This isn’t a post for PPC newbies. I’m not going to include an entry list of what you should do to get started in PPC, I’m just going to dive straight into a few things that I’ve learned over the years… Please bear in mind post is aimed at single businesses, not multi-site affiliates, though you never know…

If you have a well known brand name – 12 Thoughts:

1. Your brand terms need to be matched with branded and verifiable adcopy, throw in those ® and ™ symbols, and make use of the word ‘Official’.
2. Advertise on all possible spelling variations. I know of one variation that cost a company 37c for the year and generated over $1K in PPC based revenue.
3. Use any relevant claims you can verify on-page in your adcopy: ‘76% of Americans Prefer our Blinds…’; ‘#1 Rated Kids Learning Craft in the US’; etc…
4. Test these claims against more audience targeted ad copy, against more keyword rich adcopy, and against more ‘sensationalist’ adcopy.
5. Have a targeted landing page for each adcopy variation. Test them all against the same landing page, one page after another.
6. Take the top two performers and test again.
7. If the results are significant in terms of difference, use the winner and start optimization and conversion testing on the winning page and adcopy.
8. Don’t only work to ROAS, especially in a big brand where you have a budget and reallocation may not be so easy. Clearly spending $2m and making $4m is better in terms of pure profit than spending $0.5m and making $2m, but the ROAS for the latter is better (4:1 vs 2:1). IF you can efficiently and effectively reallocate the $1.5m spend difference to other marketing spend opportunities that provide a return of greater than 2:1, you are positively contributing to the company’s bottom line. But If you have to spend it all, then focus on both ROAS and profit. I’ve experienced both situations, and eventually try to work towards reallocation as it’s better for the business as a whole.
9. Dedicate adgroups to each product line and product type – from the highest to the lowest level, assuming your site is structured in a relevantly hierarchical way. So have a campaign for ‘cameras’, and adgroups for (non-exhaustive iullustrative list) ‘digital cameras’, ‘video cameras’, ‘digital video cameras’, ‘nikon digital camera’, ‘canon digital camera’, ‘compare digital cameras’ etc. Use phrase and exact match more as you get more specified. Keep the broader terms to the top level, but be very careful with broad terms and watch their ROAS in particular. I cut a particularly relevant term that was broad, phrase and exact matched by our previous agency after checking the data for the past 12 months. With an ROAS of 27cents on the dollar, there was no point in continuing with that term.
10. Unless you have money to burn, or a dedicated budget to ‘blow’ on brand awareness or for a specified non-return campaign, aim for a minimum ROAS of $1:$1.
11. Try to keep brand terms for which you organically rank between 1 and 5 at a PPC rank of 1-3.
12. Be wary of competitor brand names unless you have a clear competitive advantage or selling point like a free trial, free product or special offer, and watch what they do on your brand terms.

If you do NOT have a well known brand – 12 Thoughts:

1. My personal experience has leant me to believe that PPC ‘brand awareness campaigns’ are not usually worth the effort or cost as a stand-alone endeavour.
2. Don’t target the brand names of the big-players in your space. You will get burned.
3. Targeting generic keywords can be a great investment, but your adcopy must speak to your keywords, which must actually match your target market’s search query intent.
4. Driving heaps of traffic is pointless, and costly, if they are not converting. With the masses of media bombarding your average Joe today, your PPC ad that you worked so hard on to get ‘just-right’ will be forgotten as quickly as that toothbrush ad you saw this morning – unless they bookmark your site. But they have to click before they can do that, and if you don’t have an effective traffic attribution tool, you’ll never know if it was your PPC ad anyway. That may seem jaded, but if you have to prove returns, you better be able to PROVE returns, or kiss your budget goodbye.
5. Be very strategic and tactical with your big traffic generics, watch them carefully.
6. Dedicated PPC pages usually (in my experience) perform better than your usual web pages.
7. Minimize your navigation on these dedicated pages. Use numerous, well-placed calls-to action.
8. Play with colors, button sizes and text and focus on conversion rates. Refine and optimize your pages as much as possible and on an ongoing basis making use of usability studies.
9. Usability studies can be tests using crazyegg, or panel based. If you’re going for a panel and it’s too expensive to conduct via testing experts, screen family and friends of randomly selected staff members who choose to participate. Stress the fact that you want to hear their thoughts, both bad and good. Many informal studies have skewed results because that is not communicated, and the panels incorrectly assume they need to be ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ instead of neutral in their response.
10. Generic keywords are in many cases very expensive to rank in the top 3, so make use of bid management tools and test what works in terms of clicks, CTR, conversion and ROAS. You may find that your revenue at position 5 is as high as your revenue at position 2, but with a far lower cost (higher ROAS).
11. Respond to market changes in search behaviour using tools like Google Insights, and focus on geographic markets that work. As your brand becomes better known you can expand.
12. Try out AdLinks. In my limited experience (they’re pretty new) they work, and I’m not the only one to think so!

For both – 4 More Thoughts…

1. Make sure you are inline and in-communication with other on and offline marketing initiatives to make sure you target tag-lines in dedicated pages.
2. Watch your spend and keep in contact with other MMs to see if there is additional budget for you, or if you can apply excess budget to other performing programs/initiatives.
3. Don’t be shy about trying other comparison shopping sites.
4. Be careful of content.

I know there’s tons more, but for this post I reckon that’s a good chunk to deal with. I admit, I’m a PPC and organic junkie, and I love my job! Follow me on twitter for random PPC/organic and just plain me tid-bits @lauracallow!

Usual disclaimer – These are my personal thoughts on my blog. Nothing to do with my employers – current or past. My thoughts and opinions are my own. You can see my experience on LinkedIn and you’re welcome to join my network!

1. First, conduct extensive keyword research. From your potential keyword universe, you filter your preferred sample of primary (and some longer tail) phrases for onpage SEO. The full universe of keywords is applied to PPC.

2. If you are unsure of which phrases to target from an SEO perspective, then complete your PPC campaign and make it live. Careful review and analysis of your top performing PPC keyphrases (based on your predetermined KPIs) will give you a great indication of which terms to target from an SEO perspective. Bear in mind, for many major or well known brands, the brand and product names usually account for more than 90% of all traffic. Adding the primary non-brand keyphrases to the mix in the primary on-page SEO elements will not detract from the strength of the brand exposure, but will likely improve your appearance in the SERPs for related non-brand searches. Ensuring that these non-brand keyphrases form part of the anchor text in a backlink strategy is a great strategy.

3. When conducting your keyword research, pay close attention to potential negative keywords for application to the PPC campaign;

3.i. In practice: If you are performing keyword research for a prostate cancer clinic, words you want to include to add your running negative keyword list will include words that crop up in the research on the primary research phrase ‘cancer’, and will probably include:

• sign (people with cancer tend to search for cancer ‘signs’ plural while people interested in the astrological cancer ‘sign’ need to be filtered out)
• tropic
• horoscope
• astrologic (anything to do with ‘astro’ really)
• every other body part (you’re targeting prostate cancer, so you are not interested in ‘brain’ cancer, ‘breast’ cancer, ‘colon’ cancer, ‘kidney’ cancer etc)

3.ii. On a slightly different (and happier) note; if you are a winter vacation resort, and you don’t offer an outdoor hotpool, hot tub, warm spring, steam bath, jacuzzi (and all other combinations) make sure you are not ‘broad’ phrase advertising on the term ‘winter vacation resort’. Run that logic throughout your campaign creation, specifically ensuring you refine your exposure to terms you actually can service, and for which there are dedicated pages on your site.

4. Effective PPC campaign conception, creation and management is not the remit of this post, but in summary, make your campaigns geo-targeted if you serve multiple locations; if not then set campaign by primary topic such as ‘treatment’, ‘signs and symptoms’, ‘statistics’, ‘support’ etc. This step would be the adword level for a geographically diverse campaign. Ensure that adcopy includes the adword level primary search term in the title and at least once in the description, with the primary search term in every URL; i.e. ‘cancer’ at a bare minimum. Create multiple adcopy to allow for a/b testing, make sure you have your goals set, watch your budget, watch your KPI and make sure your landing pages are relevant, highly appropriate and easy to navigate with clear purpose and direction in both copy and call-to-action. Here’s more info on PPC creation why’s and how’s.

5. If your SEO contingent is targeted with assisting IA in the development of a new micro-site to complement a banner ad/TV/radio/magazine etc ad strategy, make sure knowledge of the objectives, along with all the keyword research, is passed to the PPC folks for integration into the PPC initiative.

6. If the company decides on a short term promotion targeting PPC and banner ad placement online, pass the information to SEO where they can include the target tag-line and primary likely converting phrase into a link off the home page to the PPC landing page. The chances are that your home page is crawled at least once every week to two weeks (if you are a small business and don’t update very often). If you are a larger business with more dynamism in terms of visitor volume and interaction, and if you regularly change your content, your home page may be crawled multiple times a day.

7. Most active blogs are also crawled far more frequently than less ‘dynamic’ sites. Therefore, link the corporate blog to the PPC landing page as well, ensuring that the PPC landing page is not excluded via robots.txt, or misuse of noindex etc. I read a great article on crawl and cache rate (due to effective page management and maintenance) and the effect on rankings a few weeks ago by Scott Hendison – totally worth a good few minutes of your time.

8. SEO and PPC may have very different KPI; for example, PPC may be aimed at pure profit or ROAS (return or adspend), while SEO may be aimed primarily at brand exposure.

This does not mean you need to limit either approach to any single goal. In fact I strongly urge you to set up a number of PPC and SEO goals including registration, conversion and contact as well as more tactical goals including bounce rate on select pages, most visited sub-pages, visitor paths and visitor locations. Insight into general web analytics geographic location of visitors can give insights on where to further promote PPC, or withdraw it if it is not effective.

Bounce rate can indicate landing pages that are not working, both from a PPC and an SEO perspective. Apply full web analytics to both and integrate them so that you only have one primary interface. It is very easy to tie your Google Analytics to both AdWords and general data. I strongly urge you to do so.

In Closing: Integrating, managing and reporting on both SEO and PPC initiatives simultaneously with the same team, or with teams that are encouraged to work effectively together to complement and support each other will make an enormous difference to your online presence in the SERPs. It’s not getting easier out there, but while competition is increasing, effective management is not necessarily following suit – yet. Give yourself a competitive advantage in 2009 and start today!

Happy New Year!!!

The middle web is that new playground between highly limited mobile phone internet use and full blown computer internet use via high speed access; and is made possible by a range of new hand held facilitators including the iPhone. Not that new admittedly, but in terms of time in the US 2 years is not long (release of Blackberry), and the iPhone was first released in the US in June ’07.

According to mobile advertising company AdMob, traffic from Apple’s iPhone on their advertising network almost doubled in August, and the iPhone saw the fastest growth of all smartphones worldwide, closely followed by the Samsung Instinct (some dispute the ‘smartphone’ status of the Instinct – I’m just not that smart, no pun intended.) In fact, users of the iPhone ended August with more than 2.9 million mobile Web page requests per day.

SO… what’s with mobile search marketing then? In terms of pure numbers very few companies are embracing mobile search as a legitimate advertising platform. I can’t help but wonder why – especially considering predictions of in excess of $3BN this year in mobile ad spend, and more than 14 million phones sold – very confusing…

·         It’s not hard to design a corporate branded .mobi site – or even easier – dedicated single landing pages for mobile PPC initiatives.

·         It’s not hard to make sensible mobile PPC ads with 18 characters per line.

·         It’s not hard to cost effectively alter an existing banner ad for mobile ad display through AdWords (or other platforms)

·         Analytics are pretty good, and getting better

·         Historic data indicates that even then more than 46 million mobile users used mobile search functions in Q3 last year according to Nielsen, that figure has nearly doubled.

Perhaps search behavior is different on mobiles, perhaps not so much. There are numerous studies underway and the data gives every indication of being both ground-breaking and very interesting.

I honestly believe that if your client is even remotely geotargeted in their offering, and if they provide any form of local service, including entertainment, home services, hospitality, health, pet care, or are involved in the sale of products from geographically limited locations, they should get involved in mobile PPC geo-targeting to an appropriate level, and give it a test drive. It is possible to use multipliers or other statistical formulae to run comparative tests on traditional PPC vs mobile PPC campaigns, bearing in mind the fact that your markets may or may not overlap – but you should be able to compare ROI and other KPI.

I actually think that anyone participating in PPC should run a trial PPC initiative on mobile PPC, even if it is simply based on a highly geo-targeted test market. If it works, the mobile world becomes a whole new oyster of its own… Why miss it? Run it on AdWords with strict constraints on spend and display. You can turn it off any time, you can check data whenever you like. Just make sure you allow for a reasonable period of time to make an informed decision without running scared.

Some iPhone wireless networks are free, enabling iPhone users to connect at no charge – don’t be frightened. Find out more about the medium, the advertising options, free connection areas, the set up costs and resources required to initiate a trial campaign, and give it a try that provides you with statistically significant data. Run it over 3 separate periods of time, A/B test your ads and landing pages… go to it with enthusiasm assuming you will be pleasantly surprised. If it doesn’t work, you won’t have lost much, but you will have gained enormous insights into another new market and medium, hopefully for the better.

Mobile phones are here to stay in the world as we know it, mobile use is increasing; the middle web is exhibiting a very fast growth rate, outpacing growth of traditional internet adoption (which is not surprising). People are using mobile search functionality, especially on the new generation of smartphones…

The Point?

Adapt. Adopt. Be proactive. Investigate, explore and seriously consider

mobile search marketing as a potential addition to your marketing mix!

SEO Success Stories

(Actually, this has a PPC Success Story after the SEO success story below. I hope you find them both enlightening and a boost if you ever have the same problems I do J.)

It can be infinitely frustrating dealing with clients who only want consultative SEO. In other words, they want a full site audit, with all the trappings, as well as a comprehensive list of recommendations based on ease of implementation and importance due to potential rankings impact….

…BUT, they (the client) choose whether or not to actually implement the changes – all or any – and sometimes you spend days doing a top-notch, detailed audit… and never see anything come of it. (Not for lack of pushing, cajoling, enticing etc… it just gets, ‘put on the backburner’, ‘delayed until budget becomes available’, ‘focusing marketing dollars elsewhere’ etc…etc)

In most cases they eventually end up implementing at least some of the changes – not ideal, but better than nothing – but every now and then you have a star client who not only implements everything, but actively seeks your consul throughout the process to double check…. THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!

Case in point; client starts implementing changes immediately, but cautiously. Client takes innocuous ‘About Us’ page for a test drive. Client utilizes recommended keywords and all recommended onpage elements, and initiates a backlink campaign for the page based on a (very comprehensive) backlink acquisition strategy guide. Four weeks after ‘optimized’ page goes live they call and ask to check the analytics.

Based on the optimization of ONE page, 4 weeks after deploy (and initiation of backlink strategy):

• Number of visitors from non-paid search engines – up 20.4%
• % of all visitors from search engines – up 24.4% to 40.73% (and counting)
• Google organic visitors – up 26%
• Yahoo! organic visitors – up 53%
• MSN organic visitors – up 240% (yes, I said 240%)
• The term for which the ‘About Us’ page was specifically optimized gained an increase of more than 2000% in visitor traffic, and was the second highest traffic driver from an organic keyword perspective (after the brand name)

The client has decided to continue, in full, with the optimization of their somewhat more important pages. I am thrilled to actually see the fruits of hard work on all parts really pay off. It highlights the potential positive effect of effective SEO, efficiently implemented by a proactive company which really wants to maximize its web site’s exposure and use as a marketing tool.

VIVA SEO!!!

PPC Success Stories

The positive impact a really good negative PPC keywords list can have on a campaign shouldn’t be underestimated…Ahh, I hear you say ‘but we already use negative keywords…’ Come sit by my cozy fireside and let me tell you a story about the wonders of a truly effective negative keyword list…

The background gumpff

Advanced semantic analysis software enabling the creation of an extensive list of negative keywords (the top 10,000 – being the maximum number currently permitted by Google) is produced and added to a PPC campaign. The most pertinent negative keywords are identified by the software and ranked in importance of 1 through, 10,000 yielding both quality and quantity data. A long-tail filtration effect is enabled, maximizing the potential for broad and phrase match PPC efficiency, typically saving 20 – 40% on PPC ad spend.

In other words, by maximizing the application of 10,000 negative keywords within a Google PPC campaign, the benefits of negative match keywords (improved targeting and reduced wasted ad spend, all while not eliminating the long tail via exact match) are also maximized.

In a nutshell, impressions are down; CTR is down; cost per conversion is down (20-40%), profit is up; ROI is up; conversions remain constant. It’s a PPC win-win situation.

I am so super impressed by this. It appears as though the industry is as well… So far we have given three presentations this year since July on our semantically enabled negative keyword software at HostingCon, Marketing Profs and SMX New York. I realize this sounds like a sell. It’s not meant to be. My objective is to get you to seriously consider and evaluate your negative keyword list, and if you want to know more about how Epiar does it just comment here, or email me. My email is in the footer of this post.

VIVA PPC!!!

To end…. and to quote the infamous Hannibal (I’m aging myself with A-team references *sigh*)…

“I love it when a plan comes together!” J

Thanks for reading!

laura[at]epiar[dot]com

I therefore find Google’s new release (last Wednesday) interesting to say the least.

A Bit About Display Ad Builder

Google has now integrated a do-it-yourself display (banner) ad creation tool for all AdWords users (i.e. you must have an account).

1. You can target your audience via:

• contextual (ads displayed on contextually/keyword relevance basis on sites that are part of Google’s content network); or
• placement targeting (choosing specific websites on which you want your shiny new display ad to appear; again these sites must be part of Google’s content network).

2. Then you choose your design template and customize it. There are fully customizable direct response and interactive ad templates; and there are pre-designed by industry templates – currently entertainment, financial, retail, travel. (If you log in to your Google Adwords account and click on a campaign, you will get a little ‘invitation’ asking you to try it out – there you will see a whole bunch more information on available templates – here is one screen grab)

3. You then set your daily budget and your CPC and off you go.

4. They have also included another little acronym for us all to get used to – introducing the PPR (Placement Performance Report).

Despite banner blindness, I would be very interested to see the results between the CTR and conversion rates on a specifically selected set of sites on the content network for a traditional text PPC ad and a ‘DIY’ display ad. Traditionally display ads are far less targeted in distribution than PPC ads, Google has made that annoying state of affairs disappear ‘poof’.

Admittedly the designs are by no means all stunning creatives, but they are display ads, and some are interactive, and some are dynamic – and they are free to create. I really like the idea; I think it is a great opportunity for small businesses to really test the waters far more effectively by trying both display and text ads via both contextual and placement targeting to determine what really works for them, without the prohibitive cost of creating display ads, requiring ad houses to produce reports no-one can understand, and with the ability to a/b test creatives themselves. It opens up a whole new area of online advertising streamlining and tactical refinement, and is very well times with the economic downturn.

(I wonder though if these DIY ads will count as search marketing or display advertising for adspend determination purposes?)

Anyhoo…  what I do think is that it would have been a bigger feather in Google’s hat if they had come out with the idea first, not apparently  rushed into it on MySpace’s heels. And, not to be outdone by any manner of means… Meet My Ads by Yahoo! AND Yahoo! now allows you to target your ads to a ZIP code level… That’s right – beats the socks off Google.

I think it’s great that these big online companies are being so proactive. I think it bodes well for our industry, and for the small business advertiser who can very easily manage his ad spend. And I think it bodes well for their investors.

• Yes, branding is important.
• Yes, your users are more important, and the usability and logical structure of your site is vital.
• Yes, you may have legal issues to consider.
• No, those do not pose a problem as you begin to develop you IA – though they might in the refinement stages.

First, let’s settle on a business type… say our ‘client’ is an online gift shop (www.UniqueGifts4YouOnline.com – not taken as of posting according to GoDaddy)

Starting with Wordtracker, let’s see what we get – I’m not pulling all the data for this illustration for somewhat obvious reasons J:

Now, in practice we would conduct a whole lot more research for the first phase, and we would run the search through one or two other keyword research tools to check data and see what we missed. Let’s assume we did, and it stayed the same (never gonna happen… but for the purposes of this post)…

(Some) Insights so far:

1. People are searching for graduation gifts nearly 70% more often than any other type of gift. Perhaps targeting ‘graduation’ terms in PPC with carefully worded adcopy due to likely impressions would be prudent. Also, assuming the client sells ‘graduation’ gifts, maybe an initiative to include a digital transferable voucher for graduation gifts to all online purchasers might be worth considering.
2. ‘Unique’ and ‘last minute’ seem to be cropping up a few times
3. There is a mix of searches on the singular and plural versions of the word ‘gift’. Is the client brand consciously concerned to the extent that they will want to maintain a uniform (i.e. all singular or all plural terms) approach to content presentation in the navigation and throughout the site? Find out now. We’ll assume not for the purpose of this illustration.
4. ‘Gift registry’ is searched for a lot. If the client doesn’t offer a gift registry service, perhaps they should investigate it.

Phase 2: Begin to form your IA outline. For example (I color coded the folder depths);

1*Home (Gift Store)

1*Gifts

Ø Graduation Gifts

Ø Holiday Gifts

Ø Gift Cards

·         Visa Gift Cards

·         Starbucks Gift Card

·         American Express Gift Cards

Ø Unique Gifts

·         Unique Baby Gifts

·         Unique Gift Children

·         Unique Gift Idea

Ø Birthday Gift

Ø Anniversary Gifts

Ø Personalized Gifts

Ø Business Gift

Ø Baby Shower Gift

·         Gifts for dad’s to be

1*Gift ideas

Ø Newborn Gift Idea

Ø Graduation Gift Ideas

Ø Last Minute Gift Ideas

1*Gift Registry

Phase 3: Refine and maximize usability based on SEO considerations

• I reckon that it looks a mess – so let’s alphabetize it.
• I also think that there is a whole lot of duplicate page possibilities, so we’ll cross link, and
• There is significant opportunity for internal linking, so we’ll indicate to copy where they should be linking to another page within the body copy. We’ll also delve a little deeper into the primary phrases; I’ll choose ‘anniversary gifts’ and ‘personalized gifts’.

1*Home (Gift Store)

1*Gifts

Ø Anniversary Gifts [link to anniversary gift ideas]

·         50^th Anniversary Gifts

·         Traditional Anniversary Gifts

·         Wedding Anniversary Gifts [link to 50^th anniversary gifts]

Ø Baby Shower Gift

·         Gifts for dad’s to be

Ø Birthday Gift

Ø Business Gift

Ø Gift Cards

·         Visa Gift Cards

·         Starbucks Gift Card

·         American Express Gift Cards

Ø Graduation Gifts

·         Personalized Graduation Gifts

Ø Holiday Gifts

Ø Personalized Gifts

·         Homemade gift ideas for boyfriend

·         Personalized Baby Gift (cross link to same page listed under ‘Unique Baby Gifts’)

·         Personalized Graduation Gifts (cross link to same page listed under ‘Graduation Gifts’)

Ø Unique Gifts

·         Unique Anniversary Gifts (cross link Anniversary Gifts)

·         Unique Baby Gifts

§ Personalized Baby Gift (cross link)

·         Unique Gift Children

·         Unique Gift Idea

1*Gift ideas

Ø Anniversary Gift Ideas [link to Anniversary Gifts]

        ·        Homemade Anniversary Gift Ideas

Ø Graduation Gift Ideas [link to Graduation Gifts]

Ø Last Minute Gift Ideas

        ·       Gift Cards (cross link)

       ·        Homemade Anniversary Gift IdeasLast Minute Valentine Gifts [Link to both ‘Anniversary Gift’ and ‘Anniversary Gift Ideas’ pages]

Ø Newborn Gift Idea

        ·        Unique baby gifts (cross link)

1*Gift Registry

(Some) More Insights:

While ‘homemade gifts’ has a relatively low search volume at only 73 (WT searches) there are a lot of folks looking for homemade gifts for graduation, boyfriends and more. Options include expanding offering to include arts and crafts and idea books and materials, and maybe a separate primary navigation button to ‘Homemade Gifts’ – depends on clients brand and willingness to expand product offering.

I also don’t like the term ‘unique gift children’ [1,558 WT]. Nearest term is not much better and with a count of [2 WT]. This is where, if you haven’t (which is bad, very bad), you would check against another keyword research tool. If the keyword research tools simply don’t make a usable term, change it with a stop word if possible. If not, tell the client your recommendations. I think that ‘for‘ might be a stop word; therefore I might offer the alternative of ‘unique gift for children’. I realise that is not grammatically correct, but the search volume on the term is enormous (as is the competition). This is a classic case of ‘will the user get it’? ‘be offended by it’? ‘misinterpret it’? And ‘can the brand handle it? I’m going to leave it as stands for this post.

Phase 4*: Check out the competition and other related sites and add other primary links

(*Assuming we have covered all bases, have conducted full keyword research, and cross linked and ‘internally linked’ for copy wherever possible)

Check out how many pages/sites are competing for the terms you are planning on targeting. If you are in this (gift) industry, you have some work to do with backlinking and establishing yourself via SMM and presence if you’re new… (maybe even if you’re old but haven’t harnessed the backlink capacity of the industry yet). Linking is not a one time thing. NOR is it the point of this post…

Maybe the client should consider photo albums? Linking up with Party Services? Selling invitations?

Perhaps presenting the gift categories as presented above by ‘Feeling’ (and with additional keyword research); as in:

• Cheer Up Gifts
• Get Better Soon Gifts
• I Love You Gift
• Thank You Gift

…

Or maybe by ‘Type’ (again with more Keyword research); as in:

• Christian Gifts
• Funny Gifts
• Geeky Gifts
• Trendy Gifts
• Whacky Gifts

Perhaps an internal search facility is warranted?

Don’t forget the usuals. For example:

• About Us
• FAQ
• Shipping & Handling
• Returns Policy
• Contact Us
• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Blog (with RSS)
• Sitemap
• Etc…

Phase 5: Optimize Your Home Page

I realize that it may seem odd focusing on your home page last, it’s not really. Your home page will be optimized for your brand and your highest level keyphrases. Wait until you have your IA worked out, and then go back.

Two phrases picked out so far for the Home page are:

‘Gifts’ is waaay to generic. ‘Gift Store’ is a little more on target.

Optimize for these two as well as including the term ‘unique’ (based on a quick review of only WT here):

So present the home page with initial suggested ‘Optimization Title Element’ when you present the IA. For example:

Home Page Title: Gifts Online from Your Unique Gift Store | UniqueGifts4YouOnline

And finally…

Expect back and forth with the client as they work through the final IA. As long as you have done due diligence, and you stand your ground and influence and educate like crazy, you’ve done your job. For example; why optimize for both ‘Graduation Gifts’ and ‘Graduation Gift Ideas’?:

• Search query intent and search query language are usually relatively closely associated when it comes to people who are internet savvy; not so much with those who are not.
• ‘Idea’ copy can be significantly different to ‘gift copy’ if you have a half decent copy writer.
• Interlinking is not a crime.

Whatever you do, don’t start page level optimizations until you have their have their sign-off approval in your hot-sticky (and somewhat geeky) hands J. Then provide a list of related terms on a page by page basis for copy writers before you optimize as they need to be working on the copy as you finish the html elements. Work with them as closely as possible and be open to contact (all this assuming you are not a pro copy writer and thus ‘Person-Super-SEO’ who is an expert SEO, crap-hot copywriter and guru-coder deluxe).

And that, dear readers, is how keyword research can – and should in my perfect SEO world J – provide you with a darned hot website architecture foundation.

This post will try to demystify the issue.

Why Spying on the Online Competition Can Benefit SEM (SEO & PPC) Efforts

Competitive intelligence can tell what phrases your competition is effectively ranking on, and what they aren’t, providing you with additional guidance as you plan your organic and paid search strategies.

How to Spy on the Online Competition

SEO – First;

·    Check out your top online competitors.

·    Check their title tags, META data, headers and primary targeted terms. Make a list of terms for which they appear to be optimizing.

·    Run the terms they are ‘optimized’ for through Google and see if they rank in the top 10 (or 30). Make a note of the terms they actually rank for.

·    Then run their URL through SEODigger.com. For example; if you are a Sushi restaurant in Chicago, SushiWabi.com is a direct online competitor.  SEODigger.com will show you (depending on data centers and other impacting factors, but it’s not a bad guide) what positions this site holds in Google, and for what terms.

·    Then run their URL through SpyFu.com. If you are a subscriber, their results are more comprehensive. The free tool is not a bad quick check on SEODigger for organic results, but is more useful for seeing their Paid Search terms. Which we look at in the Paid search step below.

·    Run the list of ranking terms through Wordtracker, Google Keywords, KeyWord Discovery, Suggest tools on the various search engines.

·    Make a list of the top 20-50 terms on each keyword research resource you use (use at least 2 or 3 to take into account variations and discrepancies).

·    Make this list for each primary term you are investigating, noting which competitor is advertising for which primary term, and what the search volume and competition for each term is. Apply information in Third step below…

SEO – Second;

·    Check out your top offline competitors, especially if your business is offline based or has a strong offline market. If your offline competitors are the same as your online competitors it makes life a smidge easier, but it is not always the case.

·    For example: In the town of Calgary in Alberta, a search on plumbers yields a results listing ‘grouped’ plumbers with a list of ‘top plumbers’

·    BUT If I look in the YellowPages (offline) I get:

o        Knight Plumbing

o        Roto-Rooters

o        Action Auger

o        Abacus

·    none of the plumbers mentioned in my online list from my first selection are mentioned. Incidentally the iYP search yields nearly the same results. This is indicating that the top offline listings with their big YP ads are hitting the iYP advertising as well… Anyone ever tell them about SEO? I reckon iYP is keeping it close. They can’t really take to SEO can they… way too much conflict of interest.

·    Take these top offline competitors and run them through Google looking to see if they have websites, and if they have, what they are optimized for. If you are not optimized, you may see some strong relationships between their site and yours in terms of what is being missed. It’s a nice way to view a poorly optimized site and figure out why they are not working when compared to competitors that are – almost a DIY audit on the competition. You can request that your SEO Consultant do that for you as extra data for future development.

SEO – Third;

Take all the terms you have seen, even if they are not ranking a site but are relevant to your business. Pass them to your IA team, and get a decent site plan drawn up utilizing the primary keywords. Check, refine, review and then continue as per best practice SEO redevelopment. (I reccommend reading the post on Keyword Research, and Search Query vs Search Intent as well)

Paid Search

·    Take the data gleaned from SEODigger.

·    Look at the PPC data from SpyFu.com. For a better example I’ll look at a restaurant that is advertising via PPC (I can only see those advertising across North America and including Canada in their geo-target). Let’s look at OliveGarden.com.

o     This site has a lot more traffic, and the image shows organic data on competitors as well as search terms. Paid subscription yields more data, but for this exercise this is sufficient.

o     PPC data from the Olive Garden tells us whose advertising on prime terms *click a term in the ‘advertisements’* section as above and you’ll see the top list of 10 PPC competitors ranking for the phrase you clicked in Google. Again, subscription gives much more info. The list you chose from is the list of PPC terms people are using to rank for your business. You can check that data for any URL, assuming they are advertisinig via PPC on Google. From image above, you can see that OliveGarden appears to be targeting the term ‘chilis gift card’

·    SpyFu is super easy to use, and free as you figure it out. I highly recommend it.

·    Take all the keywords you have, from organic research as per steps 1&2.

·    Take the terms you have gathered in excess left over from your IA and copy team for SEO site plan.

·    Take the terms you found from PPC competitive insights and run them through the keyword research tools to get variations.

·    Make a final trim and split the keywords into a usable, adgroup and keyword targeted PPC campaign.

Note on brands targeting other brands… Some brands have ‘gentleman deals’ not to target other competitor brand names in the PPC results to keep PPC costs down. If they work, it is of enormous benefit to all brands concerned.

In most cases this is not the case. HOWEVER, my advice is to type your brand and variations of it into Google and see who’s advertising in the paid results via SpyFu (or more advanced AdGooroo – there are a huge number of software solutions out there, I personally know these two and recommend them both).

Contact them and request a mutual cease and desist on brand name terms. If they are amenable, get a document from both/all parties listing the brand name terms they want kept ‘free’. Review all terms individually and then collectively and form a ‘brand exclusive’ partnership. As soon as you can get something off the ground, the collective is likely to have the combined power to absorb new *brand stealers*, or negate their opportunity to capitalize on your grouped name terms.

Reputation Management Spying

·    If you know what initiatives your online competition is engaging in, or what issues are befalling them you can combat them immediately via PPC initiatives, and long term via SEO.

·    For example; if a competitors is having financial issues, or board in-fighting, if they are closing stores or opening new ones, you can be among the first to know via reputation monitoring and management.

·    You can use the information to create targeted PPC campaigns, and create long term competitive, combative, or superior pages. You can use the information to create a new niche, extend a niche, or as an idea for your own product or service development. The possibilities are virtually limitless.

·    A great free tool is Google Alerts. Easy to set up, and easy to monitor. Whatever ‘term’ or ‘brand’ you enter will be monitored and emailed to you if you choose it to be an ‘alert’ any time that ‘term’ is included in a Google news, web, blog or other result.

·    Two superb paid for tools include TruCast  (a social media and blog monitoring solution from VisibleTechnologies) and TrakUr (Google Alert on steroids according to it’s creators).

Conclusion:

Monitor your competition online and off. See what they are doing and strategize reactively, and proactively depending on what you find!

1. 10% ¹ to 20% ² of consumers are strongly influenced by paid search results when searching online. That is a significant number of people for most generic searches.
2. People in the purchase phase are more likely to click on paid search listings while people in research phase are more likely to click on organic listings ³.
3. The amount of time spent by searchers on a number one organic and number one paid listing both exceed two seconds, and those focusing on the paid search term seem to linger longer ³.
4. US paid search advertising revenues were $11.8B in 2007 and are projected to grow to $26.8B by 2011 ⁴ as new players enter the market and those already engaged increase spend.
5. People looking to purchase look for keywords in headings and prominent places in results, images in results, offers, prices and reviews. It is now possible ⁵ to include each of those in the sponsored results.
6. Video search is growing exponentially. More than 10 billion people in the US viewed online video in February 2008. Google and Yahoo! are now including links to video in their sponsored results ⁶.

This data lends itself to the following single summarized fact:

• ROI for paid search is exceptionally high, over 300% for more than 50% of initiatives. ⁷

Why then are many big brands still reluctant to embrace Paid Search?

The primary issue is simply that the historical analytics data available to many companies indicates – correctly – that many big brands receive more than 90% of search traffic from searches on their brand name. As they already hold the number one organic position for the brand name search term, they see no reason to spend money on their brand name.

There are a few issues associated with this mentality that I specifically want to consider:

1. Not everyone searches for a brand name when they are researching an offering or planning a purchase.

More and more potential purchasers are interested in reviews, price comparisons, performance comparisons and other generic data.

This is particularly relevant for first time purchasers, regardless of brand knowledge.

By limiting themselves to organic listings primarily based on brand exposure, big brands may be losing enormous amounts of potential new customers as their SERP results do not speak to search query language nor answer search query intent.

They are also limiting brand consolidation by not targeting key terms like ‘reviews’ ⁸, ‘compare’ and ‘price’ in a targeted PPC ad which includes the brand name alongside the utilized primary search query language in a prominent position.

2. Many searchers are inherently reluctant to click on large brand organic listings due to implied or associated cost considerations (I’ve picked an example: athletic shoes).

Millions of people are fitness enthusiasts. A great number of these immediately associate the big brand athletic shoe names (e.g. Nike) with higher costs. When searching for a generic training or running shoe, they are more likely to click on a less well known name if, or when, cost is a consideration.

By including a paid search ad targeted to a highly relevant search term, a big brand can immediately allay those concerns in the adtitle and adcopy:

If a big brand is offering a sale on last years models, there is no ‘brand dilution’ if they offer a carefully created text ad to the effect that new models are coming in and old models need to be sold, and make the price and discount both immediately clear to the searcher. Millions of people on a budget would probably jump at the chance of owning a new Nike pair of trainers, especially if the percent discount made the cost of those shoes competitive with less known brands.

If you search for ‘Nike’ in Canada on Google.com, there are no paid search ads. If you search for ‘Nike Sales’ there are 2 ads, neither of which are Nike.com ads. In my mind this translates to a loss in online revenue. (It may also be a breach of Google’s terms, but even big brand names remain difficult to control regarding use of copyright names in paid search advertising.)

3. Copyright – I own it, that means no one else can advertise using my brand name!

Seems reasonable? But then again, how many people are involved in affiliate sales and resale? A big lot if we’re honest. If a company’s bread and butter identifies them as being a legal vendor of a major big brand supplier it’s hard for that supplier to limit the ability of the vendor to sell their product online.

Big brands need to revamp their contractual agreements regarding advertising ability and culpability, and they need to watch their space. Even then, they are going to need to outbid their vendors and affiliates if Google et al. do not see valid reason to de-permit advertising on core names. What the brands need to keep easily accessible to their legal teams are clear and careful records of exactly who has a right to sell their products, and what their trading URLs are.

4. Not everybody knows about your brand.

It might seem silly to those immersed in the marketing profession, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who do not use the internet every single day, let alone numerous times per day. They are knowledgeable about their particular market and locale to be sure, but may not know which branded hotels offer great ‘family friendly vacation’ packages.

I am in Canada, so it is impossible for me to see paid search results targeted to other countries. What I can see though, if I search for ‘family friendly hotels’ on Google.com from my little office is this:

There are three paid search listings for this term, and I don’t see a Hyatt, a Hilton, a Fairmont, a Holiday Inn or a Great Western among them. What I do see is a hotel in Austria, a hotel in Ireland, and a site for which the URL is hotelplanner.com.

I admit it is a generic term. So I dug a little deeper; ‘family friendly hotel Dallas’ yielded not a single paid search result from my Google datacenter. Neither did a search on ‘family friendly hotel Toronto’ – I’m in Canada for Pete’s sake….

5. “Oh, but It’s getting more expensive to utilize PPC”

It’s pretty darn expensive to advertise on TV, and the results are not nearly as potentially measurable in terms of ROI, but the big brands do it. Before your big brands moan about cost per click, they need at the very least to be encouraged to try it on a test trial basis in a test market and view the cost per conversion.

Big brands are so concerned about pure cost data, and in many cases so unsure of possible ROI from online initiatives – especially paid search – that they ignore the real data; the profit based on cost per conversion.

Conclusion

Paid search is only worth investing money in if you get it set-up right and manage it consistently and effectively. In summary at the very least you need:

1.       Search language appropriate keywords carefully divided into targeted adgroups

2.       Search language appropriate ad copy per adgroup to answer to search query intent

3.       Search query appropriate landing pages

4.       Fully measurable analytics (and a benchmark to compare against based on organic traffic alone)

5.       Full management of the account to allow for tactical refinement on an ongoing basis.

If a big brand cannot manage a well considered, created and managed PPC campaign in-house, there are many great vendors out there. A little research and interaction with the online community can lead them in the right direction.

Good PPC’ing! I firmly believe that when conceptualized, created and managed effectively, PPC will be an enormously powerful and effective advertising medium for all brands, especially those with the budgets to gain highly converting positions, and reap the sales.

^1. Big Research

^2. RedCardinal

^3. Enquiro

^4. JP Morgan

^5. SearchEngineJournal (January 2008)

^6. News.com

^7. NetImperative

Laura has worked on big brand and small brand PPC campaigns,

 all with high conversion rates and profit tallies.

She can be reached on laura at semcanada dot org

or you can follow her on Twitter.

Join us at SEMCanada in Calgary in September!

• 64.3% of marketers plan to increase spending on SEM during this year. (B2B Survey)
• North American SEM spending is now projected to grow by at least 36% to $25.2 in the next 4 years. (SEMPO)
• In 2007, 87.4% of SEM spend was captured by paid search (contextual and PPC), Google AdWords being the most popular search advertising program. (SEMPO)

There are many statistics citing the great ROI provided by pay per click campaigns and the fact that ad spend on pay per click (PPC) is likely to resist a coming recession due to performance. Many marketers are truly interested in exploring PPC and contextual paid search, and yet many don’t actually take the final leap. It is this hesitancy that has me somewhat baffled.

This post therefore, is going to focus on SEMI’s version of PPC 101.

PPC In A Nutshell
PPC (pay per click) is a content relevancy focused search advertising model that displays ads based on user data entry to the search field of a search engine in order of ad spend and ad quality (depending on the search engine advertising program).

Advertisers select keywords by entering them into their ad-to-display-for keyword list, and then bid an amount they are willing to pay for the ad to display for each of the keywords in their list. The more competitive the keyword or phrase, the more it is likely to cost on a per click basis.

The ads can be displayed in the search engine itself in the ‘sponsored listings’ page area when someone searches for a list-included keyword:

 (I can’t help giggling at the first Google sponsored listing here…heh!), or on the search engines content network which displays the ads primarily on publisher sites (this is called ‘content matching’ – the content of the ad and the keyword which generated its display is also featured on the page of the publisher web site). The advertiser can choose both or either of these display options, and can then choose which sites they want to include in their content match network – to a point.

The three major search engine advertising platforms are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCentre. All work in a similar manner, though with some fundamental differences. That is for another post. There are also:

• PPC product based search engines like Shopping.com and Shopzilla,
• Service PPCs like TripAdvisor and NexTag, and
• Pay per call engines like Ingenio (who charge advertisers per call generated by the pay per call providers ad).

What is the Objective of the PPC Campaign
It is easy to decide to market online, it is not always that easy to ensure that your objectives are clearly stated to the agency of choice, or even in house. What is this campaign to achieve? What is its purpose? Sounds so silly… no? Dang me if it isn’t one of the biggest hurdles to committing dollars or getting decisions though… SO, is it to:

• Disseminate information and require no further interaction
• Disseminate information and engage the user into an action (such as a download)
• Generate leads (eg, via query form submission)
• Generate brand awareness
• Generate sales (ecommerce)
• Provide customer support
• Support specific offline marketing campaigns
• Support specific emarketing campaigns
• Be a test market for offline marketing campaigns
• Engage internet users for research purposes
• Engage users to generate buzz

Setting up Effective PPC Campaigns
The two real options are very basic:

• to manage it in-house, or
• to outsource.

Out-source management fees range from 5-15% of monthly spend in general. This section will focus on how to set up a campaign in house, which in turn will provide guidance on what to ask and expect of an external agency.

Know your market
Despite what you might think your target market expects or wants, their search behavior might provide different insights. If you have not already done so for natural search optimization, the first step in setting up an effective PPC campaign is to conduct exhaustive keyword research.

Once you have your keyword phrases, you need to categorize them into specific groupings based on search query intent. The rest of the post is going to refer to Google AdWords.

Keyword Grouping
The objective of effective keyword grouping is to ensure that one or more of the keywords utilized in the search query intent is in both the title of your ad as well as in its body to draw the searchers eye to the ad and to imply immediate relevance to the user.

If you are a hotel (for example), group your keywords into primary search query intent categories including:

• Weekend getaways
• Business travel
• Meetings and Events
• Sight-seeing
• Family vacations
• Group travel
• Spa breaks
• Beach Vacations
• Ski Vacations
• Adventure Vacations
• Etc

These primary categories will be your PPC Campaign descriptors.

Then sub-divide your primary categories into sub categories, for example:

• Weekend Getaways
  • Romantic Weekend Getaways
  • Ski Weekend Getaways
• Business Travel
  • Business Free Wifi
  • Business Executive Suites
  • Business Travel Specials
• Meetings And Events
  • Conferences
  • Weddings
  • Conventions
• Family Vacations
  • Kid Friendly Vacations
  • Child Friendly Vacations
  • Family Friendly Vacations
  • Kids Stay Free Vacations
• Group Travel
  • Reunion Hotels
  • Best Group Rate Hotels
• Etc

These sub headings will be the AdGroup headings and will probably provide the initial ad titles. The one caution with hotels is that people looking for accommodation are probably going to be very geo-specific in their search, so the keyword research needs to have provided a a clear understanding of what likely geographic targeting needs to be incorporated in the ad titles and ad copy.

This also depends on the primary objective of the PPC campaign. If the objective is to generate brand awareness, then targeting searches to display the ad for country, provincial (state), and even large metropolitan area searches is worthwhile. If the objective is to generate sales at least cost then targeting the most pre-qualified searchers makes the most sense; so targeting ‘Hotels in Calgary’, ‘Hotels Calgary City Center’, ‘Hotels downtown Calgary’ need to be considered.

Writing AdCopy & A/B Testing
In Google AdWords advertisers are limited to 25 characters including spaces for the title, & 35 characters per line.

The AdCopy needs to reflect the search query language and intent of the searcher as much as possible for usable relevancy association. There should always be at least two ad copy samples for A/B testing, more if possible. Even with extensive research it can be hard to predict what ad language your target market is likely to find the most appealing. The comforting thought is that most (eventually) tend to agree that one ad is more suitable – as seen by their conversion rates.

For example:

• Campaign
  • Family Vacations
• Geotarget
  • Canada
• AdGroup
  • Family Friendly Vacations
• Search term
  • ‘family friendly skiing vacation’
• AdCopy Title (A)
  • Family Friendly Vacation
    • AdCopy Text (A)
      Winter family fun! Ski lessons, hot
      pools, great slopes, great food and…
• AdCopy Title (B)
  • Family Ski Vacation
    • AdCopy Text (B)
      Skiing family fun! Great ski slopes
      Ski lessons, hotpools, service and…

Once you have set up your campaigns and adgroups by keywords, written your AdCopy, and included your preferred display URL (be careful here, the rules are bit sticky), you can verify your final budget settings.

It is usually better to leave keyword and budget setting to the end of a full campaign, prior to going live as you may find while you are subdividing adgroups and campaigns that some keywords or phrases are less or more important than originally thought.

The beauty is that you can set your campaign spend per day, then specify it out according to keywords, display times, automatic optimization and more.

If this sounds like a minefield, it’s not. Once you start working your way through the AdWords screens, it becomes much easier. If you are interested in a walk through, I will have one online within a day or two, but as there are folks out there who know AdWords pretty well, I did not want to jam their blog reading time with screen grabs they have already seen .

Analytics
My humble and heartfelt opinion is this; please don’t even bother to setup a PPC campaign if you are not going to get web analytics data from it. It is so nearly a total waste of time as to be almost funny (sadly so) if you do. Google AdWords provide easy analytics code or implementation, with conversion goals and easy view of data. If you are not entirely sure as to why analytics is highly relevant for PPC campaigns, this post might be of interest.

The type of very basic data you might want to check out include both CTR and conversion rates per keyword, per adgroup and per campaign. For example:

• If CTR is low and conversions are high, reevaluate your AdCopy around the best performing keywords.
• If CTR is high and conversion is low, reevaluate your AdCopy and landing page.

While post click marketing is not your problem, it is nice to do the best you can to maximize efficacy even if there is nothing you can do outside of your remit. Look at all the data and interpret it carefully over a period of successive weeks and months to glean information on trends, influences, working copy, tactical refinement successes and failures. Always keep a record of the AdCopy you did have as when you edit or delete an ad in AdWords, it’s pretty much gone.

Tricky Fun Stuff
Let’s say you had a hotel in Edmonton. Let’s say your keyword research turned up a lot of searches in Edmonton for the term ‘running club edmonton’. You could play on that by developing a tailored landing page for your hotel spa along the following lines:

• Ad Title:
  • Running In Edmonton
• Ad Copy:
  • Get tired? Aching muscles? Massage?
    Great mid-day and evening rates!

The scope of capturing an online market with targeted PPC campaigns is literally infinite. But the campaign must be well conceived, well researched, well managed, and continually refined to generate the highest profit possible.

• ROI = Profit / costs x 100
• Profit = Revenue – Costs

Companies are interested in ROI as it is a percentage return based on capital invested. But Investment in alternative advertising media can by no means provide you with a realistic ROI as the ad spend utilised in the ‘cost’ field does not take into account the product development, manufacturing, distribution and other associated expenses.

Another point to take into consideration is that ‘ROI’ for paid search text ads is often referred to as Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). It would far better be referred to as Return on Ad Investment (ROAI) as opposed to ROAS which can be easily misconstrued to refer to a simple CTR x bid-value amount.

In the world of finance, the lower the ROI the less risky the investment, and the higher the ROI the more risky the investment. This is not true for paid search which depends on bid-for-placements.

The more you bid, the less likely it is that you are risking not getting CTR or conversions. The greater your CTR (in general with a relevant, usable web site) the greater your conversion rate is likely to be. The degree to which revenues increase with cost expenditure is not nearly as linear as one would expect from other marketing media investments due to the auction type nature of these bids, and the immense discrepenacies both in click-through rates and conversion rates across industries simply between position 1 and position 10 in the paid search results.

The following table provides an example that will explain this in a more visual manner. It is hypothetical, but illustrates the point.

The most sensible AdSpend here is not the one which maxes on CTR, nor the one which maxes on gross revenue. Neither is it the option which maxes on ROAI or conversions. It is the one which provides the maximum profit for this particular advertising medium.

This profit can then be applied to the actual costs of product development, production, distribution and associated costs to allow for a true measurement of ROI.

Make your paid search work for you by analysing it in terms of campaign profit. If you do, the results and eventual impact on ROI will be tangible and well worth the ad spend.