Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Marketing’
Seven Expert Search Engine Marketing Guides
Friday, February 25th, 2011Done properly, search engine marketing (a.k.a. SEM, paid search, PPC) is a powerful complement to SEO and an effective tactic on its own. SEM enables enterprises to rank for specific search terms immediately (including terms for which it would difficult to rank organically), target traffic to specific landing pages, test everything (keywords, bid levels, ad copy, landing page design), and precisely quantify ROI based on sales or leads generated. Of course, done improperly, it can also be a tremendous waste of money.
How can you improve quality scores to get a higher ad position at a lower cost? How can test to increase conversion rates while reducing the cost per conversion? How can create dynamic landing pages, and are they worth the effort? Discover the answers to these questions and others here in seven noteworthy search engine marketing guides from the past year.
My Best Advice on Improving Your Google & Yahoo Quality Scores by PPC Hero
Three strategies for improving quality score, which results in high ad positions with low cost per click (CPC), such as creating small, tightly focused ad groups (“breaking down your campaigns and ad groups into smaller ad groups…allows you to write more relevant ads for a select number of keywords in your ad group. Google and Yahoo both say that by including your keywords in your ad title and descriptions will greatly help increase your quality scores”).
How to quadruple a conversion rate by Google Website Optimizer Blog
Trevor Claiborne shares lessons learned from the Voices.com search engine marketing campaign on optimizing conversion rates, among them: knowing your customers (“time and again, the greatest conversion rate increases I’ve seen have come from a better understanding of the customer”) and testing everything.
Paid Search Ad Copy: Five Things Newbies Don’t Know by ClickZ
Andrew Goodman discusses the importance of testing ad copy and important considerations to keep in mind when doing so, like measuring both click-through rate (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA) when evaluating ad copy, and running tests long enough to generate valid data for decision making.
Dynamic Landing Pages by PPC Hero
Amy Hoffman explains why dynamic landing pages are helpful (“The more specific a landing page is, the more likely it is that the visitor will convert”), how to create one using either dynamic keyword insertion or IP targeting, and best practices to follow when using dynamic pages.
How to Double Your Conversion Rate in the Next 5 Minutes by KISSmetrics
Cameron Chapman offers a half-dozen tips for increasing your conversion rate by making your sign-up form more friendly, such as by removing unnecessary fields, making as many fields as practical optional to complete, and explaining why you’re collecting the information requested.
Lessons Learned from 21 Case Studies in Conversion Rate Optimization by The Daily SEO Blog
Paras Chopra uses several case studies to illustrate the role of design, headlines, copy, and calls-to-action in landing page and conversion rate optimization.
6 Optimization Tips to Get Ready for the New Year by PPC Hero
A half-dozen tips for “PPC housekeeping” to get you account shaped up for the coming year, including reviewing your negative keywords, segmenting your analytics by device (to determine, for example, if you get enough traffic from mobile devices to make it worthwhile to set up separate mobile campaigns) and replacing under-performing ads with new copy.
SEM Mystery: The Case of the Missing Leads
Thursday, June 17th, 2010Originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in December 2008.
It was 5:00 on a sultry, simmering Friday afternoon when she walked into the office. Trouble, spelled with a capital T, a capital R, and several other letters.
“Hello Sugar,” I said as I slipped a bottle out of the bottom drawer of my desk and poured myself a belt. “Care for a drink?”
“No thanks,” she responded as she wriggled herself down into a chair across the desk from me. “I’ve got to watch my figure.”
You and every poor slob on the street, I thought to myself.
“Mind if I don’t smoke?” she asked, pulling out a cigarette but not lighting it.
“Nah, don’t kill yourself,” I answered. This was Minnesota, the state where nothing is allowed. I was used to people not smoking in my office.
“I’ve got another job for you,” she purred.
I had figured as much. I’d done a job for Sugar a few months earlier. Government stuff, on AdWords. Went great. Door-busting CTRs, conversion rates as respectable as that lady always sitting in the front row at church, nice ROI.
“Sure,” I said, taking another sip of my drink. “Another government job?”
“No. Private sector this time.”
Well, that was fine. Government, enterprise, it was all business to me. Sugar explained the plan. Same product as before, only they’d made a few tweaks to optimize it for business use. Sweet new white paper to go along with it as well. No problem, I thought; knock out a keyword list, crank out a few ads, test a couple of different landing pages, keep an eye on things to weed out the bum search phrases and keep bids in line, piece of cake. I could do it in my sleep. Heck, a couple more drinks and I might have to.
“No sweat, Sugar,” I said. “Leave everything to me.”
Except things didn’t go quite as planned. Two months down the road, the AdWords campaign was in trouble. Trouble, spelled with a capital T, R, and those same other letters. Sure, the CTRs were decent, but the conversion rate was uglier than the business end of a sharpee. Nothing seemed to make the conversion budge either; I threw up new landing pages like condos in Shanghai, but lead production stayed stubbornly low.
Sugar wasn’t going to like this, and as the old saying goes, hell hath no fury like a woman with an underproducing SEM campaign. Or something like that.
So I downloaded a keyword report and went through it with a fine tooth comb. I tried running the numbers by campaign, by CTR, by landing page—everything seemed random. Finally I sorted all the keywords in the entire program alphabetically, and suddenly the columns lined up like a slot machine hitting the jackpot in Vegas. It seemed that everyone searching for a certain phrase, or variant of it, beginning with a letter of the alphabet that won’t be named here, was bailing out at a scandalous rate.
Why hadn’t we seen this sooner? Because we’d made a big mistake, thinking private sector yahoos would search for our offering using the same lingo as government schmucks. But it don’t work that way. Not in the city.
Once I’d cleaned out the unsuitable search terms, the campaign started humming like the V8 in my `66 Ford. I could breathe a sigh of relief, put my feet up on my desk, and pour myself another round.
She came strolling in again. “Hello Sugar.”
“Nice work,” she said. “But things were looking a little dicey there for a while. I thought you’d lost your touch. I didn’t think you had any more tricks up your sleeve. Thanks for proving me wrong.”
“No sweat, Sugar,” I tossed back. I know how to play good cop / bad cop with an AdWords report. I’ll talk nice to the analytical data set and buy it a few drinks, but if that don’t work, I’ll take it out back and knock it around until it gives up the answers. “It’s what I do.” That, and dodging bullets in the rough-and-tumble world of search engine marketing.
Best Search Engine Marketing Tips of 2009, Part 2
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010While more than 80% of companies now use paid search in some form (primarily AdWords), many of these programs are under-optimized and not delivering the results they could be. How can search marketers use techniques like testing and keyword match types to improve results? How important are branded terms in paid search? Does PPC advertising help with branding? How can you use demographic and geographic targeting to improve results? What are the best ways to reduce the bounce rate from landing pages? What’s a “conversion path” and how can you use that knowledge to increase conversion rates?
Get the answers to these questions and many others here in more of the best articles and blog posts on search engine marketing (SEM) from the past year.
10 tips for extending paid search growth by iMedia Connection
Noah Elkin walks through how to use testing, match types, ad text optimization and other tactics to improve search marketing success.
Better Targeting = Better Leads — Demographics for SMBs by Search Engine Watch
Carrie Hill explains how to use demographic targeting tools from AdWords, MSN AdCenter and Yahoo to increase conversion rates for b2c search marketing programs.
Back to the PPC Classroom | A Disciplined Approach To Managing A Client Relationship by PPC News & Opinion
For search marketing consultants and agencies, four basic phases and an example of what a monthly report should consist of to keep the client engaged throughout the relationship.
The Importance Of Branded Search Programs (Even in Tough Economic Times) by Search Engine Land
Sami Carroll shows why branded terms are important in both SEO and SEM efforts, along with tactics for maximizing results with a limited budget.
New Research: Paid Search Builds Branding by ClickZ
Kevin Lee reports on a study showing that search increases brand awareness by 6% or more, and points out that, because PPC search marketers pay only for the click, the lift in branding due to the sponsored link is free.
What’s The Real Value of Brand PPC? by Search Engine Journal
Brian Carter uses research and client studies to support the same conclusion reached by Kevin Lee in the post above, and also provides tactical options for maximizing the branding impact of search based on your objectives. Two other noteworthy posts from Brian are 5 Ways to Maximize PPC Impressions, in which he explains how to use bid levels, keyword match types and other tatics to maximize PPC exposure, and The PPC ROI Calculator: How To Forecast And Optimize Your PPC ROI wherein he shows how to maximize the productivity of search marketing programs using an ROI calculator.
Geo-Targeting Basics: A How-To Guide on Setting Up Geo-Targeting in Google, Yahoo and MSN by PPC Hero
A guide to options and techniques for limiting delivery of search marketing ads to a targeted geographic area for local SEM.
Study Confirms Display Ads, Paid Search Work in Concert by MediaPost Online Media Daily
Laurie Sullivan details results of an iProspect study quantifying how “display ads and search work together to provide a bigger impact on campaigns.”
X Marks the Spot! How to Get Listed In Google Local Map Ads by PPC Hero
***** 5 Stars
This post tells how to get a business listed on Google Maps, then goes on to explain the distinction between a map listing and local map ads: “that (map) listing doesn’t reach as many searchers and internet users as one might think. To broaden your advertising reach, Google created Local Business Ads. These ads are separate from your traditional campaign-level geo-targeting in AdWords.”
10 tactics for lowering your website’s bounce rate by iMedia Connection
Tom Shapiro explains how to analyze your bounce rate (percentage of people who hit the landing page from a PPC ad then leave your site immediately without taking any further action) and reduce it using keywords, timing, landing page design, navigation, offers, and other elements.
7 Steps to Improving Conversion Rates by Search Engine Guide
Stoney deGeyter provides a seven-step guide to using conversion paths to increase conversion rates.
How to Use Google Wonder Wheel and Related Search Tools for Keyword Research by PPC Hero
Why one of Google’s less-known tools, the Google Wonder Wheel, “is a very helpful and insightful tool for PPC keyword research” and tactics for using it.
Best AdWords Tips and Tactics of 2009, Part 2
Thursday, February 18th, 2010Optimization—the greatest results for the lowest cost—is the goal of every AdWords campaign manager. What are two of the simplest ways to optimize AdWords campaigns? Google is constantly changing and upgrading its AdWords tools; which recent enhancements are most important to understand and take advantage of? Click-through rate (CTR) is the single most important factor in determining Quality Score, which is as important as bid level in determining how highly an ad will appear in search results. But it isn’t the only factor; what other items are considered, and how can you optimize these?
Get the answers to these questions and many others here in more of the best articles and blog posts from last year on Google AdWords search engine marketing.
Setting up PPC Campaigns 101, Part 1 by Search Engine Watch
Ron Jones steps through the process of structuring content for AdWords campaigns, developing keyword lists and setting up ad groups, along the way identifying helpful resources and tools such Permutator.
2 dead simple ways to optimize your Adwords campaign by CDF Networks
Chad Frederiksen recommends using the AdWords Conversion Optimizer tool and Opportunities tab to increase conversion rates while reducing per-conversion costs.
AdWords Management : How ROI, Costs, and Services Measure Up for Your Business by Pure Visibility
Although AdWords advertising can benefit a wide range of businesses, it isn’t right for every company. Steve Loszewski walks through ROI calculations to help determine the value of AdWords for a specific situation, as well as what’s involved in properly managing a successful AdWords program.
Rich Media and Video templates in display ad builder by Inside AdWords
Emel Mutlu explains how to use the AdWords display ad builder tool to create ads for Google’s content network that display multiple products, incorporate multiple destination URLs, track unique interactions, include video, provide in-ad coupon codes and more. New templates simplify these tasks, and Emel notes that he hopes they will be “one more great reason to try out the AdWords display ad builder, and reach additional customers in new ways.” More noteworthy posts from the Inside AdWords blog:
- AdWords Editor 7.5.1 for Windows and Mac: Austin Rachlin reports on key changes in the latest updated of the AdWords Editor tool, including the ability to import .CSV files, selectively download specific campaigns, and view and organize new keywords by topical category. In another newsworthy post, Conversion Optimizer is now available to more campaigns, Austin announced that any campaign with at least 15 conversions in the most recent 30-day period is now eligible to use Google’s Conversion Optimizer tool, and that according to Google’s research, “campaigns which adopted Conversion Optimizer achieved a 21% increase in conversions while at the same time decreasing their CPA by 14% (on average and in comparison to similar campaigns).”
- New Interface Thursdays: Keep tabs on your account with custom alerts: Trevor Claiborne explains how to set up custom alerts to get notified about specific types of events or activities in your AdWords account, such as a spike in impressions for branded keywords or when a campaign is close to hitting its daily budget.
- AdWords Conversion Tracking is now even easier: Emily Williams shows how changes to the interface for the conversion tracking tool make it easier to implement and monitor this capability. Of note, the “New Conversion” button allows you to quickly define new conversion actions or import them from a Google Analytics account, and the “Webpages” tab makes it easier to track conversions by page.
Is The Hype Over Google AdWords Quality Score Justified? by Search Engine Land
Craig Danuloff provides a detailed discussion of Quality Score: its importance (high), its ability to function as either a discount mechanism or a tax, why CTR is critical, and why landing page design isn’t. Two other noteworthy posts from Search Engine Land are The 6/90 Rule: 6 Reports Contain 90% Of Actionable AdWords Insights, in which Brad Geddes identifies and demonstrates the value of the six most important AdWords reports, and How important Is Click Through Rate In Google’s Quality Score Formula?, wherein Siddharth Shah illustrates mathematically the importance of CTR to quality score (it explains about 72%; all other factors combined account for the other 28%).
Learn How to Import Your Google Analytics Goals into AdWords Conversion Tracking by PPC Hero
A concise but helpful post that explains how to pull goals and transactions from Google Analytics into AdWords for unified conversion reporting. Analytics and AdWords have traditionally been completely separate systems with inconsistent data, but Google continues to bring the two into closer harmony. Two other valuable posts from PPC Hero are 5 Tips on Passing the Google Adwords Qualified Professional Exam, which provides tips such as knowing how to calculate ROI and AdWords ad text policies before tackling Google’s AdWords certification examination, and 6 Rules to Achieve Awesome Quality Scores & Increase PPC Performance, which explains five factors other than CTR (such as having well-organized ad groups and pruning under-performing ads and keywords) that can help improve AdWords quality scores.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Best Practices
Sunday, February 7th, 2010Search engine marketing (SEM) can be a powerful lead generation source, or a complete waste of money. B2B marketers often get less from their SEM programs than possible by overlooking basic but critical steps. Here are some best practices to optimize your results from SEM campaigns:
1. Determine your budget: while there is no hard-and-fast rule for this, there are a number of factors that will affect the size of the budget required to optimize your return from search marketing:
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Number of keywords—more keywords means a higher budget. - Time-of-day and days-of-week display—running a campaign 24/7 will require a higher budget than a business-hours-only campaign.
- Geographic display—a global campaign needs a higher budget than one limited to one or a few countries.
- Search-only or search plus content sites—running a campaign across both search engines and partner content sites requires a higher budget than a campaign focused on search alone.
- The type of product or service you offer—as a general rule, products or services that are inexpensive, have only one decision-maker, and are either tactical (B2B) or impulse (B2C) purchases will benefit most from an aggressive search marketing campaign. Those that are big ticket, involve multiple decision makers, and are strategic (B2B) or infrequently purchased (B2C) generally see somewhat lower conversion rates from SEM campaigns, but can still be valuable for lead generation, using an incentive for response such as a thought leadership white paper or research report.
- Your goals—how many leads or sales are you planning to drive from search marketing? Higher goals require a larger budget.
2. Keyword / Key Phrase Development: look at multiple sources—your existing site content, competitors’ websites, industry trade publications, relevant blogs, and the keyword suggestion tool in Google AdWords—to develop your long list of key word and phrases to use in your SEM campaign. You can afford to go a little overboard here, as you only pay for actual clicks. Key words and phrases that get few impressions or a low conversion rate can be culled later.
3. Divide your keywords / phrases into logical groups: keep the number of groups manageable, but ideally you’ll end up with 30 or fewer keyword search terms per group—60 terms as an absolute maximum.
4. Write your ads. Both Google and Yahoo frown on the use of shorthand (such as “GR8” for “great”), excessive punctuation (FREE!!!) and superlatives (“best,” “leader,” etc.). So, keep your verbiage humble—but compelling. For example, “the affordable option” or the most specific functional benefit you can factually tout.
For headlines, you’ll increase your click-through rate by using variable headlines, where the term the searcher actually used appears as the title of your ad. The syntax for this, on both Google and Yahoo, is {KeyWord: your service} where “keyword” is the term your prospect actually searched on, and “your service” is the default term to use in the ad if the search phrase is too long to serve as an ad headline.
5. Set your campaign parameters—geography, time/day and search/content. Both Google and Yahoo provide campaign settings pages where you specify these various parameters for your campaign.
First, determine your geographic coverage: do you want your ads displayed to a global audience, or just one or a few countries?
Second, set the time and day criteria for your ad display. For global campaigns, time needs to be set for 24-hour display. For localized campaigns, you may want to limit display hours, but set your ranges broadly—few people work 8-5 anymore, and both B2B and B2C prospects may well be searching in the early morning or late evening hours.
Third, decide if you want your ads to display only on the search engines or across their content partner networks as well (this blog is an example of a Google content partner—notice the relevant ads displayed at the top and bottom of this page). Content partner sites tend to deliver lower click-through rates than search, but can still be a valuable part of your campaign. For aggressive campaigns, content sites should definitely be included; for more limited or test campaigns, search alone may be the better setting. If you’re uncertain, start your campaign with search, then expand to the content network once your keywords and messages are optimized. You’ll need to develop different ads for the content network with compelling static headlines to catch the attention of readers who aren’t necessarily seeking your content on network sites as they are on search.
6. Develop your landing pages. Logically, you may want a different landing page for each key term group. It’s amazing how many Google and Yahoo ads (still!) simply send clickers to a site’s home page. Unless your home page is spectacularly well-designed, visitors will wonder, “What am I supposed to do now?” Best practice is to send them to landing page that explains why you are absolutely the best vendor on earth relative to the key term group they came from, and then give them a clear call to action (“contact us for more information;” “download our white paper;” etc.).
7. Consider your “incentive for response.” A commonly used item is a white paper; visitors are far more likely to sign up to download or receive something than to simply fill out a form to get “more information”—from experience, about 10 times more likely. Research reports, webinar registrations, contests, surveys and newsletter signups can also be used as incentives.
8. Implement conversion tracking. Both Google and Yahoo provide conversion tracking code for your landing pages and instructions on how to implement this. Ultimately, the goal of SEM is to produce either leads or sales, not just clicks, so conversion tracking is a critical component of your search marketing campaigns. Without it, you’re just paying for traffic, with no way to measure the ROI of your SEM campaigns.
9. Launch your campaign and analyze the results. Neither Google nor Yahoo provide real-time statistics; there is a lag of several hours in their reporting, so it will take a few days to get a usable picture of what’s happening with your campaign. Analyze results weekly for at least the first six to eight weeks of your program. When analyzing results, look for both which keywords are generating the highest number of clicks as well as the highest conversion rate. Remember the 80/20 rule: 20% of your keywords are likely to generate 80% of your clicks. Start by focusing on improving your results for these high-value keywords, and optimize on less-frequently searched terms later.
10. Optimize your keyword bids. The top three ads displayed get the highest click-through rates (CTR), but are also the most expensive positions. The bottom two ads (positions 7 and 
get the second-highest CTR. To optimize your budget, bid for the top three position on terms where you get the highest conversion rate (regardless of CTR). For terms with a high CTR but low conversion, bid for the bottom three first page spots (positions 6-8). It’s unlikely that you’ll have terms that generate a lot of clicks with no conversions, but if you do—drop these ASAP, as they are just a waste of your money.
11. Test alternative ad copy. Write at least two different ads that point to the same landing page, then in Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search, turn on ad optimization so that your more effective ads are being shown more frequently. After 2-3 weeks, check performance; if one ad is clearly generating higher CTR than the other, delete the lower-performing ad and replace it with a new one to test.
12. Test alternative landing pages. Once your ads are optimized (i.e., you have two ads performing about equally well), point each to a different landing page. Test differing types of copy, amounts of copy, contact form / no contact form, and different offers. Test until you have one that clearly outperforms alternatives at converting visitors to leads.
13. Unless your goal is an immediate online sale, implement appropriate lead follow-up programs. “Warm” leads (someone who completes a “contact us for more information” form) can—and are likely expecting to—be followed up with a (relative prompt) phone call from sales. “Cool” leads (e.g., visitors who download a white paper) should be followed up with by email, with phone calls to those who haven’t opted out of your messages after two mailings.
14. Finally, optimize your site for natural search based on your ad search terms that generate the highest number of impressions and best conversion rate. Organic search listings typically generate 3-4 times as many clicks as paid ads, so it’s critical whenever possible to have your website rank highly in natural search results for popular ad terms.
