Target Visitors

Always keep in mind that people from which countries are going to see and click on your ads. Setting geographic location is not enough many times. The language and slang of your ads also should be geo-targeted. What I mean by this is if you are targeting people in US, your ads should contain their slang, common phrases and so on. Ads with an Indian taste will not digest for those people. So be specific when writing ads for your clients.

Conversion tracking – Verification code failed

One of my clients was complaining that her conversion tracking code Verification has failed and she couldn’t see any conversions.

I told her that verification failed doesn’t mean that conversion tracking is not working. If your conversion tracking page contains dynamic code it is not possible to check the conversion before an original conversion happens online. Another thing is if page is in a secure layer (https://www.example.com/loginsuccess.php) when adwords tries to verify code in this page, it will be redirected to https://www.example.com/login.php. So it is not possible to verify the code without a login. It’s sure that loginsuccess.php will show conversions when people reach loginsuccess.php via adwords PPC. You can try that by click on one of your ads comes in Google sponsored search.

Google Keyword Tool now Provides Approx Search Volume

Happy news. Google keyword tool started to provide approximate search volume of a keyword for the previous month. Before it was not possible to get the actual search volume value. At last Google changed their mind to disclose the statistics. Now the keyword tool provides a better service and all other paid keyword search sites and tools became outdated. If you are doing adwords PPC only, go blindly. This tool is enough for you. Who else can give you a better report than this?

Check it

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

PPC Advertising for the Right Product

We were running a perfume campaign for many months. At the first stage, we were not getting any clicks. There were huge impressions. My adgroups were not in the top 10. So i kept keyword bids as $2 to get them in the 3rd or 4th position. Then we started to get nice clicks. So we increased our daily spending limit. After that only we stated to track conversions. Unfortunately there were only few conversions. I started to modify the adcopies and bids and filter for more negatives. No use. Then I checked with the client’s website. That is working perfectly. Nice bottles, nice description and easy purchasing steps. This also didn’t help much. At last, I came to one conclusion. The first time buyer of a unique brand will not buy a perfume by reading its description online. They may like to smell and buy. It’s nice if there were a hardware which can help us smell things online. Hope the conversions seen in ppc have come from the regular users of branded perfumes.

Heyyyyyy is there anyone who’s profitably running a perfume campaign? I think perfume is not the right product to advertise online. So I have paused the campaign temporarily.

Title with Most Searched Keywords

How to make your adcopy more attractive? While starting a campaign, you are not sure about what are the main keyword phrases which will be searched by your targeted visitors. Many people will give the same adcopy for all the keywords in an adgroup. Why don’t you try different adcopies with different titles? At least, you can give different titles. Because title is the first line noticed by a user. Keep the titles you feel ok in the first stage. Monitor the campaign for sometime. Then you can check the report and find which the most searched keyword phrases are. Keep them as new titles for your adcopy. If people see the keyword which they have searched as the title of an adcopy, 99.99% of them will click on your ad. I have tried this and my campaigns are working better than before. Any other suggestions? Share it here.

Concentrate more on AdCopy

In my “Eco Alliance Waterless Campaign”, suddenly I could see many clicks but few leads. I started to check each adgroup. Then Icould find that the ads which have a word “Cost” in title are getting more clicks. As the keywords like “ariticial grass cost”, “artificial turf cost”, “waterless lawn cost” etc were getting maximum impressions, I have given those keywords as title for my new ad variations. Actually the landing pages were not telling about the actual cost for the product. So people who wanted to know about the price before purchase might be clicked on my ads. So be careful. Don’t give the term “Cost” in your adcopy if the landing page doesn’t say anything about the cost for the service/product. Another main word to avoid is “free”. Use this word in your adcopy only if you are sure that the product or service is absolutely free. Many people use “free shipping” in their ads. But most of the time there will be a cost for shipping or free shipping is available only if the purchase cost is above a particular amount. It seems that ladies are more attracted by the term “free shipping”. If people come to your site and see that the shipping is not free as advertised, 90-95% people will drop purchase and go back. What’s the point in paying Google again and again without any leads? SO concentrate more in your adcopy. It can strengthen and spoil your PPC.

Fun in PPC Training

Last 2-3 days I was busy with PPC management. A new girl came for PPC training. I had to train her, check and correct her ads and very busy schedule. She is a fresher and a story writer. Pay per click was a new term for her. Still she managed to understand many things. First day she was struggling to differentiate “adwords” and “adgroup”. I told her that “adwords” is the advertising service by Google and “adgroup” is a combination of similar keywords, their ad variations and bidding. In between the training our boss came that way and told her that he wanted to know how much she understood. He asked “what is adwords?” Suddenly she replied “It is a combination of similar keywords, their ad variations and bidding”. Boss stared at me and asked. “This is what you taught her?” I just smiled and tell him to give her some more time. Then I told her – Adwords is something like “Property Times” from “Times of India”. That got clicked. If you wake her up in the midnight and ask, she will give you correct answers for “Adwords” and “Adgroups”. She picked up PPC very fast and started to write ads for our client’s account.

Adwords Account Down

2 days before I saw an alert in my eco alliance waterless grass account that my client account has run out of balance and my ads wouldn’t be no longer visible. I was sure that my client has done a payment recently. Suddenly I checked it in Account details tab and I could see that the last payment done by my client using an AmEx card was declined. Google send a notice that we have to pay $350 immediately to make the campaign active. Suddenly we contacted the client. Then only we could realize that he has changed his AmEx card after that payment. We explained him the situation. Suddenly he gave us the new card details and we settled down the issue. It didn’t take much time for the campaign to become active. Now everything working perfectly.

Page with 2 Conversion Tracking Codes

Hi friends,

I was thinking to write something seriously. But I didn’t get any idea. So now planning to share something that is happening with my PPC accounts. This week I was trying to fix conversion tracking code in purchase page of my client’s web site. When I opened the purchase page surprisingly I could see one conversion tracking code already presented there. But I couldn’t see that conversion tracking label in adwords. May be the client has placed it long time back. My confusion was if I place a new conversion code whether it will work or not. I ran to my boss. He told me to place the code and wait for sometime. As this purchase page is dynamic and redirect to login page when we give the URL, we have to wait till a real time conversion happens. Anyway I uploaded the page. Hey… but it really worked. From the very next day my adwords tracking code started to register conversions. Do you think the presence of 2 different tracking codes prevent adwords to show the actual number of conversions? Whether you had such experience? Please share with us. Anyway I am monitoring it in a daily basis.

Top 10 Pay per Click Search Engines

Google AdWords – https://adwords.google.com/select/Login

Yahoo! Search Marketing – http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/onlinemarketing.php

Microsoft adCenter – http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising

ABC Search – http://www.abcsearch.com/advertisers.php

SearchFeed – http://home.searchfeed.com/rd/index.jsp

7Search – http://7search.com/advertise/

MIVA – http://www.miva.com/us/content/advertiser/overview.asp

Enhance Interactive – http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1465425-9777481

Findology – http://home.findology.com/business/advertisers.html

Ask.com – http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com