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!

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

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!

• 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.