Internet Marketing Blog

What It Does:

AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) is a tool that allows you to accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements.

Today, the most common way to measure the impact of these types of changes is to do a simple before-and-after analysis. However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during or between the before and after, including holidays, weekends or changes to end user behavior or advertiser behavior.

ACE allows you to test and measure changes in real-time by executing your experimental campaign alongside your original campaign. By performing this type of simultaneous split test, we can tell you precisely if your Search and Content campaign changes produce statistically significant results.

Why You’d Use It:

By using ACE, you’ll be able to better optimize your account by seeing how changes to keywords, bids, ad groups and placements impact your campaign performance.

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What it does:

AdWords automated rules let you schedule automatic changes to specific parts of your account based on the criteria that you specify. For example, automated rules make it easy to:

• Change your daily budget on peak shopping days
• Modify your Max CPC bids based on CTR or conversion rates
• Enable ad text directing users to a promotional landing pages late on a Sunday night

Automated rules give you the flexibility to make changes to a single part of your account or across multiple campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords at once.

Why You’d Use It:

Automated rules are designed to save you time and help you manage your AdWords account more efficiently. If you regularly log in to make manual changes to your account, we encourage you to give automated rules a try.

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This new AdWords targeting feature lets you create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.

To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer’s search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). However, synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) are not considered close variants. Be sure there are no spaces between the + and modified words, but do leave spaces between words. Correct usage: +formal +shoes. Incorrect usage: +formal+shoes. Incorrect usage: + formal + shoes.

If you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today, adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an ROI comparable to that of your phrase match keywords. Compared to using only phrase and exact match keywords, using modified broad match can greatly reduce the number of keywords needed to generate desirable volume because each keyword can match countless word order and spelling variations.

If you mainly use broad match keywords in your account today, you may consider using the modifier with keywords you’ve inactivated due to poor ROI or unwanted matches too difficult to manage with negative keywords. It’s also important to know that switching high volume existing broad match keywords to modified broad match will likely lead to a significant decline in click and conversion volumes and will not directly improve Quality Score.

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What It Does
When people search for goods or services using their mobile phones, they often prefer to call a store rather than visit that store’s website. Now you can make it even easier for potential customers to reach you by adding a click-to-call business phone number in ads that appear on mobile devices with full internet browsers.

There are two ways you can include a click-to-call phone number in your ad campaigns:

• Location Extensions and LBAs — display your local business phone number to nearby users on mobile devices with full browsers.
• Phone Extensions — display your national or vanity phone number to all users on mobile devices with full browsers.

Why You’d Use It
Drive more response by increasing the options you offer customers to connect with your business.

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At SES Chicago, there was an interesting session in which a group of search marketing profes+sionals debated the issue of which is better between PPC and SEO. Participants included Dave Naylor, Chirstine Churchill, Michael Gray, and Karen Weber, and Rand Fishkin.

Does PPC have more benefits than SEO? Comment here.

Churchill pointed to a study from Engine Ready on conversion rates by source of traffic (PPC vs organic). The study found:

    – Conversion rates: PPC just barely beat SEO
    – Average Order Value: Paid won
    – Average time on site: Paid won

She gave the following as advantages of PPC:

    – Gives immediate online presence
    – Have a new site? Have ads in an hour
    – Start getting ROI sooner
    – No ramp up time
    – Great for seasonal items or time sensitive promotions
    – Great for testing
    – Easily test effectiveness of new marketing message or site design change
    – Quickly gather feedback
    – Regulate traffic volume
    – Sales pipeline empty? Use PPC to push traffic
    – Overloaded? Pause campaigns or cut back spend
    – Have limited sales season? Saturate market while demand is high

“PPC is very agile. It’s also has targeting advantages,” said Churchill.

For targeting, she says PPC provides opportunity for high visibility in multiple channels (search engines, content sites, mobile phones), expands results beyond search results, and gives you control over placement on SERPs and better control over landing page/message.

It’s often easier to sell PPC to management because the concept is similar to traditional advertising, and provides for direct accountability. It’s easy to track measures of success. It’s an effective way to drive qualified traffic to your site, and it allows you to expand your opportunities.

 Weber says the top five reasons why “PPC rules,” are: speed, flexibility, it’s unlimited, it’s goal-driven, and it’s controllable. You can quickly manipulate keywords to those that drive conversions, you can quickly change bid prices, and you can quickly get in and out of the market. You can turn your campaign on and off, and change ad copy, keywords, etc. You can target a much wider range of keywords, adhere to a budget, and have an immediate impact on sales.

Fishkin pointed out that PPC gets 10% of clicks, but 90% of spend. He said SEO is more challenging and less controllable, but the spend is there and the fact that people click organic results.

Gray said he believes that PPC could make SEO better, but Google is banning people now, so it makes things more challenging. Naylor said he believes SEO is more “open.” Weber and Fishkin both said they would outsource PPC over SEO.

 Gray said it’s important to get in the top during the early part of the research phase, especially since Google is personalizing results for everyone now. Churchill noted that Google’s personalization is a better argument for PPC. Like iEntry CEO Rich Ord recently noted, the addition of personalized results could “make people less reliant on organic search results for their traffic and in turn increase their use of Adwords.”

Another point was brought up as we recently discussed – that the search engines are pushing organic listings down with mixed media (blended, universal) results.

Certainly there are many advantages to both PPC and SEO, and they can compliment one another. Actually, a recent study from a couple of NYU Stern professors found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked.

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A mobile interface for Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre devices, AdWords for mobile lets you keep track of key account developments by showing you the alerts and filters you’ve set up for your keywords and campaigns.

If you discover a problem that needs immediate attention, you can adjust keyword bids, change campaign budgets, and enable, pause, or delete campaigns and keywords — all directly from your phone.

Why You’d Use It
Because now you can take that trip to the beach! AdWords for mobile provides you with quick access to your campaigns and keywords, even if you’re away from your computer.

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While Google’s standard text-based, cost-per-click ad model has helped hundreds of thousands of businesses to succeed and grow, we know that one size doesn’t fit all. They have started working on a number of new ad models that are designed to offer innovative ways for advertisers to engage users on Google.com .

For example, they have introduced new ways of presenting information, like interactive charts that allow users to sort and compare relevant offers. They have also introduced new pricing models, like cost-per-lead and cost-per-acquisition, that offer more flexible ways to pay for results.

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Potential customers choose your website over your competitors’ based solely on what they see in your ads. If your ads don’t distinguish your site or really sell your message, then you’re probably missing out on valuable sales.

To help you think about your ads from your customer’s perspective we’ve put together a quick video covering some best practices for improving the performance of your AdWords advertising.

Check it out, and then sign into your AdWords account and make sure that your ads are working as hard as possible to win you customers!

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Posted in: Google, Pay Per Click by admin /
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In the world of PPC, a marketing concept has been working its way through the online marketing community, called “The Long Tail.” Essentially, the long tail is the hundreds to thousands of keywords and key phrases that a site is found for, yet rarely noticed or exploited.

The principle of the Long Tail is the opposite of focusing on the top 10-20 keywords for marketing their sites. The “top keyword” concept is reinforced by agencies that contract to gain rankings for 10-20 terms, maybe 30. However, when studying the referrals from the search engines and the traffic they generate, those that focus on the top 10-20 terms may be missing the majority of their market.

People tend to focus on the thousands of visitors that come to the site for the most popular terms. Most site managers are very happy to see the numbers increase for those specific terms, and even happier to see those terms consistently ranking well. Conventional thinking applies the 80-20 rule that the top terms provide 80% of the business, but in evaluating multiple sites, this has proved to be the opposite.

In most cases, the top 10 terms provide a lot of traffic, but not nearly as much as the total terms after the top 10 or 20 most popular. Add up the terms that refer 1-3 visits during the month, and chances are, they will add up to more total visitors than the top terms. On closer examination, most sites will have the majority of their business (sales and leads) generated from these terms that are rarely tracked. This is the heart of the long tail — the length, or total number of low-number referred terms outnumbers the height, or the total of top 10 terms.

In other words, the terms that are most popular, most managed by site owners, are rarely those that provide the most business. In most studies, the success of the site was from the hundreds or thousands of referrals outside of the most popular terms.  As an example, Amazon.com makes 57% of sales from keywords outside of the “popular” terms.

In the world of the web, where minute details are tracked, business is not won in the dozens of mega-popular terms, business is made in the “thousands of dozens.” The groups of terms that may only result in a single visit, but number in the thousands. These are the dozens of market segments that search for specific needs, specific requirements and detailed terms.

We have used this technique with almost all of our clients, and ALL of them fit the “Long Tail” principle. The most significant was a client whose main requirement was to rank for two terms. He believed that all of his customers focused on those two terms as well. An initial report showed that his top 10 terms brought in over half of the site’s overall search referrals. However, when looking at sales generated by search terms,18.6% of conversions were from top 10 keywords. Conversely, 81.2% of the conversions were from hundreds of other search terms outside of the top 10. The 80/20 rule works in reverse, providing a sweet spot of opportunity.

Search your keyword referrals, but leave out the top terms. What types of terms are bringing your site visitors? Where are your sales being generated? If you are not tracking sales generated by keyword, then it’s time to break out the heavy artillery and find out if the Long Tail is working for you.

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