How to Overcome a Significant Competitive Deficit

One of the major touted benefits of Google AdWords’ Quality Score system for advertisers is that the “little guys” should be able to compete with the “big guys” on a level playing field.

However, 99 percent of the small and medium-sized business that we work with come to us with such low quality scores, they are the ones being punished by the very system that is supposed to help them out.

Many small businesses don’t even know about Quality Score.  Of the businesses that do know about it, most are only familiar with the high-level requirements that keywords, ads and landing pages should all be relevant.  In the mind of the small advertiser, they have created a relevant ad campaign.  Small advertisers lack the time and resources to figure out quality score on their own, and also lack the budget to pay an expert to get them a great quality score.

Big advertisers know about Quality Score, and pay someone to take care of it for them.  So the big advertisers end up with the winning combination of great quality scores and large budgets.

So: how much does Quality Score matter? A ton. Quality Score is a direct factor in determining:

If your ad is eligible to be shown. Keyword / ad combinations with very low quality scores are not always shown.

What position your ad will appear in. Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score

How much you pay per click. Actual CPC = (Ad Rank to beat ÷ Quality Score) + $0.01

What’s Quality Score should advertisers be striving for?

First, make sure you are keeping track of your quality score.  Quality Score are actually based on keyword and ad combinations, but in AdWords they are shown at the keyword level   The Quality Score column is hidden by default, so you’ll need to click on the columns option and to add it in.

Google shows a simplified score within AdWords based on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the worst rating and 10 being the best.  They do add some qualitative descriptors to the scores “Poor”, “OK” and “Great.”

You should strive to have all of your keywords show a quality score between 7-10.

For any keywords with a quality score of 1-3.  You’ll need to give some long, hard thought as to how important these are to your advertising campaign.  Most of the time it’s easiest to just delete these and start fresh with new variations.  Keywords with quality scores of 4-6 are usually pretty easily repaired.

The Fastest, Easiest Way to Improve Your Quality Score

Don’t advertise on any single-word keywords. These are too vague, get them out of your account.

Create super small ad groups, so that you can repeat the keywords inside of your ad copy multiple times. Here’s an example:

Getting the picture?  It’s not rocket science, but it is a data entry nightmare.

Check the call out button next to your quality score within AdWords to see if it says anything about your landing page.  If it does, the landing page issue (often speed) needs to be fixed.  If not, don’t worry about your landing page.

Start to use negative keywords.  This will weed out unwanted ad impressions.  Here are two great resources for getting started:

In AdWords, select the Keywords tab, set the date range to view a couple months worth of data.  In the menu select to sell all of the search terms.  Look through this list and add any words that aren’t relevant to your website as negative keywords.

Think about all of the basic types of searches done that include your target keywords, but aren’t relevant: (1) People hunting for jobs (job, jobs, employment, resume, salaries, etc.); people hunting for pictures or presentations (pic, pics, pictures, ppt, etc.); or people hunting for reading material (news, industry, market, blog, blogs, forum, forums, etc.)

So if you are a “little guy” we recommend you start to monitor your quality score and make steps towards having a great quality score to help level your playing field.

We’ve been busy at Yield Software — this is the second big announcement in as many weeks, and there’s more to come — and today’s announcement is going to make a lot of businesses happy. Today we released the newest version of our flagship offering, which we’re calling Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite. It’s a completely free version focused just on PPC campaign management for smaller budgets.

Advertisers continue to shift from more traditional advertising channels, such as direct mail, spot cable, radio, and print ads, to online marketing channels, especially search engine marketing (SEM). However, many are unsuccessful in their SEM efforts and fail to generate the desired returns from their marketing campaigns.

Search engine marketing is a competitive and dynamic marketplace. Manually managing SEM campaigns requires significant domain knowledge and expertise, including understanding bid and competitive dynamics, keyword selection, geo-targeting, conversion tracking, traffic analytics and many other factors.

The Yield Web Marketing Suite automates SEM campaigns using our proprietary bid optimization algorithm, enabling businesses to better compete in PPC advertising. With the introduction of Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite, it’s now also the only algorithmically-driven bid management solution that optimizes campaigns across all three major search engines simultaneously and is completely free. Advertisers can manage up to $500 per month in PPC advertising at no charge. For those who choose to increase their monthly ad budgets or who wish to also use the other two modules in the Yield Web Marketing Suite (Natural Search Optimizer and Landing Page Optimizer) can simply upgrade to our standard system.  Together with our free SEO Analyzer, companies operating under tight marketing budgets now have two important tools to better their web marketing performance at no cost to them.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

First off, just in case you are not yet using them, Sitelinks ad extensions are now available to all AdWords advertisers.   These extra links to your website display with your ad when 1) your keyword and ad combo has an awesome quality score and 2) your ad appears in the top positions of the search page.

Google, and many others have seen CTRs increase an average of 30% with Sitelinks, so they are really an incredible opportunity to boost the performance of your AdWords advertising.

AdWords allows you to enter up to 10 additional Sitelinks.  When creating your Sitelinks, it’s important to be mindful of the order in which you enter them.  The first two that you enter will get the most impressions, so be sure to make those your most compelling.  It’s also quite rare to see more than 4-6 display with an ad, so there’s no need to spend much effort going beyond six links.

In analyzing how Sitelinks are being used, many advertisers have started out by just including category type links highlighting different sections of their website.

These ads still stand out more than the average ad due to their increased size and coloring.  But, we are advertisers after all, so why miss out on an additional opportunity to advertise and sell, sell, sell!

Each of the Sitelinks can include up to 35 characters, so this is not an advertising opportunity to take lightly.  Here are some tips on how to put those Sitelinks to strong advertising use:

Incorporate offers.   Not only does it make the offers and ads stand out, but it’s also super easy to maintain.  Be sure when the searcher clicks on link they are taken to a page that includes the promotional offer.

Include your phone number. Numbers always stand out in ads and on search pages, so why not have your phone number in bright blue directly underneath your ad?  This is a good opportunity to link to your contact us page.

• Offers with numbers. While we are on the subject of numbers, incorporating the details of your offer in numbers can really stand out.  Here we see some repetition that makes the ad stand out quite a bit.

• Incorporate all ad best practices.  Initial caps, strong calls to action, exclamation points, numbers… this is just another place to use all those pieces of flair that have been successful in your text ads in the past.

A few words of caution:

• Less can be more. While advertisers jump at the chance for all this extra ad text, going overboard can end up making your ad be too hard to digest in the split second that a searcher wants to dedicate to deciphering if it’s worth a click.

• Stay current. Keep Sitelinks up to date for the season and current offers.

While in the beginning of summer grills, patio furniture and air conditioners were hot items, as fall approaches these might be what the searcher is most interested in.

Start getting crafty with your Sitelinks today and watch your CTRs climb.

Goldilocks Syndrome or How to Find the Porridge that is Just Right

Most companies we talk to spend their time coming up with keyword lists and writing ads.  But when it comes time to setting bids, they either don’t have the time or knowledge to come up with the best bids.

A typical account we look at has set the same bid for almost all of their keywords (with maybe a handful of higher bids for super important keywords).  They randomly pick how much they think a click should cost and then wait for Google to perform.  Usually anger ensues if performance does not occur immediately.

Let’s analyze what happens to accounts that don’t have an optimal bid established for their keywords.

What is the cost of a bid that is too low?

Interestingly enough, a bid that is below its optimum is much more detrimental to your account than a bid that is too high.  Bidding too low can actually end up sabotaging your entire account if you let it.

Here are the negative repercussions of a bid that’s too low:

Lost impressions due to rank. If your bid can’t get you into a reasonable rank on the first page, your ad won’t appear every time a searcher is looking for what you have to offer.  You can add this column to your Campaigns view in Google AdWords to see if you are losing impressions due to rank.

Quality Score Death Spiral. Your ongoing CTR is one of the biggest drivers of your quality score.  While Google technically says it tempers its expectations by ad position, we find that it can have pretty outrageous expectations for lower positions.  Almost every time we see a campaign with keyword running in the lower ad positions for a length of period of time, we usually see quality scores of 2-4 throughout the account.  Which is a truly horrible hole to dig yourself out of.  Quality scores this low, make it almost impossible for an advertiser to get into the higher ad positions without forking over a lot more money.

Not the best position for conversions. When thinking about your bid, think about the ad position that gets you the best results.  This is where you want your ad to appear.  For most advertisers we work with, this is above the fold on the first page of the results.

Losing leads to competition. When your bid is too low, odds are your competition is out there with higher bids.  So, not only are you not getting found, but you are losing business to your competition.

What is the cost of a big that’s too high?

While a bid that is too low is quite damaging, we are not by any means suggesting that you overspend!

Paying for unnecessary clicks. Lots of searchers are known to just click on the top result if it looks anywhere near relevant.  If your ad position is too high, especially for broad head terms, you are likely to pay for a bunch of clicks that will just turn into bounces.

Not the best position for conversions. Same story as with a bid that’s too low, you need to determine the ad positions where you perform best as related to your bottom line.  That might not be ad position #1.

Double high presence. We usually find that having a double presence (a paid and natural search listing) on a page has a strong benefit.  However, if you have a very high natural search presence, you might not need to be bidding for the very top paid search position as well.

Paying too much per click. Do you get as good of performance (CTR and conversions) in ad position 3 as you do in ad position 1?  Then no need to overpay!

Lost impressions due to budget. If you have all of your bids set too high, many times your budget won’t be able to support all the possible clicks your campaign might receive.  In this case, your ad won’t be able to appear all the time for your keywords since it will be limited by the budget.  You don’t want to miss out on impressions for top performing keywords, so it’s not good to lose impressions due to your budget.

In summary, it’s a little like what poor Goldilocks struggled with: how to find that bowl of porridge that is just right.  In terms of your PPC bids, too low is very bad and too high is no good either.  You literally need a bid that is just right.  Having bids that are just right can be a key determining factor in whether or not your PPC campaigns deliver ROI.  How to manage that?  You can start to review your analytics and adjust bids yourself, you can try out some of the bid optimization capabilities built directly into the search engines, or you can sign-up for a third-party bid management software like Yield Software, which does all the work for you.

But don’t stop there.  It’s very easy these days to set up advanced bidding, especially with the much better AdWords reporting now available inside of Google Analytics.  You can very quickly get a feel for days of the week and day part performance without having to create custom reports.

In AdWords, pause or lower your bids for lesser performing segments and increase your bids for the days and times that bring you the most benefit.  Give it a try – you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to set up!

If you have some positions that you know work to bring you the best results, you can also use the campaign position preference settings to fine-tune where your ads will appear.

Happy Just Right Bidding!

13 Truly Useful Tips!

Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to court them away.  Everyone knows how big a competitive win is – but a competitive win who is loud in the social media world is the biggest competitive win of all.

2. Who loves you?

Similar to above, who’s blogging about you? Tweeting about you? Commenting about you on Facebook? Giving you positive reviews?

It’s standard practice to reward someone who refers you new business, so make it standard practice to reward those who are essentially referring you to the masses.  Provide these “fans” with some appropriate reciprocal love.  Perhaps it’s a link back, or a coupon or some other offer.  But make sure you let anyone who speaks positively about you know that you are listening, you really appreciate it and you’d love it if they do more!

3. What do people love the most about you?

Monitor trends in positive mentions about you in reviews, blog posts and other social media channels such as Twitter.

Sometimes what we may think are our biggest selling points are not what people love us  for most.  Pay attention to what people like  best about you, and start to actively promote those.  One technique we like is to actively call them out in your search ads using quotations.  Quotations lend more trust than just touting yourself, plus it will be in your audience’s own words.

4. What do people dislike the most about you?

While you’re poring through all of your praise, also start to document trends about any negative comments, or “if they only had….” comments.

Use “if only they had” information to inform your product development, road map and / or inventory adjustments.

5. What are your competitors hiring for?

Keep an active query in your reader (i.e., TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic) that monitors job postings for your competitors.

One of the biggest hints about what they are up to next can be inside of those job postings.  Many companies are surprisingly candid about direction and weaknesses inside of their postings.

6. What are your competitor’s future plans?

Along those same lines, keeping an active query in your reader that includes your competitors name along with the word plans or powerpoint or pdf docs.

Many companies are surprisingly lax about what gets out into the web, you’ll be surprised about how much free competitive intelligence will flow your way.

7. Negative keywords for PPC campaigns.

Keep a query of your head keyword terms inside of your reader and monitor the headlines and themes of blog postings and news articles that are coming in.

Add anything and everything that isn’t relevant to you as a negative keyword in your ppc advertising campaigns.

8. New target keywords for PPC campaigns.

Same query as above, but this time monitoring for new ways people are talking about your space, or new needs and reasons that are rising up.

Take advantage of these by adding them in as new target keywords to always have your PPC campaigns on top of current trends.

9. Who are the influencers and thought leaders in your space / area?

Same head terms query – both of blogs and also of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use this to identify who the big influencers are online in your space.  Then, make them your best friends and court them to talk about you.

10.  Hot topics for blogging

With that same head terms query, you can easily get a pulse for what is trendy.

Use trends to write blog posts about with your own opinion, expertise, and helpful information.  When you promote trendy blog posts, they will garner you the most value.

11.  Audience profiling

Where is your audience and how do they participate?  Do they blog? Do they write reviews on local sites? Do they attend webinars?  Do they download podcasts? Are they active on FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Questions or other communities?

Monitoring your audience’s activities and where they are most prevalent will help you figure out where to spend your precious marketing dollars and dedicate your marketing content and time.

12.  What should your Sales Tools & Collateral address?

What don’t they like about you? What is your competition promoting as their biggest advantages?  What are the current hot topics and needs?

Develop sale collateral around these so your sales force is always armed with the latest and greatest sales objections they are likely to run into and the most prevalent ways of discussing the current market climate and needs.

13.  Link building opportunities

Did someone mention you, but forgot to include a back link?

Reach out to them and kindly request that they add a link!

It’s all free data, so start to make social media one of your best sources of information today!

Fancy Nancy vs. Redundant Rhonda

When looking to hire or partner with someone to help with your search marketing, the traditional ideas of a fancy advertising agency tend to pop into people’s heads –fancy glass office, dressed fancy, talks fancy, creates fancy messaging and images, etc.  However, when it comes to search marketing, Fancy Nancy isn’t likely to get you very far.

Her sophistication and wit will likely mean that her content won’t reach, attract or convert the average searcher you are seeking out.   For online marketing, you should be thinking about working with Redundant Rhonda.  Qualities you really want are redundant, simple, monotonous and patient.

Why am I advocating for Redundant Rhonda?  Who in their right mind wants a boring person to handle activities related to marketing and advertising?

Here’s why…

Quality #1: Redundant

Being successful online is all about keywords.  From search to social, SEO to paid, from your home page to your landing page, keywords (in your audience’s voice) are the heart and soul.

Keywords are not fancy.  These are basic phrases that your leads use to research your offering and find you.  Long tail keyword generation is helpful – there is nothing fancy about this – which is just different combinations of the exact same words or plurals, singulars, prepositions, etc.

Once you know your keyword targets, these keywords and their variations must be redundantly used everywhere you are online:

Pay-per-click keywords

SEO keywords

Website copy

Blog titles

Blog copy

Landing pages

Pay-per-click ads

Website URLs

Google Local profile

Twitter profile

Twitter handler

Facebook profile

Tweets on Twitter

Internal anchor text

Inbound link anchor text

Press releases

Videos

Photos and images

Getting the picture?

Just to clarify: I said redundant usage – which should not to be confused with spammy usage!  Redundantly use your keywords in natural ways that any average person reading the English language would expect to see.

Quality #2: Simple

While Fancy Nancy is likely to come up with some very catchy tag lines, online searches are less about award-winning copy and more about helping people weed through information overload to find you, quickly comprehend what you do and contact you. Fluff need not apply.

Your PPC ad copy (in addition to being redundant) needs to simply state what you do, why it’s better than anything else, and inspiring a click-through.

Your website copy (again, in addition to being redundant) needs to very simply state in easy-to-read copy what it is you do – and why it’s better – with a clear call to action indicating what the visitor should do next.

You only have a few seconds to get a searchers’ attention and turn them into something valuable, so simple words lead to the fastest possible comprehension and action.

Quality #3: Loves Monotony

For managing and optimizing your search marketing, you will need a data geek who is happy with monotony.  My guess is Fancy Nancy would like to jump off the building at this point.  You’ll need someone who is happy pouring over tons of data, slicing and dicing it in oodles of formats, making some optimization adjustments based on the data, and then reviewing all of the metrics again.

The process goes like this: analyze, slice, dice, adjust, analyze, slice, dice, adjust, analyze, slice, adjust… there is no end game. (In the world of consumer products, it’s called “lather, rinse, repeat” — check your shampoo bottle!)  The world of search marketing is constantly changing, so the monotonous process will repeat itself again and again and again.

Quality #4: Patient

While some aspects of search marketing, like pay-per-click, carry with them some instant gratification, the process of getting to great results whether on PPC, SEO, landing pages or social takes time and patience.  Fancy Nancy is likely to want some immediate accolades for a campaign that is launched, but in the world of search, great downstream benefits can take quite a bit of time and stick-to-it-ness.  It can take quite a while to find pockets of great success – which may not last long before the world changes and you need to find new pockets of success.

So, as you think about your search marketing support system, remember this: forget the glamour, the glitter and the fluff and seek out someone who understands how to get you found, keep attention and create real results online.

A Little Knowledge Goes a Long Way

A big blocker to an integrated search engine marketing approach is simply lack of knowledge about the different areas.  Commonly, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising guys don’t really “get” search engine optimization (SEO), while SEO guys are kind of put off by PPC campaign work.  But rich rewards await those who stretch beyond their comfort zones and embrace something new or unknown within the realm of search marketing.

What follows are some tips to help you take the information and knowledge you may currently have and start to expand your search engine marketing efforts in an integrated fashion.

PPC for the SEO Guy

If you are used to SEO and are starting PPC, be prepared for a fast pace game, and get ready to spend money on those clicks.

• Use what you already know – start off with your SEO data

1. Actual search queries.  Look at your keywords list in your analytics system.  Use the keywords that are relevant as your target keywords and use any terms that are irrelevant as negative keywords.
2. Look at the geographical source of your visitors and compare the bounce rate, average time on site and conversion rate.  Target the most effective regions for your PPC campaign geo-targets.

• Here’s your PPC blueprint:

1. Organize your keyword list into very tiny ad groups.  The keywords within the ad group should be almost identical with only plural or other very minor variations.  For example, the following keyword list:

Blue shiny widget

Blue shiny widgets

Pink widget

Blue widget supplier

Would be organized into ad groups as follows:

Blue shiny widget ad group with keywords: blue shiny widget, blue shiny widgets

Pink widget ad group with keywords: pink widget, pink widgets

Blue Widget Supplier ad group with keywords: blue widget supplier, blue widget suppliers, blue widgets supplier and blue widgets suppliers

2.  Write ad copy for each of the ad groups that includes the keywords (multiple times), your unique value and a call to action.

Always try more than 1 ad in each ad group:

Blue Shiny Widget Ad Group:

Blue Shiny Widgets

50% Off Blue Shiny Widgets.

Buy Today for Free Shipping!

www.DomainName.com/BlueShinyWidgets

Blue Shiny Widgets

Blue Shiny Widgets – 50% Off!

Order Now for Free Shipping.

BlueShinyWidgest.DomainName.com

3.  The destination page on your website for ads in this ad group, should take the visitor directly to the blue shiny widgets page.

SEO for the PPC Guy

If you are expanding from PPC into SEO, you’ll need to develop some patience.  Changes can take a very long time to happen, but once day do you’ll love the free clicks!

Here are some baby steps to get you on your way:

Use what you already know.  Keywords are also the name of the game here.

Put your keywords to work.  Keywords with high impressions and strong conversions.  This will be your target keyword list for SEO.  Make sure to target the most relevant keywords for each individual page of your website.  If you have a high volume of candidate keywords, start off with those with the least amount of natural search competition first.

Use geographic information.  Review your geographical performance of your visitors to see if you should be targeting any geographic names along with your keywords.

Page optimization.  Make on-page optimizations to ensure your page is relevant to your target keywords.  For example your Page Title should include your most important keywords.  Use your best-performing ads and landing page copy for hints about what effective SEO copy will be.

Page configuration.  Make sure your web page is properly configured and in good overall shape – for example, fix broken links, trim down excessive outbound links, and make sure your page loads fast – ideally in around 2 seconds.

Page content.  Now for the big one – create truly valuable and unique content on your page that emphasizes your keywords.  This one can take some time so leverage any resources you can,

Links.  Set up the internal linking structure throughout your site to point to your content using variations of your target keywords.

Promotion.  Now go market your page’s content to build links.

Your content placement report from PPC can include some clues for good link sites.  Look for other high authority sites in your space – industry organizations, partner sites, etc. that also rank well for your top terms.

Or 15 Ways to Generate Clicks

Search result pages are crowded, ads are everywhere and we are all working within the same tight editorial guidelines and space limits.  So how are you going to capture the searchers attention in just a few seconds?  Why, with pieces of flair, of course!  Just because search network ads are text-based doesn’t mean you can’t bring some creativity to your campaigns.  A great offer is nice, but unless you write your ad in a way that stands out on the page, few searchers will ever even bother to read it.

So here’s our list of 15 pieces of flair for you to try out:

1) Ampersand Signs (”&”). Instead of saying “and” use the “&” symbol. This is one of the few symbols that are allowed to be used in ads.  We find them to be particularly effective when included at the beginning or end of copy lines, as it seems to catch your eye.

Great Deals on Widgets and

Top-Notch Service

vs.

Great Deals on Widgets &

Top-Notch Service

2) Bold. We all know that including keywords into the ad copy is helpful in many regards, from click-through rate to quality score.  But having bold in only one line of your ad is just not enough.  Go for bold in two lines of your ad – the headline and also in the body copy.  We find the second bold location at the end or beginning of the copy lines to be most effective.

Replacement  Windows

Voted #1 in Portland, OR

Call Today for a Great Deal

vs.

Replacement  Windows

Voted #1 in Portland, OR

Call Us for Replacement Windows

3) Numbers. Phone numbers, rates, offers, rankings — any kind of number can really make your ad stand out.  Try them in the headline or use numbers in multiple lines of your ad copy to really grab attention.  Say whatever you can with numbers.

Toilet Paper

Twice the Toilet Paper

Half the Price

vs.

Toilet Paper

2 Times the Toilet Paper

½ the Price

4) Exclamation Points! It may not seem like a skinny little stick with a dot at the bottom could do all that much, but it is one of the only ways to instill excitement through text.  In almost all of the comparison tests we do, exclamation points out-perform those without every time!

Great Deals on Widgets &

Top-Notch Service.

vs.

Great Deals on Widgets &

Top-Notch Service!

5) Little Sentences.  Everyone is so very worried about how they are going to cram all they have to say into the very little ad copy space, but taking the opposite approach can really help your ad to stand out.  Remember: less really is more.  Also, breaking it into little sentence chunks rather that one large, run-on sentence will enable searchers to digest your message in a much faster timeframe.

We Have Great Deals on Blue Widgets

Shop Today and Save 20% & Free Ship

vs.

Blue Widgets

20% Off & Free Shipping!

6) Totally Bold Headline. This one is also related to the concept of saying less rather than more.  Many ads include both the main keyword from an ad group along with other words in their headlines.  However, we find that having a headline with only the keyword so the entire headline appears in bold gets more clicks.

Local Blue Widget Supplier

Wide Variety of Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

vs.

Blue Widgets

Wide Variety of Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

7) Initial Caps. Capitalizing the first letter of each important word within your ad copy can help it stand out on a crowded page.  Since most advertisers do this, it is mandatory these days.

Great deals on widgets &

top-notch service!

vs.

Great Deals on Widgets &

Top-Notch Service!

8 ) Product Images. Including your products in a Google Merchant feed and then hooking up your Merchant account to your AdWords account can really enable your ad to stand out.  It also allows searchers to check out what you have to offer without paying for them to come to your site.  This isn’t just limited to the traditional e-tailers – if you have any product picture with a price from software to hotel rooms we recommend giving it a try!

Wide Variety of Widgets

20% Off & Free Shipping!

vs.

Wide Variety of Widgets

20% Off & Free Shipping!

+ Show Products from this advertiser

9) Geo-Targeting. Even if you are running a national campaign, it’s good to take the time to target states individually in order to get that extra line of ad copy.

Wide Variety of Widgets

20% Off & Free Shipping!

www.BlueWidgets.com

vs.

Wide Variety of Widgets

20% Off & Free Shipping!

www.BlueWidgets.com

Florida

10)  Address.  Add your business location to your campaign settings to have your address display in an extra free line of ad text.

Wide Variety of Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

www.BlueWidgets.com

vs.

Wide Variety of Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

www.BlueWidgets.com

2030 1^st Street, Boulder, CO

11) Keywords in URLs. Your display URL can include keywords either preceding or post-ceding the main URL of your site.  Especially if your URL does not include the keywords that you are advertising for, it can be helpful to include keywords here to make your site seem more relevant and get your URL in gold.

Blue Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

www.TheStore.com

vs.

Blue Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

BlueWidgets.TheStore.com

12) Google checkout. Enabling Google Checkout can get you an extra line added to your ad that appears as a colorful image.

Wide Variety of Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

www.BlueWidgets.com

vs.

Wide Variety of Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

www.BlueWidgets.com

13) Registered / Trademark symbols. If you are eligible, including the Registered ® or Trademark ™ Symbols within you ad copy can make it stand out and can be symbols of authenticity.

Blue Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

vs.

Blue Widgets ^TM

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

14) Questions? The question symbol can be an effective way to quickly engage a searcher to read your ad and check out your offer.

We Have Blue Widgets

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

vs.

Looking for Blue Widgets?

Order Today – Get 20% Off!

15) CAPS for Acronyms. While you can’t use all caps on regular words within your ads, you can capitalize acronyms.

Pay Per Click & Search Optimization

Sign Up for Free Trial Today!

vs.

PPC & SEO Software

Sign Up for Free Trial Today!

Take a look through your ads today and find new ways to express your unique offers with little bits of flare!

How to Become Unbounded by Budget (Without Raising It)

In a world where keyword recommendations are readily available, many advertisers have had the experience of logging into Google’s AdWords and seeing a message next to their campaign budget that says: “Limited by budget.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to be limited by anything… especially by my budget!  Here are some answers to frequently asked questions:

What does it mean to be limited by budget?

Google will not display all your ads all the time for your keywords in order to avoid exceeding your daily budget.  If you’ve ever done a search for one of your keywords in the middle of the day and your ad hasn’t appeared, this may be why.

For those of you who live in a world of unlimited funds, Google will tell you the exact dollar amount to raise your budget to so your ads show 100% of the time.  All you have to do is click on the call-out preceding the “Limited by budget” message, raise your budget to the recommended amount and — viola — you are done!

What’s that you say? Money doesn’t grow on the tree in your office?

So is it okay to leave your campaign running in this limited state?

No!  Assuming that you are advertising because you are getting results, you have some keywords that bring in valuable traffic.  Being limited by your budget means that when a searcher types in these top keywords, your ad will not always appear – definitely not okay!

Think of it this way:  Let’s say you are at the horse races.  While you might identify lots of different horses to place bets on, you don’t have enough cash to be able to make all the bets you desire.    So, you determine the horses that you can afford and are most likely to win and then place bets on those.  AdWords works the same way — you should only bet only on keywords that fit into your budget.

How far has your desire exceeded your budget?

Click on the call-out preceding the “Limited by budget” message to find out the percentage of available impressions you are missing out on and Google’s recommended budget.  If you are missing more than 35 percent of available ad impressions and the recommended budget is more than double your current budget, you’ll need to reset your expectations and do some serious pruning.

While I am normally not a fan of machete-style campaign management (scalpels are much better tools), you’ll likely need a pretty heavy blade in order to trim your campaign and bring in line with your budget. 

Criteria for eliminating keywords unworthy of your budget:

Keywords with impressions, but no clicks. If you have a campaign that’s performing, these keywords should be easy to remove.  They are getting impressions, but searchers have not been compelled to click on your ad for them.  Especially focus on deleting keywords with the highest volume of impressions, but no clicks.

Keywords that have never gotten an impression. If your campaign is performing, these are another easy target for decreasing your keyword volume.  You can use Quality Score as another good second indicator – so if there are no impressions for a keyword and the quality score is less than seven, it’s a great candidate for removal.

High traffic keywords with poor results. You’ll want to tread lightly here, but take a look at keywords that do get a lot of clicks and, therefore, use up a lot of your budget.  Look at the stats for the individual keywords.  If you can identify one or more that have a bounce rate that’s over 60 percent, or a time on site less than 1 minute, and that have never brought you a conversion, such keywords are good candidates to pause.  Be very careful here, though, so as not to turn off keywords that assist in bringing back return visitors to your site–and let stats be your guide.

Keywords with a low CTR. Sort your keywords by their click-through rate (CTR).  If you have some keywords with a very low CTR – for example lower than 0.25 percent – and these keywords also have a high bounce rate, low time on site and / or no conversions, these are also good candidates to pause or remove.

Keywords with a bad quality score.  If you have keywords with a quality score of 4 or less and they have no clicks; or the traffic they bring in has a high bounce rate, low time on site and no conversions; these are good candidates to eliminate from your campaign.

Competing keywords. Campaigns frequently contain keywords that essentially compete with each other.  If you don’t know how to identify these, you can hover over the call-out next to a keyword and Google will let you know if that search term is already associated with another ad from your campaign.  It’s best to only have one keyword entering the auction so you aren’t competing against yourself, so pause the ones that are already covered elsewhere if they have not brought in any valuable traffic or conversions.

Please keep focused on your goal as you go through this exercise.  No one likes to cut back.  For every keyword you will hear a little “but” in your head and be very hesitant to take action.  Just remember: you want your ads to appear for your top keywords all the time, and the foregoing are the necessary steps to get there.

Cut out the lowest-performing keywords then give the campaign a couple days to adjust and see how your budget and performance are doing.  It may take several tries before you can get your campaign in line with your budget without sacrificing results.  We recommend that you go slow, but do not delay starting the process!

For those of you managing your PPC campaigns through our Yield Web Marketing Suite, our underlying optimization algorithms undertake these activities for you, recommending keywords to pause and which ones to double-down on, in order to get the best results from your budgets.  And, as always, feel free to contact our Customer Success Reps if you have questions or require guidance — we’re here to help.

Sometimes the Road Less Traveled is Best

We often get questions from customers about which search engines would be best to run their search ads on. What search engines, they often ask, present the road most likely to get them to advertising success?  While in most instances the answer is “optimize across all three major search engines to get at the best possible results”, for some businesses it may make sense to focus on alternative strategies.  But how?

In order to answer this question, let’s think about what you are looking for in a search engine and what pay-per-click (PPC) advertising objectives you’re trying to reach. The answer usually includes some variation of the following:

You want…

exposure and results – leads, sales, strong word-of-mouth, etc.

at an…

affordable cost-per-click and a profitable return on investment.

I’m sure it’s not breaking news, but this scenario can often be quite a challenge for many businesses — particularly small businesses — to achieve. Most businesses just starting out on PPC advertising try out Google because it’s well-known and because, let’s face it, it generates about 65 percent of the total search traffic on the Web. But there are some alternatives out there that may produce results as good as or better than Google at a lower overall cost per acquisition. Sometimes, in other words, it’s best to consider the road less traveled.  Try thinking about your options like this:

1) The Interstate – Google

What’s possible: huge exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: bigger budgets (i.e., $1,000 per month for less competitive keywords; tens of thousands of dollars or more per month for very competitive keywords) and hard work.

For exposure and volume of visitors, this is the place to be seen. And Google is more than capable of bringing in very good results. However, it is also the winner in the categories of highest cost per click and budget you’ll need for exposure.  Because there is such high traffic and competition on Google, they’ve had to institute some very stringent measures in the form of a quality score system, which can be tough to understand and navigate if you are not an expert.

So, although it’s a big wide road with lots of traffic, Google isn’t a casual Sunday drive. This search engine requires a detailed map with lots of turn-by-turn instructions to actually achieve real results.

2) The Side Road – Bing

What’s possible: decent exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: a medium-size budget (i.e., starting at $750 per month for less competitive keywords in less competitive markets).

Though a side road, Bing is no bumpy byway you use only to avoid heavy traffic – in fact, we’ve found Bing can be a shortcut to great online advertising results. Our recent experience with PPC ad campaign results from Bing is, quite simply, “Wow!” If you haven’t tried it yet, it would be well worth your while to give it a shot.

Bing very often provides a lower cost-per-click than Google, which means a lower budget is required for full exposure. Bing also offers a much easier on-ramp since its quality guidelines are much less opaque than Google’s. With Bing, you can just turn on something basic and get good results without all the hassle of divining what your quality score is and why. We’ve also seen very impressive traffic quality and conversion results from Bing over the last couple months. It looks like Bing is certainly on the rise as a search engine and should not be underestimated.

3) Well Off the Beaten Path – Business.com

What’s possible: modest exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: smaller budgets can suffice (i.e. $250 per month for less competitive keywords).

While everyone has heard of Google and Bing, not everyone has considered Business.com. Many businesses just don’t have the budget to compete for the keywords in their space and markets on Google and Bing. Many of these advertisers, however, have found PPC advertising success with Business.com. It’s the exact same style of advertising as conducted on Google and Bing, but for much lower costs, while still delivering results. So if your budget is too limited for Google and your space is too crowded on Bing, try out Business.com.

4) Off-Road – Facebook

What’s possible: targeted exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: small-to-medium size budgets.

Though not exactly the same sort of PPC advertising as the others, the ad platform on Facebook is similar in many ways to what you will find on Google, Bing and Business.com.  On the Facebook platform, you specify keywords that folks you’re targeting use in their profiles and updates, and you can also specify demographic, psychographic and geographic characteristics to further target your ad.  While mostly text, Facebook ads can also include a single graphical element, which its easy-to-use system helps you to incorporate into your ads step-by-step.

Facebook is vying with Google to be the most-visited website in the world (it may have already surpassed Google, in fact), and it’s a traffic source that should not be overlooked.  Because it’s not exactly the same kind of thoroughfare as the search engines listed above, you do need to spend some time understanding the differences and nuances involved.  But don’t let that deter you from experimenting with this potentially rich source of traffic to your website.

5) Uncharted Territory – Yahoo! Search

What’s possible: good exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: larger budgets.

Later this year, Bing and Yahoo! will integrate search engine operations, and Bing will begin providing results for searches completed on Yahoo!  Currently one of the top three most visited sites in the world, with an enormously popular email system and some of the best-trafficked content portals on the Web (think Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Personals or Yahoo! Autos), Yahoo! Search should not be overlooked.  Still, it’s clear this search engine is in a state of massive transition.  It can be tough to optimize campaigns on Yahoo! and its rules are in many ways quite dissimilar to those in use on Google and Bing, which means you need to bring a whole different intuitive sense to using the system.  And costs-per-click for your keywords are often similar (or identical) to Google’s, though you can get some bargains on Yahoo!  Finally, in our experience traffic and conversions from Yahoo! have fallen behind Bing’s performance of late, so while there are still opportunities on Yahoo!, it’s probably best not to use Yahoo! as a primary search advertising conduit until the Bing-Yahoo! integration is completed late this year and early next year.

Currently, the Yield Web Marketing Suite makes it both easy and profitable to coordinate and optimize your PPC ad campaigns across Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing.  And we’re actively looking at how to expand to include additional PPC ad platforms.  But let’s face it: in most cases, the best road map for acquiring traffic at the lowest possible cost is optimizing your PPC campaigns across the three best-known, most-used engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Our services experts are always available to you to help you to get the most from your pay-per-click advertising campaigns and to provide objective advice about roads less traveled, so never hesitate to ask for help.