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Friday, February 05, 2010

Watch Your Capital Letters

Here is something most people reading this probably don't know because it doesn't make a lick of sense: Google treats duplicate keywords as separate if they have different capitalization. For example:

PPC

ppc

These two words would be considered different keywords even if they were both in the same ad group. So you might say…what's the big deal? Here's the problem. It has been our experience that there are times when Google seems to greatly favor keywords that are all lower case. It would not be unusual for the first keyword above to have a quality score of 5 while the lower case version had a quality score of 10.

Given that you don't really know which keyword will trigger your ad, it is best to always use the version which might give you an advantage in ad positioning. So even if you decide to experiment to see what happens with capitalized versions, always test the lower case version as well.

Another problem with having keywords in your ad groups that are the same except for capitalization is that it aids in making your account more unwieldy and difficult to manage. Accounts that are fine-tuned to the best (and smallest) set of keywords are much easier to manage, so we suggest only using lower case keywords, but have each in your account as both exact and broad match.

This is just one example of how something that seems very insignificant can have an impact on your overall paid search account performance. It is important to pay attention to the details.

Got questions about search engine marketing? Feel free to contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keywords, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

AdWords Ads: To Optimize or Not to Optimize?

When you set up your Google AdWords campaigns, you should create multiple ads for each ad group, in order to try and find the ad copy that is most effective. You have two options for how to rotate your ads.

Google AdWords has a feature called ad optimization, which Google defines as follows:

Optimize (default): The system will favor ads that have a combination of a high click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score. These ads will enter the ad auction more often.

The alternative to optimization is a standard rotation in which all ads for an ad group will be displayed roughly the same number of times.

Of the two, intuitively it seems that you would always want to use ad optimization. It just makes sense to let Google automatically display the ads with the highest click-through rate ("CTR").

But here's the problem. If you are trying to fine tune your campaign ad groups for maximum performance, YOU yourself should judge which ads are most effective, based on an analysis of historical data. Google's ad optimization kicks in quick. Ads that have a higher initial CTR will garner massively more impressions. So ads that could actually turn out to be the best performing over the long-run might be squeezed out of the picture early on.

Do your own optimization. Run all ads an even number of times. Give each ad a fair number of impressions. How many impressions will be different from situation to situation. If your are competing in a hot market with high click rates, then you might be able to tell after only a couple hundred impressions. But in most cases, you will need to give it more than that. Maybe a thousand impressions, maybe even more than that if click rates in your industry are low across the board.

If you do not have time to actively manage your search engine marketing campaigns, then you might still be better off using the optimization feature. It is better to use early optimization than to let poor performing ads run too long, dragging down your ad group performance.

But if you have time…do it right and take care of it yourself.

Or better yet…let us do it for you! Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net to find out how we can make your life a whole lot easier.

Labels: ad optimization, ad writing, AdWords, google, Google Adwords, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

A Lesson in Keywords: How Many Keywords Do You Need?

There is a client we have worked with for a long time who has a Google AdWords campaign that has not performed as well for parts of this year as it has in the past. In general, 2009 was somewhat of a difficult year due to increased competition for paid search traffic and poor economic conditions. In other words, there have been more advertisers chasing fewer customers. And this particular client definitely experienced the effects of that.

After trying many different strategies (account keyword expansion, keyword contraction, higher ad positioning, ad split-testing, etc.) we've finally stripped the account down to the barebones.

We're now only bidding on four keywords. I'm really not a big fan of bidding on so few keywords. It's the whole "eggs in one basket" thing. But in this case, looking backward, I can see that if we had concentrated our client's budget on that very small set of keywords, our performance over the last year would have been substantially better. We bid on many, many more than just four keywords. Throughout the year, we bid on fewer and fewer. And finally, this month, we're down to the final four contestants.

Should we go down to a single keyword? In theory, if you place all of your budget on the number one performing keyword, then all else equal, you will maximize the performance of your paid search account, up to the point where you run out of traffic. So there's one problem with this strategy. It is best employed in a limited budget situation.

If you have $10 thousand to spend, but bidding on a single or very few keywords only soaks up $1 thousand of your budget, there are likely many more opportunities you could be exploiting by spreading your budget around. But if you only have $1 thousand to start with, then spending the entire $1 thousand on a single keyword makes sense if it provides the best return on your investment.

Another problem is that keyword performance does tend to fluctuate. If you're all in on a single keyword, then if conditions change and that keyword's performance declines, your overall account performance will decline right along with it. So in our case, I don't see us dropping to a single keyword. We will stick with the four keyword basket, but you better believe if we start to see a trend of declining performance, we will open up some other keywords.

I guess the core lesson here is the importance of allocating your budget so that more of your budget is consumed by keywords that provide the best return for your advertising dollars. The only way to do that is by carefully examining your historical keyword performance. One caveat is that keyword performance can be affected by where your ads are positioned, so your analysis will be most accurate if your ad positioning is relatively steady across keywords.

Paid search management sometimes requires some imagination, and it definitely requires a watchful eye. Work Media have a lot of experience doing this stuff, and we're pretty dang good at it. We would welcome the opportunity to work with you on your search engine marketing. Contact us at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keywords, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing

Friday, June 19, 2009

Same Old Problems with Microsoft Paid Search

I really want Microsoft to be successful in the paid search business. I think it would be wonderful for all of us involved in the search engine marketing game if Google had some viable competition for search engine ads. Unfortunately, Microsoft continues to shoot themselves in the foot.

For example...

We have a new client for whom we are running paid search ads on Microsoft's adCenter platform. But Microsoft insists on billing for paid search in $50 increments. As a result, our client has his credit card revoked by his credit card company because they thought it was suspicious that his card kept getting charged $50 at a time.

This is the SECOND client for whom we have had this same problem! Why does Microsoft insist on billing this way? They are the largest software company in the world...and they can't figure out how to charge someone's credit card for more than $50?

It makes my company look bad when this happens because we have to explain the whole problem to our client, tell them why Microsoft sucks so bad, have them go and get another credit card, etc.

Come on, Microsoft...

You've been promoting the hell out of Bing, spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to boost your search engine business...

Fix your billing!

Labels: Bing, Microsoft, Microsoft adCenter, MSN, paid search, pay per click

Friday, November 21, 2008

Google's New Automatic Matching Feature: Good for Google, Good for the Advertiser?

Google has a new AdWords feature that is available as a beta trial to certain advertisers. It will probably be rolled out to all users within the next few weeks. The feature is called automatic matching.

Automatic matching is intended to help you capture relevant traffic that you may have missed based on your campaign keyword lists. When it is activated, Google analyzes your account and begins showing your ads for search queries that you have not specified as keywords.

The feature is not supposed to effect any of your existing keywords. In other words, keywords you have set up in your account should not get robbed of traffic in order for the system to automatically display your ads for other keywords. The point is to display your ads for alternate keywords whenever you have budget left over.

This is obviously a good thing for Google because it keeps your ads online for more keywords, which means more clicks and more revenue for them.

But is it good for advertisers?

Maybe, maybe not. You don't really want to relinquish control of your account to Google. That's asking for disaster. BUT...if you have budget left over every month and would rather have your ads running than not max out your budget, then this is a way to make that happen.
If you have the feature available, and you are currently not spending all of your budget, then you may want to give it a try. BUT...

Watch your numbers, especially your cost per conversion. If your cost per conversion rises to an unacceptable level because of extra money being consumed by automatic matching ads, then you should turn the feature off immediately.

Here are a couple of web pages that contain good information about pay per click placement:

http://placingppcads.wordpress.com/2008/09/25/is-pay-per-click-placement-in-your-control-yes-if-you-follow-these-strategies/

http://www.zimbio.com/placing-ppc-ads/articles/2/Pay+per+Click+Placement+Control+Yes+Follow

Labels: AdWords, automatic matching, google, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Useful New Google AdWords Features

Google has a couple of new features that you should check out. The first is a new keyword research tool that analyzes a supplied web site URL and seed keyword to show keywords that might be relevant for promoting that site (that are not already being used), along with traffic and bid data for each keyword. The main caveat is that you must be an existing advertiser. It's a great way to instantly generate a list of new keywords for a particular landing page along with the data you need to make decisions regarding what keywords to use and how much to bid. It's a great tool for advertisers, and certainly a great tool for Google since it will encourage bidding on more keywords.

The URL to try it out is: http://google.com/sktool/.

Another new feature is that Google has increased the number of unique results returned for a query report. These are reports that show you the actual search terms that are triggering your Google AdWords ads. Historically, the reports have always featured line items labeled "Other queries" that contained a large portion of the total queries. Now, there should be fewer results included in the Other queries line and more unique keyword results. This increases the knowledge that advertisers have about their Google accounts, improving their ability to make adjustments based on performance data.

Google is constantly releasing new features. The better you understand these features, the better you will be able to manage your account and maximize your AdWords performance.

Here are a couple more links to pages devoted to the topic of law firm Internet marketing:

http://lawyerwebsitemarketing.wetpaint.com/

http://marketingforlawfirms.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/lawyer-website-marketing-powerful-search-engine-advice-straight-from-the-source/

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Last night I read an article about American Express. Apparently, it is becoming a bank holding company, which will allow it to take deposits as well as give it access to government rescue programs. Isn't that nice?

They also laid off 7 thousand workers last month. So yeah, American Express is going down the toilet, and based on the way the company treats its customers, I'm fine with it. Like I said yesterday, we will no longer do business with American Express. I advise you to do the same, lest you get screwed like we did.

OK, now we'll talk about something related to Internet marketing.

Most businesses really don't understand the concept of targeting as it applies to search engine marketing. SEM is a science of specificity. Forget about hoping that your web site just magically appears for any search related to your business. You have to choose specific keywords and then do specific things to cause your site to appear for those keywords.

The rule of specificity also applies to paid search. Don't just run your PPC campaigns wide open, all the time, to every possible set of eyeballs. Pick your battles. You have lots of targeting options: by time of day, day of week, by geographic market. For content ads, you can even target by things like age and gender. The more finely you target your paid search campaigns, the better will be your results.

So don't think in terms of generalities. Think in terms of specifics. You will get much better results and a higher return on your investment.

Here are a couple of articles that deal with PPC targeting in relation to the promotion of law firm web sites:

http://targeting-search-marketing-attorney.wetpaint.com/

http://www.zimbio.com/sem-lawyer-targeting/articles/2/Using+Targeting+Improve+Attorney+Search+Engine

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, scientific search engine marketing, sem, targeting

Monday, November 03, 2008

Search Engine PPC Positioning

We have written a new article about PPC search engine marketing positioning that you should check out. This is an area where a lot of beginning pay per click advertisers struggle. To summarize the article: don't get caught up in trying to position your ad at the top of the listings. That is a surefire way to lose your money! Following these six rules is much better guidance:

1. Don't bid overly aggressive just to have the number one spot.

2. Know what you can afford to pay for clicks. Know your numbers!

3. Split-test your ads.

4. Split-test your landing pages.

5. Measure your performance.

6. Understand the workings of your particular chosen PPC platforms.

For much more elaboration, read the complete article.

Labels: paid search, pay per click, ppc, ppc search engine positioning, sponsored search

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Early AdWords Campaign Awareness

Quick Tip: For the first couple of weeks after launching a new AdWords campaign, watch your keywords every day to make sure they are still online.

It's easy to feel like you've accomplished something after setting up an AdWords campaign and beginning the process of driving paid traffic to your site. But you can't take your eyes off of the situation. Even if Google begins sending a stream of traffic to your site, it is highly likely that very soon it will begin shutting off your keywords. What seems to happen is that AFTER your account is up and running, the Google system begins an audit of your campaigns to see how closely your keywords match your ad content (and possibly even your landing pages), the kind of click rates your keywords and ads have, etc. While it's going through this process, it will probably be shutting off many of your keywords and insisting that you bid more (MUCH more in some cases) to turn them back on.

So if you're not paying attention, the traffic you started receiving at the beginning of your Google campaign will dry up to a trickle until you adjust your bids. So being aware of what's going on with your campaigns early on is critical to keeping your ads running.

You can avoid this situation by bidding very high early in your campaign. The problem is you could end up paying more than you should in order to have a profitable account. It is probably best to start low and adjust your bids up as needed, rather than starting high and adjusting down.

Call us if you need some help monitoring your pay per click campaign.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem

Friday, June 27, 2008

A More Accurate Way to Estimate Keyword Traffic

The very best source of keyword data for your search engine optimization campaign may be your own paid search campaign. We use keyword research tools such as NicheBot.com a lot, especially early in the life of an SEO campaign. The problem is the data generated by such tools is only an estimate, and sometimes those estimates are highly inaccurate.

If you want concrete proof about the potential traffic for various keywords, take a look at the search queries people are using that have triggered your ads. In Google, you can run a search query performance which will show you most of the actual search terms that were used when your ads were displayed. One column of data in the report is impression share. If you run a report for a month, then divide the number of queries for any particular keyword by the impression share for that month, you will have a pretty accurate total for the number of times that keyword was used in that month. If you then divide that by 30, you will have an estimate for the number of times that search term is used on a daily basis.

The formulas are as follows:

Monthly Searches = Number of Impressions / Impression Share

Daily Searches = (Number of Impressions / Impression Share) / 30

You can then plug these search queries into NicheBot or another tool to get an idea of how many directly competing sites there are for the keyword. Or you can type the search query into Google surrounded by quotes to get an estimate of the competition.

The final data set created by doing this will give you a more accurate picture of actual search traffic and competition than simply relying on the information provided by keyword research tools. You can't go wrong with hard data.

If you need some help conducting keyword research for your search engine optimization or pay per click marketing campaigns, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, keyword research, keywords, paid search, pay per click, search engine marketing, search engine optimization

Friday, June 06, 2008

Measure Your Life's ROI

I was having a conversation with my brothers this morning, and a thought popped in my mind that I thought I would share. Much of what we do here at Work Media is based around the idea of maximizing our clients' ROI, or return on investment. Our clients give us money, and we try to return that much money plus more.

But the concept of ROI is much more globally relevant than in just figuring out the value of financial transations. Everything you do, say, and think has an ROI.

For instance, if you stay up late and get up in a tired, hurried state the next morning, then your ROI might be a chaotic, unorganized day. If you plan your day the day before and get a good night's sleep, the return on investment will be that you feel good and have a productive day.

Every moment in life is a choice, and there are usually numerous options. When you sit down for dinner in a restaurant, you have many choices for your beverage. You can have beer, wine, cola, tea, or water, among other choices. Over time, which one do you think will provide the highest return on investment?

And of course, the classic: you can spend all your money, or you can set 10% of everything you make aside for saving and investing. It's easy to figure out your ROI on this one, because it can be measured in dollars.

So my advice to you is to estimate the ROI of every decision you make. Noone can be good all the time, but if you make more choices that have a positive outcome than those that have negative consequences, you will get a much greater return on your life.

We don't really do much in the way of life consulting, but if you need some help maximizing the return on investment on your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: paid search, pay per click, ppc, return on investment, roi, search engine marketing, sem, sponsored search

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Does Your Search Engine Marketer Know What He's Doing?

These days, anyone can set up a paid search account and call himself a pay per click expert. But there is a big difference between knowing how to set up an account and knowing how to maximize the profitability of that account. Before you hire anyone to manage your pay per click account, ask the following questions:

1. Are you certified by the major search engines?
2. Do you have any references?
3. How many accounts have you managed?
4. Do you do other things, or only search?
5. How long have you been managing pay per click accounts?

I know it's tempting just to let your ad agency or web designer do this stuff for you. But the cold, hard fact is that most web designers don't know that much about search engine marketing, either paid or natural. And most ad agencies don't really know what they're doing when it comes to online advertising.

My advice? Hire professionals who only do search engine marketing! In the long-run, it will save you a lot of time, money, and frustration.

Work Media is a search engine optimization and pay per click firm in Nashville. That's all we do, and we would love to talk to you!

Labels: advertising, paid search, pay per click, pay per click firm, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, seo, web site marketing

Friday, May 16, 2008

Have Patience with Pay per Click

You have to have patience when running a paid search campaign. Here is a real world example, from our own Google AdWords campaign. We are running a promotion right now whereby we are doing free optimization analyses. We're using AdWords ads, targeted to our local market, to advertise the promotion. Obviously the benefit to us is that we would collect local leads...if it worked.

The campaign had run for several days without much success. It was costing us a little money, but not much. I was on the verge of cutting it to try something else, when all of a sudden we got two good leads two days in a row, from companies based in Nashville looking to promote their web sites. The cost of these leads? Maybe $20 each, if not less. Compare that to the cost of a lead generation service where you are competing against several other companies for each lead, and it's a real bargain.

So have patience with your paid search campaigns. Don't pull the plug until you have enough data to know for sure that what you're doing is not going to work.

If you could use some help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, sponsored search, web site marketing

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Make Sure Your Landing Pages Work!

The topic of today's post may seem obvious. I mean, who wouldn't make sure their landing pages work before launching a pay per click campaign? Well, we do make the assumption that you would test your pages before launching the campaign...but what about afterwards?

You should check your landing pages periodically. Hey, things happen. If your landing page is completely static (straight-up HTML with no server-side code), then chances of it breaking are minimal. But what about your form?

Your landing page probably has some kind of form. If it doesn't, then what's the point? Your form will have to use some kind of server-side component or script to deliver the contents of the form to your site (or to process an order). And that's where things can break.

We have a client whose account recently began performing quite poorly. It turns out that her hosting company had moved her site to a new server. In the process, they had broken the form confirmation page (the page that sends the contents of the form to our client in an email). We spotted this by submitting the form ourselves to make sure it still works. We did this on a hunch after noticing that her site had stopped showing any conversions in her search engine conversion stats.

So...don't let this happen to you. Once a week, check all of your landing pages to make sure your forms are still working. The nickel you save could be your own.

If you need some active, professional help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, landing page, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem

Monday, April 14, 2008

An Introduction to the Kelly Formula

Today we're going deep. We're going to examine a mathematical equation created years ago by a guy named J. L. Kelly. Kelly was a brilliant man who devised a formula that is so rudimentary, yet so critical, it is the foundation for many systems in the world of finance AND gambling. Here is the formula:

Fraction of bankroll to invest = Edge / Odds

Edge means any information you have that gives you better than 50/50 odds. For example, if you have a quarter that is weighted in such a way that heads should come up 60% of the time, then your edge would be 10%. On any one flip of the coin, you would have a 10% edge if you bet on heads. In the world of finance, an edge can be any information you receive that gives you an advantage over other investors.

Odds are odds. It is the payout from winning the bet or gamble. For instance, going back to the coin flip example, the odds would likely be 1:1, or even money. In the formula, this would just be represented as 1. If you guess the coin correctly, you would win an amount even to your bet. If the odds were 2:1, then a 2 would be used in the formula.

So using the above edge and odds in our formula gives us:

Fraction of bankroll to invest = 10% / 1, or 10%.

The formula tells you that you should invest 10% of your total bankroll on every coin flip.

If the odds were 2:1, then the formula would look like:

Fraction of bankroll to invest = 10% / 2, or 5%.

So...what does this have to do with search engine marketing? Everything.

To be as successful as possible in your search engine marketing, you need to allocate your funds to those keywords, ads, and campaigns that generate the highest return on ad spend. If you had enough information, you could use the Kelly formula to allocate your budget. If you don't have enough information, it is still a good mental model for you to follow. Put more of your money on keywords that have proven to be most effective.

We will be discussing these types of concepts more in later blog posts. I just wanted to introduce you to Kelly and get you thinking about the process of maximizing the return on your paid search ad spend.

If you need some help with your search engine optimization or pay per click management, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: bid management, Kelly formula, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Designing a Pay per Click Management System

In the course of working on our latest book, I have put a lot of thought into the concept of a trading-style system for managing a paid search campaign. There is definitely a correlation between investing in securities and investing in paid search. Every keyword you bid on is sort-of like a stock: you are bidding a certain amount in anticipation of turning a profit on it.

Possibly the investing concept (also a gambling concept) that is the most relevant to pay per click is money management. You want to allocate your budget to the keywords that will maximize your profit and minimize losses. Unfortunately, unlike with securities, you have no historical data to use to test your beliefs except your own. And it costs money to generate your own data.

There's no way around it. If you want to successful in paid search, you have to be willing to pay the price to generate enough data to know what changes you need to make to your account.

Another big difference between trading securities and managing a paid search account is that there are other variables other than just the keyword (the "security") and the price paid for it. With paid search, you have more "touchy feely" things to deal with - namely, your ad copy and landing page copy/design. You can have your account set up just right and your bids set perfectly, yet still not be successful because of your ads and landing pages. There is a complex relationship between the keyword, bid, ad, and landing page. A weakness in any of the elements can greatly diminish the effectiveness of a pay per click campaign.

But again, it all just comes down to generating data, and the way to do that is to test, test, test. With our new book, we hope to give readers a reasonably simple system to use to properly allocate their budget. The rest is just good ol' split-testing and constant revision.

If you need help with PPC management NOW and can't wait for our book to come out. feel free to call us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: bid management, internet marketing, keywords, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, web site marketing

Monday, March 24, 2008

Thinking Hard About Pay Per Click Management Strategy

I've been reading a lot lately about trading systems - that is, rules-based strategies for making short-term investments in stocks or other securities. So far, most of my personal stock purchases have been made in more of an "investing" mode, as opposed to trading. In other words, I'm buying stocks that I think are undervalued or that have strong future prospects, in order to realize long-term appreciation in the stock prices. Trading is completely different. It is based purely on things like volume of purchases and momentum.

What's the point, you ask? It's that there is a strong correlation between the trading of securities and the management of a paid search campaign. For instance:

When trading, you are buying something at one price in hopes of selling it at a higher price. In pay per click management, you are biding a certain price for a click in hopes of turning a profit on it.
When trading, many, if not most, of your trades will be losers, with the hope that your winning trades outweigh your losers. In pay per click management, most of your clicks will be losers, with the hope that you have enough clicks that convert to outweigh your losers.
Trading involves a set of stocks or other securities. Pay per click management involves a set of keywords or web sites.

One major area of difference between a trading account and a paid search account is that paid search has a strong creative element. Even if you do the math right, if your ads are lousy or your landing pages are lousy, you're still going to lose. But we have some ideas that we think will make the creative side easier even for novices.

We have begun work on our newest book, that will be a rules-based strategy guide for managing paid search accounts. This one will be shopped around to real publishers, rather than publishing it ourselves as we have in the past.

For the time being (until you get a chance to buy our book), the point is to think of your pay per click campaign as an investment. Your keywords are the entities (your securities) that comprise your portfolio of keywords. Some keywords are going to make you money, and some (if not most) keywords are going to lose money. You need to figure out which ones are your winners.

If you need some help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: bid management, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, web site marketing

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Latest Things You Should Know About Google

Here are a couple of items of news from the Google camp that we thought were interesting, and that you should know about.

First off, Google now takes the loading time of your landing pages into consideration when determining relevance for AdWords ads. Google requires advertisers to pay more for clicks if it determines that there is low relevancy between the keywords, ads, and landing pages. It wants to make sure that there is a strong sense of congruency - that everything relates and is relevant. But now they have gone a step further and are measuring the loading speed of your landing pages. Advertisers who have pages that load too slowly will be punished by being forced to pay more for clicks.

We don't agree with this move by Google. Economics takes care of this kind of problem. If an advertiser's keywords are not appropriate, or if its ads are not effective, or if its landing pages take too long to load, the economics of the situation will drive the advertiser away. The business will lose too much money to keep doing it. Google's micromanagement continues.

The other Google news item is that an ad purchasing system similar to what Google offers for newspaper and radio is now in beta testing for TV. The new platform lets advertisers purchase TV ad time on the Echostar satellite system. It is currently being tested by a few select advertisers, but early feedback seems to be very positive. The day is fast approaching when Google's advertising platform can be used to manage a completely integrated marketing campaign incorporating search, online content, print, radio, and TV.

Speaking of Google, we are still finishing up the first iteration of our AdWords management tool. We've been fixing bugs for weeks, but hopefully it will be ready to try out next month.

If you could use some help with Google pay per click management or any other online marketing activity, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 of Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, sponsored search, TV advertising

Monday, March 17, 2008

Improving Return on Equity with Pay per Click Marketing

The mark of an exceptional company is the ability to generate ever greater returns on equity. For instance, if your company has $1 million of accounting equity, and you generate $200 thousand in earnings (profit), then your return on equity is 20%. Your goal for next year, then, might be to generate a return on equity of 25%. This kind of analysis is particularly relevant to public companies, but it is also valid for private companies as a measure of performance.

One way to increase your company's return on equity is to invest in things that will increase sales and that can be measured so you know how much they are increasing sales. These "things" consist of advertising and other forms of marketing. Unfortunately, most forms of advertising make it very difficult to track how much business you are actually generating in return for your advertising dollars. But you and I know about a form of advertising that does not suffer from this weakness.

Paid search, or pay per click.

Pay per click lets you know exactly what your return on investment is for all of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. Over time, as you generate data and do more split-testing, you should be able to make your return on investment from paid search improve. Improving the ROI on your advertising improves the return on equity for your overall business, all else being equal.

So if you are looking to improve your company's financial performance, look to advertising platforms that are cost-effective, easy to implement, and provide complete transparency with regard to return on investment. Paid search is your best bet.

If you could use some help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, roas, roi, search engine marketing, sem

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Our Thoughts On Several Second Tier Paid Search Platforms

We have been experimenting with second tier, or alternative, paid search platforms. Here are our thoughts on these platforms:

Turn. This is a really cool concept. We love the pay per action model, where you specify an amount you are willing to pay for the completion of some action - having the prospect fill out a form, make a purchase, or whatever. Unfortunately, we have had no luck generating leads on Turn. Perhaps we are just not bidding high enough for conversions, but we know what we can pay and still engage in a profitable transaction. So far, Turn just hasn't worked for us.

Miva. This is a content network. We're a little divided on Miva. We used it on one paid search campaign very effectively, but on another...nothing. So you might want to invest a very small amount in Miva and see how it does. If your first attempt doesn't produce anything, abandon this one.

GoClick. Don't waste your money here. Their search marketing interface is pitiful. We burned through our entire budget in a couple of hours, without having any idea where the traffic came from, and without a single conversion.

Enhance. This is a content network with which we are starting to see some nice positive results. The interface is more professional than some of the others as well. This one is worth a try.

SearchFeed. We had mixed results on SearchFeed. It might be worth a try, but start conservatively.

Though not really a "secondary" platform, we should also mention that we have had mixed results with Ask, but we definitely recommend you include it in your marketing mix. It has much wider distribution than the above mentioned platforms and is somewhat cheaper than Google or Yahoo!.

Even though we have not had outstanding results with any of the second tier platforms, we still recommend that you experiment for yourself to see if you can find something that works. Google and Yahoo! are not the only games in town. If you could use some help managing a wide, multi-platform paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: Ask, Enhance, GoClick, internet marketing, Miva, paid search, pay per action, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, Turn

Friday, February 29, 2008

Generating Leads via Paid Search: Sometimes It Just Ain't Easy

We have been involved in a project that is very different from the way we typically work with our clients. Rather than funding their own paid search accounts and then paying us a management fee (generally figured as a percentage of the ad spend), our client arranged for a special affiliate program that pays us a certain amount for each lead. We normally don't agree to such arrangements, but we have done enough work for this client in the past with good results that we thought we already had a good feel for what to do. We expected to make more money this way.

You just don't know how something is going to work out until you try it. Even though the site and service we are promoting is very similar to what we have done in the past for this client...something is different. We are driving traffic, but that traffic is not converting into leads. No one is filling out our client's form. We are on our third different landing page design, and still no luck. People just don't seem to trust our client.

If you are in this situation (spending money to drive traffic to your site that is not converting), you need to take a hard look at your situation. Do people trust you based on your web site? It may be helpful to get one of those Better Business Bureau logos for your site. Are there certifications in your industry (and corresponding logos) you can get that can prove your level of expertise? Do you have a phone number placed prominently on your landing pages?

Speaking of phone numbers, it is also useful for you to get a separate number specifically associated with the paid search campaign. This way you will know exactly what calls resulted from your paid search ads.

All you can do is test, test, test. It is impossible to predict what will work, and every situation is different. Based on our experience with a similar campaign, we thought we had a good idea of what would work for this particular client. But we were wrong. The lesson? You can never stop testing. Never.

The negative aspect of this is that it will likely cost you some money to do adequate testing before you start making any money. But paid search is much more cost effective than any other type of marketing, and it gives immediate feedback. It can provide you with critical data that can be carried over to other forms of marketing.

So...generating leads via paid search ain't easy, even for experienced Internet marketers like us. But if you are patient, systematic, and willing to absorb some losses in the short-term, you can make it work.

If you could use some help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: copywriting, internet marketing, landing page, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, web site marketing

Friday, February 22, 2008

Our 200th blog post: Our Very Best Tips for Successful Search Engine Marketing

Well, well...here we are...200 blog posts. Please excuse us while we give ourselves a pat on the back...[pat, pat, pat]...

We thought we would use this occasion to give some of our very best tips for promoting your web site:

Pick one keyword for which to optimize the front page of your site. Make that keyword the first words in your title. Use it twice in the copy, once in a header, and once in bold. Use it in the alt attribute of the first image on the page. Use it in the text of every link throughout your site that links to your home page. And, if possible, use it in the text of links on other web sites that point to your site. Speaking of links...
Get lots of external links pointing to your home page. I don't care what some "experts" say - we have seen time and time again that linking still works as an SEO technique.
Write articles. This may be the single best way to acquire one-way, keyword-rich links to your site. Do it often. If you do one a week, in a year's time you will have a TON of links. If you can't write, there are companies you can hire to do it for you. Or hire a smart local high school kid to do it.
Publish a blog. Search engines love content that changes often. That's exactly what a blog is - content that you update often. But you need to post at least twice per week.
Use paid search. Sure, it delivers targeted traffic to your web site. But possibly even more importantly, it generates mission critical data. It will tell you things like what keywords generate the most traffic, what keywords generate customers, what web page copy converts at the best rate, etc.
Use your analytics. You need to have a strong understanding of what is going on on your web site. For example, are your visitors using a particular screen resolution that doesn't work well with your site? Is there a particular location where a lot of your visitors come from? Is there a particular page on your site where most visitors leave? Google Analytics can answer all these questions for you, and it's free.
Never stop trying to do better. Using the data from paid search and your analytics, you should constantly be looking for clues as to what changes to make to improve the performance of your site.

If you do these things, you will be successful. But is it work? Of course. That's why we're able to be in business. Because it takes time to implement a search marketing campaign and get a feel for what the data means. So if you could use some help with your search engine optimization or pay per click management, call us today at 888-299-4837 or email us at Info@WorkMedia.net.

See ya in blog post number 201!

Labels: article marketing, blog, internet marketing, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, web site marketing

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Allocating Your Advertising Budget: Think Before You Spend

Think before you spend. That is today's lesson. We're talking about spending with regard to what you spend on advertising, especially online advertising. We have a large client who inquired about advertising on the front page of Yahoo!. Before we even looked into what it would cost, we knew this was a bad idea.

Yahoo! has massive reach. The home page gets nearly 2 billion impressions PER DAY. That is a lot of eyeballs. It's fairly analogous to advertising during the Super Bowl, both in terms of reach and expense. So yes, advertising on the front page of Yahoo! would give you an incredible amount of exposure and probably drive a lot of traffic to your web site.

But even if you are a big enough company to afford Yahoo!, is it the best use of your money? Probably not. For a fraction of the cost, you could run ads on dozens or hundreds of web sites much more closely aligned with your target market. For instance, if you are a financial services company, you could run your ad on many financial-related web sites, where people are already interested in your type of service, for pennies on the dollar of what the Yahoo! ad would cost.

You should apply this kind of thinking to all of your marketing. Ask yourself: am I spending my money on an advertising forum that will expose my message to the maximum number of people who are good prospects for my service at the best price? If you have lots of money to spend on marketing, we still think you should apply this kind of thinking. Spend your money on targeted advertising first, and then if there are funds left over, you can use those funds on a more broad, branding-oriented campaign.

If you could use some guidance with your pay per click management or search engine optimization, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: advertising, business advice, internet marketing, marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, Yahoo

Friday, February 15, 2008

The Simple Secret to Ultimate Online Marketing Success

You probably don't realize it, but you have the ultimate tool for business success right in front of you. Assuming you sell a reasonably high quality product or service, all you have to do to be successful is get people to your web site and then use the words on your site to convince your visitors to do business with you. Fortunately, there is a marketing technique that can accomplish both of these objectives:

Pay per Click!

Or, as we usually refer to it, paid search marketing. With paid search, you can find the marketing copy that turns visitors into customers. You can run multiple ads for sets of keywords (ad groups), with each ad linking to a different landing page. You can then use the landing pages to test different copy. Make sure you set your ad groups to display the ads an even number of times (turn optimization off). After a few days or weeks (however long it takes to generate a few hundred clicks), you will have some very solid data showing which landing pages (and which copy) generate the most sales or leads.

Once you have figured out what copy converts visitors into customers or clients, it is time to get more aggressive with your campaign. Direct all your traffic to the best landing page. Increase your budget. Increase your bids (although keep an eye on your return on ad spend - you don't want to bid too high).

One critical component of making this technique work is to make sure you have conversion tracking in place. This is very easy. All you have to do is place a snippet of code supplied by the search engine on your conversion confirmation page. This will allow you to make the connection between specific keywords, ads, landing pages, and conversions.

Many times in life, the things that work seem too simple to believe. Success is not about carrying out some complicated plan - it's about doing the simple things very well. Create a plan for your business based on the technique discussed in this article, and you are guaranteed to succeed. Just don't rush the process. Be patient, and make sure you have enough data to analyze before making any big decisions.

If you could use some help implementing a data-based pay per click management plan, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: ad writing, advertising, copywriting, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, web site marketing

Monday, February 11, 2008

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Trying to Finish

Yes, after all these months, we are still trying to finish the Google AdWords management application. Some time in late November, I decided that it was just going to take me too long to finish and stabilize the program myself. So I decided it was time to seek some help. The vehicle for finding that help is http://elance.com.

Elance.com, if you don't know, is an online resource for finding developers, writers, and other skilled individuals for hire on a project-by-project basis. We don't really need a full-time programmer right now, and don't want to deal with an I.T. staffing firm, so finding an off-site resource on our own is the best option.

Using elance, is pretty easy. You just create an account and then describe what you are looking for. You can also upload documents for prospects to get more detail about the project. I think that's a critical part of the process - making sure you have created documentation that thoroughly details what you are trying to accomplish. I spent a few weeks working on a Word document that contained specs for the project. My specs are probably not up to par with what a real developer expects, so I also created a static HTML mockup of the site. This allows potential hires to get a better idea of how the application should work, beyond trying to interpret my specs.

We have been contacted by a number of developers since posting on elance. Bids are all over the place. One of the bids is so low that we don't believe the bidder understands what we are doing. But there are a couple of bids that are very much in the ballpark of what we were looking to spend, and those developer seem to have a good understanding of what we need. So we are very confident that we will be able to hire a quality developer within our budget (which ain't much).

We also posted on http://craigslist.com, but did not receive much of a response to that. We did get contacted by one local developer who was between gigs. That would have been perfect, but he really didn't have the skillset we needed.

If this project goes well, I have a feeling we will be using elance for more projects in the near future, to get things done quicker and free us from having to do them ourselves.

If you need help with your search engine optimization or pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: application development, elance, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, pay per click, search engine marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Search Engine Marketing: Going Wide Versus Going Deep

We are in discussions to provide search engine marketing services to a company with a very significant presence in numerous Latin American countries. One of their primary competitors has been making extensive use of Google's content network to distribute its marketing message to the same countries, so our potential client wants to do the same thing. In the course of a conversation yesterday, we discussed something which may be something you should think about for your own search engine marketing. And that is:

Should you go wide or go deep?

Here's what we mean. We don't want to launch an all-out marketing blitz in all of this company's market countries at once. We want to start on a fairly small scale, generate some data, and then start expanding. But is the best approach to take a single country and saturate it with search and content ads (going deep), or should we pick just a few target content sites and run ads on those sites in many countries (going wide)?

Each approach has its advantages. The deep approach will generate a lot of country-specific data related to lots of different sites and search queries. Chances are pretty good that what works with one country will work with another. So if we can generate enough data, we can probably create somewhat of a template that could be applied to the search marketing campaigns in the other target countries.

The wide approach makes sense if the advertiser already has a very good idea about what specific sites are effective for its marketing message. Our prospective client believes it knows at least one site that will be very effective, although we won't know for sure until we run ads and see if they result in converting customers.

Ultimately, like everything else to do with Internet marketing, it just comes down to testing. We don't know which strategy is best until we try some different things to see what works. Our suggestion in this case is to do both. By aggressively marketing in a single country AND marketing cross-country via a few select sites, we will learn very quickly which approach is best and can start doing more of it.

So ask yourself...should you go deep or go wide? The only way to find out may be to do some testing on your own.

If you could use some help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: ad networks, advertising, internet marketing, local search marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, sponsored search, web site marketing

Monday, February 04, 2008

Microsoft Buying Yahoo! Would Be Wonderful for Advertisers

I read over the weekend that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo!. They are willing to pay a nice premium over where the stock is at right now (having been beaten down by disappointing earnings), so it would represent a nice profit for Yahoo! stockholders. Will the deal go through? Who knows.

As search marketers, we would like to see the deal go through. We have tried to use Microsoft's search network and marketing platform (and continue to try) but Microsoft just doesn't have enough traffic yet, and its ad serving platform sometimes just doesn't seem to work very well. There are some features of Microsoft's ad center control panel that we really like, and some that we don't like.

The same with Yahoo! There are some features of its control panel we like, and some we don't. If the merger does happen, we would hope Microsoft would combine the best features of the two platforms into something really useful. The keyword inventory of the combined companies would also come closer to rivaling Google, and would exceed Google worldwide.

Frankly, we would just rather have to only deal with two major search marketing platforms than three. We like a lot of the things Microsoft has tried to do. Combining Microsoft's technology with Yahoo!'s Web positioning would create something new that could really be a boon to search engine advertisers. It would also set up an even more competitive situation between Google and the combined company, which should result in an increased pace in innovation and a better situation for advertisers. It seems counter-intuitive to think that a decrease in competitors from three to two would result in more competition, but it would. Microsoft just does not have the search engine traffic to be a real threat to Google or Yahoo!. But the new merged Microsoft/Yahoo! would be able to give Google a real run for its money. And that would be good for all of us.

If you could use some help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, Microsoft, Microsoft adCenter, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, Yahoo, Yahoo Search Marketing

Monday, January 28, 2008

Managing a Paid Search Campaign: The Importance of Goals

I'm still working on the specs for our Google AdWords management application. I have to say...even just doing specs for something like this is a laborious task. Trying to get everything out of my head and onto paper that I want the application to do is difficult. If I were a better programmer, I probably would have creates specs from the start for my own purposes. But it really helped me to get a feel for what we could do with the AdWords API by writing code and building the thing organically.

I'm now trying to work out the logic of how the application should make automatic bid adjustments. I have read where some applications of this type use complicated Wall Street-style algorithms to make adjustments. These applications tend to be very expensive. And I really don't think we need to worry that much about it. The situation is sort-of similar to stock trading - you can obsess over charts and technical analysis to make just the right trades, but in the long run, a steady and consistent investment plan will likely do just as well.

One problem with a single magic algorithm to make adjustments is that it does not take into account the goals of the advertiser. For purposes of our application, I don't see any way around letting the user set his own account parameters to meet his specific goals. Some advertisers may just want lots of volume, regardless of conversion rates. For those situations, obviously, a wide open, aggressive bid attack is called for. More often than not, cost per conversion is a major consideration. For those advertisers, it is critical not to bid too much. Different objectives require different strategies.

So how does this relate to you? We just want you to think about your goals while managing your paid search campaign. Do you just need the visitors? Is there a a major branding component to your campaign? Do you need to turn a profit on the campaign right away? Or are you in a position to lose money initially in order to get new customers in your system? It is important that you decide early on what exactly you want to accomplish with your paid search campaign.

Your goals will have a major impact on how you manage your campaign. If volume, branding, and name recognition are your major goals, then you will want to be aggressive, bid high, and try to position your ads as high as possible. Likewise, if you are trying to get customers into your system even at a loss, you will want to be aggressive, though possibly less so than with a branding strategy. If immediate profitability is your main concern, then you need to be much more concerned with the price you are paying for clicks and conversion rates.

If you need some help withpay per click management so that it accomplishes your goals, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: advertising, Google Adwords, internet marketing, MSN, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, sponsored search, web site marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing

Friday, January 25, 2008

Friday Afternoon Musings

Friday afternoon...and we've not made a single blog post this week. Not good. I don't really even have any knowledge to impart today, so I figured I would just use this post to let you know what's going on around the Work Media offices.

We have been working with a company called Student Loan Financial Group for a couple of months. We were doing paid search,which was really cool because they had a big budget and (at first) just needed as many leads as we could get. The closing rate of the leads turned out to be low, so as the campaign went on the priority shifted from volume to unit cost. Toward the end, we really had the thing humming, generating a strong number of leads at a very reasonable cost per lead. The student loan business is very cyclical, so that campaign has ended. The kids are all in school now so not too many people are still looking for student loans. We are also engaging in an SEO campaign to generate free traffic. That is going well. The whole student loan industry is in a crunch right now (as are most things to do with credit), so we're not sure what the future holds but hopefully we'll get a chance to take what we have learned in the first round of paid search and kick some major ass in round two.

We are in discussions with a few very large companies to run search marketing campaigns. Large companies are definitely our focus these days, as far as our marketing efforts go. Our guy here Jim Reams is making some great contacts that hopefully will pan out in the weeks ahead.

The Google AdWords management application that we've been working on for many months got stalled toward the end of last year because we just got so dang busy. I have decided that the quickest way to finish that thing is to pay somebody who is a lot better programmer than I am to finish it. So I am working on specs that lay out exactly what it is supposed to do, then I will begin searching for a programmer to finish the thing up.

We have developed a proprietary method for analyzing a web site's search engine competitive situation. Rather than post it here, I have written an extended article and am seeking publication in a legitimate magazine or newsletter. More about that later.

Finally, we are just about set to record the first episode of our long-awaited podcast. We finally bought some podcast recording/broadcasting equipment for the office. In fact, I think this afternoon Chris and I are going to take a stab at doing one. We'll let you know how it goes.

That's about it. Busy, busy. But that's the way we like it. As usual, I leave you by suggesting that if you need any help with your company's search engine marketing, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 (615-263-2811 if you're in Middle Tennessee) or email us at Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search marketing, sem, seo, web site marketing

Friday, January 11, 2008

Microsoft's Latest Keyword Research Tool: adCenter Add-in for Excel

Microsoft has released a new tool for use by advertisers on its search engine - adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007. Microsoft describes it as:

"...a keyword research and optimization tool that can help you understand keyword popularity and trends, and gain valuable insight on the demographic and geographic information of actual searches."

Now, we are all the time doing keyword research in various tools, exporting the data, and opening up it up in Excel to do whatever type of sorting and filtering we need to get down to a list of keywords we can use for our purposes. So we were very interested in a tool that would allow us to do keyword research directly from Excel, even if all the data comes Microsoft's own search network.

To download the tool, go here:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter_addin

It is easy to install and it even worked the first time we tried it. One disadvantage is that you have to have Excel 2007, which a lot of people probably don't have yet. Obviously Microsoft would like everyone in the world to upgrade to their latest version of Office, which may be one reason it only works in the 2007 version. But it did not seem to cause any problems with Excel's functionality, so if you have Excel 2007 and have need to do keyword research, you should definitely try it out.

After installing it, it places a new tab on Excel's main menu labeled "Ad Intelligence". Clicking the Ad Intelligence tab reveals a whole new sub-menu of really big, colorful buttons:

Keyword Wizard - generates a keyword list from seed keywords.
Keyword Extraction - generates a keyword list based on the copy in a particular web site.
Keyword Suggestion - suggests keywords based on three possible criteria: advertiser bidding behavior, keywords which contain the original keywords, and by keyword category similarity.
Search Buzz - suggests keywords based on top spikiness or frequency.
Monthly Traffic - provides historical and forecast traffic for selected keywords.
Keyword Categorization - identifies categories for selected keywords.
Geographic - provides location information for keywords.
Demographic - provides demographic information for keywords.
Monetization - provides keyword monetization data, such as CPC, CTR, impressions, etc.
Advanced Algorithm - lets you customize the parameters used to create keyword lists.
Options - lets you set system options for the keyword tool.

To try it out, we typed in three seed keywords in successive cells, clicked the Keyword Wizard button, selected the cells, selected the algorithms to use (campaign association, keywords that contain the seed keywords, or keywords that are similar - we selected all three options to bring back the most keywords), set the maximum results to return and the minimum confidence, and then let it run. It returned a list of keywords directly in our Excel workbook that contained lots of traffic-related data for each one.

The whole problem with Microsoft's search platform is that it just doesn't have enough keyword inventory. We recently gave up on Microsoft for a search campaign we were running because we were actually doing much better generating traffic in second tier search engines like Miva (and of course, Google and Yahoo!). But purely for purposes of generating keyword data to be tried in various search engines, Microsoft's adCenter Add-in for Excel is a very cool tool.

If you need help running paid search ads in Microsoft or any other search platform, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keyword research, keywords, Microsoft, Microsoft adCenter, MSN, MSN Labs, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, web marketing

Friday, January 04, 2008

Improving Paid Search Performance Through Better Targeting

If you are driving traffic to your web site through paid search, but that traffic is not profitable, then you may need to re-examine how you are targeting your ads. Chances are your targeting is too broad. Remember, you don't just target with your keywords - you target with your ads and you target with your landing page copy.

For your keywords, you should use a wide package of keywords that includes broad, high volume keywords as well as more specific, low volume keywords. Make sure you have tracking in place so you will know exactly which keywords generate sales or leads. After a few weeks, you should have a very good idea which keywords you should be spending your money on.

If your keywords are driving traffic but no sales, then you need to look deeply at your ad copy. Are you attracting the right prospects? If you attract a lot of traffic that is not converting, then you need to tighten up your ad copy to attract the right prospects. You will generate less traffic, but it will be much more profitable traffic. Ask yourself this: who is your ideal prospect? What industry does he work in? Does he drive a truck? Does she have good credit? Whatever characteristics make up your perfect prospect, you can use that information in your ad copy. For example, if your ideal prospect is a deer hunter, maybe your ad copy should mention deer hunting. If your ideal prospect is disabled, maybe you should try an ad header like "Disabled? We can help". These are just hypothetical examples, but you get the idea.

The same thing applies to your landing page copy. You need to make it clear who you are looking for and write your copy with that person in mind. Think of this whole process like a big funnel, and you are doing everything you can to apply filters so that the prospects who arrive at the end of your funnel are very eager to do business with you. By fine-tuning ads and ad copy for specific groups of people, you should greatly improve the performance of your paid search campaign.

If you need some help better targeting your paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: ad writing, conversion strategy, copywriting, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search

Friday, December 07, 2007

Importing Google Data Into Yahoo! - Things to Keep in Mind

Earlier this week I was trying to import a Google campaign into Yahoo!. Yahoo! has this tool that is supposed to convert a spreadsheet with Google campaign data into the correct format to work with Yahoo!. Well, that thing seems to be a piece of crap. We ended up having to manually move lots of columns around, change column names, and add lots of data that Yahoo! needed. It was a pain in the butt. And then it still didn't work...at first. If you are trying to do this same thing, here is what we had to do to make it work.

1. We had to first create a campaign in Yahoo! to hold the new campaign data. Unless I'm wrong, you can't actually create a new campaign by importing the data - you can only add data to an existing campaign.

2. We had to specify our newly created campaign ID in the import spreadsheet.

We had also originally specified IDs for our new ad groups (which we made up), but Yahoo! did not like this. So...you DO specify a campaign ID in the import file, but you DO NOT specify ad group IDs.

There was a lot of work that had to be done on the import file (which was created by doing an export from Google AdWords Editor, which we have blogged extensively about), but the frustrating thing was when we got to the point of importing the file and it still didn't work. That is until we took the above steps.

If you need help managing your Google or Yahoo! campaigns (or any other search engine), feel free to contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, web site marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing

Thursday, December 06, 2007

A Few Quick Microsoft AdCenter Tips

Like all of the major search engine ad platforms, Microsoft's AdCenter has some nice features as well as some not-so-nice features. One feature we like is its bulk keyword editing feature. For one of our accounts, We imported a data file that contained both broad and exact match keywords. For some reason, the exact match keywords didn't get added. But using the bulk keyword editing feature, it was a simple matter to also set the keywords as exact match. Unlike Google, which requires that the same keyword be added twice in order for it to be in your account as both exact and broad match, with Microsoft, you only add the keyword once, but you can then set it as exact, broad, phrase, or any combination of the three.

For maximum coverage, we recommend you add your keywords as both exact and broad. Keywords set to exact match receive preference over broad match due to increased relevancy.

Microsoft requires a privacy statement or link to a privacy statement page on ad destination URLs that collect visitor contact information. This is a very minor, easy-to-account-for detail, but if you forget it, Microsoft may shut your ads down and it could take 24 hours to get them running again.

One thing we don't like about Microsoft's ad platform is that it takes much longer for your ads to enter rotation. With Microsoft and Yahoo!, your ads can begin being displayed in a matter of hours or less. With Microsoft, it seems to be at least a day. Also, for some reason, it seems that search ads go online much slower than content ads.

Another thing we don't like is that Microsoft places a credit threshold of $50 on new accounts.This means that every time the advertiser spends $50 on ads, Microsoft will send a payment request to its credit card company. So, for example, if you are investing $1,000 per day in MSN ads, Microsoft will be making 20 payment requests to your credit card company on the same day. We have found that some credit card companies are resistant to allowing that many charges from a single vendor. If a payment is declined, it can cause your ads to go offline. Once you're offline, it can take 24 hours to get back online. So we recommend having a conversation with your credit card company so that they know to expect many charges every day from Microsoft.

So above are a few tips to keep in mind when setting up a Microsoft AdCenter account. The Microsoft search network doesn't have nearly the total keyword inventory (search traffic) of Google or Yahoo!, but you may find that you can generate cheaper leads. It's definitely worth your time to give it a try.

If you would like to try out MSN ads for advertising your web site but just don't have the time or patience, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net. We'd love to hear from you.

Labels: internet marketing, Microsoft, Microsoft adCenter, MSN, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web site marketing

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Things to Test in Your Paid Search Ad Copy

The human mind is a wondrous and complicated thing. It is also completely unpredictable. When it comes to writing ads for paid search marketing, you might think you know what copy will cause people to click your ad...but you really don't. We've preached this before but it bears worth repeating - the only way to know what works is by testing. Here are some different things you can test that could have a profound and unexpected impact on the success of your ads.

Capitalization. Most marketers capitalize the first letter of every major word in the title. You should try that as well as not capitalizing any letters. Do the same with your display URL.

The order of content. Let's say you have an ad with both an offer as well as a deadline. Try running ads with the offer first and with the deadline first.

Dynamic versus static content. Most search engines now allow you to dynamically have the keyword that triggers the ad placed in the headline or copy. Usually, this will result in higher click-throughs, but not always. Experiment to see what works for you.

The display URL. Try using "www" versus leaving it out. Try just the root domain name versus a domain that includes a sub-folder with keywords. For example, "www.yourdomain.com" versus "yourdomain.com/keyword".

Adjectives. For example, "easy" versus "fast". One of the two will probably trigger many more clicks. The only way to know the right psychological trigger is to test both.

Call to action. Visit now...Buy now...Learn more. These are all different ways of specifically requesting that the reader of the ad click the ad to visit your web site. Try different calls to action as well as not having a call to action to see what works best.

If you experiment with the above elements of your ads, you will have a much better chance at discovering the ad copy that generates the highest click-through rates as well as conversion rates. Another important part of this analysis will be only changing a single ad element at any one time. For example, if you change both the display URL and the call to action at the same time, you won't know which change causes a chance in the performance of the ad. This kind of analysis will not only drive the most traffic to your site, it will save you some money because ads with higher click-through rates can be displayed above ads with lower click-through rates even if the placement bid is lower.

If you need professional advice for managing your paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: ad writing, advertising, copywriting, Google Adwords, internet marketing, marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, web site marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Ready, Fire, Aim - the Right Way to Launch a Paid Search Campaign

'Hope everybody had a fantastic Thanksgiving. I headed down to Memphis to spend a few days at my in-laws'. I lived in Memphis for several years. The city has gotten some bad press recently because of its' crime rate, but it's a great city with lots of interesting shops and places to eat. Nashville, where we're located, is more of a corporate city. Memphis is more "down home."

Anyway, the day before Thanksgiving we got contacted by a business needing a paid search campaign up and running the same day. We're a small firm, so we have the capability to drop whatever we're doing and change directions. But getting a complete campaign created, funded, and up and running in just a few hours is quite a task. But we got it done.

The reason we were contacted is that the search marketing firm that was originally hired (about three weeks previous) was taking way too long to get the campaign on-line and was only spending a trickle of what our client wanted.

The problem the other firm made was that they spent days and days setting up a broad, super finely targeted campaign before launching. Our client needed traffic immediately. What they should have done (and what we did) was launch the campaign with a small set of keywords, start generating traffic, and then build out and fine-tune from there. This is a strategy you should adopt if you are an aggressive user of paid search.

It's sort-of like the old "Ready, Fire, Aim" marketing maxim. In other words, launch the campaign, generate data, examine that data to see what changes you need to make, and adjust accordingly. It makes no sense to spend too much time tweaking a campaign before you have any data to examine.

If you need some help with your paid search marketing, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, November 19, 2007

Google Changes Site-Targeted AdWords Campaigns

Google has changed the name of its "site-targeted" AdWords campaigns to "placement-targeted." We're not sure of the reason behind the name because it's the same thing it was before - a way for advertisers to advertise on specific web sites that are part of Google's content network, rather than on Google's search results pages. Perhaps the name change relates to Google's ongoing efforts to expand its advertising platform beyond just web sites, into areas such as radio and newspaper. Who knows.

The only difference, as far as we can tell, is that you are now allowed to bid on a cost per click ("CPC") basis for content ads, in addition to the existing method of bidding per thousand impressions ("CPM"). There have been occasions when our effective click cost for CPM campaigns was less than CPC, and there have been times when it was more. We like the fact that Google now gives you the option of bidding either way. It gives the advertiser more flexibility to try different bidding strategies and see what works best.

On a related note, we have noticed that Google's pay per action platform has been down for quite a few days now. We have one client using PPA (it is only available to select large advertisers), and we are beginning to see some very nice results with it. Our cost per acquisition is substantially lower than with pay per click. We aren't generating nearly as many total conversions as with pay per click, but we'll take a cheap conversion any way we can get it. But what is the deal with it not working? Is Google shutting it down already because they're not making enough money with it? We'll see.

If you need some help managing your Google paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per action, pay per click, ppa, ppc, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Friday, November 02, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 5

Yes, yes, development of our proprietary Google AdWords application is still ongoing. We just finished a section of the application that I am excited about it because it will be a major time saver in setting up Google campaigns. What we've done is give our keyword research page the functionality to create multiple ad groups at once. The list of keywords returned from a keyword search has a textbox next to each keyword where you can specify the name of an ad group for that keyword. Keywords for which you type the same ad group name will be added to the same ad group. This is a continuation of our plan to break away from the 1.2.3. approach to setting up ad groups that is used in the AdWords interface.

The next step will be finding some way to add some automation to the ad creation process. This may involve setting up a global ad template that will apply to all ad groups within a campaign. We're still trying to work out the logic in our heads and haven't really coded any of that yet.

We are running up a decent bill in Google API fees. We learned too late about using Google's sandbox AdWords API classes, which would have let us do our testing for free. But I did not want to go back and have to recompile all of our classes again. We had to add some custom code to the classes to get them to work anyway because of a bug (not really a bug, just a bad feature) of the .NET platform involving the way it communicates with Web Services. So it just seemed easier to pay the Google API fees than go back and have to re-do a bunch of work. Dealing with the API fees just from our testing certainly has shown us that we will need to be careful to price use of the application to cover the fees we'll run up once we open the application up to our clients. By the way, the trick to using Google's sandbox API is that you use a different URL for each Web Service when compiling your classes that make the Web Service calls.

Development of the application has slowed the last couple of weeks due to client demands. The thing has come a long ways - but it has a long way to go. We hope to be ready to launch by January.

If you could use some help with pay per click management or search engine optimization, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, search engine marketing, sem

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Targeted Online Advertising with Facebook

Facebook has just released a new advertising platform called Flyers Pro ads intended specifically for serving targeted ads to Facebook users. Rather than serving ads based on keywords, like search ads, the ads are served based on user profiles. For example, you can choose to display ads to users who, according to their profile, are fans of a certain TV show, movie, or sports team. You can also target them based on where they stand politically - liberal, moderate, or conservative (what about Libertarians like me?).

I confess to knowing little about Facebook. I used to play in a band, and we used MySpace to promote our band. But in the last couple of years I've just been too busy to spend much time engaging in online social networking. So the whole Facebook phenomenon has pretty well passed me by. Another part of it is that I am already on the outside of the age range of heavy users of the service.

According to Facebook, the oldest age with at least 1 million Facebook uers is 24, and the age with the most total Facebook uers is 19. I'm 34, so I'm on the outside looking in.

BUT...I am an Internet marketer. So now that Facebook is opening itself up as a marketing medium, I'm interested. The way ads in Facebook are targeted is completely different from search engines. Will it be effective? Who knows? But it's definitely something that advertisers should try out. I know we will. Like all forms of marketing, it will take a lot of testing to find what works (if it works at all), but it is a low cost form of marketing that should be explored.

If you could use some help with your online marketing, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: advertising, Facebook, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, October 29, 2007

Picking Up Search Engine Traffic with Misspelled Keywords

My brother/partner and I had a good laugh the other day. We're based in Nashville, and let's face it - people around here have their own unique take on the English language. We are working on a new design for the Work Media web site, and Chris accidentally typed "Inernet marketing" at the top of our new home page - which is pretty well the way the word "internet" is pronounced by many people around here.

But that got me thinking - we would probably pick up a lot of traffic if we actually had a page that emphasized "inernet" rather than "internet". That technique has worked for us before accidentally. There have been times when, while looking at our site stats, I would notice we were getting traffic from what at first seemed like a fantastic keyword. Upon further inspection, we were getting the traffic because we had misspelled the word. But you know what? Web surfers misspelling the word the same way found our site because of it.

So purposely creating pages optimized for specific misspelled words is a strategy that can be quite effective. Now, you want to be careful with this strategy. You don't want to use it so much that it creates the impression that you just don't know how to spell. But if there are high traffic terms for which you would like to rank but just can't seem to because of excessive competition, ranking for a misspelled version of the search terms can be a very nice technique for picking up some of that traffic.

The misspelled keyword strategy can be used in your paid search campaigns as well to pick up high ad placement for much cheaper than properly spelled keywords.

If you could use some help developing a keyword strategy for your natural or paid search campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net. Cawl us tooday!

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine optimization, search marketing, web marketing, web site marketing

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Dynamic Keyword Insertion in Google AdWords Ads

We are perplexed by how mysterious Google tends to make things. Certainly, the company does everything it can to hide the intricacies of its search algorithms so as to disallow anyone taking advantage of it for artificial gains in search rankings. Fair enough. But Google goes far beyond that in hiding its secrets.

We recently ranted a bit about Google's sparse documentation related to its AdWords API and about the lack of logic behind ad Quality Scores. We're just as perplexed about Google's failure to give full disclosure about all of the features of AdWords. We are Google certified, having studied all of Google's exam material, but we had never read anything about dynamic keyword insertion until we stumbled upon it by accident.

That's right. Just like Yahoo! and MSN, Google allows you to dynamically insert keywords into an ad. The reason for doing this is that the closer the ad matches the intentions of the viewer, the greater the likelihood of generating a click to your site. By inserting the exact keyword that triggered the ad into the title or ad copy, you more closely match that user's intentions.

To dynamically insert a keyword, place the following code where you want the keyword to appear: {keyword: default keyword}. Replace "default keyword" with the keyword that should appear if the trigger keyword is too long in characters for the ad. For example, if the dynamic variable is used in the title, but the keyword triggering the ad is more than 25 characters, then the default keyword will be used.

Don't overuse dynamic keyword insertion or your ads will all become very generic and boring. But it is a powerful tool to use in moderation.

For help managing your paid search campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: ad writing, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 4

We're big on gaining as much Google "shelf space" as possible. In other words, for any particular keyword we are targeting, we want to have a paid search listing on the search results page as well as at least one natural search ranking. We think it greatly increases your chance of getting a click to your site, and it is a strong branding move. To make this happen, you need to create landing pages specific to certain keywords. This improves your chances of converting the visitor into a customer AND gives you the opportunity to heavily optimize a page for natural search listings.

Keeping all this in mind, we've decided we would like our AdWords management application to also be useful in optimizing landing pages for natural search rankings. The first part of this is providing the natural Google search rankings for each keyword. In other words, I don't want to just know what my ad position is for a keyword - I also want to know what my natural rank for that keyword is. This information will help me generate shelf space.

Unfortunately, as usual, Google makes things much more difficult than it should be. Google used to have a search API that would return search results and related information. But that API is no longer available. There is a new search API, but it is an AJAX JavaScript-based control, which really doesn't help us in our situation because we need that data on the server side, not the client side. We also need ranking data, which doesn't seem to be available in any fashion via any Google API.

But we've figured out a way to do it. It's much more processor intensive than if we could just request the information directly from Google, but that's alright. We're getting it done, even though it's a lot more work than it should be. Why Google is intent on making its vendors and customers jump through hoops is beyond me, but the situation is what it is. We'll deal with it. We can't wait for the day when Microsoft catches up with Google in terms of natural search traffic and keyword inventory, because we know Microsoft would make it easier to plug into their backend to get the data we need.

So we carry on, fighting one battle after another. When we're done, we will have an application that will make it much easier for us to manage our own clients' paid and natural search campaigns. The next step would be to open it up to others who might want to use it for their own campaigns.

If you could use some help managing your own search engine marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine optimization, search marketing, web site marketing

Thursday, October 11, 2007

A Rant About Google Quality Score

We don't do a whole lot of complaining in this blog. We like to stay on the positive side. But Google is really getting on our nerves with its keyword "Quality Score". A representative from Google described Quality Score thusly:

"Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It's calculated from various factors, including the relevance of your ad and keyword, your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, and your landing page quality.

Quality Score is used to determine your ads' position on Google and the Google Network. It's also used to determine your keywords' minimum bids. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the better your ad position and the lower your minimum bids."

Okay, no problem. Only...from what we are experiencing first-hand in many instances, Quality Score works very poorly.

We have ad groups running in which a keyword perfectly matches the text used in the ad and on the landing page, and that have a reasonable click-through rate (or no click-through rate because it's brand new)...and Google is still giving us a low quality score!

Basically, Google can assign a low Quality Score to any keyword and mandate that the advertiser pay an outrageous price for clicks, even if there is not a single other advertiser for the keyword. As far as we can tell, the logic for determining Quality Score has some serious problems. Google is forcing advertisers to overpay when it should not be necessary.

Is this good for Google? It might make them a few more bucks in the short-term, but long-term they are going to hurt advertisers and force them to go elsewhere. It's simple economics. If advertisers are forced into paying so much for clicks that it makes it impossible to generate a positive return on investment, then they will stop advertising there. Is Google so big and powerful that it can afford to have its customers start leaving? I don't think so.

Hey Google, how about letting the market determine what advertisers are successful and stop meddling in every little detail of everything that happens? Control freaks...

If you are experiencing your own Google frustration and need some help managing your AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, Quality Score, search engine marketing, search marketing, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, October 08, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 3

Today we will continue with our series of posts chronicling the development of our proprietary Google AdWords management application.

One thing that's a little unwieldy about using the Google AdWords API via its various Web Services is that every time a Web Service is called, you have to pass in a number of variables, such as the account email and password, the client email, and the developer and application tokens. And it's not as simple as setting properties of an object to these values. The values have to be set as arrays, so I have to create a variable to hold each value, then pass that value into a single element array, etc. etc. This can result in a lot of code just that doesn't really DO anything. To get around this, all of the code that actually involves using the Web Services is placed in separate classes that my web user controls call.

Which brings us to another key development strategy, which is breaking major chunks of user interface and functionality into their own web user controls. This way, those same elements can be easily reused on other web pages. It takes more time early in the development process to set things up this way, but it will save us a lot of time down the road.

One thing that seems odd about the way the Google AdWords API works is that it has a service called Criterion Service that is used to do things like add or remove keywords or web sites from a campaign, or add new keywords. To me, it seems like it would make more sense for there to be a function provided by the Ad Group Web Service that would return the keywords for a particular ad group. A lot of the AdWords API functionality seems counter-intuitive.

We have quite a few working components of the system, so this week we will probably begin tying everything together into a cohesive unit. This is going to be exciting.

If there is anything we can do to help you manage your paid search or natural search campaigns, feel free to contact us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sponsored search, web site marketing

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 2

I had a good day yesterday working on our Google AdWords management application. I started implementing keyword research functionality. I created a .NET user control and class that lets the user perform keyword research, using Google's keyword data, which is returned in the form of a datatable with checkboxes that allow the user to specify the particular keywords he wants to use. Then we added a couple of functions which we think gives the user a lot more flexibility than when using Google's AdWords interface. After selecting his keywords, the user can either add them to any existing ad group in the campaign or use them to create a new ad group. Essentially, we have broken keyword research/addition out of the ad group creation process and made it a standalone process. We feel that this will greatly speed up the process of creating new ad groups or adding keywords to existing ad groups.

Speed is going to be a critical aspect of our application. The online Google AdWords interface seems like it is tailored toward users who need a step-by-step, "take me by the hand" approach. Google is probably right in designing its interface for the inexperienced user. But for the experienced user, the interface is slow and clumsy, and often not very practical.

Google does provide a much quicker, leaner AdWords management tool, the Google AdWords Editor, which we have blogged about extensively. The AdWords Editor is an offline, client-side application that can be used to create ad groups and other account elements, and move things around quickly. However, since it is completely disconnected from the Internet, it has no research functionality. We feel that our application, which will run on-line, bridges the gap between the off-line tool and the default online AdWords interface. It won't be as quick to use as AdWords Editor, since it will still have to move data back and fourth from Google's servers, but it will be a more complete management environment.

I would be fibbing if I said that we had this application completely laid out and designed before we started coding. We needed to get a feel for what we could with the AdWords API in order to know what we could do. And the best way to do that was just to start coding. So the application is very organic - growing as we program it, right before our eyes.

If you have some particular features you would like to see in such an application, feel free to email your ideas to us at Info@WorkMedia.net. And as we always say, please contact us if you need some help managing your Google AdWords or other paid search campaign. You can email or call us at 888-299-4837.

Labels: AdWords Editor, api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application

Jerry Work here. I think I never commented on my daughter. She had surgery last week to fix a kidney reflux problem, which basically caused her urine to flow the wrong way. The surgery went well, although there will probably be some additional future treatment required. So that's the update there.

I mentioned in our last blog post that we have begun programming our own Google paid search management application. I thought I would spend the next couple of blog posts discussing that process. This may turn into a whole series of posts chronicling the development process. We'll see.

First off, Google does not make it easy to figure out how to use its Google AdWords API and Web Services. There is an API reference, although one critical page of information didn't seem to be linked to from anywhere (that I could find) and was only discovered by searching the API reference web site. And the code samples are very sparse. It almost seems as if Google wants to make things difficult.

I have also searched online for code samples or tutorials that discuss using the AdWords API and have found next to nothing. So we're having to do things the hard way - by trying things out to see what works. We are building the application on the .NET 2.0 platform. At one time I was a certified .NET C# developer. That was several years ago, but once I got into the development process it all (well, maybe not ALL) started coming back to me.

So the main hat I am wearing in the company right now is that of application developer. Chris is really keeping the company going for the most part, while I spend as much time as I possibly can programming. I am using Microsoft's free Visual Web Developer software to build the application. I have to say, I am impressed by the little program. It is barebones but much simpler to use that full-blown Visual Studio. And since our application is meant to run on-line, it works just fine for our purposes. One thing that I love about it is that I can easily run the application on my development workstation without placing the code on a server. I just click the run button and it launches the site in my browser, running on its own built-in server.

So far, the application is communicating with the Google server, returning data related to ad groups, bids, and so fourth. The very first time I actually made that work, I was thrilled, even though all it was was a text string with the name of an ad group. We've already come a long way since that point, with nicely formatted data grids that contain all kinds of data, including performance data.

In our next blog post, we'll talk more about the challenges of pulling this off and where we're going with it. Until then, if you need some help managing your paid or natural search marketing campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, October 01, 2007

Mashups - the Future of Online Application Development

Jerry here. For those of you who had inquired about the status of my daughter, she is doing just fine. The surgery was a success. She is waking up in the middle of the night in quite a bit of pain, but for the most part she is still a happy, healthy baby. I was at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital most of the week, so little real work was done. But now that that is over with, we can get back to the business of Internet marketing!

The future of online application development will involve heavily around "mashups", which are applications that combine functionality from different APIs ("Application Programming Interfaces"). Many companies, such as Google, make data available via Web Services. A Web Service is a way of retrieving data in XML format for use in an application. For example, Google has Web Services which provide search data and that allow you to manage AdWords accounts. By accessing these Web Services (which, in turn, provide access to APIs), you can create your own custom applications that let you manage AdWords accounts and perform various other functions.

In general, when accessing data via a Web Service, you create a "class" that uses the functions provided by the Web Service. Web Services are written in a language called WSDL ("Web Services Description Language"), which can be used to generate a class. The class, in turn, provides methods and properties that can be used in the application code.

So what is the point? It's that if there is an online marketing application you need that doesn't exist, chances are pretty good there are Web Services that can be accessed that will make the development of the application much easier. Sure, you still need to be able to program, but programmers can be hired for cheap (try elance.com) if you can clearly define what the application needs to do and there are Web Services that provide the necessary access to data.

Work Media is working on a proprietary AdWords management system that works by using Google's Web Services. What features would you like to see in your ideal paid search management program? We would love to hear from you on this matter. What other kind of application could you use that would improve your online marketing? Chances are pretty good that there are some Web Services that could make it possible.

If you have an idea for a new online marketing application and need some help, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, internet marketing, mashup, paid search, pay per click, ppc, programming, search engine marketing, web marketing, web service

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

150 Blog Posts and Going Strong

This marks Work Media's 150th blog post. Whoohoo! To those of you who have been along for the ride, we thank you. If you're new to Work Media, then welcome. If you don't know, Work Media is a small Internet marketing firm based in Nashville. The company consists of the Work brothers (Jerry - 34, Chris - 28, and Corey - 20), and their partner/sister company, Frank/Best International, which is a top-10 Nashville advertising agency with clients such as Honda and AKG.

We specialize in helping companies develop and implement aggressive, multi-pronged Internet marketing attacks using paid search, natural search, and content strategies to drive targeted traffic. We have many things in the works for the coming months, including the release of our own paid search bid management tool. That is a big step for us. We want to be the THE agency in the Southeast for cutting edge Web marketing that combines technology with results-oriented marketing strategies. We also have a new book about to come out which discusses using Google AdWords Editor for efficient AdWords campaign management. And soon we will be recording our first audio podcast.

We've got a long ways to go, but judging from how busy we are, we're headed in the right direction. If there is every anything we can do for you, please call us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, search engine optimization, web marketing, web site marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Using Google's Ad Preview Tool to Verify Your Geographically-Targeted Ads

One technique for fine tuning your Google AdWords campaign is to use Google's geographic targeting options to only run your ads specific markets. One very good reason for this is if you only do business in certain markets. In this case, you will be wasting money if you run your ads nationwide. It just makes sense to only run your ads in markets where you do business.

Another reason for using geographic targeting is if you have reason to believe that your products or services may sell better in certain markets. In this case, you would want to set up a separate campaign for each market in order to generate separate performance data for each market. By doing this, you can learn exactly what markets are more receptive to your marketing message and concentrate your budget in those markets. If you already know that your products or services will sell better in certain markets, then you should just run your ads in those markets to start with. For instance, it is a pretty good bet that snow blowers will sell better in Minnesota than Arizona.

Google's geographic targeting works by examining the IP address of the Web browser and making a determination of the location of the user. It's not a perfect system, but it seems to work fairly well. The negative for you, if you are running geographic-targeted ads, is that you can only see yours ads in Google if you are actually sitting in the market in which your ads are running.

But Google provides a way for you to test your geo-targeted ads:

Visit Google.com/adpreview

This page will let you select a specific market in which to view search results pages and ads. Just type your search phrase (one of your campaign keywords), select a market, and then do the search. This will let you actually verify for yourself that your ads are running in your target markets.

If you could use some help managing your Google AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, web marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Advanced Bid Changes in Google AdWords Editor

In Google AdWords Editor, when you are on the Ad Groups screen/tab, there are two options for making bulk bid changes: Advanced Bid Changes and Advanced Content Bid Changes. They accomplish exactly the same thing for search and content bids, respectively.

Clicking one of the buttons brings up the Advanced Bid Changes popup screen. The tool allows you to increase or decrease bids for the selected ad groups by a particular percentage or dollar amount. You can also set a ceiling or floor for bids.

For instance, if you want to raise all of your bids by 10% but bid no more than $2 in any particular ad group, you would select the "Increase bids by:" radio button, type "10" in the text box, and set the dropdown list to "percent". Then you would click the checkbox labeled "Set bids no higher than:" and type "2" in the text box. Then click the "Change Bids" button.

Alternately, if you want to decrease all bids by $.50 but want to maintain a minimum bid of $1, you would click the "Decrease bids by:" radio button, type ".50" in the text box, and set the dropdown list to "USD". Then you would click the "Set bids no lower than:" radio button and type "1" in the text box.

If you are on the Keywords screen, you have a similar option (also labeled "Advanced Bid Changes") that does the same thing for keyword bids, but it also has a couple of extra options. One option is to raise the minimum cost per click for selected keywords that are inactive to the minimum for activation. The other option is to remove keyword-level maximum CPCs and use the default ad group bid. There is also an additional constraint option to disallow setting keyword maximum CPCs to values lower than their minimum CPC bids.

If you could use some help actively managing your Google AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, September 10, 2007

Google AdWords Editor: Replace Text & Advanced URL Changes

When working with text ads (in the Text Ads tab) in Google AdWords Editor, at the very bottom of the screen are two very handy functions - Replace Text and Advanced URL Changes.

Replace Text does just what it says - it replaces text. It works just like find/replace functionality in word processing software. First you select an ad or a group of ads, then click the "Replace Text" link. In the box that appears, type the text you want to replace in the "Find text" text box and the text you would like to replace it with in the "Replace with" text box. You can specify whether to replace text in all of the ad fields, or in a particular one such as the headline, display URL, or one of the description lines. When you are ready to run the replace function, just click the "Find Matches" button. A popup box will appear that will require you to confirm the replace if any matches are found.

The Advanced URL Changes function allows you to do the following for a single ad or a group of selected ads:

Change the URL. To do this, type the desired URL in the "Set each URL to:" box.

Append a text string to each URL. To do this, type the string in the text box labeled "Append this text to each URL:". This is a very handy function if you want to append a parameter to a set of ads for tracking purposes. For instance, if you want to append a parameter to each URL so that you can identify the source ad group that generated traffic to your site, you could set the string to something like "?Source=Google-Ad_Group_Name". Then when you look at the analytics for your site, you can identify the traffic that originated from the ad group because it will have the ad group name appended to the end of the URL.

Remove a parameter from each URL. To do this, type the parameter name in the text box labeled "Remove URL parameter with this name". Continuing with the example above, if each URL already has the Source parameter but you want to remove it, you could type "Source" into the text box to remove it from a set of ads at once. To remove it from all ads, you would need to make sure that all ads were selected.

These functions let you make changes to your destination URL in bulk, which can save you a lot of time. Play around with them and see what uses you can come up with.

For help making the most of your Google AdWords campaign, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Friday, September 07, 2007

Making Use of the Google AdWords Editor Tools Menu

The Google AdWords Editor has a Tools link on the main menu that has four options: Find Duplicate Keywords, Keyword Grouper, Show Ads with Selected Images, and Settings.

Find Duplicate Keywords is a very useful function for making sure you are not duplicating keywords across ad groups. To use it, select Tools/Find Duplicate Keywords, then select strict or loose word order (whether or not the separate words in the keyword have to be in the same order), whether to search for duplicates account-wide or within a specific campaign or ad group, and whether or not the keywords have to have the same match type to qualify as duplicates. Then click the "Find Duplicate Keywords" button.

The keywords found to be duplicate are listed in the Keywords screen/tab, grouped together by ad group. To eliminate any duplicates, you can select the keyword, then delete it, or right-click/cut, or set its status to Paused. We recommend pausing them, just in case you decide to use it again later.

The Keyword Grouper tool will automatically divide a set of keywords in an ad group into many smaller, more specific groups. One of the keys to successful pay-per-click campaign management is having ad groups devoted to a specific, finite set of keywords so there is tight congruency between the keywords and ads. The Keyword Grouper tool makes this easy because it does the work for you. It is often the case that an AdWords account begins with just a few ad groups which each contain lots of keywords. This helps keep things manageable and makes it easier to launch the campaign. But over time, as more time is devoted to the campaign, it becomes clear that there are sets of keywords that would probably perform better if they were broken out into their own ad groups.

To use the Keyword Grouper tool, select Tools/Keyword Grouper from the main menu. Then select the campaign and ad group within the campaign you would like to break up. Then click the "Generate common terms" button. This will extract the keywords from the specified ad group. To focus the generated keyword list, you can type words that should not appear in any of the returned keywords by typing them into the "Ignore these words" text box. Then click "Next".

AdWords Editor will then show you a preview of new ad groups it would create from the list, based on common terms shared among groups of the keywords. If you plan on creating new ads from scratch for all of the new ad groups, check the radio button that says "No, don't create any text ads...". However, it will probably save you some time to check the radio button that says "Yes, copy text ads..." This will automatically populate the ad groups with the same ads used in the original source ad group (or another ad group that you specify). Then you can go back through each new ad group and modify the ads as necessary. Finally, click the "Finish" button.

The Settings option on the Tools menu lets you specify various options, such as whether to hide deleted campaigns, ad groups, or ads. You can also specify if you want to download deleted and ended campaigns and ad groups. You also have the option to connect to an HTTP proxy and the account language.

The Tools menu contains some powerful features that can save you a lot of time. Get to know it - it could become your best friend.

If you could use some time-saving help for managing your AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Google AdWords Editor: Importing and Exporting Data

Google AdWords Editor lets you export AdWords account data in several different formats - as a CSV file, as an AdWords Editor archive file, as an AdWords Editor sharing file, and as an HTML file. File exporting options are available via the File link on the main menu at the top of the interface, or by right-clicking on an account, campaign, or ad group name.

The "Export for Archiving" and "Export for Sharing" options do essentially the same thing. They both export AdWords Editor data in a format that can be re-opened in AdWords Editor. For example, if you wanted to move your account and data settings from one instance of AdWords Editor to another, you could export the account data with the Export for Archiving option, save the file (a .aea file) to your computer, then move the file to another computer. On the new computer, you would use the File/Import Account Snapshot links to import the data into AdWords Editor. Imported data can be in either the .aea or .aes file format. The .aes files are created by using the "Export for Sharing" option to export your data, rather than "Export for Archiving".

The other two export options, "Export to CSV" and "Export to HTML" are for exporting the data to look at in other programs. The CSV option creates tab-delimited text files which can be opened up in spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel. This is useful for analytical types that like having all the data displayed for them in one big file.

The HTML option creates a nicely-formatted HTML option that can be viewed in a web browser. This option is useful for creating a file that can be easily viewed by anyone. If you have clients or other interested parties who want to see the keywords and ads that comprise an ad group or campaign, you can create an HTML file and give them exactly the information they need. Work Media has used this option on numerous occasions to get client approval for the keywords and ads we are using before launching a campaign.

What exactly you can export depends on what is selected in the left-hand side of the screen. For instance, if the account name is selected, from the File menu you have options to export the entire account or export the current view (if exporting to CSV). If a campaign is selected, you have options to export the entire account or the currently selected campaign. If an ad group is selected, you have options to export the account, current campaign, or the current ad group.

Using AdWords Editor's file exporting options, you have a lot of freedom to export all or part of your AdWords account in several different formats - either for data movement purposes or account viewing purposes.

If you would like help managing your Google AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

A Walkthrough of the Google AdWords Editor Tabs

We thought we would step back a moment in this blog post and discuss each of the tabbed sections on the right-hand side of the Google AdWords interface.

The right-hand side of the Google AdWords Editor is divided into eight different screens, with tabs at the top to move from one screen to the next. The screens/tabs are: Keywords, Sites, Negatives, Text Ads, Image Ads, Mobile Ads, Ad Groups, and Campaigns. Following is a description of each screen.

Keywords. The Keywords screen displays all the keywords for the campaign or for a specific ad group, if an ad group is selected on the left-hand screen. By default, the information displayed for each keyword is the type, status, minimum CPC, and destination URL. If stats are turned on, then it also displays average CPC, total cost, average position, conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion.

Sites. The Sites screen is only enabled for site-targeted campaigns. By default, it displays the site URL, status, maximum CPC, and destination URL for each site in the campaign. If stats are enabled, it also shows the clicks, impressions, click-through rate, average CPM (cost per thousand impressions), cost, conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion for each site.

Negatives. The Negatives screen shows negative keywords or sites for a campaign. It also displays the type.

Text Ads. The Text Ads screen shows the headline, first line description, second line description, display URL, destination URL, and status for each text ad in an account, campaign or ad group. If stats are enabled, then it also shows the clicks, impressions, CTR, average CPC, Average CPM, cost, average position, conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion for each text ad.

Image Ads. The Image Ads screen shows the image, name, dimensions, display URL, destination URL, and status for each image ad in the account, campaign, or ad group. If stats are enabled, it also displays the clicks, impressions, CTR, average CPC, cost, average position, conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion.

Mobile Ads. The Mobile Ads screen displays the headline, description, business name, business phone, country, display URL, destination URL, markup language, status, and mobile ad type for each mobile ad in the account, campaign, or ad group. If stats are enabled, it also displays the clicks, impressions, CTR, average CPC, cost, average position, conversions, conversion rate and cost per conversion.

Ad Groups. The Ad Groups screen displays the ad group name, status, maximum CPC, maximum content CPC, and maximum CPM for each ad group. If stats are enabled, it also displays the clicks, impressions, CTR, average CPC, cost, average position, conversions, conversion rate and cost per conversion.

Campaigns. The Campaigns screen shows the campaign name, status, daily budget, start date, end date, whether or not search or content is used, whether or not specific content bids are set, and if budget optimizer is turned on for each campaign. If stats are enabled, it also displays clicks, impressions, CTR, average CPC, cost, average position, conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion.

For each screen described above, clicking on an item in the data section displays details/options about that item in the box below. For example, clicking on a campaign name on the Campaigns screen results in the display of a series of text boxes that contain the campaign name, daily budget, status, search or content networks, and the start and end dates for the campaign. You also have options to edit the language and geographic targeting of the campaign.

Now that we have described each screen in detail, we advise you to just click around the AdWords Editor interface to get comfortable with it.

And, as always, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net if there is anything we can do to help your paid search campaigns be successful.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web marketing, web site marketing

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Creating Draft Campaigns in Google AdWords Editor

Google AdWords Editor lets you create draft accounts, which are accounts that do not get uploaded when you click the button to post selected changes. The reasons you would want to set up a draft account are numerous, including:

You want to build out a new campaign and set everything up before actually adding the campaign to your account.

You want to build out new ad groups while maintaining existing ad groups through AdWords Editor.

You have a planned schedule of campaigns or ad groups and want to work ahead and to build out the campaigns without adding them to the account.

Or maybe you just want to practice building campaigns without risking negative effects on the account.

Whatever your reasons, AdWords Editor makes it easy. Here's how. Right-click on the account name on the left-hand side of the screen and click either "Add Draft Keyword-targeted Campaign" or "Add Draft Site-targeted Campaign". Or you can click the Data button on the top menu, then Campaigns, then the link to create a keyword or site-targeted campaign.

Once you create the campaign, you do the same thing you do with any campaign - specify the campaign name, daily budget, status, start/end dates, and whether the campaign is for search, content, or both. You can also specify the language and geographic targeting. The first time you set the campaign details, you will also have a form below that to add your first ad group. Type in a name and maximum cost per click, then click the Create Ad Group and Go to Keywords button.

When the time comes that the campaign is ready to be launched, all you have to do is change its status to active or paused.

Work Media is here to help you maximize the effectiveness of your paid search campaigns. Call us today at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web site marketing

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Creating Site-Targeted Campaigns with Google AdWords Editor

Continuing with our Google Power Users series focusing on the Google AdWords Editor...

Google AdWords Editor can be used to quickly set up site-targeted campaigns. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Right-click on the account name in the left-hand menu.
2. Click "Add Site-targeted Campaign".

The new campaign will appear in the campaigns list. Click the Campaigns tab to set the attributes of the campaign, such as campaign name, daily budget, status, and start and end dates.

To set the sites where your ads will run, do the following:

1. Click the Sites tab.
2. If you have a single site to add, click the Add Site button.
3. If you have multiple sites to add (which is more likely), click the Make Multiple Changes button, then "Add/Update Multiple Sites".

If you opt to select multiple sites, a popup box will appear in which you type in or paste multiple URLs. With regard to adding sites, the AdWords Editor is lacking because you do not have any way to research sites. So for this, you will probably want to begin the process of setting up a site-targeted campaign in Google to generate a list of strong sites to run your ads. Or you can add sites discovered from other sources and let Google tell you if they are members of the Google content network.

If you could use some help with your Google AdWords management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web marketing

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Using Google AdWords Editor to Quickly Set Up Separate Search and Content Campaigns

Here is a quick tip on using AdWords Editor for setting up separate search and content campaigns.

Google's AdWords Editor application is not without its bugs. One thing we would really like to be able to quickly do is create a copy of a campaign and then change it from a search campaign to a content campaign. We talked in a previous post about the advantage of splitting your content campaigns from your search campaigns in order to give each its own budget. Ideally, we should be able to make a copy of a campaign in AdWords Editor, make one a search campaign and the other a content campaign, and be done with it.

But it just doesn't work. At least not as of the time of this writing. The AdWords Editor throws errors when this is done.

But there is a sort-of work around that cuts at least some time out of the process.

What you have to do is create the shell of the content campaign in the AdWords online interface. It can have a single ad group, a single ad and a single keyword. Just enough to get it started. Then open up AdWords Editor and use the Get Recent Changes button to pull down the new campaign.

Once you have the shell of the campaign downloaded into AdWords Editor, you can use the editor's copy/paste functionality to add the ad groups from the corresponding search campaign. Since you can copy an entire ad group, you will automatically add all of the ads and keywords for each ad group. You will also need to check the settings for the campaign you copied to create the content campaign to make sure it is set for search only; otherwise, you will have duplicate settings.

If you need some help implementing an effective Google AdWords campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, sponsored search, web site marketing

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Google AdWords Editor: Cut & Pasting Ad Groups

The AdWords Editor makes it very easy to set up new ad groups, ads or keywords based on ones that already exist. This is particularly helpful in two situations: when you require ad groups that are very similar except for some kind of central concept, and when you want to create similar yet slightly different ads for split-testing purposes. It makes it easy by giving you the ability to copy and paste items.

For example, an automobile dealer might require ad groups for different models of cars. The ad groups would likely be very similar, but would contain ads and keywords that used the name of a particular model. So there might be a Ford F-150 ad group and a Ford Ranger ad group. If you already have a Ford F-150 ad group set up, then you can make a copy of it and then change the name, ads, and keywords of the copied ad group to use the word "Ranger" instead of "F-150".

From an ad perspective, it is often desirable to split-test the same ad with different headlines. In AdWords Editor, you can simply make a copy of the ad and then change the headline in the copied ad.

You can even create a copy of an entire campaign, if you have need to do so. Another interesting option on the right-hand menu is "Copy Campaign Targeting", which lets you quickly apply the targeting criteria of one campaign to another.

Just like any standard program, AdWords Editor has a right-click menu that gives you access to a copy option. It is often necessary to use the File link on the top menu to paste items. Cutting and pasting items in AdWords Editor is MUCH quicker than manually building all your ads or ad groups from scratch.

If you need some help implementing an effective Google AdWords campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, web site marketing

Friday, August 24, 2007

Generating Stats with Google AdWords Editor

Performance statistics for your Google campaign can be obtained directly from the AdWords Editor interface. To turn on statistics, click the Data button on the main menu, then Stats, then one of the pre-selected date ranges or the Create Custom Date Range button to create a custom view. You can also click the button with the graph labeled "Showing stats for:" at the top of the page and select a date range. Statistics can be viewed at the account level, the campaign level, the ad group level, or for individual ad group elements such as keywords and ads. To view statistics for each level, click the appropriate link on the left-hand menu.

For instance, to get a quick overview of keyword performance (to see what keywords are costing the most money, and which ones are making the most money), click an ad group name on the left-hand menu. You will then be shown the average cost per click, total cost, conversion rate, and cost per conversion (if conversion calculation has been enabled in the account), among other values, for each keyword. You can then scroll down the list to see which keywords are converting the most or at the lowest cost per conversion. And you can see which ones are costing the most money yet generating few conversions.

You can also quickly see which keywords (or ads, or whatever) are performing the best by sorting them. To sort, just click the header of the column you want to sort by. To see which ones are costing the most per conversion, for example, click the Cost/Conversion column header. It is likely that many of the keywords or ads have no conversions, so this will group the ones that do have conversions together.

The advantage of using the AdWords Editor to view statistics is that it is a much quicker process than using the AdWords online interface, or generating reports through AdWords. As you scan through the list, you can make adjustments on the fly - increasing bids where necessary, turning keywords off, etc. - and then upload your changes.

If you could use some help maximizing the effectiveness of your Google AdWords campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, paid search, pay per click, ppc, reporting, search engine marketing, sponsored search, web site marketing

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Google Campaign Management: an Introduction to AdWords Editor

AdWords Editor is a client-side program released by Google to allow for off-line AdWords account management. "Client-side" means that the program is installed and runs on your hard drive, rather than from a web site. The advantage of the program is that it is much quicker to use than Google's AdWords web site. The disadvantage is that it is much less user-friendly. It doesn't walk you through anything like the AdWords web site. If you can get comfortable using it, however, it can save you a ton of time.

To get the AdWords Editor program, log into your account, then click the Tools link. Near the bottom of the page is a link that says "Download AdWords Editor".

The AdWords Editor user interface is fairly sparse, with a spreadsheet-like appearance. The interface is divided into two vertical sections - the left side is a list of folders and objects that represent the campaigns and ad groups in the account. The right side is the information associated with each object. It is tab-divided into eight sections: Keywords, Sites, Negatives, Text Ads, Image Ads, Mobile Ads, Ad Groups, and Campaigns. Beneath the tabs is a spreadsheet-looking window that displays data. Clicking on an object on the left side changes the information on the right.

For instance, clicking on an ad group on the left, and then clicking the Keywords tab on the right, changes the information display to show the keyword data for that ad group. By default, the information displayed for each keyword is the type, status, minimum CPC, maximum CPC, and destination URL. You can also change the data display to show statistical information (this will be discussed in a subsequent post). Clicking on an item in the data screen displays details about it (in editable text boxes) in a section of the screen below.

Above the tabs is a dropdown list labeled "View:" which changes the data shown. By default, View is set to "All". One interesting option on the View menu is "Duplicate keywords", which will show you keywords that are repeated across or among ad groups. You can also use it to view unposted local changes.

When you first start using AdWords Editor, you use the File/Open Account menu option to access a particular AdWords account. The first time, you will pull down the entire account. After that, you will use the Get Recent Changes option each time you start up AdWords Editor. The exception is if you are definitely the only person ever working on the account, and you always use AdWords Editor to make all account changes. Otherwise, ALWAYS use the Get Recent Changes option before you start working or you might end up overwriting work that has already been done.

There is no "save" functionality in the program. Once you have made your account changes and are ready to post them to the account, you click the Post Changes button. Easy.

The reason that using AdWords Editor is so much faster than the online AdWords interface is that all of the information is right in front of you, and you don't have to wait for various screens to load in your browser to make changes. Similar to working with a spreadsheet, you just type your changes in the appropriate places in the data screen - no loading or waiting required - then upload all of your changes at once in bulk.

There is much more to know about AdWords Editor, and we will expand on this discussion greatly in the coming days and weeks.

If you could use some help maximizing the effectiveness of your Google AdWords campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web site marketing

Monday, July 23, 2007

Fine Tuning Your Paid Search Account with Negative Keywords

There is a fine line between running ads for enough keywords in your paid search account to generate sufficient traffic and running so many that you generate junk traffic. Unless you only use exact match (or the equivalent). But there are so many variations of keywords or themes that if you only run exact match ads, you are likely to miss a lot of relevant traffic. But there is another way to fine tune the traffic your ad draws without missing relevant searches.

It's done by using negative keywords.

Negative keywords are keywords you specify that should not be included in search queries that trigger your ad. A common example is the word "free". If you sell a product but you do not want ads for your product being displayed to those looking for something free, then you could set a negative keyword of "free" to prevent it.

For example, let's say you sell an ebook about dog training. You might run paid search ads for search phrases like "dog training", "how to train a dog", "dog training information", etc. But if you don't want your ad to be displayed for a search of "free dog training information", then you would set a negative keyword of "free".

You can probably think of some negative keywords at the start that make sense, but as you run your campaign, it really helps to know what keywords people are actually using that trigger your ad at inappropriate times. In Google, you can generate a search query report that will show you exactly what phrases have triggered clicks to your site. As you look through the report, if you see keywords that are not appropriate, then those are keywords that you should add to your account as negative keywords.

Using negative keywords is a way for you to fine-tune the traffic that you drive to your web site via paid search without limiting yourself by using exact match ads. It is a strategy we definitely recommend you look into.

If you need help fine tuning your paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search marketing, search query performance, web site marketing

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Problems With Google Reporting

There seem to be some technical issues going on at Google related to reporting. We have one client who is unable to change the range of data reported in his control panel. To see a specific range of data, he has to go through the full process of creating a report. Here is Google's response to the problem:

Thank you for your response. We do have a workaround for this issue for you to create a report. Please follow the instructions given below to create a report on demand:
1) Sign into your AdWords account.
2) Go to the 'Reports' tab.
3) Click on ' Create a Report Now ' link and create a report following the instructions given.
Please continue to manually generate reports until we find a solution to this issue. Also, our engineers are currently working towards resolving this issue. I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

And we have another client for whom conversion data is being reported incorrectly. This is a serious problem since we use conversion data as the basis for our actions. Conversion rate is a much stronger basis for determining the success of a keyword or ad than click-through rate. So the lesson here is to make sure you double check the data in your reports. And if you are having trouble (with date ranges, conversion data, or anything else) make sure you contact Google AdWords customer support (there is a contact link inside the control panel). We have found Google to be fairly responsive when it comes to these issues. Which you would expect them to be since having people run ads is how they make their money!

If you need any help managing your Google AdWords campaign, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sponsored search, web marketing

Friday, July 13, 2007

Google's New Geographic Ad Preview

Well, we've done it - we went a whole month between blog posts. I am definitely not proud of that fact. Hey, business is good, but that's no excuse to let our blog die. So let's try this again.

One problem we've had with Google up to this point is that if you ran geographically targeted ads, and you were physically located outside of the area, you had no way to preview your ads. There was no geographically-based preview.

Fortunately, Google has changed that. Check out the following URL:

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

This page lets you type in a keyword and then specify a geographic location for which to view ads that are currently running for that keyword. Finally, you have the ability to run specific ad campaigns in different geographic areas other than your own and actually verify that your ads are running and see how they look. You can even specify particular geographic coordinates if you need that level of detail.

So that is today's Google power tip. Hopefully we'll find the time starting next week to get back on a regular schedule, bringing you tips and information you need to be successful with your online marketing.

If there is ever anything we can do to help you in your online marketing efforts, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search

Monday, June 04, 2007

Bringing Your Message to the Masses with Google Radio Ads

You may have noticed a new tab on your Google AdWords control panel - "Audio Ads". The Audio Ads option lets you run a radio ad campaign in a very similar fashion as a paid search ad campaign. When you click the tab, you have the option to "Create an audio ad campaign". Sound familiar?

We at Work Media are excited about the prospect of being able to create and manage radio ads right alongside paid search ads, all from a single interface. There are probably a lot of marketing theorists and business school professors who would argue that it is not good for a single company, Google, to dominate so much of the advertising market on so many different platforms. But as business pragmatists, our view is "Who cares?" If it helps us make more money for our clients, and it makes life easier, then we're all for it.

The first thing you do when setting up a campaign is to set your weekly budget. There are several pre-set options, ranging from $500 to $2,000, but you can set your own budget at whatever amount you want, as long as it is at least $25. The second step is to select your geographic market. The third step is to select your option for specific stations. You have the choice of either running your ads on whatever stations reach the most listeners at the lowest cost, or you can pick stations in particular formats. If you have a definable target market, then your best bet is to select stations that best cater to your market.

Now, this is a brand new program, so the number of stations on which you can run your ads at the present is fairly limited. For instance, when we were playing around with setting up a radio campaign, there were no sports stations available in our preferred target markets. But hey, this is cutting edge stuff, so you can't really expect everything to be perfect yet.

The next step is to set a bid per thousand impressions. Same old auction format - tried and true.

After selecting the days and time blocks in which you would like your ads to run, Google will show you an estimate of how much you will spend and how much your cost per thousand impressions will be.

The next step is to either upload your audio ad or use Google's ad marketplace to find a company to create your ad for you. Either way, the end result is that you will be running audio ads on multiple targeted radio stations without the hassles of having to deal with radio sales people. Beautiful!

If you could use some help running your own Google radio ad campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or via email at Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, Google radio, Google radio ads, internet marketing, pay per click, ppc, search marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Please Excuse Our Lack of Blog Production

Well, I knew it would happen sooner or later. We've finally gotten so busy that publishing our blog has slipped way down our list of priorities as we do everything we can to keep our clients happy and our business growing. We apologize for the lack of new posts - we know you've been anxiously awaiting a new post for a week now.

Our friends at Bentley Systems are keeping us slammed. We are involved in a major pay-per-click management initiative with them involving many keywords, many ads, and many landing pages. Much like SEO, pay-per-click is a front-heavy process. Once you get your keywords set and your ads written, it's largely a matter of managing bids to maximize your return on ad spend. Bentley is a little different because there are SO many landing pages to create that we're doing a few a week, so it's much more of an ongoing manual process.

Our server crashed this week, putting us in a very awkward position. Our hosting company is replacing both the hard drive and memory. In the meantime, we have several sites down, which is ruinous for search engine rankings.

We also have a bunch of new prospects in the pipeline for whom we have had to have meetings, phone calls, and a series of email communications. We are a small firm. At the moment, the same people who are doing the actual work are the same ones doing the marketing. We hope to change that very soon.

Anyway...no lesson today. We just had not blogged in a week, so we wanted to at least post and say "Sorry", and we will try to do much better from this point on. If there is anything we can do for you, please call us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search marketing, sem, seo, sponsored search

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Google AdWords Power Management: the AdWords Editor

We at Work Media have started using the AdWords Editor tool quite a bit. The AdWords Editor is a free tool that Google recently released to allow for OFF-LINE editing of your AdWords account. It is a bare bones application with a couple of neat features. One feature that is very useful for a large account is the ability to report on duplicate keywords across ad groups.

We are currently managing an AdWords account for a software company with many very similar products. Our keyword research for each ad group has returned many duplicate keywords, some of which get added to the ad groups in an attempt to flesh out the keywords. The AdWords Editor will show us when we have duplicate keywords, so we can make sure we only use each keyword for a single ad group.

The main reason we've begun using the AdWords Editor is speed. Using the Google AdWords online interface is a fairly slow process. You can only work on a single ad group or ad at a time, and there is a lot of "traveling" involved in moving from one thing to the next. With the AdWords Editor, we can quickly move from one ad group to the next. We can quickly add a group of keywords, and even copy ads from one ad group to the next, or within an ad group.

The ability to copy ads is a feature we are making heavy use of. If you have read much of our writing, you know we encourage ad testing in which a single element is changed in each ad, such as the title. By copying and pasting ads, we can quickly create lots of ads by just changing the title (or body copy) on each one.

If there is more than one person working on your AdWords account at any one time, you should be careful about stepping on each other's toes with the AdWords Editor. It works by pulling down the data for your account, and when you are done you upload the account data. In the interim, there is the possibility that someone else could have made changes that are not reflected in the data you have.

The Google AdWords Editor is a power tool that can save you a lot of time. However, we suggest not using it until you understand how your AdWords account works. After a few weeks of actively managing your account, then switch to the AdWords Editor.

If you could use some help managing your Google AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: AdWords Editor, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, sponsored search, web site marketing

Monday, May 07, 2007

Search Engine Marketing: Not All Keywords Are Created Equal

We have given advice on numerous occasions about using an ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)-based approach in setting your initial bids. In other words, don't just GUESS what your opening bids should be - use some logic to set a bid that will allow you to make a profit, assuming some minimal level of conversions. But once your campaign is running, you need to re-evaluate your bids on a keyword-by-keyword basis.

Over time, you generate solid data that you can use to adjust your bids. But until you have enough data, you need to use some common sense to make your adjustments. The main question you need to ask with regard to each keyword is: what is the likelihood that a person using this keyword will purchase my product or service? If the keyword is a broad, generic one related to your industry, the likelihood of any one person converting who visits your site from an ad triggered by the keyword will be very slim.

However, if the keyword is more specific, that would indicate a higher likelihood of a conversion because the person might be further along in the buying cycle. Therefore, that keyword is worth a higher bid.

Here is an example. Let's say you sell refurbished laptop computers online. A keyword like "computers" or even "buy computer" is very broad. It is also probably going to be very expensive. You might bid on the keyword to cover your bases, but you would probably bid low and really wouldn't expect a whole lot from it. But a keyword like "refurbished HP laptop" is much more specific. That would indicate a person who has already decided what he wants (a refurbished HP laptop) and is looking to buy it. For that keyword, you would want to bid more aggressively because of the higher chance of making a sale. Finally, a keyword like "refurbished HP Pavilion ze2000 laptop" would be the best of all because of its specificity. If you happen to have that model of laptop for sale, it might be worth bidding very high on the keyword because of the high likelihood of generating the sale.

If there is anything we can do to help you with your pay-per-click keyword bid management, please contact us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: bid management, internet marketing, pay per click, ppc, roas, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing

Thursday, May 03, 2007

The New Yahoo! Search Marketing Book Has Been Launched

Okay, after months of researching, writing, scrapping what we just wrote, re-writing, and re-writing some more, we have finally launched our latest book:

Yahoo! Search Marketing User's Handbook & Strategy Guide

We believe this is the first book on the market devoted purely to using Yahoo's new search marketing platform to manage Yahoo! paid search campaigns. It is an 85 page, 6" X 9" format pdf download. It is available at the following web site:

http://yahoosearchmarketingbook.com

for $49.95.

Here is some of what the book teaches:

How to create an account.
How to create campaigns.
How to create ad groups.
How to do keyword research so you TARGET THE RIGHT KEYWORDS.
How to administer and fund your account.
How to run reports.
How to set up analytics so YOU KNOW EXACTLY HOW YOUR CAMPAIGNS ARE DOING.
How to use Yahoo!'s dynamic text features to CREATE MORE POWERFUL ADS and SAVE TIME.
Strategies for setting your bids.
Understanding the math behind running successful ad campaigns.
How to write POWERFUL ADS that get results.
The importance of keyword/ad/landing page congruency.
How to create LANDING PAGES THAT GENERATE SALES.
How to beat Yahoo!'s Quality Index ranking.

Any purchaser of the book who is not satisfied gets his or her money back, no questions asked.

If you have any questions about the book, or our Yahoo! Search Marketing management services, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, Yahoo, Yahoo Search Marketing

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

The Rise of Integrated Ad Media

You've probably heard that Google has recently purchased Double Click, an ad network management company. Well, in keeping pace, Yahoo! has just announced the purchase of Right Networks, an online ad exchange. Both deals greatly increase the respective company's reach by increasing the total ad inventory available.

So what does this mean to you?

It means the sooner you adapt to the new world of Internet-driven advertising, the better able you will be to take advantage of converging media. Face it - Google and Yahoo! are no longer search engines or directories. They are full-blown media giants who are steadily increasing their reach, both on-line and off-line. Being an informed advertiser experienced in the use of search engine interfaces gives you the cutting edge advantage. Soon you will be able to purchase search engine ads, TV ads, print media ads, billboards...all from a single company, using single centralized media management control panel.

Don't fear the future. Be on the cutting edge. It starts by running a simple pay-per-click text ad campaign. Where it goes from there, is only limited by your imagination and willingness to learn.

If you would like help entering the world of search engine marketing, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: ad networks, advertising, internet marketing, marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search marketing, sponsored search, web site marketing

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Preferred Cost - Using Google's New Ad Pricing Technique to Reduce Your Risk

Traditionally, bidding on clicks in a search engine has been a hit-or-miss proposition. You set the MAXIMUM you are willing to pay for a click, and then your actual click cost usually ends up well below that. To play the game, you have to be willing to bid high to get your actual cost about where you want it. But you also run the risk of getting burned by being forced to pay what you bid.

Google has released a new ad pricing method that reduces your risk - preferred cost bidding. In this new method, you don't specify a maximum bid - you specify an AVERAGE price you are willing to pay for clicks to your site.

For example, if you know that, based on your historical conversion rate, you can afford to pay a maximum of $.50 per click to achieve your desired return on investment, then you can set a preferred cost per click of $.50. Google will then adjust your ad ranking on the fly to get your average cost per click as close to $.50 as possible. You are freed from worrying about getting burned by bidding more than you really want to pay. It also frees you from having to constantly monitor your bids.

To make this technique work, obviously, you have to understand your numbers. You need to know how many people who click through to your web site become customers and how much profit you earn on them. If you know the lifetime value of your customer, that's even better. But as long as you know how much you can afford to pay to generate a sale and what your conversion rate is, you can figure out how much you can afford to pay for a click, and use that as your preferred cost.

We think there is a lot of potential in Google's new pricing scheme and we will definitely be checking it out. If you have enough information about your business, then we suggest you do the same.

If you would like some help managing your Google campaign bids, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: bid management, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web site marketing

Thursday, April 26, 2007

LookSmart Expands Its Paid Ad Offerings with Contextual Targeting

LookSmart is a lower tier search network that has a pay-per-click advertising model similar to the major search engines. The disadvantage of using LookSmart is that it has only a fraction of the penetration of Google or Yahoo (or even MSN, for that matter). The advantage is that, in general, clicks can be purchased for much less than the big search engines. Work Media has tinkered around with LookSmart in the past. Our initial results were not all that favorable, as conversions were very low. In all fairness, however, we really haven't done enough with LookSmart to draw any kind of valid conclusions.

LookSmart has just launched a contextual targeted distribution model through which you can place paid ads on its FindArticles web site. FindArticles is an interesting site that has (so it claims, at least) 10 million articles from magazines, newspapers, and other sources stored in a searchable database. Some of the articles are free, some of them are considered premium content that requires payment. With LookSmart's new advertising option, you can place relevant ads on articles that pertain to your industry.

You won't generate nearly the amount of traffic you will through the Google or Yahoo content networks, but the traffic will likely cost you much less on a per-click basis. It's definitely another component you might consider for your search strategy as a way to increase your reach and generate cheap traffic. As always, the quality of this traffic should be measured in terms of conversions over some period of time to see if it is worth spending your money on. If it generates a positive return on investment, then stick with it. If not, abandon it.

If you are already a LookSmart advertiser, you should be aware that your ads will automatically begin being displayed on FindArticles beginning in May, unless you specifically opt out of this option.

For help integrating LookSmart or other lower tier search engines into your search marketing strategy, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: content network, internet marketing, LookSmart, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web site marketing

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The Push Versus the Pull of Search Engine Marketing

While discussing the proper strategy for a new client who is in a brand new market, we realized that paid search would work, but that we would have to go about things a different way. The problem is there is no search traffic of any significance directly related to our client's business because noone even knows such a service exists. So how can you use paid search ads to get your message in front of your audience when there's no traffic to begin with?

Basically...you can't. At least not in the search engines. Not until some traffic materializes. In this instance, rather than try to display your ad to those already searching for you (the "pull"), you have to place your message on other properties where your target market lives, to make them aware that you exist (the "push").

In other words, rather than running search engine PPC ads, you need to use a site-targeted campaign to place your ads on web sites frequented by your target market. No matter how esoteric your offering, chances are very good that there are web sites that your market visits. That's how you can "push" your message, rather than trying to "pull" from existing search engine traffic. You should really do both, because there is the possibility that running your ads could create awareness of the existence of your offering, and your market might then begin searching for information about it, rather than clicking your ad. So hedge your bets.

We will discuss the specifics of implementing a site-targeted campaign in later posts, but we just wanted to point out that just because sufficient search traffic does not exist yet doesn't mean you can't still take advantage of paid traffic. It's the push versus the pull.

For help implementing an aggressive paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Friday, April 13, 2007

Managing Your Pay-Per-Click Spend When Funds Are Limited: Spend It or Save It?

If you are on a very limited search engine marketing budget, you face two options when it comes to budgeting: either spread your budget out over the whole month (divide your monthly budget by 30) or spend it until it's gone, regardless if you use up your budget before the end of the month. Intuitively, you might think it is better to spread it out, but in our opinion, this is not really the case. Why? One word: data.

When you spread a small budget over a month's time, you are going to generate very little data for any one day, and it will take the whole month to generate sufficient data to do any kind of analysis. What kind of data are we talking about? Performance data. As we have said before, you do not know what keywords, ad copy, landing page copy, etc. will work. It doesn't matter how smart you are. The only way to know what works is by testing.

So rather than spreading your budget out over a month, go ahead and run your campaign wide open (within the confines of a responsible biding strategy). You will most certainly burn through your budget quicker, but if the campaign generates quality leads or sales, who cares? Why wait to generate new business? Why generate business next week when you can generate it today?

It's also better to do be able to analyze your campaign performance sooner than later, because you can then make changes to the next round of your campaign based on what you learn. Your next round should perform better than your first because you will have an idea of what works.

So...don't think of your budget in terms of an amount to spend over a month's time. Just think of it in terms of generating data and conversions as quickly as possible.

If you would like some help managing your pay-per-click campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Case Studies that Highlight the Importance of Landing Page Design

We recently came upon a web site with some interesting content:

http://www.marketingexperiments.com.

This site runs experiments to find marketing techniques that work well. The following page:

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conversion/optimizing-site-design.html

shows results from an experiment in which two different landing page designs were tested for a couple of different web sites - the original landing page design and a new landing page designed to meet the expectations of the visitors to the site, based on research of what those expectations are.

In one experiment, the landing page of a service business web site was changed to meet customer expectations in terms of industry-specific visual appearance. The new landing page converted over 12% better. Not bad. In a year's time, that would represent a significant amount of revenue.

In another experiment, a new landing page was tested that used anxiety-reducing elements like testimonials and guarantees. The new landing page converted over 70% better, even though the original landing page looked very professional and was consistent with other landing pages in the industry.

So what is the lesson?

First off, know your customers' expectations. Not just in terms of service and whatnot, but what their expectations are in terms of colors, fonts, design, etc.

Second, use whatever it takes to put your prospects at ease - testimonials, guarantees, anything that proves that what you say is true and that you stand by your word.

Third...you need to create landing pages! Period!

For help creating landing pages for your search engine marketing campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-437 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, landing page, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web site marketing

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Google AdWords - How to Know What Times of Day Your Campaign is Most Effective

Knowing what hours of the day your pay-per-click ads are running and when in the day you are generating the most clicks is very useful information to know. For instance, it may be the case that your ads are not running at all part of the day because your budget is getting spent too soon. Or it may be the case that there are particular times of day when action is hottest. If you know these kinds of things, you can make adjustments to your campaigns to maximize its effectiveness by making sure that your ads are displayed when people are most actively looking for your kind of information.

Here is how to generate this kind of data for your Google AdWords campaign:

1. After logging into your Google AdWords console, click the Reports tab.

2. Click the "Create a Report Now" link.

3. Select a report type. If you are going to be looking at time of day performance at a high level (campaign or ad group), then select ad group performance or campaign performance. If you want to see more detail, such as time of day performance for a particular ad or keyword, click keyword, ad, or URL performance.

4. In the Settings section, set the "View" dropdown list to Hourly (by date) or Hourly (regardless of date), depending on whether or not you want to see aggregate data or data for individual dates.

5. Set the other necessary options, such as the date range for the report.

6. Click "Create Report".

Now you will have a report that tells you what times of day your keywords and ads perform best.

If your ads are not even being displayed throughout the day, then you might want to increase your budget. Or if there are certain times of day when your campaign performs particularly well, then you might want to set the campaign to run only during those certain hours and ramp up your campaign to show more ads during those times.

For help maximizing the effectiveness of your Google AdWords or other paid search campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web site marketing

Monday, March 26, 2007

Is it Time to Go Mobile? Google Mobile Ads

Imagine this scenario:

You own a construction equipment rental company. A piece of equipment being used by a construction crew somewhere across town breaks down, and they have to find a replacement as quickly as possible. Someone on the crew uses his phone or other mobile device to do a search on Google for equipment rental companies in the area. An ad for your company appears. The person with the phone clicks a button and is connected to your company instantly. You arrange to deliver the equipment the company needs. The cost of the sale to your company? A quarter.

This scenario is not that far-fetched. As mobile devices become ever more omnipresent, people are going to turn to them more and more for research purposes as well as communication. You might as well begin preparing for it.

To run mobile ads in Google, you just select the mobile ad option when setting up an ad group (you must select the "Ad Variations" tab). Mobile ads are even more sparse than standard Google text ads, as you are only given two lines of text with a maximum of either 12 or 18 characters, depending on your language. You can also have a "Call" link appear on your ads if you choose the option to allow customers to directly connect to your business via phone (and why wouldn't you?).

You can also choose to display a mobile web page to the user who clicks the ad. This is where things get a little tricky because mobile web pages are different than standard HTML pages. They are created with an alternate markup language specifically for mobile devices, such as WML or CHTML. You will need to format the page so that is displays properly on mobile devices, which means it is probably going to need to be a lot more narrow and sparse than your standard web page. When setting up the mobile ad, you select the language in which your mobile web page is written.

Currently, mobile ads can be targeted to Google users in the following countries: the U.S., the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, China, Ireland, India, Russia and Australia. You can also specify to show your ad with particular mobile phone carriers, or to all carriers.

You don't want to be the last one in your industry to be on the cutting edge by displaying your Google ads to mobile searchers. You're better off getting in before the market catches on.

For help running Google mobile ads for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, mobile ads, mobile pay per click, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search marketing, web site marketing

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Pay-Per-Click Marketing: Testing Different Landing Pages & Offers

Pay-per-click marketing is a fantastic way to engage in a targeted advertising campaign - this you probably already know. But what most people don't think about is what a quick and cost-effective testing ground search engine marketing is.

For example, if you sell a product that has very little actual cost of production (such as an information product), there is a price point at which you would generate the most revenue. It's probably not the lowest price you could charge, and it's probably not the highest (although it could be). It's probably somewhere in the middle. The difference between $49 and $59 could mean thousands in additional sales, but you have no idea what the right price point is until you test it.

That's where ppc comes in extremely handy. In the old days (the 90's) of direct marketing, you would have to conduct expensive sales letter campaigns to uncover such data. It took weeks and cost a considerable amount of money to run a split sales letter campaign to test two different offers. With pay-per-click, you can begin generating data today, and the cost can be as little or as much as you feel comfortable spending to find out what you need to know.

Here's how to do it:

1. Set up an ad campaign in your favorite search engine.
2. Run two or more ads for each ad group, with each ad linking to a landing page with a different offer.
3. Within a week, if your product and landing page copy is decent, you should make some sales.
4. Compare the revenue generated by each landing page. The one that generates the most revenue is probably the optimal offer.

You may want to run the test campaign for more than a week. The more data you have, the more confident you can be in your results.

This procedure can be used for any product or service.

For help using paid search engine ads to test your offers or other variables, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: advertising, internet marketing, marketing, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Search Engine Marketing: The Hottest Industry Around

A recent article in MediaPost.com titled "Hiring Line: Keep Your People Happy Before Someone Else Does" touched on the fact the new media advertising industry (such as paid search) has zero unemployment and workers are very hard to find and difficult to keep. There are just not very many people with any kind of experience in this industry.

So if you are reading this and are looking for a direction for your career, we encourage you to consider search engine marketing. There are basically two paths you can take: natural search engine optimization (SEO) or paid search marketing (pay-per-click, or PPC).

SEO is the process of optimizing web pages to achieve high natural search engine rankings. There is some talk about the diminishing importance of SEO given the rise of social search (sites like technorati.com and del.icio.us), but we think it will be a while before you can disregard natural search. Look at it this way: as long as people continue continue to use computer-based search engines like Google and Yahoo, and as long as your competitors are ranked in those search engines, then you need to be an aggressive competitor and get your site to the top of the rankings.

PPC is the process of running paid search ads alongside natural search results in the search engines. As search engines continue to make it more difficult to generate natural rankings, paid search has become more and more important. It is the single most targeted form of advertising there is. You place your advertising message in front of people are looking for exactly what you have to offer. PPC now includes image ads, video ads, and various other formats. But in its most basic form, it is still the use of words to compel the reader to take some action. It's an advertisement.

SEO and PPC involve two different skill sets. Although there is an element of copywriting in both, SEO involves coding, knowing how to write clean HTML and use stylesheets for formatting, as well as a lot of manual labor in the form of generating links to a web site. PPC is more like a traditional advertising medium, although you have to be skilled at managing bids, which involves some math.

If you seriously want to get in the search engine marketing industry, we advise you to become skilled at both SEO and PPC. You will become a highly desired employee and will have no trouble finding employement (well, that partly depends on where you are - search engine jobs are not found here in the South yet like they are in other areas).

To learn SEO and PPC, you are largely on your own. There are few training courses on the subjects. The best way is to learn it is to set up a web site for yourself, get your hands on as many books on the subjects as you can, and just start experimenting.

Labels: advertising, internet marketing, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine optimization, seo, web marketing, web site marketing

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Advice on Generating Keywords for Your Pay-Per-Click Campaign

Keywords are the lifeblood of your pay-per-click marketing campaigns. If you don't have a strong list of keywords, then you are going to lose quality traffic. Don't just rely on the keyword tools within the search engines for your keyword research. Here are some ways to generate keywords to try in your campaigns:

Comb your web site for keywords. Every different way you have described your business on your site is a new keyword or set of keywords.

Think from your customer's perspective. Are the words you use to describe your business really the way other people would describe it? Ask around. Whatever words people are using to search for your kind of business are the words you need to target, regardless of what terms are used in your industry.

Nichebot.com. We really like this web site. First sign up for an account. It's free to sign up. Then type a starting keyword related to your service or product in the text box at the top of the page and hit the Search button. You can change the middle dropdown list to "Overture" to get a better idea of the actual keywords people are using to search in Yahoo. But don't overlook the "Word Tracker" option, which will generate a lot of keyword data. The data will be returned with information such as the number of searches performed for each keyword, the amount of competition, and the KEI for each keyword ("KEI" is a value for the keyword based on a formula that considers the number of searches for the keyword relative to the number of directly competing web pages).

You can also look through your web logs for the search terms people have used on your web site or to find your web site.

If you sell products, you can combine brands with attributes of the products (color, width, size, etc.) to create many specific, late buying cycle keywords.

Try to think of keywords that reflect different stages of the searcher's buying cycle. Early in the buying cycle, they will be looking for more general information about your type of service or products. Later in the buying cycle, when they are much closer to making a decision and doing business, they will use more specific keywords, which might include particular brands and models, or even locations to make a purchase. Try to use keywords that cover the entire buying cycle.

And remember that you are looking for groups of keywords. Unless your campaign is very small, it is unlikely you will want to run a 1:1 ratio of keywords to ads. It will be a very unrulely number of ads to have to create and monitor. So you will be assigning ads to small groups of related keywords, and writing ad copy that applies to all of the keywords. So if you're going to run ads for "gardening", you might as well run them for "flower gardening", "spring garden", and "planting". Yahoo and MSN have some nice dynamic features that make it pretty easy to customize an ad for multiple keywords.

If you would like some help generating keywords and managing your pay-per-click campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keyword research, keywords, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Monday, March 12, 2007

Pay Per Click Marketing: How to Set Up Keyword Tracking in Google

Today we're going to give a quick lesson on how to set up keyword tracking with your destination URL's in your Google AdWords campaign. In Google, as in all the search engines, you want to try and use a separate URL for every keyword in your campaign, so that when you look at your stats, you can instantly see exactly what keywords are generating traffic. It used to be that Google would only allow you set up a single URL for each ad in an ad group, but not for each keyword. Now, if you know how to do it, you can set up a separate URL for each keyword. Here's how:

First you have to set up your ad group. We're not going to go through all the steps on setting up ad groups. We're glossing over that part because you can't set up the keyword URL's during the process of setting up your ad group. You have to go back and set up your URL for each keyword in a separate step.

From the Campaign Summary screen, click the name of the ad group for which you want to set up keyword tracking.

Then click the Keywords tab.

Click the checkbox next to "Keywords" on the left-hand side of the keywords table header. This will select all of the keywords.

Click the Edit Keyword Settings button (this is not the same as the "Edit Keywords" link).

On the next screen, fill in your destination URL for each keyword, which will include the keyword itself. You might want to first type a URL without the keyword, such as www.mywebsite.com?keyword=, into the first text box and then click the "V" button next to the top URL textbox to copy the URL to all the other textboxes. Then you can just go from box to box adding the keyword to the URL.

Then click "Save Changes" and you're all done.

Now when you look at your web stats, you will be able to tell what keywords generated the most traffic because you will see URL's ending in those keywords.

If you can't get Google's own conversion tracking script installed, this is a great way to generate your own data (although it won't tell you which ones actually converted into customers).

For help managing your Google AdWords campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Yahoo Search Marketing's Find Keywords Tool - a Quick Primer

Today we're going to give a quick tutorial on using Yahoo Search Marketing's Find Keywords tool. It's a pretty slick little tool that allows for a good bit of tweaking. What's good about specifically using Yahoo's keyword tool rather an outside tool is that Yahoo gives you an idea about how much traffic each keyword gets on the Yahoo network.

To begin using the Find Keywords tool, first type three words that describe your product or service. You can generate a more finely tuned list of keywords by using the other tool options. If you want Yahoo to pull keywords from a particular URL, type it into the appropriate text box. This can save you some time.

For example, say you have a page on your web site devoted to a particular type of product. If it is well-written, it should naturally contain lots of keywords related to the product. If you supply the URL to that page, you can automatically create a list of keywords for your paid search campaign based on the content of that page.

If you want to search for keywords that contain or do not contain a certain word, type it into the appropriate text box. For example, if you do not want your ads displaying for searches specifically related to a competing brand, you can type that brand name into the "must not appear" box to filter out search terms that include it.

When all the appropriate text boxes are set, click Get Keywords. Yahoo will return a list of suggested keywords, with a small bar chart indicating the number of searches for each keyword. The traffic numbers are relative, so you really don't know with any kind of specificity how many searches there are for each keyword. But you can see which ones generate the most traffic relative to the others in the batch of keywords.

To generate even more keywords, click the Refine this List button. On the popup that appears, you can choose to include or reject any of the keywords for purposes of creating a new keyword list. You can continue this process until you are satisfied with your keywords.

Finally, click the check boxes next to the keywords you want to add to the ad group.

If you could use some help managing your Yahoo Search Marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Monday, February 26, 2007

Beating Yahoo's New Quality Index

Yahoo has gotten overly strict in its attempt to only allow relevant sponsored search ads. We are finding that a lot of terms that are not directly related to the specific product or service are being automatically denied. We think this is short-sighted, because it eliminates the possibility of displaying your ads to those who would be strong candidates, but performing searches on other related topics. For example, if you sell diamond engagement rings, you may not be able to run ads for searches related to weddings.

We also have to admit that we're fairly perplexed by Yahoo Search Marketing's new Quality Index score that is applied to sponsored search ads. But here is a strategy to help deal with that particular issue:

Bid high at the start of the Yahoo campaign to generate as high a click-through ratio as possible. It seems that generating a high click-through ratio has a positive influence on the Quality score. Once you have established a Quality score, you can back off of your bids if you need to in order to maximize your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Another strategy is to pursue a tight coupling between keywords and ads. Yahoo allows you to dynamically insert keywords, but it may still be helpful to write lots of specific ads that are highly related to their keywords.

We like the new Yahoo interface, but we're definitely not crazy about their new rules. But as we develop effective techniques for dealing with Yahoo (and the other search engines), we will be sure to share them with you here.

For help managing your Yahoo pay-per-click campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Pay-Per-Click Ad Keyword Tracking: Just Do It!

Keyword tracking is very important to the success of a pay-per-click advertising campaign. If you have a conversion event page on your site, such as a thank you page or order confirmation page, you can measure your exact return on investment (ROI) or return on ad spend (ROAS) for each keyword.

Even if you are not able to specify some kind of converting event on your site (for example, if you sell services rather than products), you can still use keyword tracking to learn which keywords generate traffic that spends time on your site. This information will help you determine what keywords attract the most interested users.

To track your keywords, each keyword ad needs its own URL with a parameter that contains the keyword. For example: www.yourwebsite.com?keyword=whatever

The search engines have historically made it as hard as possible to track your ads at the keyword level, but things are getting better. With the release of the latest update to the Google AdCenter interface, it became possible to set a separate URL for each keyword.

You can also set up a separate URL for each keyword in Yahoo, although you have to go back and do it after setting your ads up.

MSN makes it simple. In Microsoft adCenter, you can attach a dynamic variable to the URL for a group of ads that will automatically add the keyword.

It takes more time to set up a separate URL for each keyword in your campaign, but it is definitely worth the time.

Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net for help setting up your PPC campaigns.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, Microsoft adCenter, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, sem, web site marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing

Monday, February 19, 2007

Microsoft adCenter Keyword Research Tool: Generating Demographic Data Useful to Your Search Engine Marketing

We have been doing a lot of pay-per-click campaign management that spans all three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. We've always done Google, but with the newness of the Yahoo and MSN ad interfaces, it has given us the opportunity to learn some new things. Of the three, MSN has the nicest interface. You're probably going to be shocked to hear this, but it has some bugs (WHAT? Microsoft release something with some bugs?), but they are fairly minor.

One feature of Microsoft adCenter we really like is its keyword research tool. To access it, after logging in to adCenter, just click the Research tab on the main menu. You can then have Microsoft generate a list of keywords based on a single keyword, or based on a URL. The returned keywords are sorted by the number of searches performed for each keyword in the previous month. You can generate keywords that contain the specified keyword, or that are similar to the specified keyword.

But what really sets the MSN keyword generation tool apart from other similar tools is its ability to generate a demographic profile for a set of keywords.

Here is an example:

Let's say you are in the business of copywriting. Typing "copywriting service" in the search box returns the following results (in the "Contains Term" box) in order of previous month's searches:

seo copywriting service
copywriting service
website copywriting service
copywriting service web
complete copywriting service

This in itself is interesting data, because we can see that more people are searching on MSN for copywriting services related to search engine optimization than anything else.

If we select each of the keywords and then click "View Profile", MSN generates a tabbed box of charts, divided into five sections:

Traffic Trends
Age and Gender
Geography
Wealth Index
Lifestyle

Below is a screenshot of the chart displayed if we click the Geography tab.

Very interesting. We would have expected cities like New York and Chicago to appear high on the list, but they are nowhere to be found. By far, the number one geographical location for MSN searchers searching for copywriting services is London. So what does this mean? Well, you don't want to draw any wild conclusions, but it looks like if you could get your marketing message to web sites and forums based in or focusing on the U.K., you might find yourself a very active market. This information is also useful in targeting specific cities with your pay-per-click ads.

The above demonstration is just a simple example, but we suggest that you give it a try and see what insites you can glean about your target market.

For help running an effective pay-per-click campaign for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4827 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keyword research, keywords, Microsoft adCenter, MSN, MSN Labs, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Keyword Research Tips

Keyword research is a very important part of the process of running a successful pay-per-click campaign. If you only run ads for broad, heavily searched phrases related to your business, you will likely be competing against lots of other businesses, and bids may be quite high. But if you expand your view and seek more "long-tail" terms, you will face less competition, and clicks to your site will cost less.

"Long-tail" terms are less-trafficked search phrases that are more specific than broad, general phrases. In addition to being less competitive, and thus less expensive to bid on, they have another bid advantage. Often, they indicate a searcher who is farther along in the buying process. For example, the keyword "tennis shoes" indicates that the user is searching for information on tennis shoes, but may not have any particular brand in mind. However, the keyword "Nike Air Max 360" is an indication of a user who searching for a specific brand of shoes. The searcher using the more specific keyword is likely further along in the buying process.

Our favorite tool for finding keywords is Nichebot.com. You provide the tool with a keyword and it returns a list of related keywords, along with traffic and competition information for each one. Clicking on a keyword in the list of returned results will generate a new list of keywords similar to the one you clicked. You can use it to drill down through keywords and come up with lots of keywords you may not have thought of. But to use the tool to its maximum effectiveness, you need to come up with unique keywords to start with.

Think of all the different ways someone might search for information related to your products or services. For example, if you sell wedding dresses, you might want to research keywords related to tuxedos, limousine services, wedding and engagement rings, locations for weddings, how to conduct a wedding, etc. And of course keywords related to specific brands and products in your inventory. Running all of those kinds of keywords through a keyword tool like Nichebot will reveal many more keywords you can use in your PPC campaign.

If you would like some help conducting keyword research for your pay-per-click campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keyword research, keywords, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Pay-Per-Click Marketing: Expand Your Horizons

The American pay-per-click market is getting crowded. You can still keep costs down by taking a "long-tail" approach (looking for lots of little used by highly targeted search phrases for which to run ads), but with growth in paid search revenue for 2007 estimated at 27% by Merrill Lynch, it is going to get increasingly more difficult to get a leg up on your competition.

So perhaps the time is nearing when you want to take a more global approach to your PPC (if it's relevant to your business, of course). Click prices for PPC campaigns in other countries are generally much lower than in the U.S. Yet the U.S. accounts for only 21% of the worldwide Web population. For those of you not that good in math, that leaves another 79% of the entire World Wide Web for you to market to.

One important key to being successful using paid search worldwide is segmentation. For one thing, you don't want your ads and bids for other countries mixed in with your U.S. ads and bids. You may end up bidding more than you need to. And ads for other countries need to be written for each country specifically. So each country in which you market your services via PPC should be set up with its own campaign.

It will take some work to figure out how to write your ads for other countries. You might want to start slow with countries that are not that different from the U.S. - Canada, Australia, the U.K., etc. A next logical step might be Spanish-speaking countries, such as Mexico and Spain. Of course, when you enter the domain of advertising in foreign language markets, you will either need to be fluent in the language or able to hire someone who is.

And as with all PPC campaigns, you will want to create landing pages tailor-made for each country. Your landing page design and offer should also reflect the culture of the country.

Will it be a lot of work? Yes. But you will open yourself to 5x more prospects, to whom you can advertise for cheaper than in the U.S.

Please contact Work Media today at 888-299-4837 or info@WorkMedia.net if you need assistance planning or managing a pay-per-click campaign for your business.

Labels: bid management, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

MSN Advertising: Taking Advantage of Dynamic Text Options, Part 2

Yesterday we began our discussion of dynamic text options when setting up pay-per-click ads to run on MSN, focusing mostly on the option to dynamically add the keyword into the title or ad copy. If you recall, there are four dynamic variables you can use in your ads:

Insert Keyword Destination URL {param1}
Insert Dynamic Text {param2}
Insert Dynamic Text {param3}
Insert {keyword}

Today we're going to continue our discussion of MSN's dynamic text options by looking primarily at the Insert Dynamic Text option. The two available dynamic text variables can be set for each individual keyword when setting up keywords for an ad. After adding keywords to the keywords list, you will see two links directy above the list: Match Options and Dynamic Text. Match options, obviously, are the match options for the keywords that determine how strictly a search must match your keywords before triggering your ads. We'll look at that another time. The Dynamic Text option lets you set dynamic text variables for each keyword.

Clicking the Dynamic Text link gives you three options to set for each keyword: Show Keyword Destination URL, which lets you set a separate URL for each keyword; and Show Dynamic Text {param2} and Show Dynamic Text {param3}, which let you set two dynamic variables for each keyword. Your ads can then be written in such a way that the dynamic variables you set for each keyword will appear in the ad.

To have your dynamic variables appear in your ad, on the screen to add or edit your ads, place your cursor where you want the variable to appear, and click the Dynamic text link beneath the text boxes for the ad title or ad text. Then select Insert dynamic text {param2} or Insert dynamic text {param3}, depending on which variable you want to insert at that particular location.

Now when the ad appears in search results, it will display with the dynamic text you set up for the keyword that triggered the ad. This is a fantastic way to personalize your ads while cutting down on the number of separate ads you have to write.

If you wanna get really fancy, you could place one of the dynamic variables into the URL (or use the Keyword Destination URL variable) to send a keyword parameter to the destination URL. Your destination page could then take the parameter and dynamically place it into the text of your page. This would create a tightly coupled ad and destination, which should help improve conversion rates.

For help using running MSN ads to promote your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, Microsoft adCenter, MSN, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, February 12, 2007

MSN Advertising; Taking Advantage of Dynamic Text Options

The Microsoft AdCenter console used to manage sponsored search ads on MSN has some very interesting dynamic text features that let you leverage your time and effort.

When setting up an MSN ad, you enter text into four fields: Ad Title, Ad Text, Display URL, and Destination URL. When typing in any of those four text boxes, you will notice a link beneath the text box labeled "Dynamic text". When you click the Dynamic text link, you will see four options:

Insert Keyword Destination URL {param1}
Insert Dynamic Text {param2}
Insert Dynamic Text {param3}
Insert {keyword}

The option we have used most often is the last option, which automatically inserts the search term used in place of the dynamic text placeholder. For example, if you sell electronics, you set the title of the ad to use the dynamic Insert keyword function, so that is someone is searching for "Sanyo LCD TV", then the title of your ad will be "Sanyo LCD TV".

Research has shown that using the search terms in the ad (either the header or body) improves click-through rates. So Insert keyword function automates that for you. One caveat is that if the dynamic keyword causes the title or body of the ad to exceed the maximum character limitations, the ad will be declined for that keyword. For example, if Work Media had an ad for the following two keywords:

internet marketing
internet marketing consultant

and we had used the Insert keyword function for the title, the second ad would be denied because the title would be too long. One way to avoid this is to set up specific keyword parameters for each keyword.

We will talk about using the other dynamic parameters tomorrow (unless we think of something else really interesting to talk about).

If you need help setting up an effective pay-per-click campaign for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, Microsoft adCenter, MSN, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Friday, February 09, 2007

Pay-Per-Click Marketing Analysis: Another Look at the Numbers

When preparing to begin a pay-per-click (ppc), or sponsored search, campaign, it really helps to go into the situation with an idea of what the numbers look like. By "the numbers", we mean what kind of return on your investment you can expect assuming different bid levels and different conversion rates. Following is a chart that is an example of one we might create when beginning a ppc campaign to give the client and ourselves an idea of what he might expect his return on ad spend (ROAS) to be. It also helps us establish a benchmark average bid.

These numbers are reflective of a company selling a fairly high priced item. We have used a range of conversion rates from .10% (1 in 1,000) to 2% (2 in 100). For a high priced item, we would expect a low conversion rate for online sales, possibly 0.25% (1 in 400). Assuming a 0.25% conversion rate, the $.50 bid makes more sense than the $.75 bid because it generates a ROAS of 548% (or $5.48 in revenue for every $1 spend), versus 416% for the $.75 bid.

However, at the $.50 level, you are going to receive fewer clicks to your site. If the ROAS at the $.75 level is acceptable, you may want to use the higher bid to generate more total revenue. In this example, the $.75 bid generates $42 thousand in revenue, versus $31 thousand for the $.5o bid.

The question of how much to bid may also be determined by your budget for the campaign. At higher bids, you are going to burn through your budget quicker. If there is so much keyword inventory related to your business that you are able to use up all of your budget regardless of what you bid, then it makes sense to bid lower...if ROAS is your main consideration.

If there is a branding component to your online marketing, then you may want to bid higher for higher positioning on the page. Another consideration is that not all sales are made immediately. If you position yourself as the leader in your category (high on the page), you generate more immediate traffic and more potential future business from prospects who visit your page but don't immediately do business with you. This branding component is not reflected in the kind of analysis we displayed above.

An analysis like the one above can easily be prepared using a spreadsheet, and we highly advise you perform this kind of analysis to get a feel for your numbers. Use the sponsored search control panel for whatever search engine you want to use to get an idea of what bids for keywords in your industry look like, along with how many clicks you can expect to generate at different bid levels. Using this information, you can estimate how much revenue you could generate assuming different conversion levels. Then you can calculate ROAS at different conversion levels. Doing this for each of the major search engines will also help you determine the best place to spend you money.

If you would like some help preparing to begin your own paid search marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, MSN, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, roas, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Warnings on PPC Bid Management Software

Bid management software for managing pay-per-click campaigns seem like a great idea. You tell the software what you want your campaign to accomplish, set up the ads, and let the software do the work of changing bids many times a day to accomplish your goals.

But it ain't all it's cracked up to be. And it ain't what it used to be.

For one thing, the search engines, while making their API (application programming interface)'s more robust, are making access to them more difficult. Yahoo has placed restrictions on the number of calls that can be made to an API. What that means is that if you have lots of keywords in your Yahoo search marketing campaign, there is going to be a tight limit on the number of times that bids for those keywords can be updated in any given day. That's the whole point of bid management software - to change bids.

Google, by contrast, has not such bandwidth limitation, but it charges for use of its API. We like to call it the Google tax. The current rate is a quarter for every 1,000 calls to its API. $.25 may not sound like much, but consider this: updating a single bid will likely require several calls to the API. If you have thousands of keywords that are all being updated 10 or 20 times day, that is many, many thousands of calls to the Google API. Over a month's time, it definitely adds up.

But on top of the problems using the search engine API's is the fact that bid management software generally works by making constant updates to bids to try and achieve some kind of specific metric, such as return on investment (ROI). If you guess about what the target metric needs to be, you could end up with bids that are way off. If you target an ROI that is too high, you may force the software into setting bids too low, which could end up cutting way back on the amount of traffic you generate. Likewise, if you target an ROI that is too low, you could end up paying more for your clicks than you need to.

The way to find out how you need to use your bid management software is by manually running the campaign for a while, doing lots of testing, and generating data. Once you have an idea of what your typical conversion rate is and what your profit is on a typical conversion, then you can determine what your bids need to be and what you can expect in terms of ROI. This kind of information is extremely valuable in figuring out how to configure your bid management software.

If you would like some profesisonal help in managing your pay-per-click marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: bid management, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sponsored search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Monday, February 05, 2007

Google Site-Targeted Search Engine Campaigns: Another Internet Marketing Weapon

You already know about pay-per-click. If not, you haven't been paying attention. Give us a call.

But did you know that Google has an alternate ad distribution method called "site-targeted"? This is different than using the content network. Standard content network ads are still keyword-based, pay-per-click ads. Site-targeted ads, on the other hand, appear on specific content-focused web sites that you specify, and they are priced on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) model.

When you set up a site-targeted ad campaign, you have several options with which to choose the sites to target:

Browse categories. This option lets you browse through categories and sub-categories to look for sites that are categorized a specific way. Similar to adding keywords, the site selection screen provides you with a list of possiblities, and you click the ones you want to add to your selected sites.
Describe topics. This option lets you type in words related to your business and Google will show you a list of sites that match those topics.
List URLs. With this option, you type in specific web addresses where you would like to advertise and Google tells you if those sites are available to run ads.
Select demographics. This option lets you select certain demographic options and Google will show you a list of sites whose audience matches those demographics. Possible demographics are gender, age, annual household income, ethnicity and whether or not the audience has children.

Regardless of what option you choose, a list of matching sites will display at the bottom of the screen for your selection.

After you have selected the sites you want to target, you enter a maximum daily budget and your maximum CPM.

The cost-per-thousand pricing model requires you to know and work your numbers in a slightly different way. Click-through rates are probably going to be much lower than search ads. But you really won't know what your CTR might be until you run start running some ads and see what happens. But if things work out, your net cost-per-click could end up being lower or about the same as standard PPC ads.

For example, if you pay $1.00 CPM and your click-through rate is .25% (1 in 400), then your cost-per-click is $.25. If your CTR falls to .1% (1 in 1,000), then your CPC rises to $1.00.

If you are careful in your selection of web sites you target and manage your CPM wisely, then you can do quite well using site-targeted ads in Google.

For help implementing a site-targeted search engine marketing campaign for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Yahoo! Search Marketing Secret Weapon: the Alternate Text Feature

We have been spending a fair amount of time lately exploring the new Yahoo Search Marketing interface, and we've come upon one new feature that we are very excited about. It's the Alternate Text option for your keywords. This option lets you place a specific word or phrase in a particular location in the ad associated with the keyword. For this to work, the copy for the ad must contain the placeholder {KEYWORD:default_text} in the ad body or title. If alternate text is specified, then the ad will contain the alternate text. However, if the alternate text causes the ad to exceed the maximum character limitation, then the default text will be used.

Here is an example:

Let's say you sell shoes on your website. Let's also say you sell a line of shoes called "Hudsons", so you have an ad group set up for keywords related to Hudsons. Let's say the Hudsons come in three colors: red, yellow, and blue. You might have the following keywords in the ad group:

Hudsons
red Hudsons
yellow Hudsons
blue Hudsons

Your ad could be written like so: Find the {KEYWORD:default_text} you are looking for here!

The default text would be "Hudson", so the "Hudsons" keyword would use the default text.

The "red Hudsons" keyword could be set with the Alternate Text property "red Hudsons", so when the ad was displayed for that keyword, it would read: Find the red Hudsons you are looking for here!

The same would be done for the yellow and blue Hudsons keywords so that depending on which keyword had triggered the ad, it would be customized to match the exact search phrase.

This is an extremely powerful feature because it splits the different between using a single ad for every single keyword and using an ad for lots of keywords. The more personalized the ad copy seems, and the more tightly coupled with the user's search phrase, the more likely it will generate a click.

For help managing your Yahoo Search Marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, sponsored search, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Monday, January 29, 2007

Seach Engine Marketing: the Trouble with API's

An "API" is an Application Programming Interface that allows you to hook into another computer system to exchange information with it. For example, Google and Yahoo both have search API's that allow you to extract search data from their systems for display in your own applications or web pages, formatted however you want. This data is generally in XML format and exchanged via a protocol called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). If you're not going to be doing any programming, you really don't need to worry about this stuff. But the reason I bring it up is just to give a little bit of technical background for the remainder of our discussion, which is about using pay-per-click applications that use the search engine API's to get data.

In our opinion, it only makes sense for the search engines to provide open access to their API's and to provide plenty of information for advertisers to run effective ad campaigns. But the trend seems to be going in reverse.

Last year, Google announced that it would begin charging a fee of $.25 per 1,000 operations. This doesn't instinctively feel like a lot, but it is. Performing a single action in a pay-per-click management program generally involves several operations. And these programs, by their very nature, are intended to be used to make several or even dozens of bid changes for ads every day, for every keyword or keyword group associated with each ad. So this adds up to potentially many, many thousands of actions every day, adding substantial costs on top of the expense of paying for the ads in the first place.

A backlash has already started, as some companies are moving toward using cheap labor to manage their ads, rather than this expensive technology. Given that the easier it is for advertisers to manage their campaigns, the more money Google will make, we don't see how this benefits anyone.

Yahoo, with the release of its new ad management system, has also made a change to its API. Though Yahoo is not charging like Google, it has placed a much greater bandwidth restriction on the data returned from its API. What this means is that bid management programs will have to make fewer changes to bids to stay within limits. Again...why would Yahoo make it more difficult for advertisers to use manage their accounts? We know that constantly pinging search engine servers to make changes to sponsored search bids are a drain on their servers, but these companies make billions of dollars a year, and their profit should easily pay for enough servers to handle it.

As for MSN, except for invited parties, they have not yet released their API for general consumption (we wish they would get on with it), but we have a feeling that Microsoft will be much more open with its API, at least initially, since it is still playing catchup in the search arena.

The net effect of these changes to API's is that it just won't be as cost effective to use bid management software as it once was. With Google, you will be paying an expensive tax on top of your bids, and with Yahoo, you will have much less control. At Work Media, we are still experimenting with different ways to manage campaigns. We actually still do most of our campaign management manually and will probably continue to do so. Especially now that the search engines are making it so difficult to use their API's.

If you need help managing your sponsored search marketing campaigns, please call us at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, sponsored search, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Friday, January 26, 2007

The Two Disciplines of Successful Pay-Per-Click Marketing, Part 2

Yesterday we began our discussion of the dual disciplines of successful Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing with an explanation of the mathematician side. Today we continue that discussion by looking at the artist side - the part of the process that involves creative writing. It's not really so much "creative" writing as it is direct marketing style writing. The PPC ad writer has very limited space in which to persuade the reader of the ad to click and visit the advertiser's web site. Writing the ad is actually the very opposite from a sales letter situation, where the top copywriters often flourish. The long-form sales letter is a forum that great copywriters love because they have all the room they want to draw the reader in, list lots of benefits (not features!), tell stories, and do everything they can to convince readers of the letter to visit. However, long-form copywriting experience comes in very handy when writing the copy for the destination web page. If they've clicked your ad link, then they have expressed some interest in what you have, so the destination web page is where you can use copywriting to convince the visitor to do business with you.

But as far as the ad itself, how do you use such limited space and so few words to compel the reader to click the ad? We've touched on PPC ad writing strategies in previous posts, but following is a summary of some of our tips to get you started:

Use the search terms in your ad.
Use a call to action.
Write from the reader's perspective.
Use buzz words like "free" and "guaranteed".

The first tip above is the most basic but perhaps the most important. You have to find the line between keyword/ad granularity and having a manageable number of ads. The more separate ads you have with few keywords for each ad, the more effective your campaign will be because the ads will more closely match the search terms. If you can use the exact search terms, or nearly exact, in the ad body, or even better in the head, then the more closely the ad will match what the person was looking for.

The second tip is a basic copywriting rule. Tell the reader what to do! The search engines may not allow you to use the words "Click here", but you still need to use some similar kind of phrase to tell the reader that he needs to take some specific action: "Visit now", "Buy now", "Come see", etc.

The third tip means that you use the word "you" and focus on the benefit to the user, as opposed to some kind of list of features. People do not buy features, they buy what those features will do for them - the benefits. Using the word "you" focuses the ad on the reader, so he knows that the ad is talking to him.

The fourth tip really gets into the "artist" area because this is where good writing really comes into play. There are certain words that get people's attention, and "free" and "guaranteed" are high on the list. Two huge tools in the copywriter's toolbox are giving away freebies - free reports, free samples, free memberships, etc. - and reversing the prospect's risk. Risk reversal means that you guarantee your product or service so that the customer knows he can get his money back with no trouble - you take on the risk, not the customer.

Much of this discussion is based on copywriting principles that have been around for years, tweaked to apply to the online world of writing for a very small ad space. We cannot recommend enough studying copywriting from some of the masters, such as:

Dan Kennedy
Brian Keith Voiles
Jay Abraham
David Ogilvy

There are many more fine copywriters, but if you look into the work of the above men, it will set you on the road to learning what you need to learn to be a strong copywriter. And that's how you tackle the "artist" side of the Pay-Per-Click equation.

If you need some help managing your Pay-Per-Click campaign, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, sponsored search, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Thursday, January 25, 2007

The Two Disciplines of Successful Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay-Per-Click, or Sponsored Search, marketing is an interesting field because of the duality of skills necessary to be successful in it. On one hand, you have to understand the numbers - you have to know what a customer is worth to you, how many visitors to your site you can reasonably expect to become customers, how much you can afford to pay for a single visitor, etc. On the other hand, you have to be able to write convincing, compelling ad copy, and the destination web copy has to also be well-written. So to be successful in Pay-Per-Click, you have to be both a mathematician and an artist.

The Mathematician

The Mathematician really needs to understand the goals of the Pay-Per-Click campaign. You need to know how many customers you want to try to gain and how much you can afford to pay to acquire each new customer. If you don't know what a new customer is worth, then that is something you really need to find out. Otherwise, you're shooting in the dark.

As a professional PPC marketer, I have clients asking me to generate x sales per day or per month while spending y dollars. This is often a difficult situation because it often means I need to get clicks as cheaply as possible while maintaining a certain level of conversions. The thing that makes this a difficult situation is that as click bids go down, often conversion rates go down as well. One reason is that to generate low cost traffic, you have to use content networks as well as search results, which are much less targeted.

Nonetheless, to even tackle the problem I need to understand the numbers. Here is a very simple formula to calculate how much you can spend per click on your PPC campaign:

Cost Per Click = Amount You Can Afford to Pay Per Customer * Conversion Rate

OR

Cost Per Click = Average Sale * Profit Margin * Conversion Rate

For example, if you generate $50 revenue per customer, on average, with a 50% profit margin, then you can afford to pay up to $25 to acquire a new customer. You would only break even at that rate, but at least you would gain a new customer and would have the opportunity to sell more products or services to that customer in the future. Assuming a conversion rate of 1%, then the numbers work out like this:

Cost Per Click = $25.00 * .01 = $.25

OR

Cost Per Click = $50.00 * .50 * .01 = $.25

So you now know that you can afford to pay a quarter per click. If you can double your conversion rate (which falls on the Artist side), then you can double your profit or double your bids.

As you watch your PPC campaign, you might find that certain products sell much better on-line that others. If this is the case, then you might want to re-work your numbers to emphasize the products that are selling. For example, let's say you have the following products, which are selling via PPC in the following proportions:

Product A - $25 profit per sale - 50%
Product B - $10 profit per sale - 10%
Product C - $40 profit per sale - 40%

Then your average profit per sale via PPC is as follows:
($25 * .50) + ($10 * .10) + ($40 * .40) = $12.50 + $1 + $16 = $29.50

Based on these numbers, you now know that you can raise your bid to about $.30.

As eluded to above, it may even be worth taking a loss on the first sale just to get the customer. If you know the lifetime value of your customers, then you can make this call. If you generally only do business with your customers a single time, then that is another area of your business you need to investigate - how to sell more to people who have already done business with you. This is where you should use vehicles like email, newsletters, blogs, etc. to create a community of customers who come to rely on you for information. It all comes down to creating a holistic, integrated marketing plan, and it all starts with knowing your numbers.

Tomorrow we will look at the other PPC discipline - the Artist.

If you would like some help managing your own effective, powerful Pay-Per-Click marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Monday, January 22, 2007

Internet Marketing: Pay Per Click Keyword Research Tips

When setting up keywords for our PPC campaigns, it is generally a better strategy to set up keywords and ads with as much granularity as possible - in other words, use lots of ads for small sets of related keywords, rather than have a single ad running for lots of keywords. It is also better to use an exact match strategy, if this strategy generates enough clicks. If you cannot generate enough clicks using exact match, then you can switch to broad or phrase match (there are Google terms) ads, which will result in your ad being displayed more often. The reason you want to use exact mach whenever possible is twofold: 1. The ads will be more targeted, since your ads will only be shown to people searching for the exact phrases you specify; and 2. You will save some money on click costs because exact match ads are always shown above broad or phrase match ads.

Since we are arguing that you needs lots of ads representing lots of exact keywords, then you are going to need to generate a lot of relevant keywords. We highly recommend using a tool called NicheBot: http://nichebot.com.

Nichebot will show you a list of similar keywords for any keyword you type in, along with traffic and competition data for the keywords. For each keyword, it will show you how many people searched for the term during some period of time, the number of competing sites (sites that are specifically optimized for the phrase), and the KEI, or Keyword Effectiveness Index. This data will allow you to rank keywords so you can decide which are the best keywords to target for your web site.

The search engine tools section at http://seobook.com also has a nice keyword tool that uses data pulled from Yahoo's search inventory. The data also shows the number of searches for each keyword, along with other data such as bid rates.

Here a few more sources of possible keywords:

product names
competitor names or competing product names
URL's
names of people associated with your industry
synonyms

Don't just rely on keyword tools to show you lists of related keywords. Think of anything and everything that people who have a need for your product or service might search for and use it as a keyword in your campaign. The wonderful thing about Pay-Per-Click marketing is that if you select a keyword that does not generate any traffic, you haven't lost anything. So you have nothing to lose and lots to gain by experimenting with different keywords, even if they seem wacky.

For help managing your Pay-Per-Click campaign, call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, MSN, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sponsored search, web site marketing, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Monday, January 15, 2007

Internet Marketing: Eye Tracking Research Reveals the Most Valuable Search Engine Real Estate

A San Fransisco-based company called Eyetools has just released a new report based on eye tracking research involving people performing searches on Google. The URL to read about the research is:

http://www.eyetools.com/inpage/research_google_eyetracking_heatmap.htm

The research reveals that searchers' eyes scan the search results page in an a triangle pattern beginning in the upper left-hand corner, with another hot, smaller triangle of eye activity in the right-hand side.

The report's results are not really surprising, as it verifies what earlier similar research had indicated, as well as what you would expect based on an American's reading pattern of left-to-right. It supports the idea that you will receive the most search engine traffic if you have your site listed as near the top as possible. However, the report does not take into consideration economic factors such as return on investment and search inventory. Search inventory means the total number of searches performed for a particular search phrase. For most search phrases, there is plenty of search inventory to generate traffic without being at the top of the page, and you can generate clicks for a much lower rate than clicks at the top of the page will likely cost.

You should try to get as close to the top as possible while keeping pay-per-click bids as low as possible. Obviously, for natural search results, you just want to get as close to the top as possible.

For help maximizing your Pay-Per-Click or natural search marketing campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, sem, seo

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Off the Air – On the Net

The Christmas season, while jolly for the family gatherings and children, can be a financial nightmare for service oriented businesses. As retail businesses scramble to get their messages out during the holidays, it drives television ad rates through the roof. Guess what? I have a tip for you. I’ve been preaching this for a month now…listen closely. Now is the time to place your TV budget online. With Pay Per Click you can target specific markets (GEO Targeting) so you’re only paying for visitors in your area. In fact, 2 out of 5 local searchers (41%) are looking for information in their local area and 37% of this traffic is actually going to contact a local company as a result of this search. Now that’s what I call TARGETED advertising. If you can match those numbers with any offline advertising, I’ll manage your online campaign for free.

If you have any questions regarding your internet advertising and how it can be improved, give us a call. We would love to speak with you.

Labels: internet marketing, pay per click, ppc, seo

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