Pay Per Click Blog Back Again

Welcome back to our pay per click blog. Our blog has been dead for a while now and we have a reason for it. Blogger has stopped FTP publishing for blogs and we were using them to publish our blogs. This blogger change affected about 7 blogs on our own site and about 100 blogs we own and operate for our company / clients. Due to this we stopped temporarily posting contents to our blogs, we are resuming our content posting from now and hope to be regular from now on. We assure we will post at least once a week to our blog.

TAGS: Pay Per Click Blog Back Again

PPC Tool suggestions

We are inviting people to give us some suggestions on the type of tool they want for PPC. We have one of the most extensive free tools in internet. Almost all the tools on our website are free to use without any paid ads or paid links.

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm

We are now in process of developing tools for our PPC section. We know people out there require simple but effective tools to manage their PPC campaigns. Already there are many tools available in internet but most of them are just paid tools.

We are willing to provide free tools and we want suggestions. If you want any tool to be created just let us know and we are willing to program it.

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/contact-us.htm

Remember we are not interested any more for tools that query search engines. Already we have tools that query search engines and we are guilty of it. We don’t want to trouble the search engines anymore. If you want a tool that doesn’t query the search engines let us know.

PPC Vs SEO

PPC

Pros

1. Its great for starter websites. They don’t have to go through the major process of going through the big SEO process and can instantly come to top if you shed more money to Google.
2. Fast and reliable -As I said before its very fast you setup website today later that day you setup a adwords account and boom your ads are live and running and you are even in 1st page if you bid high. Its not possible in SEO atleast for medium to high competitive terms.
3. You can control your budget. If you can pay more you can get higher traffic and it all depends on the money you are willing to spend.
4. Good quality score helps you boost your ad positions and bid money.

Cons

1. Too costly if you have a big website you need to have big budget to make PPC work.
2. You ever keep paying money you stop paying and your positions and ads disappear.
3. Limited knowledge required for better performance of your ads. You need to spend your precious time to learn something about PPC to get good results.
4. Bigger companies can easily beat you with their money. Its all about money more you have better your results, keywords and positions are.

SEO

Pros

1. SEO is best for quality sites. If you have a quality site and have time and resource SEO is best since organic results can drive huge amount of traffic to your website.
2. Non stop listings. Your listings are there 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
3. You never have to keep paying. Once your site is established in rankings you can stop SEO and still will reap the benefit of search engine listings and rankings.
4. Great for low budget and even non-profit sites. You don’t have to keep paying and small budget can still get you on top.
5. Not the rich wins here but quality wins over the rich people. I have some great sites run by just simple person and it brings 1000s of visitors per day to their website.

Cons

1. Slow and long term. If you need quick fix for your results SEO is not right since it takes time and patience.
2. Sometimes it can be costly since lot of man power involved.
3. Don’t have full control. Since organic results are very unpredictable you will not have 100% control like PPC. We need to be going by search engine guidelines.
4. Experts required since it takes lot of time. In PPC you can get it running in a day but if you need organic results you need to learn a lot to get yourself qualified.

Overall both have advantages over each other. At times SEO is better and sometimes PPC is better. Its very difficult to say which one is best.

Do you decorate your ads ?

Making your ad look better and getting appeal from people is an excellent way to get more clicks. But with the rules of Google how will you decorate your ads. Well if you are using text only ads use few bold text, ampersands, capitalization , exclamation, commas etc. Even simple text ads if well formatted will attract people to click your website. I have seen some excellent ads which looks very simple but gives great visual appeal.
Check these samples

If you are doing picture ads or animated ads your options are open. You can do lot of things with animated ads or picture ads. A picture is worth 1000 words. Good graphic designers can bring great look to ads so the problem is only with text ads. Same as picture ads flash animation / regular animation ads can also bring great visual appear. Some ads I have seen on sites really made me click on it. Look at these samples of some simple but great ads for conversion.

If your ads allow special characters and the search engine PPC algorithm understands and approves it I am sure you can use it to your advantage in text ads. Special characters bring great visual appeal to them. For instance once we tested a special character on the title of our homepage and we suddenly got 20% more clicks to our homepage. I assume people came just to see what the text we used to bring the special character on the title. So we make people adventurous. People are naturally eager and regular internet users will click your ads if you use allowed special characters.

2009 sees significant drop in click fraud

Click forensics a leading companies that monitors PPC clicks have reported significant drop in click fraud in 2009 compared to 2008. http://www.clickforensics.com/resources/click-fraud-index.html According to the above URL click fraud originates mostly from Russia, UK etc. I am personally surprised by the number of botnet spammers in UK. I feel the regulations in UK is too easy to exploit. Spammers take advantage of the lenient laws in UK to spam with botnet. Lots of online spam and online fraud originate from UK. There had been reports of increased phishing activities by UK nationals. Some of them have agents in Nigeria to hide their original identity.

Compared to 1st and 2nd quarter there has been an increase in 3rd quarter it’s probably because of the start of holiday season, botnet spammers are taking advantage of the holidays to earn money running botnet.

Click forensics claim their data is most accurate because it is done by an independent detective agency which specializes in click fraud. They seem to monitor over 300 ad networks and 1000s of advertiser’s own websites.

Google does it again now badder and stronger slap

I have already complained of weird PPC behavior where I had 10/10 quality score but my ad was 5$ for a 5$ highest bid keyword. Usually I tend to get very low prices when I get such quality score but here Google wanted me to pay full even if my quality score was great. I thought it’s a singled out problem but now I realize I am not alone. Lot of other people in webmaster world has faced similar problems.
One webmaster in webmaster world says he has terrible problem with the current Adwords scoring system. It’s too tough and since its completely automated it is bound to make mistakes. Human’s are much better in judging and the webmaster highlights that in his post here http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4020049.htm . I second his thoughts i feel the whole quality score thing should become much more lenient. It’s too tough now and sometimes it’s also very faulty. We have clients spend at least 100,000$ a month with adwords but still not getting good quality score because of minor mistakes handling 1000s of pages. We sometimes manage large campaigns with 100s of landing pages and there are some pages which might not be relevant and that one page affects a ad group and certain important keywords. We need to keep our eyes always open to identify such type of problems.
Taking action automatically is fine but if an account is having some problem automated closure shouldn’t happen. A reviewer should review and give the final word. Yahoo does that but Google prefer to depend on automated methods. If some cases this has proved to be true. Google’s method of depending on automatic validation is not working as expected. It’s weird results are hurting some Businesses like for one of our client. I feel Google will look into this issue more deeply and will take action.

Four important strategies for pay per click

1. same size and ads doesn’t fit all
2. keyword planning
3. think about your bidding strategies
4. optimize for success

Same ads don’t fit all:
It is not necessary that taking same keywords and ads from Adwords will fit every one in the same manner and pour in conversions. They might not deliver the same results. Your ads needs to be more persuasive and real in order to drive traffics and clicks. Special offers and promotion in your ad will have more effect than an ordinary ad in order to drive traffics and clicks. The basic objective of your ad should be to attract buyers and make them click on your ad.

Keyword planning:
Keyword planning is very important for your PPC ad campaign as it helps to drive traffic. We should know which keyword is most appropriate to get conversions. Proper research should have been done before setting up the keywords for your campaign. Keyword plays a most important role in your PPC ad campaign. Also make sure to set up negative keywords which mean you don’t want your ad to be displayed when the particular keyword is searched on the search network or content network.

Think about your bidding strategies:
While bidding your ad make sure you bid it more effectively in order to appear on the first page of the search networks and content networks. As the importance of ad appearing on the first page carry more weight age than on any other ad which will in turn help you to drive traffic and clicks. Recent analysis also says that 90 percent of clicks come from ads in the top three positions in listings.

Optimize for success:
The success of your ad is measured by the volume of traffic your ad gets from day to day and also volume of clicks you receive. As result regular optimization is required in order to get best out of your search and maintain the quality of your ad campaign. Regular optimization is best way to track the success of your ad campaign because this helps us to know at position our ad is and what are the necessary changes need to be done in order to make ad more effective.

These are the four strategies for PPC marketing which will help you to plan and run your ad effectively on the Adwords or any other search marketing engines

Tips to get more traffic with long tail keywords that convert in to sales

In pay per click management keyword targeting is always the hot topic and use of long tail keyword is one of the best keyword discussed. The use of long tail keyword will bring in additional traffic to your sites all you need to do is spend time in optimizing those specific long tail keywords for better ranking in search engine.

Once you plan to optimize your keyword, you can build on more traffic to your sites in two ways that are as follows:
1. Write more and more content using those keywords. It is one of the most popular ways to optimize your long tail keywords and your site too.
2. If you think that your particular long tail keyword is bringing more and more traffic to your site then put more offers, special discount or other deals that convert this traffic in to sales, which will in turn help you to achieve your return on investments and your advertisements goals.
These are the two ways that will help your pay per click campaign to get more sales with traffic you are already receiving.

How to make your ad relevant with the help of keyword matching options

According to Adwords, there are four keyword matching options which help you determine your ad to appear in Google search. Each and every single keyword can be set as targeted keywords by using any of these four options.

The four types of keywords matching options are-
Broad match: keyword This option allows your ad to be shown for similar phrase. For example, if your ad contains the keyword “wrist band” then your ad will be eligible to appear even when the user searches for either or both words. Like your ad may show on search for the following keywords – wrist, band, buy wrist band, wrist watch etc.

Phrase match: “keyword”
This option allows your ad to be shown for the exact phrase. For example, if your ad contains the keyword “wrist band” then your ad will be eligible to appear only when the user searches for exact phrase “wrist band”. The ad can also appear for search that contain other terms as long as it contain the exact phrase.

Exact match: [keyword]
This option allows your ad to be shown for the exact phrase exclusively. For example, if your ad contains the keyword “wrist band” then your ad will be eligible to appear only when the user searches for specific phrase “wrist band”. The ad will not be eligible to appear if the phrase contain other terms in it.

Negative match: -keyword
This option ensures that your ad is not shown when any search contains the specific term.

Keyword matching option just requires you to add appropriate punctuation to the keyword while setting the target. With the use of appropriate matching you will get more ad impressions, clicks and conversion which will in turn helps us to meet the ROI goals.

How to get higher Quality score in Google adwords Pay per click

Before proceeding to know how to get higher Quality Scores, l, we need to understand how a quality score is calculated. Simply stated, a Quality Score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query – or in other words, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad.

Then, it is necessary to know why Quality Score is important. The Ad Rank or the position an ad shows on a search result or across the content network – is determined by maximum cost per click and quality score. There is a widely accepted formula to arrive at the ad rank and the formula may be stated thus:

Though somewhat confusing, one needs to understand that for search purposes, the keyword quality score is used and for content the ad group quality score is used. For keywords, every keyword has a quality score fixed to it. So, it is important to keep in mind when talking about ad copy as it will be associated with multiple keywords.

Here’s the step by step instructions on adding your quality score column to your keyword view.

First, navigate to the keywords in your AdGroup. Next, click on the ‘customize columns’ option seen below.

This will let you see the drop down menu:

Click on ‘Show Quality Score’. Your AdGroups will now look like this

A keyword’s Quality Score influences its cost-per-click (CPC) that is, how much the advertiser is charged for a click on the ad when it is triggered by a keyword. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower is its Cost per Click (CPC), and vice versa.

Quality Score also determines, in a way, if a keyword is eligible to enter the ad auction that occurs when a user enters a search query. Usually, the higher the Quality Score, the lower will be the applicable costs and the better your ad position. Every time one of your keywords matches a search query, the combined Quality Score and cost-per-click (CPC) bid is evaluated to see if it’s eligible to enter the ad auction. Keywords with a higher Quality Score will be eligible to enter the auction more easily and at a lower cost.

On the keyword analysis page, there will be a metric called ‘first page bid estimate,’ that means the CPC bid required for your ad to appear on the first page of Google search results assuming the search query exactly matches your keyword. The estimate is obviously based on the Quality Score as well as the advertiser’s competitors for that keyword. However, it is to be noted that succeeding in your first page bid is no guarantee of your ad placement which will depend on Quality Score, your CPC bid, your budget and user and advertiser behavior.

It is to be understood that ads are positioned on search pages and content pages depending on their Ad Rank. The ad with the highest Ad Rank obviously appears in the first position, and the other ads appear in the order of their rankings. For Google, to put it simply, the Ad Rank is determined by your keyword’s Quality Score and (CPC) bid.