As the paid search industry has evolved from the days of goto.com to Overture to Yahoo and the rise of Google Adwords all sorts of search engine marketing strategies have been suggested and debated. Bid management, writing effective ad copy and day parting are just a few worthy of mention. Yet among all of these tactics the one most fundamental of concepts is time and again overlooked, conversion tracking. Let this then be just a friendly reminder to track your campaign's target conversions and more specifically, all conversions.
A great example of the importance of tracking all available actions (and not just the most desired) is in one of Rock Coast Media's present campaigns. After a substantial period of time working through numerous technical challenges we were finally able to track call center sales in addition to just search driven online sales. All along we had some theories about the value of these calls but we were never sure...the result, over 40% of our sales were still over the phone. Clearly these numbers have substantially impacted the campaign's bottom line and our overall strategy.
Yes, the holidays are coming soon, 2008 planning is in crunch time and things in general are crazy. Hence, just this friendly reminder to review all of the available actions in your campaign and make sure they are properly tracked.
An often overlooked aspect of Pay-per-Click Advertising, targeted landing pages can have a significant impact on conversion rate. Why? It's the first page a visitor sees after clicking your ad, can be as relevant and granular to a search term as desired, and has the ability to give the customer exactly what they're looking for. Moreover, search engines favor campaigns whose landing pages are highly relevant to their ad groups. As Jennifer Laycock pointed out in her recent blog, (http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/five-common-paid-search-mistakes-that-ca.php) "Microsoft and Google both look at an ad's landing page as part of their determination of what an ad will cost per click. If the landing page doesn't match up with the keywords from a user's search, the cost per click needed to rank well goes up." So, what are some elements that help make a good landing page? Here are a few things to keep in mind when designing your PPC Campaign landing pages:
1. Does your Landing Page support your ad? If the copy in your ad is focused on running shoes and the landing page is about running clothes and accessories, you are requiring visitors to search for information that you've already advertised to them was immediately accessible. In many cases, not only are you distracting the visitor from their initial focus, but you may be turning them off enough they leave your site completely.
2. Does your Landing Page match your call to action? If you are promoting "buy now" in your ad copy, a visitor will expect to land on a page where they can make a purchase. Likewise, if you are advertising "learn more" or "get more information," the user should be brought to a page where they will find exactly that. Make sure your landing page delivers on the expectations set in your ads.
3. Does your Landing Page focus on one specific action? Whether it's signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or requesting more information, everything on your landing page should be focused around this one goal. Keep distracting links that take the visitor away from this path to a minimum, shorten text to get straight to the point, and minimize the number of clicks a user must make to reach the end goal.
4. Does your Landing Page look like the rest of your site? This is not to say that the landing page cannot deviate at all from your website, but there is something to be said about keeping logos, colors, and branding in place. This builds confidence with the customer and maintains the company image that customers have come to expect.
If your goal is to increase conversion rate, creating targeted landing pages is a valuable tool which shouldn’t be overlooked. Keep the above considerations in mind, and be sure to have clear goals about what other elements you will be testing. Most importantly, remember that determining the best landing page is a process, possibly requiring several rounds of revisions to determine what factors work best together. Good luck!
Every week, I read another warning from search marketers about various algorithm changes in the engines. Although these changes can have very little impact on some of our PPC campaigns, they can cause more pain in others.
Google's expanded broad match has been a big topic for a while now. Among all the algorithm changes search marketers have to deal with, issues with expanded broad matching seem to have caused the most problems, and often some of the most challenging.
Earlier this year, one of my campaigns suddenly started to decline in efficiency, as early as the end of January/early Feb (without making any drastic changes to the account). After digging into some data, I noticed that the majority of the decline was coming from rising CPC's in Adwords. When looking into it further with Google, I learned they rolled out a more "robust" expanded broad match at that time and knew right away this was effecting my ads. Sure enough, although I had very targeted creative in my campaign, certain keywords were triggering ads that did not match up with some of the specific search queries users were typing in (many of which weren't even in my keyword list).
Google's recommendation was to change all of my broad match types to either exact or phrase and add more negatives to the account. At first I was skeptical (and a bit freaked out), as I was concerned my traffic volume would significantly decrease. However, after changing match types and conducting a couple rounds of keyword research to capture all the important variations - the campaign was performing better than ever. After a couple of months, volume picked right back up to where it was before the change, with larger returns. Nowadays, I'm more aware of assessing the vertical, as well as keyword variations that "could" trigger my ads, when considering launching terms on broad match.
Another challenge - the recent algorithm change for achieving top positions above Google search results, which rolled out in August. With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, Google will now consider your maximum CPC bid (which you control) for achieving top placement - http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=72975. Before this change rolled out, I didn't expect this to effect our campaigns much. However (sigh), at the beginning of August, one of our accounts experienced some ups and downs, predominantly due to increased CPC's on a handful of our most competitive terms. Sure enough, these terms were victims of the new change; we quickly put forth a new bidding strategy for these terms in an effort to combat the issue, and the campaign is performing efficiently again.
These are just a couple of the algorithm challenges search marketers have to constantly keep up with on a day to day basis. Although these changes can be challenging and more often frustrating, it keeps us on our toes... and keeps our jobs interesting!
As an SEO consultant, I have been asked on more than one occasion, is there a way to combine traditional SEO practices and pay per click advertising into one bundled package for optimal results? I am always delighted to provide the answer to that question. Absolutely YES! Yahoo has a program called Search Submit Express. The way the program works is for a site owner to set up an account with Yahoo and pay a nominal value to register a URL in the program. You then pay $0.30 cents per transaction each time a user clicks on your web site in the Yahoo Search Engine Results Page.
Now the question that generally is asked to me following that explanation is, how is this any better than pure PPC? The answer to that is rather simple. In traditional PPC, you may pay much less, $0.05 per click, or you could pay much more (in some cases $30 per click or more). Moreover, in a PPC campaign you select the keywords to go after and need to manage the account very closely. In the Search Submit Express program, you do not select your keywords; rather, your site comes up for the same terms it should come up for based on your SEO efforts. However, being a part of the aforementioned program your ranking is theorized to increase from its natural position in the SERPs to a higher position.
What is the gist of this program? You still need to use link building, content optimizing, title and Meta tags optimization and other forms of search engine optimization. However, the program will enhance those rankings which look natural to the user. All the while, you pay only a fraction of what many PPC programs might cost, and eliminate the stigma attached to paying your way into the engines that many searchers have.
