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Archive for the ‘ppc’ Category

Top 10 tips & things you need to know about AdWords Remarketing

Posted on August 17th, 2010 by Rob Hillyard

This is a guest post from Rob Hillyard at Return on Digital.

AdWords Remarketing

  1. Create a brand new campaign for Remarketing. This will enable you to monitor how everything is doing much easier than running it within an existing campaign.
  2. You need at least 500 people in your target list before Google will start to show your ads. Depending on how much traffic your site gets and who you are targeting, it could take a couple of days before you see any traffic.
  3. Image ads work best. Make sure you include all the possible image sizes to allow your ads to receive the largest amount of impressions possible.
  4. Use a different message than your standard ads to bring the users back to your site. This is your second chance to convert the visitor into a customer. Special offers / discounts work well.
  5. Continue Reading »

The Value of AdWords Brand Bidding

Posted on May 25th, 2010 by Richard Fergie

In my last post I talked about a method for testing the value of using AdWords on your brand.

The results are now in:

  • Average Hourly Revenue from brand keywords when Running AdWords: £3471
  • Average Hourly Revenue from brand keywords without AdWords: £3278
  • Average Hourly Cost of brand keywords: £0.86

WIN!

Methodology

Traffic in this account varies quite a lot depending on the day of the week so I chose to segment by hour rather than day of the week. I wanted to keep the slices as fine as possible to reduce the variation caused by the time of day so I used the following day parting scheme:

I waited a month before analysing the data; for this account a month is plenty of time for the result to be statistically significant.

To get the information I needed I opened the Total Revenue part of the Ecommerce Report in Google Analytics.

After exporting the information to Excel I could easily find the averages that I needed. To make the test as fair as possible I only looked at the hours between 1600 and midnight. This may mean that my results are invalid during the rest of the day

PPC Ad Quality – Richard Fergie Presentation from SMX London

Posted on May 17th, 2010 by Kevin Gibbons

Richard Fergie has just presented at SMX Advanced London on PPC Ad Quality. Here is the presentation:
PPC Ad Quality – SMX London 2010 by Richard Fergie

For more coverage of the SMX London event, follow @kevgibbo.

12 Blockbuster #seofilms & #ppcfilms on Twitter

Posted on February 25th, 2010 by Kevin Gibbons

A new craze has been sweeping Twitter during the last couple of days, with hundreds of suggestions for #seofilms and #ppcfilms. This has been so popular it even managed to make it as a Twitter trending topic!

I’ve picked out some of the best ones here:

SEOfilms 1
Continue Reading »

PPC for the iPhone

Posted on January 19th, 2010 by Richard Fergie

I don’t have an iPhone. Most of the SEM community are early adopters so many of you will already be using smart phones and many of you will already be aware of what I am about to tell you. I’ll put the important information in bold just here so that it is easy to spot:

When searching on Google using the iPhone…

  • There are only 2 sponsored results above the organic listings
  • The remaining results appear right at the bottom of the page NOT to the side
  • There are only 5 ad slots available

Google results on the iPhone - Top of the page

Google Results on the iPhone - Bottom

Continue Reading »

The 12 Days of Christmas – SEO Agency Edition

Posted on December 22nd, 2009 by Kevin Gibbons

Christmas isn’t Christmas without someone butchering a much-loved song to make a marketing point and this year it’s our turn. Brace yourselves for the SEOptimise Twelve Days of Christmas Special…
12 Days of Christmas

Image credit: krisdecurtis

Continue Reading »

Awesome AdWords Flowchart to Check PPC Performance

Posted on November 25th, 2009 by Richard Fergie

A few weeks ago I did a training course for a client who is running their own lead generation campaign in AdWords. In my experience, clients want two things from lead generation campaigns:

  1. More leads
  2. A lower cost per lead.

AdWords makes it very easy to report on these metrics but what AdWords beginners often struggle with is how to change them. I made them a flow chart to show what changes they could make, and how these changes effect the other metrics:

This is pretty hard to explain if you cant see it. Sorry blind guy :-(

Click the picture for a bigger version

I’m sure that if you are an AdWords guru then you’ll be able to draw a lot more lines on the chart but I think I’ve covered the most important stuff.

Usage Example

  • Suppose you want to improve (reduce) the cost per conversion.
  • Following the arrows backwards shows that you can either improve the conversion rate or reduce the average CPC.
  • Going back another level tells you that the landing page and the ad text influence the conversion rate so you can change one or both of these.
  • Alternatively you can reduce the average CPC either by reducing the CPC bid or by improving the quality score black box.

7 Reasons Why You Need to Deal With Search Engine Marketing Change

Posted on November 22nd, 2009 by Kevin Gibbons

Around 5 years ago I read the book Who Moved my Cheese. It’s a very simple, short story about the different methods of dealing with change. I’ve recently re-read this, (it only takes about an hour so I’d definitely recommend reading if you haven’t already) – but I realised that there’s a lot which can be applied to day-to-day life in search marketing.

Cheese
Image Credit: Flickr

They say an internet year is the equalivent to 7 normal years, I’m sure a search engine marketing year may be more! So basically if you don’t like change – you’re probably in the wrong job! Continue Reading »

Using Xenu Link Sleuth to Find Broken Landing Pages

Posted on November 13th, 2009 by Richard Fergie

We recently took over managing a large PPC account. After checking the changes I was making Google kept giving me disapproving looks because of landing page errors. I wasn’t changing landing pages; I was trying to improve the account structure.

How could I easily and quickly find all the pages that were 404ing?

1. Download Xenu Link Sleuth

SEOs love Xenu link for finding broken links by asking it to crawl the whole site. We won’t need to visit every page on a site but we do want an automated way to check if a page exists or not. Download Xenu here. Continue Reading »

What do you want from your online efforts?

Posted on October 19th, 2009 by Stuart Tofts

If you’re about to embark on an online marketing campaign, have you actually thought about what you want to achieve?

Last week, I was reading Patricio Robles’ excellent article 10 reasons people criticise SEO. Among the many comments left on the post was one suggesting that many clients don’t really know what it is they want to achieve from search engine optimisation before they start.

I think this is surprisingly true. At SEOptimise, we always encourage our clients to outline what they would consider to be success, to make sure we’re targeting our efforts. Not everyone’s goal is a straightforward commercial one.

Surprisingly often, they don’t really know and SEO is now just one more aspect of online marketing. Many organisations dutifully sign up and spend a great deal of cash of an array of web-based promotional efforts without a clear picture of what they want to achieve.

Considering how easy it is to analyse and measure online marketing success, this is an inexplicable waste of money.

More sales

This is the most obvious reason for any online marketing effort – to increase traffic to a commercial website in order to increase sales; to boost a brand’s reputation and mindshare in order to increase sales; and to encourage customers to return and make further purchases.

Continue Reading »