Archive for the ‘PPC’ category
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.