Giving a helping hand to see the real infomation

In Part 1 I explained how quality and relevancy of your ads is vital to avoid wasting money on a PPC campaign.

Let’s consider some more pitfalls.

Not many people new to PPC will be running global businesses and if we were to follow the traditional advertising analogy, it is highly unlikely that many businesses would either wish, or indeed could afford, to advertise in newspapers or periodicals around the world. The same applies with setting up an Adwords camapign. The default target audience is all countries but you can narrow this down to suit your needs by specifying language and locations, right down to a region or city.  This will reduce the amount of times your ad is triggered but result in a higher click through rate (CTR).

Keyword selection and their use in your ads is important and failing to understand how keyword matching works can be a major pitfall. The match type selected determines how and when ads will be displayed for a given search query. The main match types are broad, phrase, exact and negative. The default is broad match and a whole series of articles could be dedicated to exploring keyword matching. One aspect that will certainly save you money is building a negative keyword list and adding these to your campaign. Why is this important?  Remember why people are searching the Internet – usually they are researching a subject or they are actively seeking a product or service.  If they doing the latter, your keyword selection and ad copy needs to ensure your ads appear.  However, if say a college student is researching material for an essay on a subject that could be related to your business, you do not want your ads to show.  The way to prevent this is to put yourself in the position of the different types of searcher and anticipate what keywords they would use.  Any irrelevant keywords should be added to your negative keywords list and Google will stop showing your ads when they are entered. Use Google Analytics to monitor keywords triggering your ads and keep adding irrelevant phrases to your list.

Another pitfall to avoid is running poor performing ads. Google make it easy to improve ads because you can split test by running them against each other and then analysing the results. You then enter a virtuous circle of continuous improvement that increases click through rate and conversions and smarter, more relevant ads reduce cost per click too.

Look out for more PPC advice from our expert Hannah.  Next time I am going to give a brief overview of why SEO complements PPC so well as part of an Internet marketing strategy.

Choosing Keywords involves many skills

Keyword research is the most important and first step in setting up a successful PPC campaign.

If you haven’t got a clear goal in mind as to what keywords you need to bid on, you could end up missing some really important ones, or wasting money on irrelevant ones.

You firstly need to analyse the purpose of your campaign.  Are you trying to drive visitors to your site or do you want them to buy your products?
If for example, you were selling black trench coats, should you bid on the word ‘coats’?  You need to think about your potential visitors’ buying process.  When someone searches for the word ‘coats’ are they looking to buy straight away, or could they be researching the type of coat they want to buy?

Broader keywords such as ‘coats’ often have a much higher Cost Per Click (CPC) as the competition is much higher.  If you want to sell your black trench coats, you’d be better using longer tail keywords such as ‘trench coat’ and ‘black trench coat’.

Once you’ve chosen your initial keywords, you can use Keyword Tools to give you ideas for many more related suggestions.  Caution is needed though as some tools can spit out a lot of irrelevant words.

Ensure that you check through them before blindly adding them to your campaign.  This can take some time, depending on the size of your campaign and the amount of keywords.  Again, there are tools to help you with this, but we won’t discuss them here.

Once you have your finished list of keywords, it’s a good idea to make sure you have them listed three times for the three different match types – broad, phrase and exact. So you will end up with the same keyword listed three times:

• black trench coat – broad
• “black trench coat” – phrase
• [black trench coat] – exact

We will discuss the various match types and how to reduce your CPC and appear higher in the search results in a future post.

Search Engine Optimisation

We must however ask ourselves, if we are looking to increase the non-brand keyphrase visitors, we must also accept that brand search will also increase if the website invokes the visitor interest strongly.

Advanced Segments allow us to split Brand and Non Brand traffic, therefore historic data is imperative and can only be provided by the client. Asking questions such as what TV, Radio and offline advertising have you done, and over which months? This will allow you to monitor historic peaks and troughs.

Create the Advanced Segment to include brand phrases. For this example I’ve used ‘Tom Jones’ and searches for variations with the keyword search history such as, ‘Tom’, ‘Tommy’, ‘Jones’ and ‘Jhones’. After saving the segment go to Traffic Sources > Keywords. Next choose a 3 month period and export the data as CSV.

With this data you can view the percentage increase between Brand keywords and Non Brand keywords. A Wash, Rinse and Repeat policy is required so that you insert this data into Excel on a weekly basis.

Let’s consider Google Adwords because its by far the biggest PPC player around.  Superficially its an auction.  You set the maximum cost per click (CPC) you are prepared to pay to have your advert displayed and if its higher than your competitors, the ad is displayed in the first position.  (Whether that’s necessarily the best position to bid for in every case I’ll leave to another time.)  But that’s not how Google works.  They want to give people the most relevant search results and that is not guaranteed by how much advertisers are willing to pay.  So they use something called Quality Score (QS).  Basically the formula is applied to the keywords you are bidding on and considers various factors to calculate the relevancy of your keyword to your ad text and to a user’s search query.  Keyword QSs are frequently updated and closely relate to its performance.  Usually, a high QS causes your keyword to display ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).  This can be summarised as Ad Rank = CPC Bid x QS.  So, it’s the interaction between your maximum CPC bid and your ad position QS that will ultimately decide which position your ad will be displayed.

Can you see the implications of this?  If you do not focus on the quality and relevancy of your ads and just up the maximum CPC to try and ensure your ads are displayed, you could potentially be throwing huge sums of money away.  This is just one key area that can be a major pitfall for some businesses and explains why many try a PPC campaign and then abandon it after a short while because they fail to see a return on their investment.  This contrasts with others who have seen massive returns from well-managed PPC.

Watch out for some more pitfalls to avoid in future posts.

The page they land on is called the Landing page.  It is possible to use one of the existing pages on your site, but it’s better to set up a specific landing page so that you make the best impression when your potential client views your site for the first time.

You can set up multiple landing pages and split-test them across your campaigns.  It’s best to have at least one landing page per product or service you are advertising.

Your landing page needs to be simple and uncluttered.  It needs to be relevant to the keywords the user was searching for when they came across your advert.

You need to have a good, clear Call to Action and clear navigation.  If someone has come to your site to buy yellow shoes, they don’t want to be confused with lots of other navigation to do with red shoes, blue shoes etc.  They want information on yellow shoes; they want to know how they can buy them and why they should trust you.

You need to have a clear, relevant headline and bulleted text to show the benefits of your product or service.

You need to have a simple contact form that people won’t be put off filling in.

Testimonials and trust factors are really important.

These are just a few initial tips, but the most important thing to do is test, test, test.  And measure
your success – why do or don’t your landing pages work?  Would you fill out your enquiry form if you were your potential client?

We find that when we take over campaigns for our clients, they have previously been wasting £100s, if not £1,000s due to lack of knowledge and experience.

To be frank, Google are out there to make money in whatever way they can. We are here to make sure you can use Google Adwords to your advantage, saving you money by using our expertise.

What Are The Disadvantages In Using a Pay Per Click Manager?

We charge a monthly fee. However, our clients often find that this is easily offset by the amount of time and energy their staff spend in-house trying to make their campaigns work.

We aren’t as knowledgeable about your products as your staff. This is true, however, we make sure that we’re in constant communication with you to ensure we are up-to-date about all your latest products and offers and we then reflect this knowledge in your Campaign management.

What Are The Advantages In Using a Pay Per Click Manager?

• We provide full keyword research at the start of the project to make sure we bid on suitable keywords. We will run these past you before we start to make sure you’re happy we’ve got it right.
• Once we’ve got the keywords you want, we will group them correctly. This is really important to make sure your Quality Score with Google is high. (Having a high Quality Score often means lower bids rank higher than your competitors with lower Quality Scores, so you pay less).
• We ensure your adverts are shown to the right audience, and if appropriate, in the right geographic locations and at the right times of the day and/or week.
• We write creative and powerful adverts which we continually split-test to find the best performing ones.
• We carry out research on your competitors to see what keywords they’re bidding on and what their adverts say.
• We track your campaigns and conversions constantly and optimise the better performing ones.
• We monitor your budget on a daily basis to make sure your money is being wisely spent.
• We add negative keywords to ensure your adverts don’t appear for things you don’t want to appear for.
• We keep in close communication by weekly email and phone calls to ensure you’re happy.
• We’ll tell you if we don’t think your campaigns are converting very well and why.
• We’ll send you a report every month to show you how things have gone and what our recommendations for the month ahead are.

The money we save you in unnecessary Google Adwords expenditure and the extra sales we bring to your business far outweigh our modest monthly fee.

Think about how it compares to traditional advertising.  You place an ad in a newspaper or magazine and hope your target audience buy the publication and look at your advert while reading through.  Hopefully some will note your call to action and do business with you.  Its a scatter gun approach though and there’s no guarantee that anyone reading the ad is actually looking for your product or service.

However, PPC works totally differently.  First of all, unlike the print ad, you don’t actually pay anything for your advert if no one looks at it.  The only time it costs you is when someone clicks on your ad and goes through to your website.  Another advantage is that the majority of people doing so will be those actively looking for what you have to offer, because your ads should only appear when someone has typed in keywords relevant to what you are selling.  What’s more, Adwords appear right at the top of the search results and along the side, so it is much easier for a business with a new website to become visible quickly.

Next time we’ll look at some of the pitfalls of PPC and how these can be overcome.

Sitelinks have been shown on organic links for a while.  They are the collection of links that appear below the search result for your website.  They help users navigate to the main pages of your site.

You can now use them on Adwords, so rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks can display up to five different, additional destination URLs so that users can go to specific targeted pages within your site.

Google have designed Ad Sitelinks so that they appear when an advert gives the user the best result for a particular search query.  They will only appear however when your adverts qualify for the top positions.

They don’t cost any extra to add to your campaigns and if your adverts aren’t in the top positions at the moment, it doesn’t hurt to have them set up ready for when they do.

One advantage to using Ad Sitelinks is that your Click Through Rate may improve dramatically as you are displaying more relevant options to your audience.

To set up Ad Sitelinks for your campaigns, remember that they will be displayed on all the adverts in the chosen campaign, so make sure they are relevant for the entire campaign.

Adding Sitelinks is easy.  You need to go to the Campaign Settings tab.  Choose ‘Ad Extensions’ then go to ‘View’ and select ‘Sitelinks Extension’ .  You will then be able to add your extension by following the simple steps.

One of the main target audiences is the Search Network.  This is where you adverts appear on the Google Search (and if you choose Google Search partners sites) pages.  When your keyword is searched for, your advert will appear at the top or down the right hand side of Google’s search engine:

Google also offer the option to advertise on their Display Network.  They offer two types – Contextual Targeting and Placement Targeting.

Contextual Targeting is where your adverts can be shown across a network of sites chosen by Google.  You can use keywords and themes to find the best sites for your adverts to be shown.  For example, if you sell vans you would choose related keywords and your adverts would be shown to audiences on car and van auction and review sites.  This means that your adverts will be in front of people who are interested in your business and services and who are more likely to take action.

With Placement Targeting, you manage the websites where your adverts appear.  You can choose which sites you believe are the best for you and block your adverts from sites you feel are irrelevant.  Options of placements available are specific web pages, online videos, games, RSS feeds and mobile sites.

Adverts on the Context Network will appear like this:

Caution is needed when using the Content Network as a lot of clicks can be from curious browsers and your adverts can be shown on sites which are completely irrelevant to your product or service.  The Click Through Rate is usually very low and this can lead to a low Quality Score and lead to increased CPC.

However, once you have had a Content campaign running for a few days or weeks, using Contextual Targeting, it is possible to see which sites Google have been showing your adverts on.  If you feel the sites are not relevant or the CPC is too high, you can exclude the domain so that your adverts are not shown on that site again.

If you do decide to advertise on the Content Network, we would recommend that you choose very specific keywords.  These do not have to be directly related to your product.  You need to make sure that your adverts are compelling as they need to stand out on the page amidst all the text and other adverts.

Another factor to consider is Google’s attitude to new websites.  Google isn’t the most popular search engine for nothing.  It has built its reputation on delivering useful and relevant results when users type in search queries. To be able to do this it needs to ensure that new websites “on the block” are not fly-by-nights, here today and gone tomorrow.  Google also wants to ensure websites contain useful current content that users will find relevant to their needs. That is why it can take some time and considerable effort to begin to feature in the search results.  So simply building a website or having someone design it for you and making it look attractive will not necessarily bring you the desired business to justify your investment in time and money.

Happily there are some key ways to drive visitors to your website – one is a quick fix that even benefits new websites and another is slower but delivers far better long term results.

Look out for future posts explaining what these are.