family references in ad copy will help you relate and connect to the Hispanic consumer.

Content is King

Once the visitor has landed on your site from your targeted ad copy, they will expect to see content relevant to the ad copy that enticed them to click on your ad. Building out website content that is directly correlated with the values and interest of your demographic will ensure the visitor will more actively engage with your site, brand, and product.

Networking

Create a content network campaign to specifically seek out websites with content related to your targeted demographic. For example, a baby food company that wants to target new parents should check out baby blogs, new parents forums, or diaper websites.

Socialize

Social media sites are here to stay. Whether your brand is on Twitter or Facebook, the easiest way to relate to your targeted consumer is by interacting with them on their favorite social media networking sites. By participating in conversation or sending out news updates that the consumers will find interesting, you will establish yourself as a credible brand that cares about its consumers.

Summary

By engaging niche markets by using creative messaging and developing website content around their interests and values, digital marketers are creating a relationship with the consumer that will pay off in a conversion later down the road.

Image Credit: Matthew Field 

Save up to 30 percent! Register now for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. Hurry, pre-agenda rate expires September 1!

BizCloud Computing Consultants Offer 6 Essential SEO Tips for Business Blog

BizCloud, a leading cloud technology and Web marketing solutions provider, offers tips for companies on how to optimize their blogs to enhance their performance across the major search engines and achieve greater online visibility.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) October 30, 2011

The online marketing and SEO experts at BizCloud® have compiled a list of tips to help companies that use business blogs as part of their Web strategy. How can these blogs be optimized for major search engines to boost the volume of relevant traffic resulting in increased conversions? These tips are focused on understanding proven, easy-to-implement SEO techniques necessary for improving company blog ranking for competitive keywords on search engines and increasing both quantity and quality of traffic.

The following tips outline best practice SEO rules and guidelines for optimizing blog content:

1. Determine Keywords. Performing keyword research and identifying the set of most relevant keywords for a business blog is the most important part of an SEO campaign. Tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool are helpful for checking the popularity of chosen search phrases and getting suggestions that may work better for a particular business blog.

2. Smart Use of Hyperlinks. Search Engines place a higher value on blogs containing optimized links to previous posts. Using primary keywords in the anchor text of these links is highly recommended as search engines use them to crawl blog content. Linking to previous posts also benefits blog readers providing them with more resources on the topic they are interested in. The recommended density is one hyperlink per paragraph of text.

3. Title Tag Optimization. The title tag appears as the clickable link in search engine result pages and it may just be the most important place to use targeted keywords. Article titles should be optimized and effective. This will lead to higher rankings and inspire potential customers to click on them and visit a company blog. Ensuring that the entire blog post title shows up in the search result can improve a click-through rate, so it should be under 72 characters long.

4. Add Tags And Categories to Blog Posts. Tags are very helpful in organizing the content of a blog so that readers can easily find what they are looking for. They also make it easier for search engine robots to crawl a blog. But beware: large numbers of tags per post can lead to penalties by Google as they may be seen as an attempt to trick the search engine. To prevent that from happening, keep the number of tags at a maximum of five for each post. Adding the right categories for blog posts is also very important for helping visitors navigate blog content easier and also helps to improve the search engine rankings of a blog.

5. Optimize the Meta Description Tag. The meta description tag is the description that appears in the search results just below the title tag. It is a unique summary of a blog post that should contain the primary keyword- ideally towards the beginning- to get a good response from search engines. Its length should not exceed 160 characters. This content snippet is what will engage visitors to visit a blog for more information.

6. Optimize the Content of Blog Posts. Writing blog posts with SEO as a priority will make the content seem unnatural. Articles that are relevant to the reader and rich with keywords make a winning combination. Including keywords in the body of the post, with the emphasis on the first paragraphs, will increase the chances of achieving higher search engine rankings. The content of every blog post should be developed around primary key phrases.

Online awareness can be very helpful for bringing in business, and blogging is one of the most effective online marketing tools available. Companies can get their target audiences to visit their blogs through search engines which is why it is crucial to implement SEO techniques for business blog optimization.

About BizCloud®

Based in San Francisco, California, with offices in Europe and Asia, BizCloud® (http//BizCloud.net) is focused on technology and cloud innovations to assist businesses in Sales, Marketing, Operations and Engineering solutions customized to individual business needs. BizCloud® has mastered the art of integrated delivery alliances of cloud computing infrastructure, BPM platforms, business applications and service delivery organizations to deliver large inclusive customer outcomes for business owners. BizCloud® utilizes the latest breed of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) products thus passing on a tremendous value to clients. BizCloud is a registered trademark.

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For the original version on PRWeb visit: www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2011/10/prweb8921698.htm

Google Makes All AdWords Phone Numbers Clickable for Mobile

From SearchEngineWatch.com

When AdWords advertisers place a phone number in their ad copy, the phone number will be clickable by default, Google has announced. Advertisers will be charged the same rate as their standard PPC when users call through the advertisement.

The Added Features

google-adwords-clickable-numbers-mobileGoogle has been offering a click-to-call feature for AdWords since January 2010.

Previously, AdWords users who placed a phone number in their ad copy could only get a call if the searcher entered the number manually. Now, the phone numbers inside the creative are clickable by default.

Additionally, advertisers can view details on the performance of the clickable number by looking at the “click type” campaign segment of their campaign reporting.

In some ways, the added features are redundant. Advertisers can already set up a location and click-to-call extension in AdWords, getting a third line of text in their ad copy that gives a clickable phone number.

As with the new clickable numbers in the standard creative, the click-to-call extensions charge the same as the standard PPC price when users click on the number.

The click-to-call extension also offers a few extra features, with the most notable being that your number appears on its own line of text. The click-to-call extension also allows call-only creatives, in-depth metrics reporting, and vanity numbers.

3 Benefits of Note

So where’s the benefit for adverisers in the clickable numbers in the standard creative?

  • Advertisers can add their phone number without having to set up the extension, saving time and removing the learning curve.
  • Advertisers will be able to experiment with different ad creatives, examining exactly how the use of a phone number in their ad impacts the success of their campaign, website, and business.
  • Advertisers will be able to gain greater control over where their number appears in the creative, allowing experimentation with specific placement to maximize calls.

To take advantage of the clickable numbers, you need only insert your phone number in a standard format inside your ad copy.

Save up to 30 percent! Register now for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. Hurry, pre-agenda rate expires September 1!

Attorney SEO: Buyer Beware, Microsites Can Kill Search Engine Rankings

2011-10-28 19:17:24 (GMT) (Caymanmama.com – Business Mesothelioma News News)

10/26/2011 // New York, NY, USA // Rene Perras…… Le Buzz // Rene Perras

New York, NY (Attorney SEO News) — All too often law firms are given a sales pitch for additional marketing services from another lawyer marketing company than the one they currently retain. It’s easy for law firms to think that the more efforts they employ to reach new clients the better. But, that isn’t completely accurate—in fact, “too many cooks can spoil the broth.”

In some cases, marketing agencies that only specialize in one marketing tactic, like pay-per-click (PPC), don’t always think about how their PPC campaign will affect another agency’s SEO efforts, resulting in a negative impact. This is why we advise law firms to hire one lawyer marketing firm that is experienced in creating lawyer Web marketing campaigns that encompass several attorney marketing strategies. The problem is, Internet marketing companies don’t often speak to one another, and aren’t necessarily aware how their marketing plan may affect your other marketing efforts.

For example, one of these tactics that could harm your whole SEO campaign is the creation of microsites or landing pages.

Microsites are a commonly used PPC tactic used by many of the major online marketing groups like the Yellow Pages and FindLaw. But lawyers beware; this technique to help generate traffic could actually damage your attorney SEO campaign.

A microsite, also known as a landing page, minisite or weblet, is created to target a niche market and act as a supplement to the primary website. These are often created for specific Web marketing campaigns, especially keyword targeting. For example, lawyers often create microsites for pharmaceutical litigation in order to target potential clients who were injured from taking the prescription drug. Once the potential lawsuits are over and the defective device or drug is no longer in play for litigation, that particular microsite can be taken down, without hurting their lawyer website SEO and rankings.

Microsites are tools that are used to help secure clients, but they can actually quickly destroy any future chance of acquiring cases. This is because many Web marketing companies don’t supply new and fresh content on each microsite, which leads to duplicate content and lost rankings. Many lawyer SEO companies claim that their microsites are on a proxy server, which prevents Google from crawling those sites—eliminating the threat of duplicate content. But can they really guarantee that Google won’t crawl them? No, not necessarily.

As I have stated before in “Law Firm SEO: Duplicate Content is Sure Fire Way to Kill Lawyer Website Rankings,” having duplicate content not only diminishes your credibility if someone else finds the same content on another website, it will hinder search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Fresh, new and relevant content is the key to creating visibility, establishing authority and boosting your lawyer website to page one of Google.

If you’re going to use microsites, make sure you look after your own interests because no one else will. Ensure it is in writing that your law firm microsites are going to have fresh and new content, not re-purposed or recycled content as that will only hurt your efforts. In addition, always approve the design and content prior to launch.

But, if you decide to leave the lawyer SEO marketing company that supplied your microsites, make sure that they are taken down before you try a new approach to Internet marketing and have your former lawyer marketing agency put it in writing. Then do due diligence and monitor, and keep checking those sites to ensure they have been properly taken down so that they don’t pop up unannounced. This will insure your online investment and hopefully mitigate any possible negative impact.

In addition, have an accounting done of your current lawyer search engine results pages so that you can keep tabs on how well your lawyer website continues to rank.

In the end, it’s advised that you only hire one lawyer SEO marketing company to implement your law firm marketing campaign, rather than multiple firms. This will eliminate the threat of different marketing tactics negatively affecting one another.

About the author:

For over 20 years, attorney SEO specialist Rene Perras has worked with law firms of all legal practices to create successful lawyer marketing campaigns. For a free consultation and more information about lawyer marketing and attorney SEO, please contact Rene Perras at 720-ONE-RENE or visit Cepac.com.

Media Information:

Address: 244 Fifth Ave., New York NY 10001
Phone: 720-ONE-RENE
Url: Lawyer marketing – Rene Perras

 

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