Wordstream.com have created an infographic showing how Google Adwords auctions work. For many, the auction may be a mystery, but this graphic shows quite clearly how it works.
If you have not yet read our PPC book (available from Amazon), you may want to check out Tips 66 – 68 about keeping your Quality Score as high as possible, just for starters. Maintaining your Quality Score could save you a fortune in successful bids for a high ranking, and although there are multiple factors which affect your PPC campaigns, QS is one of those which should be a top priority.
The fact that PPC is now an extremely complex subject that requires time and dedication (Tip 9 in the PPC book) is one of the reasons why involving a specialist/ PPC internet marketing agency with experience should be considered (Tip 100).
However, never put all of your eggs in one basket. PPC can help you to quickly find the search terms and keywords for your on and off page optimisation, link building, social media activity, and more. Understanding how your potential customers and audience search, and which terms trigger a click, can be researched through PPC, and then the results of this research can be deployed in your other internet marketing activities.
Understanding the search queries that Google enters your keywords and phrases into for the auctions is of paramount importance, and for this you should spend as much time as possible studying your analytics. (Tips 78-80) Or your agency should.
This will help to build a picture of the audience with whom you are having maximum success, as well as which long tail terms are leading consumers to you. There may also be unexpected markets for your products which you can remain unaware of if you ignore your analytics and the in-depth information available to you. For instance, once you have set up goals for visitors to your site, you may see results of goal completion from referrals you had not sought nor been aware of.
So, a website, forum, blog, twitter or social media user may be regularly feeding customers to your site who complete an action, such as a purchase or download, from a target market that you had not considered. Harnessing these actions by actively engaging with that market and creating PPC ads specifically for those that complete can help to keep your QS high.
The following infographic will help you to understand Google Adwords auctions and benefit from the simple steps (outlined in the 101 Guide) or suggested/utilised by your agency to ensure Value For Money from your PPC budget.
A recent report by YouGov states that less than a fifth of SMEs using Google Adwords recoup their costs, and the remaining 82% do not appear to know whether they are getting any benefit from PPC or even recovering their ad spend in sales.
One of the problems is undoubtedly that many SMEs use Pay Per Click as a marketing tactic before understanding what needs to be achieved and how to do so. Whilst PPC is a potentially effective strand to any marketing bow, the temptation may be to rush in before fully understanding how the system works, and then it is also undoubtedly too simple to presume that you can use it as a “Set It and Forget It” service.
Yet, PPC is like anything in that it improves the more time you dedicate to it. So, a mere 30 minutes per week to review your campaign and try out new ad ideas and text/copy can pay dividends.
The fact that such a large number of businesses do not appear to be recovering their costs is not reflected here at ClickThrough Marketing amongst our clients. Amy Bott, Head of Paid Search & Affiliates at ClickThrough, stated, “It’s not uncommon to see ROI of three, four or five times spend. For example, one of our larger clients, Norgren, has generated £9 in sales for every £1 spent on PPC. But it’s not just big companies who can benefit. Small companies can also start to see increased returns on their ad spend by adding in keyword negatives, following best practice in account structure, limiting spend on broad match, controlling CPCs and by thinking carefully about keyword selection.”
Even companies who are spending in the tens of pounds rather than the tens of thousands of pounds on PPC can achieve similar results by understanding the mechanisms behind PPC.
In our 101 Guide to PPC we cover many of the issues such as Quality Score, campaigns, ad copy, keywords, relevancy and much more of the essential tips and tricks which will help any SME to ensure a return on the marketing spend for PPC.
This basic understanding of PPC could mean all the difference between throwing money down the drain and increasing online sales. For instance, is your business setting a cap on spending, especially during the hours that your target audience is least likely to be online? Google will happily spend your advertising budget showing ads when the clickthroughs are least likely to result in a sale, so you need to ensure that this does not occur. Low clickthroughs will also affect your Quality Score, which tends to have a knock on effect over time, lowering the likely placement of an ad in the rankings, amongst other undesirable consequences.
In addition, it is important for SMEs to realise that the competition being faced may be amongst the largest corporates, particularly for certain highly desirable terms, and spending your precious budget on these terms is likely to result in lower sales. There is also too little attention paid to making sure that the terms being used lead to the appropriate landing page and a call to action relevant to the ad copy.
Following on from a slew of announcements about Google+ additions, the latest is that the +1 and personal recommendations are to be added to ads on the Google Display network.
Google appear to be throwing pretty much everything behind Google+ and +1s and anyone serious about maximising the return in investment from internet marketing needs to grasp just what the proposed level of integration can mean for even a small company with a small budget. Whilst some features of Google’s repertoire have vanished eg Huddle, far more are being integrated into Google+ features and the +1 theory.
There may seem to be issues with G+, its adoption, the competition etc, but there is little doubt that Google are working to a strategy to harness the power of all the different applications and services into one. After all, we all now the power of the network is the square of the number of members, and Google has both consumers and number of apps to count as members, giving a 3D effect when it comes to ‘power’.
The fact that a +1 for a piece of content reaches across so many different places on Google’s network (G+, search results, search sites, websites, blogs, display ads etc etc) means that you can extend the reach of any single marketing campaign further than could have been dreamed of even a few short years ago.
Should you be adding a +1 button to all of your content? YES! There are many places where Google is doing the work for you, but in all those places where you have control eg your website or blog, you should ensure the +1 button is there for all to click. It also means that you can re-use content across different media, knowing that the clicks will all add together to show your authority, relevance and reach. And we all know that Google looks generously upon the creation of such content and the positive reactions to it!
A search demand gap analysis is an essential part of a search engine marketing audit to check how well your search engine optimisation and/or pay-per-click marketing is working for your company. It will show you the commercial opportunity available from search engine marketing and compare your current performance against this opportunity, so showing sales growth potential. It’s often completed as part of a quarterly or annual review, but due to seasonal fluctuations in search volumes and changes in Google’s ranking approaches and competitor activity it should also be completed more regularly; we suggest monthly.
Here’s an example of a gap analysis. As, you can see it’s based around the main strategic high volume generic for a particular market, in this case related to LCD TVs.
Benefits of a gap analysis
A gap analysis will show you where you are underperforming for particular keyphrases or products and you can then set goals and then brief an agency or colleagues to take actions to improve performance in these areas.
A gap analysis also has the benefit that it enables you to compare performance of your search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing. Since these channels are often treated separately, it helps bring these together in an integrated way to compare their relative performance. For example, in the example above where bounce rates are relatively high or market share is relatively low the cells are shaded in red.
What is a search marketing gap analysis?
A gap analysis is a comparison of the potential visits, leads or sales from searchers arriving on the site against what the company is actually achieving. It should focus on high volume phrases which are typically two to three keyword phrases including brand searches. However, a form of the analysis can also be completed for longer ‘long-tail’ keyphrases made up of more than 4 keywords.
What should you measure for a search gap analysis?
As for the review of the performance of all traffic sources, the main measures you need to look at are traffic volume, quality and cost:
Traffic volume – measured through the number of actual visits from paid and natural search. Actual visits are then compared with potential visits
Traffic quality – measured by bounce rate, lower if the quality is good. Also measured by conversion rate to lead or sale, higher is better.
Traffic value – The value generated through sales or leads can be compared against the cost of search marketing. The revenue per visit can be calculated for each keyphrase and for pay per click can be compared to visitor acquisition costs – amount bid.
These measures are all available from your web analytics system such as Google Analytics from which data is extracted for the analysis.
You should also measure the percentage traffic gap which can be calculated by comparing the number of visits against demand indicated by a keyword research tool. We recommend using the Google Keyword Tool to review demand in a single country. It’s best to select the exact match reporting although it can be worthwhile to select phrase match for a different form of long-tail review.
About the author
Dr Dave Chaffey is Insights Director at ClickThrough Marketing. As Insights Director he’s responsible for the quality of analysis and reporting used to review and improve the performance of clients’ natural and paid search campaigns. He’s also involved in consulting on digital and search strategy for ClickThrough’s clients through analytics-based audits typically using Google Analytics for which he holds the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ).
You can also read his advice on best practice and updates on the latest developments in digital marketing at his Smart Insights Digital Marketing advice site. Dave is a recognised expert in digital marketing, listed in 2004 by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have shaped the future of Marketing. Dave is author of five best-selling business books including Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice and eMarketing eXcellence (with PR Smith). He is also author of the Econsultancy best practice guides to Search Engine Optimisation, Paid Search Marketing, Web site design and Managing Digital Channels. Dave also contributed the foreword to ClickThrough’s first two search engine marketing books.
Often, a little imagination is all that is required to showcase your skills and advance up the career ladder to the job of your dreams.
The Internet has given us chances to do things with our lives that some of us could never have imagined. Here is an example of how thinking out of the box a little can bring to you the job, customers, etc that you and your business need.
Watching this may fire you up to consider creating PPC ads for, hmm let’s see……. maybe your dream client who as yet haven’t realised they need you on board to help their marketing strategy….just a suggestion!
This add-on allows you to track phone call conversions from any source – banners, affiliates, forums, as well as PPC and organic searches. The importance of demonstrating ROI to internet marketing clients can never be under-estimated, particularly during economic rough patches, and this analytics add-on does precisely that.
We have been offering phone call tracking as a free service to clients for some years, but this latest version of the tool adds deeper functionality to enhance the service.
E-consultancy have recently published a very interesting article citing Google Chief Economist Hal Varian stating that research shows that position is not related to conversion rates.
So, whilst you may have staff dedicated to maintaining your position in the PPC SERPs, it could well be shown from this research that they would be better utilised if they focused on other internet marketing strategies.
Sure, being in the top 10, above your competitors, seems to bring in more clicks, but importantly, it does not seem to bring in more conversions. In other words, the position is not related to attracting quality, targeted traffic who will then complete the call for action, be that a purchase, download, sign up etc.
Whilst being in the top 10 rankings, or nowadays the top 20, is still of key importance, where you figure within those top adverts seems to be irrelevant to produce the results you require.
Pay Per Click, although a simple idea in itself, and proven for traffic generation, has now become a complex game. In order to learn how it all works and ensure you get the best bang for your buck, you need to spend many hours experimenting with bids and keywords, monitoring and measuring, and tweaking your campaign for maximum effectiveness and ROI. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, making your budget go that little bit further is going to be a top priority for businesses and a well-managed PPC campaign can do just that.
There are a wide variety of software tools available, both for free and paid, to help you get the most out of your PPC campaign, as well as articles, and consultants offering PPC services.
If you are new to the Pay Per Click game, it is worth considering using a PPC services team to do two things. Firstly, to manage your campaign efficiently, particularly whilst you are a novice in bidding and choosing keywords, optimisation, and conversions, and secondly to help teach you the ins and outs of PPC. Many of those offering PPC services will help to train you so that you will be able to take over the reins at some point if you choose.
You will always know more about your business and customers than anyone else will, but it may be that you are a small organisation or business with insufficient resources to do PPC in-house on a full-time basis. Understanding what is being done on your behalf with Pay Per Click bidding, choice of keywords and phrases, scheduling and more will help you offer insight to your PPC services team that will, in turn, optimise your campaign.
Should you wish to do it yourself in future, it is far better to have a fully functional PPC campaign up and running that is bringing you a high clickthrough rate (CTR), is generating a Return on Investment (ROI), and leads customers to landing pages which are optimised for the purpose than to try to start from scratch and learn as you go along.
Choosing a PPC Services provider can seem a daunting task, but it needn’t be. Make sure that the provider does not tie you into a lengthy (and inevitably expensive) contract, that all your data is your own and can be easily accessed any time you choose, and are PPC and/or Google Adwords professionals.
![What is Google AdWords? [ infographic ]](http://www.wordstream.com/images/what-is-google-adwords.jpg)
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