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Monday, May 14th, 2012
Paid search advertising can be a bit of a minefield – tactics which work on one PPC campaign aren’t always transferrable to another.
Managing profitable pay per click services involves a lot of foresight, analysis, and just a touch of guess-work. This experimentalism is absolutely imperative to ensure your paid ads are displaying to the right people at the right times, and getting the right results. Without experimenting, most PPC strategies will fail. Or, at least, fail to meet their potential.
Google’s always been acutely aware that the more tools it can give to search marketers, the more people are likely to spend on search marketing.
If you can analyse properly – to see where money is best spent and best avoided – you can afford to invest more in paid ads as you know you’re more likely to get the conversions you want.
As such, Google’s AdWords tool has, for some time, given search advertisers ways to project and forecast how a PPC ad may work at both the keyword and ad group level. Now Google’s improved its projection tools, allowing advertisers to forecast simulations at campaign level, too.
The change is designed to give advertisers a way to create reports on potential future campaigns even without the requisite level of data to do so at keyword or ad group level.
The tool allows advertisers to swap variables to check effects – such as lowering all bids by a certain percentage.
The system feeds back on how an advertiser can then use the data on a real campaign – with projections on potential necessary campaign budget and a downloadable summary. An AdWords Editor file is also available showing simulated bid amounts and applicable groups.
The changes have already gone live – check the Opportunities section of AdWords.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Tags: ad group, advertising, adwords, campaign, display, Google, Keywords, Paid Ads, Pay Per Click (PPC), PPC, projection, search marketing, SEM, SEO, simulation, tools
Posted in Pay Per Click Marketing
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Monday, March 19th, 2012
Search engine giant Google is set to change the game for search engine optimisation once again: by penalising sites that are too obviously optimised.
Recent changes to Google’s algorithm have attempted to weed out sites which feature poor content, poor information and poor quality, but rank well because of their SEO measures.
Now, the engine is going a step further: it will downrank pages which are too obviously tweaked for SEO.
The changes should be a bonus for any site which features quality, pertinent content, and a death knell for spam sites set up to farm clicks.
Similarly, the move will also see amateur SEO efforts – which are often based on outdated information, black hat strategies or falsehoods – become less effective, whilst agency-experienced SEO will become more effective and more valuable.
Head of search at Google, Matt Cutts, told delegates at the South by Southwest conference: “The idea is to try to level the playing ground,” he is reported to have said by Search Engine Land.
“We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t do SEO, we handle that,” he said. “And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect.”
The changes have been in the pipeline for some time, but are likely to go public sooner, rather than later, Cutts said.
The announcement comes after Google said it was refocusing its efforts on Semantic Search, to return better search results for mobile and voice queries.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Tags: algorithm, backlinks, changes, Google, Keywords, optimised, SEO, update
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
In any PPC marketing campaign it is important to ensure that your adverts are tested and optimised on a regular basis – according to Search Engine Watch, Bryan Eisenberg once stated that “successful companies run at least 30 tests a month.”
Not all companies will be able to run this many tests each month, but Noran El-Shinnawy has pinpointed six elements that you can focus on testing without a great investment of time.
Here are just a few of the elements she suggested:
Element 1 – Strong Headlines – Usually the first element of a PPC advert that a searcher sees, the headline needs to be strong enough to draw them in.
El-Shinnawy provides an example of a recent test; she writes: “In one recent test, the same exact body and URL of an ad remained the same, but the headline changed from “Does your CTR Suck?” to “Your CTR Sucks.” The result? A 52 per cent increase in click-through rate.”
The example shows that just by making a statement – rather than asking a question – click-through rates can be improved upon.
Element 2 – Include Keywords when Necessary – El-Shinnawy states that Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) can be great when creating PPC adverts, however it shouldn’t be abused.
She writes: “Mirroring keywords in your ads creates a tighter and more relevant search experience and increases your chances of winning more clicks.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Tags: Click Through Rates, Dynamic Keyword Insertion, Keywords, Noran El-Shannawy, PPC, PPC adverts, PPC marketing, Search Engine Watch, testing
Posted in Pay Per Click Marketing
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Thursday, February 9th, 2012
Are you selling products online? Then you should check out Pinterest…. It gives you an opportunity to showcase all of your products, with photos, and Pinterest is fast becoming a buzzword in the social media world. It is driving more traffic to corporate websites than Youtube, Google+ and Linkedin together, so ignore it at your peril.
Why should businesses be interested? Pinterest offers a great chance to link your product photos back to your website, offering another traffic driver to your site. However, it is also social media and – the clue is in the name – the ability to comment on photos and share offers an additional opportunity to engage with users.
By pinning other people’s images on your boards, as well as your own, you can open up the doors for pins (rather like Facebook posts) to be repinned, shared or sent to other users, and also to go viral if an image is particularly good. The images you pin do not necessarily need to be directly related to your brand or products, as you can create multiple boards for different topics. In fact, Pinterest, unlike many other social media sites, puts subjects and topics before people in its search capabilities so you could create an artistic images board, photos of landscapes, funny shop names or anything that will encourage users to find you when searching on a specific topic.
As with all things social media, this is not a static site and requires engagement to reap maximum benefit. This means finding and following users or subjects that are of interest and interacting with those people. Pinterest is very much not about ‘sell, sell, sell’ and anyone pursuing a purely promotional strategy on Pinterest will quickly lose ground. Social media users want engagement, they want conversations, they want dialogue not monologue, they want to be treated as people rather than as a potential customer.
This change in tack for marketing and PR teams has exercised many, who have been slow to realise what social media is and what it most definitely is not. There are few social media tools that work purely as a broadcast channel; yet many companies are still only using their Twitter, Facebook etc accounts simply to put out marketing messages. This works until one person complains on your wall, posts on Twitter that you don’t respond and then others will come out of the woodwork quickly to add their negative comments, whether or not they have any experience of the company, products, brand etc.
Agile responses are required and many social media crises can be avoided by monitoring your socmed accounts and responding promptly to any input, positive or negative. Pinterest gives a gentler arena, particularly whilst it remains new and novel, and is an ideal opportunity for you to use any images you have (don’t forget to also put them on your Flickr account and on your Facebook page) whilst also giving your company the chance to develop a personality through the boards you set up. Allowing your staff to contribute funny pics, or examples of great design, or quirky photos, will help you to attract more followers who will then share your pins on their boards and lead more traffic back to you.
As ever, content is king so choose your images and boards carefully to give the appropriate image of your company. You can optimise your descriptions of your photos with keywords so pick from your keyword list wisely and this should also help the Google and other image search results. Don’t forget to include your brand or product names in the description, and actively follow people so that you can easily engage with a wider audience.
Happy Pinning!
Tags: boards, images, Keywords, optimise, pin, pinning, Pinterest, Social Media, socmed
Posted in Blog, Small Business Resources, Social Media
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Thursday, August 4th, 2011
In PPC marketing there is always an onus placed on getting the most of out of PPC campaigns.
According to an article featured on business2community.com, improving your keyword research is one of the most effective ways to increase the long-term effectiveness of PCC campaigns.
It is important to get a balance between keywords that will bring in a good level of traffic but without being so commonly sought that they’ll be too expensive to rank on.
A number of good sources to consult on good keywords include:
- Free Web-based Keyword Tools – These will provide an insight into the level of opportunity for your specific niche. Some tools will produce more in-depth information about rates of traffic, on a monthly basis, and competitiveness.
- Web Analytics – Consulting the keyword reports provided by an analytics tool will point you in the direction of those keywords that are ‘driving traffic to your site’.
- Search Query Reports – Analysing search query reports will show you which search terms are actually triggering the appearance of your adverts – as well as the ones that aren’t.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Tags: Keywords, PPC, PPC marketing, Web Analytics
Posted in Pay Per Click Marketing
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Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
‘Insurance’ has been found to be the keyword that fetches the highest price per click in Google AdWords PPC marketing, according to insurancejournal.com.
Word Stream, based in Boston, who conducted the study, found that 24 per cent of the most expensive keywords related to the term – including any search phrase containing the word insurance.
The findings also found that a staggering 97 per cent of the revenue made by Google came through advertising on its sites – which over the last four quarters amounts to $32.2 billion.
‘Loans’, ‘Mortgage’, ‘Attorney’ and ‘Credit’ were the other keyword categories that rounded out the top five on the list.
Chief technology officer and founder of Word Stream, Larry Kim, stated that the companies with a higher level of lifetime customer value were represented more in the study’s results.
Keywords that feature in the most competitive categories have been known to make up to $50 per click.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Tags: Ad words, Google, Insurance, Keywords
Posted in Pay Per Click Marketing
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Thursday, July 7th, 2011
A new study on tails for search engine keywords suggests shorter phrases may mean you miss vital sections of potential customers.
Chikita Insights looked at the average number of words used by searchers on a range of search engines.
General SEO practice dictates it’s usually better to aim for short-tail keywords – snappy phrases that use two or three words to sum up what a user might search for.
But this could mean your pages don’t rank for certain search users – mainly those who are less internet-savvy or confident online.
The study found AOL users typed around 4.17 words per search, with Ask users using 4.74 words.
However, when Chikita looked at searches of eight words or more, they found almost 15% of Ask users were writing almost-complete sentences to search, compared to 8.38% of AOL searches hitting eight words or more.
From the research, it suggests that using short-tails will help improve Google page ranks, but could mean you miss out on users of AOL and Ask – an audience which may be particularly important if you’re trying to rank your pages for products suited to older people.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Tags: AOL, Ask, Keywords, SEO, short-tail
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
We all know that people like to use the search engines to get answers to questions, but when promoting our sites, creating content and so on, how do we know what questions they might be asking in their search queries?
Well, look no further than the extremely useful Wordtracker question generator tool
Let’s try some examples:
Internet marketing – of course people want to know what it is, but look at some of the other questions asked that you could create content about…
SEO – what does it stand for and what is SEO come at the top but there are plenty of opportunities to incorporate some of these questions into your page content and optimisation.
Swine flu – pick an item in the news and you get some great ideas for topical content.
Give it a go!
Tags: content creation, Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, search queries, SEO, wordtracker
Posted in Content, Keywords, SEO, Small Business Resources, Tips & Tricks
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Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
Here’s an easy one for you to do.
Open your Analytics package, whether that is Google, getclicky or another, and look at what keywords and phrases people search on to come to your site.
What you are looking for is not the single keywords but the modifiers you might not have noticed previously. This can be anything like geolocators such as the name of the town or county you are based in eg ‘plumber London’ rather than just plumber, colours eg ‘red hat’ rather than just ‘hat’, ‘cheap TV’ rather than just TV, and so on.
Now look at the pages where these are driving traffic to. There are always ways to increase your rankings on the search engines by moving these modifiers into more obvious places where the search engines can take more notice of them.
Page titles, H1 headings, alt img tags, in your copy and so on.
A few minor tweaks with these modifiers can lead the search engines more readily to your pages.
Easy!
Tags: Keywords, modifiers
Posted in Content, Keywords, Web Analytics
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