All posts in ppc

I have been working as a full time SEO Exec for just about a year now and a few things have become apparent in that time, most notably that SEOs love tools and are always on the lookout for that elusive competitive advantage to give them a ranking edge. So it strikes me as odd that every agency already has access to a free tool that will (amongst other things) get them high quality links, improve their keyword research, increase their PPC CTRs and conversion rates and keep their clients happy and informed. But they very rarely use it to its full potential.

I recently read an AdWords Remarketing tips post which made me think of a few ways to improve your AdWords Remarketing campaigns by introducing a delay between when a person visits your site and when you start showing adverts to them.

Image from Stuck in Customs on Flickr

Last year I made 10 predictions for PPC in 2010. I got a few of the more obvious things right, and few things wrong and I completely failed to predict some quite important changes. Here’s how I did:

Image by Westside Shooter.

Google Instant is the talk of the town not only in the SEO industry. While some people still hope SEO will go away most experts agree that SEO is either just changing a bit or now more important than ever due to the recent changes. So I won’t list most of the usual “SEO is not dead” posts here as I expect you to know that. I’ll focus on what the instant search results will mean for SEO, SEM and analytics in reality.

Check out the following 40 Google Instant SEO, SEM & analytics resources list. Btw. The last item is probably the best one.

Everyone is talking about Google Instant; the new way for Google to display results.

Image from Zenera on Flickr

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.

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

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.

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

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

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →