Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

Analysing your Google AdWords Campaign

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

In this series of posts we have looked at a number of the different facets involved in setting up and maintaining your Google AdWords campaign. From keywords to the actual ad text we have explored tips and information detailing what they are and how they work. In this blog post we will look at the other end of the process: Just how do you evaluate the progress of your campaign?

Once you have set up your Google AdWords campaign and spent all the necessary time looking at the products on your site that you wish to promote. Then found key phrases that will perform and are relevant to your needs. And finally taken care to write ad text, and have actually had the campaign running for a period of time. You will soon be looking for some indication of whether your campaign is working effectively. After all, if you can optimise your campaign then you can, not only spend your advertising budget in a more effective way, but you can actually make more sales.

One of the initial components to look at is Impressions. This represents the actual number of times that your ad has been shown. If you find that your ads do not have many Impressions, then this could be for a number of reasons – the keywords that trigger your ads may not be popular, meaning your ads are only being shown to a very small number of people.

Clicks are hopefully the results of Impressions, these represent people seeing your advert and deciding to click on it.

Click through rate, or CTR, is a combination of the two previous factors. CTR is the number of Clicks compared to the number of Impressions represented as a percentage. The higher the CTR the better your ad is performing.

Conversions represent the final goal of most sites: a sale. Although high numbers of Clicks and good CTR’s are desirable, they must all make way for the ultimately essential Conversions.

It may seem like most of the work on your AdWords campaign is over when you have all your keywords and ads in place. But the most effective way to run pay-per-click advertising is by constant revision based on previous results. By analysing statistics such as these you can evaluate how your Google AdWords campaign is performing.

Martin Able is an online advertising authority working with payment gateways and money transfer services for ecommerce stores.

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Writing Ad Text for Google AdWords

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

In the previous blog post we continued our look at Google AdWords. We looked briefly at the subject of keywords and how they were pivotal to the success of your pay per click campaign and how selecting keywords that suit your business is an essential step.

This time we will be looking at the concept of ad text and how using it effectively can have a dramatic effect on the effectiveness of your campaign. You wouldn’t believe the seemingly small changes that you can make to ad text to improve the ads success.

One of the primary tips that people are given about ad text is to try if possible to use your keywords in the top line of the text. This is good for potential customers to see when they search – the text that they just searched for (as it is the keyword that triggered the ad) is shown back to the user. This increases the likelihood of them clicking on your advert. In addition this text will show in bold when the customer searches for it, further drawing attention to your advert.

The second line can be good place to really hook the viewer by mentioning some great selling point or reason for them to shop or click on your site. For sites selling directly to consumers this could be a promise of cheaper prices such as a percentage offer deal, or perhaps trying to temp the customer with a free postage offer. Either way the text should try and create a compelling reason for the viewer to click your advert.

The third line is normally a ‘call to action’, an authoritative instruction for the user to follow. An example of this might be “Don’t delay, order today!” Google AdWords won’t allow every type of ‘call to action’ though, text telling the user to “click here” will fail the ad text quality checking.

The final two lines relate to the URLs associated with the ad. The first is the display URL, it is the link that the viewer will see at the bottom of the ad. Depending on how lengthy your text for the rest of your ad has worked out it can be useful to include a shortened URL – without the ‘www’ or full directory path. The last line is the actual landing page URL, the ad viewer won’t see this link so its aesthetics don’t matter. It should however, always be pointed at the most relevant page on your site.

Martin Able is a web retail specialist working with payment gateways and cheque processing for ecommerce websites.

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Key Tips for Keywords in AdWords

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

In the last post we went into more detail about Google AdWords and the methods that advertisers can use to get the best from the budget they have allocated for pay per click advertising. This time we shall look at the powerhouse of any AdWords campaign – keywords.

Keywords are the words that a user enters into Google Search, they are the ‘trigger’ for the advertisers advert to show. As they have such a pivotal importance in an AdWords campaign it is imperative that they are carefully selected.

There are a number of ways to research decent keyphrases, Google itself provides some tools to help advertisers. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool allows users to input keywords and evaluate them for competition and local / global search volumes. Not only that, but the tool will also provide additional suggested keywords to provide the user with even more options. This tool can be a powerful asset for advertisers looking to find keywords for PPC marketing.

Another Google supplied tool is the Google Search-based Keyword Tool. This system takes a different angle to finding keywords, it will actually analyse a specified site and suggest keywords based on its findings.

One tip for advertisers to use is to look at the products they sell and use them as a starting place for the keyword research. After all, the keyword will be separated into specific campaigns and ‘ad groups’ based on the products sold, it pays to find which of those products are searched for most often.

Once the advertiser has a list of keywords that they believe represent the products they are selling it is time to remove any that do not have enough ‘commercial intent’. For an ecommerce site which relies on sales this is an important step, any keywords that are more likely to represent a user simply looking for information on a topic should be removed. Similarly any keywords that are simply far too broad should also be removed, for example – a company selling holidays in Italy shouldn’t be using the keyword ‘Italy’. ‘Italy holidays’ or ‘holidays in Italy’ would be more targeted.

Martin Able is an ecommerce professional with experience in online credit card processing and money transfer services for retail websites.

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An In-depth Look at AdWords

Monday, April 12th, 2010

We initially looked at Google AdWords last month. It is a popular way for businesses to attract targeted traffic to their site by placing adverts alongside Google’s search results or even across Google’s content network. Many companies find this to be an effective way of advertising as they find their adverts are only shown to the people using certain keywords in their search terms. This means that (as long as the AdWords campaign is well administered) only the right people are shown the ad and only the right sort of people will click on it.

This time we are going to look at some aspects of using AdWords in more detail, so if you are interested in knowing how this system operates or perhaps considering using AdWords to advertise your business then this blog post is for you!

Like any advertising, the company has to see that they are getting a return on their investment – money in must mean money (or some other benefit such as furthering their brand) out. With AdWords there are a number of ways to control how much money is used by the system.

An advertiser can decide how much they are willing to spend on their daily budget – this can be as much or a little as they can afford. However it is worth bearing in mind that if the company works in a highly competitive sector then for the highly competitive keywords there can be a sizeable cost – budgets may not last as long as you first intended. Although there is a way to regulate this cost as well:

The Maximum Cost-Per-Click value is set by the advertiser. It represents the highest amount that the advertiser is willing to pay for a user to click on their advert. If this value is set too low then it will start to effect where the ad appears alongside the Google search results – it is much more difficult to achieve great results if your ad is only showing on the second page of search results.

Finally we come to a more abstract concept to understand – Quality Score is a Google assigned number based on several factors. Your keywords, advert and landing page (the page the advert directs the user to) are all analysed and rated based on how pertinent they are to the products and services being searched for. Quality Score also has an effect on the cost of advertising, the better the quality score the lower the cost-per-click. So advertisers who fine tune their campaigns and websites effectively can actually advertise for less.

Martin Able is an online trade specialist with experience with payment gateways and cheque processing for ecommerce websites.

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How PPC Can Increase Your Online Revenue

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

mouse click Pay-per-click (which is often referred to simply as PPC) is a method of online advertising whereby the advertiser pays a certain amount of money each time someone clicks on one of their adverts and is taken to their website.  A small number of sites will sell advertising space on this basis but the most common way to run a pay-per-click campaign is through a dedicated service which will supply adverts to a huge number of website owners (who in turn receive payment for each click that is generated on their website).

The most prominent PPC advertising services are those run by the major search engine providers, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, who run the PPC programs AdWords, adCenter and Search Marketing respectively.  There are two key ways that these three companies run their PPC advertising; through search engines and through websites that have opted to display their adverts for a cut of the profits.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all place adverts in a column on the right hand side of their search results pages (and occasionally in a box located above the standard organic listings).  In order to have adverts placed in these positions advertisers need to bid on keyphrases.  A keyphrase is a term that, when typed into a search engine, you want your advert to appear on the search results pages for.  The cost-per-click (CPC) will vary depending on how many people are vying for advertising space on the results for that particular keyphrase, but typically the cost will be lowered the more appropriate the PPC provider deems your website to be.  Google AdWords, for example, will give each advert a quality score based on well related the keyphrase, the advert, and the landing page are to one another.  By doing this advertisers are encouraged to create the most relevant adverts possible and in turn Google can provide its searchers with adverts that are as appropriate to the keyphrase they entered as possible.

In addition to PPC adverts that are placed on search engine results pages website owners can also choose to add advertising space to their website and have the adverts displayed by a PPC provider.  This can bring the website owner an additional source of revenue from their website and gives advertisers the opportunity to display their adverts to a specifically targeted audience.

Nowadays PPC adverts are often found on blogs as it allows bloggers to make a small amount of profit from an area they were previously unable to.  This is also of benefit to the advertisers as they are able to hunt out niche blogs that are very closely related to their industry and then choose to display their PPC adverts on these specific websites.

Pay-per-click advertising can be an excellent way to give your website a quick boost; they appear instantly and you can decide exactly when you want them to run and what your daily budget is.  The downside however is that a lot of popular terms can generate a high number of clicks in a relatively short space of time.  This means that you would either have to run your advert in very short bursts, or you have to commit to a very large budget.  Providing you carefully select keyphrases (or websites to display the adverts on) and ensure your landing page is well optimised you will be able to convert these adverts to profit and scale the PPC campaign up accordingly.

Remember to check back regularly to read my upcoming posts where I’ll discuss techniques for investigating keyphrases, as well as how to optimise your PPC adverts and landing pages.

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