South Florida Web Marketing Blog

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:

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 Media

Even if the local search volume is so low that the number of new leads is negligible, AdWords has another trick up its sleeve. By split testing different ad copy, businesses can find the best copy for their print ads, radio and TV scripts, and yellow pages listings.

It’s not unusual for one ad to perform 2-5 times better than another. Imagine leveraging that improvement across all advertising platforms – especially the ones where testing is unwieldy, expensive, or just plain impossible.

Since most offline media is of the “interruption” variety (print ads, radio and TV commercials, billboards, etc.), you can take advantage of the interruption arm of AdWords, the Display Network. Not only does the Display Network generate about 10 times the traffic of search, the clicks are also cheaper (typically half the price of clicks from search). So the Display Network is the perfect place to find the messages, offers, and calls to action in offline media.

3. Remarketing for Lead Gen and Branding

Remarketing is one of the most powerful AdWords features – and one of Google’s best kept secrets. You’ve experienced remarketing if you’ve ever seen an ad “follow” you around the web. Here’s what happened: you visited a website and Google planted a remarketing cookie on your computer. Now whenever you visit a page in the AdSense network, Google checks for cookies and often shows you ads based on sites where you’ve already demonstrated interest.

Remarketing done well can make you seem ubiquitous, like a giant billion-dollar brand, even if your ad budget is a couple of hundred bucks a month. Because you’re only ubiquitous for the very targeted and highly qualified people who have already visited your site, and didn’t convert on their initial visit.

Imagine sending your local business client a screenshot of their ad on the New York Times or Washington Post – while keeping their advertising budget under $300 per month.

Here’s a powerful local twist to remarketing: when you get an inbound call, try to take the prospect to a page on your website where you have a demo, a price list, a feature list; whatever can help educate your prospect and further the sale.

Stick the Google remarketing code on that page, so that your ads now follow the prospect around the web. Instead of being one more forgettable contender for the prospect’s business, you soon become the dominant player; the obvious choice.

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

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

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.

So, if your PPC competition is employing the ad scheduler, it become fairly easy to identify when they stop running ads by running test searches throughout the day at 15-minute intervals. Once you’ve identified a competitor using the ad scheduler, you’ve just found a soft spot–your bid competition will be lower during the times of the day when that competitor isn’t bidding on ads. If you can identify more than one competitor, then you’ve found and even more favorable environment.

Identifying Competitors’ Under-Budgeted Campaigns

There is another way to determine soft spots in PPC bidding: look for under-budgeted campaigns. You can identify your competition’s under-budgeted campaigns fairly easily. An under-budgeted campaign is one where the advertisers daily budget will not supply the maximum number of clicks available to that advertiser. So, say a competitor is paying an average of $20 per click for a particular keyword; assume further that their daily budget is only $60–yet there are ten clicks available to that advertiser.

That advertiser has only budgeted enough to purchase three clicks, so Google is forced to economize ad delivery–and it gives advertisers only two choices: standard delivery and accelerated delivery.

Standard delivery means that Google will spread the ads throughout the day. In practice, Google might show an ad every third time a keyword is searched. Accelerated delivery means that Google will simply show an advertiser’s ads every time they are triggered by a search query until the advertiser’s daily budget is exhausted.

There lies the opportunity: if your competitor is employing the accelerated delivery method with an under-budgeted campaign, that means their ads will eventually stop running at some point during the day. You’ll know that your competitors are employing accelerated ad delivery if their ads show consistently in the morning (in 99% of cases, advertisers set their time zone correctly so a Google Adwords “day” begins in the morning) but their ads disappear at random times in the afternoon from day to day.

Outsmarting the Under-Budgeted Competitor

So, how can you capitalize on a competitor that employs accelerated ad delivery? Say your competitor is fighting hard for position one for a particular query and will not yield on their bid price in order to stay on top (that’s a fool’s approach, as we’ll see). You can force your competitor to exhaust their budget more quickly by simply raising your bid as high as you can without dislodging the competitor from position one. Google’s bid price calculation system takes care of the rest: Google adjusts the actual cost-per-click to be based on the dollar amount needed to exceed the “next ranked ad.” If the next ranked ad (you) has a higher bid then the ad that got the click (your aggressive-bidding competitor) costs more. Thus, you can knock your competitor out earlier in the day while at the same time increasing their cost-per-click. Be warned though, you will, of course, be raising your bid, so you could potentially wind up paying more for clicks you do get.

Now to Enjoy the Lighter Competition

With your competitor’s budget exhausted in the later hours of the day, the competitive bidding for a particular keyword/keywords thins significantly. If circumstances line up properly, you can lower your bids in the afternoon hours and enjoy far less expensive clicks, and better click-through rates (and, ultimately, higher quality scores). There are two ways to approach lowering your bids in the later part of the day.

The first approach employs the advanced “bid adjustment” feature in the Adwords ad scheduler described above. To use the bid adjustment feature, log in to your Adwords account, click on a campaign, and then click the “Settings” tab. From there, scroll down to the Advanced Settings section and select “Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling” and then click on “Edit” in the “Ad scheduling” subsection. This will reveal the ad schedule pop-up window (shown below). At the top of the pop-up window, you want to click “Bid adjustment” mode. You can then set specific time periods on specific days and apply a percentage multiplier to lower your bid. In the screenshot below, we’ve adjusted our campaign from 4pm to 7:30pm to adjust our bids to 72% of the standard bid. At all other times, our bid prices stay at the standard bid prices we’ve selected. There it is, we’ve just adjusted our bids downward to enjoy the lighter competitive market we’ve identified that takes place during later hours of the day.

There’s a second approach to lowering bids later in the day that is a bit less elegant, but still effective. The second approach involves simply creating two ad campaigns: a first campaign scheduled to run during the earlier, more competitive hours of the day, and a second campaign with lower bid prices that is scheduled to run from say, 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The advantage to this approach is that you’ll have separate analytic data for the separate campaigns. We prefer this second technique for specifically this reason.

We hope you’ve learned a bit from this article. While a bit Machiavellian, the techniques we’ve outline can help in competitive markets, and certainly the lessons here can be transposed into your daily PPC activities.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/a14twcV1OrE/outsmarting-your-competition-in-highstakes-ppc-markets

PPC is short for Pay Per Click. Google, Yahoo and MSN, as well as other search engines, offer pay per click advertising services.

PPC is an advertising process where you bid on keyword phrases.

Pay Per Click is useful when you have a new websites or if you want to bid on keyword phrases that you cannot get naturally ranked in the top 10 results.

Since Google has the largest market share of search engine queries, then it is the first search engine one would use to start a PPC campaign.

To setup a PPC campaign, you need to do several things.

1. Select keywords phrases that would best fit your marketing needs
2. Group the keyword phrases to create ad groups
3. Write the ad for the keyword group
4. Make sure you have an solid landing page for each ad group
5. Setup the account with business contact information and a credit card
6. Load up the ads and set the bids
7. Monitor the account weekly
8. Be sure to create reports on a monthly basis to make campaign adjustments

This is an example of an ad:

Website Marketing
Market like the Experts
Increase traffic & Gain More Sales
www.SmittysHoldings.com

There are many lessons to learn in Pay Per Click marketing. The biggest factors to understand are biding, landing pages, conversions and use of the reporting.

It's always best to use someone with experience to manage a pay per click account or you can burn through money like it's water.