December 6th, 2012

6 Ways to Fail AdWords Campaigns

It’s easy to set up an AdWords account in order to run ads on Google, but it’s even easier to fail AdWords campaigns, especially if you manage them poorly.
 
fail adwords campaignsPaul Downs is a small business owner who manages his own AdWords campaigns and realizes that his campaign was being wasted on the wrong people. “Google’s algorithm saw the total number of clicks generated as evidence of success, regardless of whether we closed any business,” he tells the New York Times, “By all of its own metrics, the AdWords campaign was a home run. I had received lots of impressions and bought lots of clicks. The only problem was that these apparently were the wrong clicks.”
 
This is classic example of how people fail AdWords campaigns.
 

How People Fail AdWords Campaigns

Here are six ways for you to fail AdWords campaigns, especially if you don’t prepare for the unexpected:
 

1. Failing to Link to a Landing Page

 
Website visitors will be lost in the shuffle if you send them to your home page, causing you to fail AdWords campaigns if you don’t find a way to lead them to the right direction. By setting up a custom landing page with either a plugin or an HTML company, you can convert your AdWord leads into sales. The process becomes simple and focused on one action. Limit the copy to what you want your visitors to do — such as subscribing to a newsletter, making a purchase, or downloading a free sample. (more…)

June 4th, 2012

How to Use PPC Advertising to Determine if Your Product Will Sell

Whether you’re in the process of creating a new product or trying to find a tagline for you next big marketing campaign, testing the waters is a pivotal step. After all, you wouldn’t want to shell out thousands of dollars on developing a product or campaign only to find out that people don’t have a need for it.

There a number of market research methods that you can use to assess the market validity of your prospective product.  Common practices include conducting focus groups, surveys, or in-depth interviews to test ideas. However, while the above-mentioned tactics are effective in gathering data, they can often be time consuming, not to mention expensive.

If you’re someone who doesn’t have the time or budget to conduct elaborate studies, then consider using PPC advertising as your market research tool. Not only is it easy to set up, it’s also very cost-effective, because you’ll be able to control how much you spend on your campaigns.

On to PPC market research

Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling book The 4 Hour Workweek, was one of the first people to popularize the use of PPC for market research. According to him, when he was choosing the title for his book, he decided to use Google AdWords to A/B test various titles. He created several text ads with different headlines and tracked the CTR of each ad. In the end, the ad with the headline “The 4 Hour Workweek” received the most clicks, and that’s how it ended up being the title of his best-seller. (more…)

May 15th, 2012

Recent Google AdWords Changes and How They Will Impact You

As you have likely heard, Google has recently announced that it is changing the way it approaches keywords in its AdWords campaigns. The new changes are related to the way that exact and broad matches are made.

These new changes are promising, and they are designed to reduce issues associated with misspellings, plurals, accents and abbreviations. In the past, only exact matches would trigger the ad. Beginning in mid-May, exact match can be used to match broad variants. This new approach is designed to match user intent with the appropriate AdWords.

*Address User Differences
The new changes are designed to address the fact that different people may enter variants of the same keyword during their searches. This has caused lots of marketers trouble in the past, and it often led many firms to create multiple AdWords using various keywords. Now, they can simply choose to include close variants in their campaigns. This will attract more shoppers and promises to make marketing easier.
(more…)

March 27th, 2012

What Sets PPC Pros Apart?

A successful Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign can be a cost-effective way to connect directly with your company’s target audience.  PPC campaigns are easy to measure and track, providing opportunities for analysis and adaptation that simply aren’t available for many other forms of advertising.
 
Hiring an effective PPC manager is the key to running a profitable campaign. However, it’s possible that some PPC managers are trying to fake competency. Dan Slagen writes for HubSpot, “Making a campaign look good on paper could simply mean opting into the content network and showing an Excel chart with increasing leads at a decreasing price, without ever taking the quality of said leads into account.” In light of these challenges, here are some tips on what to look for in a PPC pro.
 

Perseverance

It’s one thing for a PPC manager to know how to manage an ad word campaign, but it’s quite another thing to be passionate about it in order to persevere when the work becomes frustrating, dull, or monotonous. (more…)

March 22nd, 2012

5 Tips For Getting The Most Out Of Google Analytics

One of the most important parts of an advertising campaign is ensuring that it is successful and measuring its performance. Before internet-based advertising, tracking a campaign’s successes and failures was mostly hit or miss and required customers to leave feedback. However, with internet-based advertising and Google Analytics, tracking advertising through pay per click (PPC) is simple.
 

Track Visitor Movement through Google Analytics

google analyticsThe goal of all advertising campaigns is ultimately to drive sales, so even if your PPC ads are increasing traffic to your website, the ads still need to also be able to generate revenue. One of your most important tools in Google Analytics is the ability to track where visitors go after they arrive at your website. This can not only let you know if the ads people are following end in a purchase but also let you know what part of the website they get to before they leave. If visitors are arriving at the site but all leaving before checkout, the issue may not be with the ad but with the checkout system for the website. Knowing where your problem lies will allow you to fix it.
 

Track Your Website’s Bounce Rate

Additionally, if your ad generates a large number of click-throughs but most visitors leave the site immediately, you know that your ad is not successful. Either you are misrepresenting what the visitor should expect when clicking your ad, or you are not targeting your correct audience. Google analytics allows you to track your visitor bounce rate, which is the number of people who left the site without visiting any pages except the entrance page. By tracking the bounce rate caused by your ads, you can determine which are most successful at leading customers to a site that they will stay on or purchase from. 
 

Find Out Where Click-Throughs are Coming From

Another great tool provided by Google Analytics is the ability to monitor where the click-throughs from ads are coming from. If you find that there are very few coming from a particular site, you know that you need to either change your ads or find another site to advertise on. Additionally, you can use the analytics tools to show you which search engines are providing the most click-throughs, along with the keyword searches visitors used to get to the results that showed your ad. Knowing what keywords are attached to your ads can help you get a sense of what customers are looking for or expecting on your website.
 

Isolate Unsuccessful Media

While the goal of pay per click ads is not to simply get visitors to your website, you still need people to click on ads to get them in the door. If you have an ad that is getting no clicks, you either have it in the wrong place or it needs to be redone. The AdWords tracking in Google Analytics allows you to follow click-throughs from links, banners, embedded keywords and a variety of other sources. This lets you know what medium is the most successful and where to put your advertising dollars.
 

Target Different Audience Demographics

Finally, one of the best things about web advertising is how specifically it can target potential customers. Using the tools provided by Google analytics you can see which ads are successful and where they are successful. Instead of using a one size fits all application to marketing, with pay per click ads you can target different demographics by simply uploading a new ad.
 

Sam is an Internet marketing blogger and a contributing writer for QuickSprout. He enjoys writing about a variety of marketing topics ranging from social media trends to SEO techniques.

 

January 9th, 2012

A Few Important Marketing Strategies Employed by Law Firms

Online marketing for law firms comes down to focusing on natural search optimization and/or paid search.

The contents of your site need to include your law firm’s certificates, practice skill, area of expertise together with other information which might be useful for people looking for legal assistance.

Promoting law firms online also calls for testimonies from your satisfied clients.

Another sort of marketing activity in this field includes taking part in search engine optimization programs.

If you have an interest in search optimization and/or Google AdWords management we would be happy to help you.

September 27th, 2011

10 Powerful Case Studies for Selling Social Media

Challenges in Selling Social Media

Selling Social MediaFor businesses, there is both a fierce attraction and an intense fear of selling social media. While it is a cost-effective but powerful way to connect with customers, both new and established, it is also seen as a medium with very little control and with a level of immediacy that is not as compatible with corporate hierarchy, even for medium-sized businesses.
 
For businesses accustomed to press releases and ad campaigns, selling social media can be a frightening thing. However, with the risk comes the potential for great rewards and many businesses that have seized these opportunities have done very well.

Selling Social Media: Who Did It Right?

Here are ten great examples of businesses that banked on the benefits of selling social media and had their efforts pay off in a big way. (more…)

September 23rd, 2011

Why Is It Important To Blend PPC and SEO?

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and when it comes to online business and marketing, the sentiment couldn’t be truer.
 
blend ppc and seoWhatever kind of business you have online, one thing is certain. You need traffic! Without visitors to your website you won’t make any sales regardless of what product or service you provide.
 
So how does the need to blend PPC and SEO come into this?
 
As a refresher for those who may be new to the Internet, the two most common ways of bringing traffic to your websites are PPC and SEO. PPC stands for pay per click advertising, and SEO stands for search engine optimization. Understanding how both works is the key to knowing how to blend PPC and SEO.
 

What is the Difference?

PPC is a form of paid advertising. Businesses pay the advertising platform a fee each time a customer clicks on their advertisement. A business can choose where their advert appears by bidding on different search terms. Each time someone types in that term into the search engine, the adverts paying the most will appear in the listings.
 
SEO relies more on organic search results. A business will optimize their website for certain search terms, and the search engines will then deliver what it deems to be the most relevant results to a user when they go searching for the said term. The sites that appear in the top 10 search results of a term will get the lion’s share of the traffic.
 
There are pros and cons for both types of advertising but one thing is for certain. You need to blend PPC and SEO if you want long term business success.
 

Why You Need to Blend PPC and SEO

 
Relying on either one of these traffic sources can spell trouble for your business. If you rely solely on SEO for example, and all of your traffic comes from the search engines, then you are very exposed. What happens if they suddenly change their algorithms (as they often do) and suddenly all your page one listings disappear overnight? Guess what’s gonna happen to your traffic? It’s going to disappear too.
 
If you base all your advertising methods on PPC traffic alone, you could end up getting priced out of business, unless you have a huge marketing budget. As search terms become more popular, the cost of appearing high on the search engines shoots up too.
 
It’s not unusual to see a search term go from costing $1 per click to almost $6 a click in the space of a few weeks depending on the niche.  Unless you have the money to compete, you’re going to get swallowed up.
 

How Do You Blend PPC and SEO?

 
The simplest solution is to use both methods of advertising. Blend PPC and SEO together and experience the best of both worlds. Because SEO takes a period of time to start working for you, it should be classed as a source of long term traffic. You need to invest time and effort generating content that will attract the search engines, and prompt them to rank you highly in their listings.
 
The focus of your attention here should be providing useful content that can be used and implemented by your readers. It’s becoming more important than ever to create content that provides real value to people as the search engines are cracking down on people that put up trash simply to gain rankings.
 
PPC traffic, on the other hand, is much faster. You can set up an ad campaign now and start seeing results straight away. It can be a very useful medium to test out different forms of advertising and marketing messages, and can form the basis of your SEO marketing when positive results are spotted.
 
The key here is balance. Long term success online requires a business to attract a wide range of traffic from multiple sources. Sticking to one and one alone is a recipe for disaster. Blend PPC and SEO now and see the difference.
 
This post is written by Lior Levine, a marketing consultant who works for a web hosting company that lists the top 10 website hosting companies available online.