The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

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

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Splitting Up Your Search and Content Campaigns for Maximum ROI

Today we're going to start a new series of blog posts - the Google Power Users Series. We're going to be focusing on strategies and techniques to get the most work done in the least of amount of time, while maximizing your campaign performance. So here we go...

Splitting Up Your Search and Content Campaigns

Most search campaigns combine search and content together. Oftentimes, this is not the best strategy. Even if you set separate bids for your content ads, you should probably just separate content into its own campaign. The reason is that content is almost always much less effective than search, but it may generate just as many if not more clicks.

For instance, here is some actual data from one of our clients:

Search
Click-through rate: 1.57%
Avg. cost per click: $1.71
Total cost: $261
Conversions: 20
Conversion rate: 13.07%
Cost per conversion: $13.07

Content
Click-through rate: .05%
Avg. cost per click: $1.03
Total cost: $414
Conversions: 15
Conversion rate: 3.73%
Cost per conversion: $27.64

As you can see, the content clicks, though they cost less, convert at a MUCH lower rate, and conversions cost twice as much. Also, content clicks are consuming almost twice as much of the total budget. Now, every case is different, and it very well may be that this account is getting all of the search clicks it possibly can and must run content to generate more overall traffic and conversions.

But that may not necessarily be the case! It may also be the case that if a cap was placed on the total budget that was spent on content, then more budget would be soaked up by search, which would result in an overall increase in conversion rate and decrease in cost per conversion. But the only way to do that is to move content into its own campaign. If content and search are running together in a single campaign, it could very well be that when the daily budget has been hit, much more of the budget was spent on less-effective content ads. If content is running in its own campaign, then it can have its own budget, so we can allocate more of our budget to search.

With the help of AdWords Editor, it is a reasonably easy process to duplicate a search campaign and change it to a content campaign (thought not as easy as it should be due to bugs in the AdWords Editor). We'll talk about that in a subsequent post.

If you could use some help in maximizing the effectiveness of your 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, ppc, search marketing, sponsored search, web site marketing

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Fine Tuning Your Google AdWords Keywords with the Search Query Performance Report

We are running a large campaign for a software company that sales design-related products. A lot of our time thus far on the project has been devoted to ad group "expansion" (that is, expanding the number of keywords and ads in each ad group). It is a multi-stage project, and the first stage is basically to start generating as much traffic as possible, and then later stages will be devoted to improving the quality of the traffic and increasing conversions.

We've been working on the project for a few weeks, and have begun generating a fair amount of traffic. So we decided it was time to take a look at the search traffic that was generating clicks and see what it looked like. We did this by generating a Search Query Performance Report from the AdWords Reports tab. The results were very enlightening.

What we discovered was that we were getting lots of traffic from completely irrelevant searches. We are using broad match, in order to maximize ad impressions, but we discovered that our ads are being triggered by way too many searches that are unrelated to the products we're selling. Despite ad copy that clearly states the nature of our client's business and its products, people are still clicking on the ads even if it is not relevant to what they are looking for.

The solution is to add negative keywords to the ad groups to prevent our ad from being displayed by all of the irrelevant searches. After generating the Search Query Performance report (with the data divided up by ad group), we pulled out bad search terms that had triggered clicks and added those as negative keywords to the proper ad groups. As a result, we should greatly cut down on the number of irrelevant impressions and clicks, which should result in improvement in our conversion rate. And that's the ultimate goal.

So the negative for us is that now we're going to have to do more keyword research to try and generate as much traffic as we can. But we're pretty sure our client will be happy at the prospect of paying much less for conversions. After we add another round of keywords, we'll have to repeat the whole process, generating reports to look for irrelevant search terms that are triggering our ads. But that's what it's all about - iterative improvements over time that maximize account performance.

If you would like Work Media to help you manage or improve the performance of your Google AdWords (or other search engine) campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keyword research, keywords, pay-per-click, ppc, reporting, search engine marketing, search marketing, search query performance, sem

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

More About Google Radio Ads

In our last blog post, we began a discussion about Google's new Google Radio Ads feature. Today we are going to provide some more detail about the service so you can decide for yourself if this might be right for your.

Currently, all radio ads purchased through the Google system must be 30 seconds in length. There is a slight bit of flexibility - if your ad is within 2% of 30 seconds, Google will compress or stretch the ad. We suggest you just go ahead and make it exactly 30 seconds.

As far as the content of the ads, Google states that the ads must adhere to their AdWords' content policy (nothing promoting violence or discrimination, no academic aids, no anti-drug testing devices, no auto-clicking products, etc.) as well as a set of editorial guidelines specifically created for audio ads, which basically state that the ad should accurately represent your business and emphasize the unique qualities of your product or service. In addition, content promoting sexual content is not allowed, as well as political election or fundraising ads. Ads of a non-commercial nature are also not allowed.

With regards to the technical specifications of the ads, it may be in MP3 or WAV format. If MP3 format is used, the maximum file size of the ad is 1.5 MB. For WAV files, the maximum size is 11 MB. You may get slightly better sound quality from using WAV format, but it could take a lot longer to upload the ad. You're probably just fine going with MP3.

Given the cheap cost and high quality of today's audio recording/mixing equipment and software, you can easily create your own ad or hire a professional to do it. If choosing between spending your time on production or writing compelling ad content, we would advise you to spend the most time crafting your message. If the message is strong, and audio quality acceptable, then the ad will be successful if it is heard by the right people.

If you would like help running Google Radio Ads for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, Google radio, Google radio ads, internet marketing, pay-per-click, search marketing, sponsored search

Monday, May 21, 2007

Google QuickTip: Watch Your Dashes

When setting up Google AdWords ads, you have to split your ad copy up into two lines of 35 characters or less. To save space, you may be tempted to split up a word with a hyphen, starting the word on the first line and continuing on the second line. This is often the only way to squeeze all of your words into the ad.

For example:

This is test ad copy that is going to be hy-
phenated. This will save some space.

When your ad is positioned on the right-hand side of a search engine results page, the ad looks fine. However, if your ad is positioned at the very top of the page, the body of the ad will be on a single line, and the hyphen will still be there. From a practical standpoint, it doesn't matter, but it won't look nearly as good.

So if your bidding strategy is to try and achieve top ad rankings, then you are best to avoid the use of hyphenated words. If your bidding strategy is more conservative and will generally result in right-hand positioned ads, then you're fine using hyphens to save space.

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

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

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

A Quick, Non-Mathematical Lesson on PPC Bidding Strategy

Here are some quick, non-mathematical thoughts regarding your bidding strategy.

There is a fair amount of research that indicated that, in general, the higher your ad ranking on a search engine results page, the higher your conversion rate. So there's one strategy - bid to get to the top. The problem, of course, is that you can end up in bidding wars which drive your bid prices way too high. Even if that does not happen, you could still end up damaging your return on ad spend by paying too much. It is a balancing act between paying a price that generates a reasonable ROAS and that generates enough conversions to make it worth doing to start with.

However...

There is also evidence that in some circumstances, especially with lower volume "long-tail" keywords, LOWER ad positions generate a higher conversion rate. So applying this to your overall strategy, you want to bid for higher rankings on your high volume, general purpose keywords and low for your low volume, more specific keywords.

Ultimately (as we have said many times), user behavior is completely unpredictable, so you won't know what works until you test different strategies and see.

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

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

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