New Features Added To MSN adCenter Analytics Interface
On 29th of July, MSN adCenter announced that they have updated their analytics (formerly known as “Project Gatineau”) interface and added new features.
Here are various features added to adCenter Analytics.
Dashboard Changes – New changes to the dashboard at MSN adCenter Analytics include a fresh new look highlighting the following default views:
– Top pages
– Top keywords
– Top referring websites
– Traffic summary
– Page views
– Visits
Path Reports – This feature allows you to find how visitors come to a particular page in your website. That means, what link path they take to arrive at Page Y if they started with Page X.
Top Entry & Exit Pages – This feature allows you to get details about the top entry and exit pages of your website.
Treemap Tracking – This feature allows you to see who is using your website from an age and gender viewpoint.
It is nice to see MSN adCenter making useful changes to its analytics product.
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.
Misspelled and Competitor Adgroups
Include misspelled and competitor adgroups in your campaign. If you are waiting for people correctly knowing the spelling of the keywords or people searching for your company only, your ad is not going to work well in search engines. Try to include maximum misspelled keywords in your misspelled adgroup and top competitors in your competitor adgroup. If someone searching for your competitor gets attracted by your adcopy and apply for your service. Why should we spoil one lead? Suppose your company ad is coming in local radio and someone hearing this ad trying to locate your website. It is not sure that whether he knows the spelling of your company or the product he’s searching for. Our wristband campaign is getting many clicks and conversions for “ristbands”, “wristbands”, “wristbands” etc. So bidding on misspellings is an intelligent way to increase the efficiency of your PPC advertising. Try this now itself if you haven’t experiment this before.
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.
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