Using Organic and Paid Search Together

Why you are using pay per click advertising? You don’t want your targeted users to miss your service when they are searching for that. Estimations show that 10% – 25% of searchers click on the paid search ad. If your website is not listing is 1st or 2nd page of Search engine result, you will loose majority of your users. Many marketers are satisfied with 75% of the search market that clicks on the organic listing. But revenue is revenue. It is hard to see people click on someone else’s paid search and missing your service. Right? Why should you loose your target audience? According to SEM researchers, out 12% of the searchers on search engines clicked on the top pay per click ad and 7% clicked on sponsored links on the side of the search results. That’s 19%. If you are not running some kind of search marketing campaign through paid search then you will miss some sales. Try to maintain PPC campaign along with your SEO tactics. If you are 1st or 2nd in the organic search result, you can pause your PPC and when you are down in organic, you can resume your ppc. One of our clients is doing the same. He’s ranking top for “auto transport”. If he’s going down means he will start ppc. He is ready to pay $30(cpc) to get the first position in PPC.

AdWords’ PPC Placement Tool – Find Websites for Your Ads

Now it is easy for you to find website for your ads through Google AdWords’ pay per click placement tool. After log in to your account, go to your desired campaign and click on the Placement tab. But you have to start with your keyword list. Go into your campaign settings and ensure that you have filtered your keyword list to be as highly optimized as possible. Don’t look for placements for an insecurely optimized website. Your money will flow somewhere without your knowledge. There are many methods to look for placements – search by category, topic, specific URLs, and demographics. Find exact websites that are correlated to your function and if you like your ads to run on those sites, start with specific URLs. May be those sites are not running adsense, but sometimes like to start. Now next step. Search placement by category and topic. Placement search tools will help to do it. Lastly, you can search demographics. But be careful with searching by demographics because you are really looking for a type of customer and these sites may or may not be related to your service. Remember that everyone in your demographic will be interested in your product. It is nice to see Google AdWords keeps improving. Hmm Right?

How to Increase Landing Page Relevancy

There are five ways to make your landing page more relevant to your visitors. These are wonderful ways to increase the relevancy of your landing page:

* Search applicability
* Keyword importance
* Loading speed
* Strong call to action
* Construct Trust

The great thing about these recommendations is that these are important regardless of the PPC provider you are using. No matter whether advertising through Google AdWords or MSN adCenter, if you want to be effective you’ll need to include these five things into your landing pages. Search Applicability means you have to maintain your landing page in a way that its content should go with the content in your ads. Suppose a user types a keyword and sees results. Your ad is matched with the keyword that is used for the search. Likewise, your landing page needs to match with that too. Keyword importance means make sure your landing pages use the keywords that are most important to your users. Loading Speed of your landing page should be minimum. Reduce image sizes and flashes. It may slow down the loading process. Give more relevant text content. Sometimes load speed can lower your quality score too. So design a landing page that loads quickly. You can design custom landing pages for your PPC purposes. A strong call to action will tell the visitors what you want them to do. Ensure that your landing page convey the message that you provide security and privacy to the visitors. Be honest and truthful.

Give Time for Your Ad Campaigns to Prove Themselves

Don’t expect boon results in one month. One of the most significant characteristics of running a PPC campaign is the time factor. Take your time and assemble your campaign slowly by concentrating in periodic ad testing, daily budget, and bidding. This is very important. Your ad testing should be simple. You can create 2 or more adcopies and compare them with your current ad text. You can do this weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. I suggest monthly. You’re building your campaign one day at a time. The daily budget will avoid you from spending huge amounts too soon. It allows you to make mistakes without much risk. You can test your ads and change your bids peacefully. Bidding changes are essential because if you stay at the same bid all the time, then you will rise and fall according to the market changes. If you are not changing the ads and bids periodically, sometimes your top position ad will list in the 10th page. That’s what I am telling you every time. Monitor your campaigns on a daily basis.

How to increase Click throughs on your Ads

Main problem in PPC ad writing is there’s no enough space for you to express your ideas. Humm? For example, in adwords there are two description lines with 35-35 characters and a title with 25 characters. Shrinking our ad to this much character spaces is sometimes really difficult. Your sale process starting at your landing page. But bringing people to your landing page is done by your adcopy only. The number of visitors coming to your landing page depends on how effectively you could convey the ideas and features of your service. So utilize all the characters effectively.

Here are three ways you can increase your click-throughs – Use influential Words in Your Titles – An influential word is an emotionally thrilling word that gets the attention of visitors and makes them click because you’ve strike a trigger. Some powerful power words are: amazing, incredible, successful, vital etc.

Promise a Benefit – Tell your visitors that you are going to give some benefits like free shipping, free consultation, discount etc. But it should be genuine.

Be Specific – Be specific when telling about figures like company turnover and revenue. If you are concentrating more on these steps, your adcopies will give you more click throughs.

Concentrating on a Single PPC Provider?

It seems that 95% of PPC Advertisers concentrating on Google adwords only. What you think? Is that enough for your online marketing? How will you reach people who exclusively using other search engines like yahoo and msn? So it is better to create PPC account in other search engines also. It is not a must. And do a market research before doing so.

For some product, I have seen yahoo is working better than Google. Especially tax saving, payday and consolidation programs. Normally we are seeing minimum clicks and conversions in MSN when compared to adwords and yahoo. But remember one thing. What you are spending in MSN for that clicks and conversions are also very less when compared to the other two search engines. so try to create account in at least two search engines. But don’t go too risky.

New Keyword Research Tool from MSN adCenter

It seems all the search engines are competiting to deliver new services to the customers. The latest one in the queue is MSN adCenter’s New Keyword Research Tool. Whether they hope they can possess some search engine shares that Google is enjoying now? I donno. Anyway these are the unique features they are offering-

1) Audience Insights – this tool will help you get a little more detail about certain demographics that you are planning to target with your PPC campaigns. Sounds good no? But you can use it only if you are running ppc in MSN and opt for this service.

2) this tool is a beta add-in for Excel. Unlike Google’s keyword research tool (that is purely an online tool), you can install this MSN tool. If you are using Excel to analyze your keyword lists, then it may surely make sense for you. Some people download the CSV list even on Google AdWords. Having the MSN adCenter keyword research tool will make it easier for you to analyze the difference between Google adWords keywords and MSN adCenter keywords. We can’t say that the tool is a worthy one now. You use and find out.

What should you do if unexpected increase found in PPC?

A sudden increase in clicks means that either your campaign is working nicely or it could be a click fraud. What should you do if you find a click fraud?

First, try to discover why you are experiencing a spike in click. According to Yahoo Search Marketing Blog, a sudden spike in clicks may happen because of any of the following reasons:

* Changes to an ad’s ranking in search results
* Change to the match type used for your ads
* Keyword seasonality
* A new distribution partner added to the Yahoo network
* Yahoo Buzz placement
* Yahoo Front Page placement

You could see a spike in the number of clicks if there is a change in the placement. Example one of your major competitors paused his campaign and suddenly your ad got a better placement. That could increase the number of clicks that you are getting. Adjust your budget and monitor your campaign. If it’s a click fraud you can see many clicks without adequate conversions. Yahoo can help you. You can report sudden spikes and ask for an investigation. Yahoo’s Traffic Quality Center will help you. They will send you a report which can tell you why your clicks have suddenly gone up and you’ll be able to take action accordingly. Each of the search engines has a service like this. What you have to do is report it on time. Remember all sudden rises in clicks may not be frauds. Think logically. Suppose your site is down and search engines are showing your ads. What will happen??

Website Optimizer has Added New Features

If you have not yet used Website Optimizer, I greatly recommend it. It is a wonderful testing tool by adwords and saves you lots of money on ppc campaigns by allowing you test your landing pages before you start driving traffic to them and to minimize money on low conversions. Website Optimizer has added new features to its site. According to AdWords blog announcement, the new features include:

1) Experiment Pruning
2) A/B Offline Validation
3) More Intuitive Reporting

Experiment Pruning: This new feature allows you to disable one or more combinations from taking part in your Website Optimizer experiments. Pruning can help you achieve faster, more meaningful results by allowing you to remove poorly performing or illogical combinations. This is especially helpful in cases where your experiment may have too many combinations relative to the amount of traffic it receives.

A/B Offline Validation: If your test or goal pages aren’t accessible to Website Optimizer then no worries. You’ll now be able to just upload a copy of your tagged page and Website Optimizer will make sure that everything is tagged properly.

More Intuitive Reporting: We’ve enhanced our reports to more clearly show how your combinations are performing, and to better indicate when we’ve found one or more high-confidence winning combinations. This will help prevent you from drawing false conclusions from results or from ending experiments prematurely.

Tips to Increase Ad Quality

It is very important to pay attention to your ad quality. Each search engine that uses a quality score and you can check that very easily. Your keyword bid is inversely proportional to your ad quality score. That means the higher your ad quality score, the lower your keyword bids will be. You can expect a better ROI and save money with higher ad quality. It is nice to see something ensuring you better click throughs. You can do three things to increase your ad quality. Applying these very simple ad campaign management tactics will improve your ad quality.

Select the right keywords – Find maximum number of keywords relevant to your product or service. Some keywords might be appropriate to your whole campaign but only be applicable for certain ads within that campaign and some others might be relevant for every ad in the campaign. Remember to avoid too generic keywords.

Stay with your budget – Never spend too much or go overboard. You can’t reach your expected ROI. You will spend more on low performing keywords also. So always stick on to your pre-decided budget; if the change is not essential.

Group highest converting keywords together in one ad group. In yesterday’s post I have explained it.

Have a look.

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/pay-per-click/2008/08/tips-to-optimize-your-ppc-campaigns.html