Archive for the ‘paid search’ category
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.
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.
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.
Lessons from the Presidential Primaries
There are some important lessons to be learned from the presidential primaries that relate directly to search engine marketing:
1. Successful search engine marketing requires diligence.
2. You must make the most of the visits to your web site.
For example, in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama ran an ongoing paid search campaign so that his marketing message was constantly seen. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, ran ads sporadically. Obama consistently collected names, email addresses, and donations for months on end, building a huge database of voters and bankrolling his campaign with millions in small donations.
And now we know the outcome.
Obama has won the Democratic nomination and will be running for President against John McCain. McCain himself has done a good job of consistently using paid search ads to build mailing lists and collect donations. Even though he had no competition late for the Republican nomination, McCain wisely continued promoting and building momentum. Chances are excellent that both candidates will continue to use search engine marketing all the way up to the election.
How can you use search engine marketing to gain an advantage over your competitors?
Let us know if you need some help with SEO or pay per click management for your business.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.