All posts in ppc

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.

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!

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.

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.

Google are now including a 4th match type in their search query reports: “Broad Match (Session Based)”. I think it is great to have some reporting about the search history issue so I quickly got to work to see how this match type performed.

A Broad Toad by Pixieslayer on Flickr

A Broad Toad by Pixieslayer on Flickr

I ran a search query report for one of our accounts and then I compared “Broad Match” with “Broad Match (Session Based). Here are my results:

  • Just under 2% of all broad match queries were session based. As speculated in my last post I think this number will depend a lot on your vertical and how much you bid per click.
  • Click through rates for session based broad match are ridiculously high. For the account I tested the average CTR is 64%! This illustrates the importance of having an advert that is different from the competition.
  • The average cost per click is about 10% higher. I think this will be another thing that varies quite a lot depending on the account. For the account I checked the average CPC is normally very close to the CPC bid; I think the cost per click for Session Based Broad Match would be propotionally higher if you have a larger gap between average CPC and max CPC.
  • The conversion rate is 14% lower. O’ dear. And I was going to say that things weren’t as bad as I thought.
  • Because of the higher CPC and the lower conversion rate the cost per conversion is nearly 30% higher. Cost per conversion is a major KPI for this account. For standard broad match keywords it is just under the target figure. For session based broad match it is well over.

Hello, Google? Richard Fergie here. Can I have my account back?

Update: We now have a 15% discount code for the SMX London 2010 event.

For those who couldn’t make it to SMX London I’ve written up my notes from the last 2 days spent at the event.

SMX London 2009

Flickr Image credit: burningmax

I didn’t quite make it to up to my 77 SES London takeaway tips, but overall I felt this was a very useful conference and the audience certainly seemed to appreciate the more advanced approach to the sessions this year.

I saw a tweet from @bgtheory with a link to his article about an email he got saying that one of his clients will be forced to use  the new AdWords interface in 30 days. According to seroundtable 56% of advertisers prefer the old interface and I’d count myself as one of them. People seem to hate it whenever a familiar web interface changes (I’m talking about you, Facebook) so, rather than dislike it because it is new and unfamiliar I thought I’d try and think of some more rational reasons to hate it.

Everyone agrees that getting the account structure right can improve PPC performance and make management a lot easier. When setting up a new account the structure is one of the first things I think about but what is the best way to change the structure of an existing account?

Image by Elsie Esq.

I’ve read a lot about how account structure is important when setting up an account but I haven’t seen anything about the best way to modify and adapt the account structure of an exisiting account.

Last week I asked on Twitter if anyone had any good ideas for a PPC related blog post. @bhartzer replied suggesting I do one about PPC mistakes using his post as inspiration. In the post he shows how many businesses that shouldn’t be were bidding on the keyword “keyword”

I did my own search on the word “keyword” to see if this also occurred in the UK. It does, as you can see from the adverts that were returned. So far, so much a duplication of Bill Hartzer’s post. Then I clicked the Renault advert and was taken straight to the homepage without even being sent to a specific landing page; given the ad text I’d expected to find more information about the £2000 scrap scheme and how to use it to buy a Renault.

One of the most interesting topics talked about at SES London was the problem of conversion attribution. The easiest way to describe it is with an example. Suppose you sell widgets over the internet and that you use AdWords rank well for some organic terms and are also running a radio advert. A customer’s path to conversion might look something like this:

  1. They hear your radio advert
  2. They search on Google and click your PPC advert
  3. At a later date they arrive at your site organically
  4. They buy something from you
From Tobo on Flickr

From Tobo on Flickr

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