Incremental and Demographic Bidding

I think you know what I am going to tell here. Like geographic targeting, you can target people of specific gender and age group in your pay per click campaigns. Each search engine has the capability to target your ads in the direction of a precise demographic. It is known differently in different search engines. Google calls it demographic targeting and MSN AdCenter calls it incremental bidding. It is very simple. What you do is simply modify your keywords bid for the targeted demographic which is already defined. Suppose you are selling anti-aging cream targeted toward women ages above 30. You can adjust your bidding for the important anti-aging-related keywords that you are targeting so that you bid on the demographic that is important to you. You can bid .50 on “anti aging cream” and up your bid for that keyword to $1.00 for the 30 and above age range. Obviously women ages 30 and above are more valuable to your business than women in the 18-30 age range and it makes sense. You can still attract the younger women through your normal keyword bidding, but by using a higher bid for the older group target demographic as more valuable and the search engines will place your targeted ads effectively.

How Simple your PPC Campaigning is?

Simplicity is the most powerful policy behind a successful PPC campaign. It should appear simple. Sometimes it is very hard to do. But remember thing. Something appears simple and clear only will be attracted by your targeted visitors. It takes time and skills. Make your PPC ad and its landing page language as simple as possible. Usage of colloquial phrases and terms sometimes makes opposite effects. The users might not be able to understand what you are actually wanted them to tell. Result-they won’t click on your ads. And sometimes colloquial terms will help. Some scientific or technical terms won’t be familiar to the audience. In that situation use simple colloquial terms. So always think what your target visitors will search for and what terms they will use to find the product. Simple ads sell better and they get more clicks. Like that way, simple landing pages with simple language convert more sales. Keep your landing page simple and appealing that it can touch your visitors’ emotions. Result-more sales, more profit.

How To Find Your Ad In The Search Engines

What do you do to see your live ad in search engines? I know a simple search. Here are tips that make your search easy. Go to your adgroups or keywords. Find the maximum spending keywords from your list. Obviously those keywords are listing top in search results. See if your ad visible on the SERPs when you enter those keywords. Go further than page 1 because your ad may not always appear on the first page. Scroll down several pages till you find your pay per click AD.

After looking through your most expensive keywords, try searching for the most relevant keywords. Those are the keywords that are most often used on your landing page. Pick the top 5. Search for them as well. If you have chosen to show your ads only at certain time of a day, then perform a search during those times. Otherwise, try it several times during the day to see when your ads may be appearing in the SERPs

The following link also will help you search for the sponsored searches.

http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks

The result will look something like this.

Important Things to Know About Landing Pages

Landing pages are very important. Take the time to study how to do it correctly and your PPC campaign will be a big success. So you have to give much importance to your landing page design. Here are some suggestions.

1.Include a call to action – We have already discussed this topic. Let your visitors know what you want them to do and make them do it.

2.Polish your copy – The most important thing is your landing page content. That content should have a power in it to convert into a purchase. If it is not like that, do more and more work and make it like that.

3.Use simple and short paragraphs – Keep the paragraphs short and make it easy to scan. People can find something they like in it and they will stop and read.

4.Don’t put much exiting page links in your landing page. If the visitors find a link much appealing they will go that way.

5.One important factor about PPC advertising and heavy traffic to your landing pages is detaining the contact information. You can close the sale any time later.

Try a Call to Action – Your Ads do convert

Simply writing ads are not enough in PPC. There should be some power in the ad that forces the viewers to click on it. That means there should be a call to action in your adtext. The viewers feel that the ad can lead them to the service or product what they have searched for. The call to action can create urgency to the demand. Some examples are –

– Apply now
– Order today
– Download here
– Free quote
– Free shipping
– Request a quote
– Free estimate
– —% discount

This is an easy way to increase conversion. Try it today itself and feel the difference. But something you always have to remember. Your landing page should be informative and include “free” and “% of discount” only if those are available in your website.

Be Familiar with These PPC Terms

After 1 week training, my PPC trainee asked me what is CTR, what is CPC and Quality Score. Then only I remembered that I forgot to explain her these terms. Ok. Here I am explaining some of the common acronyms associated with pay per click advertising. Before starting your PPC advertising, you should understand these terms thoroughly. Otherwise, you might make a conclusion based on an incorrect guess.

CTR – Click Through Rate. This is the number of times that viewers of your ad click to go through to your website. We can calculate CTR by this formula-

CTR=Clicks/Impressions * 100

CPC – Cost Per Click. This is how much you are paying for clicks on your ads. It is usually expressed as an average because most of the time you will not be paying the same amount. The actual cost per click varies depending on many factors like competition and some other factors, but it is always within the range of your pre-set values.

CPC= Costs/Clicks

CPM – Cost-per-thousand Impressions – This is how much you are paying for each 1000 impressions of your ads. That means, for every 1000 views of your ads, you have to set a budget and pay that.

Bring Seasonal Effects in Your Campaign

There was no friendship and friendship day related keywords in my wristband campaign. 3-4 days back, my colleague told me first Sunday of August is friendship day and what are plans for the same. I thought about something else. Why can’t I keep an adgroup for friendship day wristbands and suddenly included one. Most of our competitors didn’t think about it I feel. We got nice clicks and leads for a minimum bid of $0.36! My ads are showing in the second place in the sponsored search. Hooray. If you are running a payday campaign, concentrate it more on Christmas days. That will surely help you. I have experience.

Yahoo Search Marketing

I always forget that yahoo’s ppc service is no more overture and it is Yahoo Search Marketing only. Leave that. When you are writing ads for yahoo search marketing, create 2 ad descriptions. 1 short ad description and one long ad description. If you have the option to add both these, why should we skip it. If you are adding only a long ad description, in some search engines, search results with descriptions longer than 70 characters will be cut off. So try to create unique long and short ad descriptions. Your 190-character long ad description is supported by yahoo’s many distribution partners’ sites. So use this chance to give maximum important points about your product and service.

Google Analytics – Find Route of Your Site Traffic

If you have access to your client’s site, include urchin code (Google analytics). Simply including the code is not enough. You have to monitor it on a daily basis. Set goals in analytics. That will help you to find where your targeted users are coming from and where they are dropping. If you have an OsCommerce site, you can set a goal for your checkout success page. You have an option to set steps for this goal. Keep login, login success, payment and checkout as your steps. Even if your visitor is not reaching till checkout success, you can see the visualization of steps and number of visitors comes to each step and their entry and exit points. If you see many people are exiting in a particular page, check that page thoroughly and make the desired changes.

Make a Light Home Page

One of my clients home page was too heavy. He was spending $1200/day and getting min of 1100 clicks/day. But conversion was only few conversions. We requested them to give access to their server. With my boss’s help I started to examine the pages. That website home page was filled with heavy flashes and images. the header image was 3MB in size!!!!!!!!! There were 5 javascrip files and 2 style sheets calling in that page. Out of that 7 files only 4 were actually using by the home page. We created a dummy home page and removed the unwanted pages and flashes. We changed all flash files to gif anf jpg. Thus we could make the file size by less than half. We used that dummy home page for PPC adverting and checked the conversions. The page was working perfectly and we started to get better conversion. So we replaced the original homepage with this dummy. So from organic search also my client started to get nice conversions.

So always careful about your landing pages. If your landing page is not loading fast, create your own dummy landing pages with less script and images. Nobody has time to wait 2-3 minutes to load your page.