When Your Conversion Rate Plummets

Twelve Diagnostic Questions to Get Answers

We frequently get inquiries from businesses that were getting a healthy amount of leads and conversions, but then suddenly their conversion rate takes a nose dive. When the phone stops ringing in today’s economy, panic ensues.

Many businesses aren’t even aware of all the different factors which can cause a negative change like this to occur. In order to give you a hand, we put together this list of questions to ask yourself to get to the root of the problem.

We’ll start at the “front” of the line with our problem-solving and work our way back to the landing page and website, since front-line changes are much easier to address.

1. Have the paid search keywords that are getting clicks changed?

Check out your pay per click (PPC) advertising keywords bringing in traffic.…

Aardvark, an Awesome Wave and a Good Buzz

Google’s Social Revolution

Last week’s announcement of Google’s (relatively small) acquisition of Aardvark, the real-time social Q&A start-up, received a fair amount of buzz.  Which was on top of the abundant buzz generated by Google’s release of Google Buzz.  Which, of course, follows last year’s buzz about Google Wave.

Though Wave, a social collaboration tool, is kind of uber-geeky and not particularly intuitive, Google Buzz draws on a now well-known metaphor: the news feed.  And while it has generated some early heat around privacy issues, Google Buzz (in its most current form – they’ve been updating it nearly daily in response to user reactions) draws on your Gmail and chat contacts to form an instant social graph.  That graph enables you to stay connected with your contacts in much the same way you would via Facebook or Twitter (or, more accurately, FriendFeed before…

AdWords Excluded Locations: Secret Double Agents

The geographical area in which you want your Adwords ads to display is a very important factor to consider, not only for local businesses but also for national businesses.

One common scenario we run into is a business that is located in a particular area, but provides service to people across the country, or multiple countries.  A few examples here include real estate agents, travel guides and hotels – pretty much any business that focuses on relocation or visitors.

For these types of advertisers we find that running campaigns targeted toward their local area is often not productive.  We’ll use the real estate agency as an example here – many people like to check out photos of houses on the market and what they are listed at in their own neighborhood, but they have no intention of…

The Positives of Being Negative

We are excited to announce that we just launched our patent-pending Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine as part of both the Yield Web Marketing Suite and Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies. This new feature is now available to all new and existing customers.

The Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine analyzes volumes of your historical traffic segmented by keyword, ad group and campaign. It then aggregates data based on common terms and uses sophisticated algorithms based on a variety of criteria including search volume, bounce rate and conversion rate to automatically recommend negative keywords for addition to each of your campaigns and ad groups.

While there are many facets of a search marketing campaign that are critical for success, many search engine marketers forget to pay enough attention to one of the most important aspects of their campaign. You launch your…

Pay-Per-Click Can Save You Money

And Knowledge Can Equal Profitability

For the most part, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is all about goal achievement and profitability. However, there are situations when spending PPC dollars to attain valuable knowledge can lead to great cost savings for your business.

PPC is a truly unique medium – enabling you to test business strategies on volumes of people across the world in very short time periods. Given its speedy broad reach, it is a valuable data-mining tool that can help you make informed decisions.

Here are three key situations in which PPC can help your business save money:

1) New Marketing Message or Positioning

New marketing positioning is a very expensive venture. It often involves changes to your website, marketing materials, sales materials, employee training and more. PPC is a great way to get a lot of exposure fast and see…

An Efficient Check List for Starting a PPC Campaign

Five Clear Steps Before Getting Started

Many people think starting a PPC campaign is as easy as opening up a Google, Yahoo!, and Bing ad center account, writing some quick ads and then watching the clicks and dollars roll in.

Were it only so simple.

Although PPC campaigns do give you results faster than a SEO campaign, starting a PPC campaign does require some up-front work on your part. You’ll want to use the following checklist to ensure you have everything needed to make a smooth PPC transition.

1. Determine your budget.

If you’re spending less than $500 a month, you might want to consider a single search engine such as Google or Bing. Why is that? Spreading such a relatively low budget across three search engines won’t give you enough bang for your buck.

Generally speaking, we recommend a minimum…

Can a PPC Ad Change Your Mind?

Tips for Gaining Clicks on “Stretch” Ads

I like search engines – they quickly find what I am looking for and don’t talk back.  I can visit them when I like, ask about as many search terms as I want and the search engine responds in a speedy fashion with more information than I could ever find the time to read.

Because the search engine is such a trusty sidekick, we quickly forgive it when there is the occasional irrelevant result.  We have become so accustomed to irrelevant results spattered about, that our eyes are actually trained to quickly glaze over anything that doesn’t exactly match.  Search engines even help us with this by bolding the results that parrot our requests.  Even if we accidentally click on an irrelevant link, we can immediately bounce back to the…

But Google, that Keyword IS Relevant

Nothing frustrates a marketer more than when their golden keyword, that is, in fact, their product or service, has a quality score of two or one from Google, usually accompanied by this lovely message: “Rarely shown due to low quality score.” When you click for more info on how to fix it, Google says the keyword just is not relevant and you should delete it.

Outrage!

Can’t Google see this keyword is in all of my ads and it’s all over my landing pages? This is the core of my business!

How could this possibly be?

With a little investigation, we usually find that proper account structure and maintenance have not been in place, and have left the advertiser in a punished state — Google has effectively issued a restraining order and your ads are no longer allowed to…

We’re Big Fans of Agencies…

…Which is Why We’re in New York

Even though we are headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, we are making our first trip east to exhibit at ad:tech New York 2009, with very good reason. The nightlife? The food? The fashion? While New York certainly has a lot to offer–the three months I lived there, I think I slept for about 2 hours total–it is also one of the epicenters of advertising activity. Sure, Madison Avenue is renowned. However, in this digital media age, there are tons of interactive agencies successfully helping advertisers get online and leverage search engine marketing to attract and acquire customers.

So, what could be a better location to launch our agency offering, the Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies. We’ve been working on this product for over a year, ensuring that…

Web Marketing Holiday Prep, Part 3

A Little SEM Strategy Now Can Pay Dividends Later

If you haven’t already begun planning for the holiday buying rush, then it’s time to get moving. In this Part Three of Prepping for Holidays, I’ll show some of the things you can do to ensure online buyers find your products and services. (In Part One I talked about aligning your online and offline strategies, and in Part Two I covered how to spruce up your virtual store-front.)

In our free e-book, The Link Economy, Matt and I talk about how successful search marketing companies develop all of the components of a search marketing campaign at one time.

What we mean by this is a savvy marketer will sit down and plan out the campaign strategy, keywords, and content (i.e. blog posts, landing pages, offers) before implementing the campaign – often…