Recently in Pay Per Click Advertising Category

MarketingSherpa's Marketing and the Economy Survey shows an overall picture that offline marketing is definitely on the decline and online marketing is on the rise. I want to delve a little deeper into the online marketing trend.

Why are businesses adding more online marketing and reducing offline? Well, I'm a web analyst so my view of this answer may be a little biased. However, when marketing dollars are being cut, it makes the most sense to spend your money where you can definitively measure what you are getting in return. All online marketing can be measured using web analytics tools, whether it's email marketing, banner ads, pay-per-click or anything else. If properly implemented, all of these campaigns can be measured. How, exactly, do you measure the impact a billboard ad has had on your revenue for the year?

Let's look at the top three increasing online marketing items:

Web 2.0

The survey shows that 48% of marketers are adding dollars to their Web 2.0 (social network marketing) budgets. How is that measurable, and what do you get from it? There are many levels of social networking, and each will have its own goal. Check out The 6 Spheres of Social Media Marketing. Here's an example of what happened when our SEO team created a StumbleUpon post for one of our golf clients. On the day of the post, traffic increased 48% above the average daily visits. These visitors had a 45% lower bounce rate than the site as a whole. So not only does the post help our SEO efforts, the post boosted the site activity, and started building relationships with these new visitors.

Paid Search

Paid search has proven to have one of the highest return on ad spend (ROAS) - IF it is done right. We have seen great success stories from our clients with 500%-3500% ROAS. We are also now seeing some interesting trends on how paid search campaigns can help with natural search conversions due to the synergistic effect paid and natural search have together. As my colleague, Brian Carter, mentions in a recent blog post, "When you show both, you make a bigger impact on the buyer, which increases attention and trust, thereby increasing traffic, conversions, conversion rate, decreasing cost per conversion, increasing ROI."

Emailing to House Lists

This option has just as high a percentage increase as did Web 2.0. From my perspective, this is hands down, one of the best returns on spend out there. Judging from the 48% of marketing putting more money into this venue, clearly I'm not alone in this opinion. We have seen time and time again clients getting 1000% or more return on spend. If you train your subscribers well, don't abuse your list, and send quality messages, you won't be disappointed with this decision.

That being said, not all online marketing is increasing.

Emailing to Rented Lists

NOT ALL EMAIL IS CREATED EQUAL! This is why I am not surprised to see 43% of marketers reducing spend here. With more and more companies implementing web analytics, I believe it has shown that many rented lists do not perform as well as we would like. Why spend the money here, when you know your existing list gets a much better response?

Online Display Advertising

43% of survey respondents are reducing spend here as well.  Why?  In general, display ads are more costly than other makreting media, and that drives up the cost per acquisition, and brings down the return on spend.

Every company has a different marketing budget and different goals.  Maybe you are still adamant about sending email through rented lists.  I'm not going to stop you, but I am going to insist that you measure your results.  Look at your conversion rates, cost per lead, return on spend.  The numbers will speak for themselves.  You be the judge of your marketing effors to see which onces give you the best bang for your buck, and then spend more on those efforts.

I do not often enough get an opportunity to collect my thoughts and blog on our company website – but try to make an effort every other full moon or so when I think something is absolutely critical to our industry.  The recent buzz (or lack thereof depending on if you are one that loathes anything Microsoft) has been regarding whether or not Microsoft’s most recent effort at launching a viable search engine is something that the Mountain View Monolith need worry about.  And the short answer to that should be, at least if you are in the Interactive marketing industry, God (or other worshipped deity) I hope so!

Here is a scenario that I am sure is not unique to Fuel Interactive regarding paid search engine marketing: Yahoo provides a pretty good return on ad spend, but not enough volume to make a real difference to your client’s business.  Microsoft/Live.com could not deliver enough traffic to even determine if it might be a viable marketing resource for your client’s business.  The other secondary/tertiary search engines are not even worth you or your client’s time to invest in the allocation of resources to investigate whether or not it might be a viable marketing resource for your client’s business. 

What is left?  The 800 lb Googrilla – which can provide the volume of business necessary to make a difference, but is becoming so hypercompetitive that you cannot afford any inefficiency.  And if you are really trying to deliver market-changing results for your client, elevating the CPC to effectively move the needle absolutely comes into play.  After all, there is only so much optimization you can do before bidding up to garner more impressions across high volume, ultra competitive keywords becomes a reality.

So, will Bing.com be a homerun?  Is it “disruptive” search technology?  Maybe not – but the few searches I have conducted on Bing would indicate the quality of results returned is competitive with what one has come to expect from Google.  I use Google now because I have to – it’s what the majority of the population of Earth uses and it is the only concern our clients have related to their positioning, both paid and organic.  I long for the day where I need to worry about something else.  So count me in to the minority of people who hope Microsoft succeeds with Bing.  Maybe the $100 million ad campaign buys enough market share to make them a viable competitor.  Maybe they will buy Yahoo’s search business before it’s entirely irrelevant.  Having only one player in search is not good for anybody – especially not SEM rockstars like Fuel’s Brian Carter or the agency for which he works.

 Just a brief announcement... because we'll be rolling out a new website and blog in the near future- and most of my blogging these days happens on Search Engine Journal and Search Engine People...

We created a Pay Per Click ROI Calculator right here on the Fuel site to help you anticipate your ROI before starting a PPC campaign, as well as to help you understand how improving the component metrics of ROI could boost it.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Stuart Butler and I were recently interviewed by a reporter for a local dining guide about the latest techniques in web design, pay per click, SEO, social media, and email marketing for restaurants.

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As you may know, I write a PPC column on the well-known industry news site, Search Engine Journal.  Here are some of my recent posts:

4 Reasons Why PPC Is The Best Online Marketing Channel

January 2nd, 2009 by Brian Carter | 26 Comments

What’s the number one reason for PPC’s strong growth as an advertising channel? High ROI.

PPC is one of the most profitable advertising and marketing channels. This view is shared by most online marketers, who in 2007, according to Marketing Sherpa, ranked PPC and email marketing as the two channels with the highest […]

5 Common AdWords Myths Absolutely Destroyed

January 5th, 2009 by Brian Carter | 14 Comments

#1 Myth: AdWords Is Media Placement

This is a misconception of ad agencies and clients who have done more media placement than pay per click. In media placement, you place your ad somewhere for a set fee, and that’s it. We can make analogies between that and pay per click, but it’s not […]

2009: The Year Ahead for PPC and Google AdWords

January 13th, 2009 by Brian Carter | 5 Comments

Advertising dollars are moving from traditional to online. The recession is accelerating this shift. Advertisers want to spend smarter. As more companies use enterprise-level analytics to track ad spend ROI and see what works best, they’ll move from directly-negotiated media placement to AdWords (both search and placement-targeting). AdWords beats other advertising […]

PPC: Is Vertical-Specific Experience Really Necessary?

January 22nd, 2009 by Brian Carter | 1 Comment

George Michie just wrote a really cool blog post about PPC RFP’s (requests for proposal). So I was a list of what should you ask a PPC firm before hiring them. It’s a really authoritative, awesome looking post that I find too intimidating to read completely, but I do like George, and really respect him […]

5 Critical AdWords Reports for Optimal PPC Optimization

January 26th, 2009 by Brian Carter | 4 Comments

1. ROAS reports For Revenue-Based Accounts

For whatever strange reason, AdWords will give you ROAS (return on ad spend) in the Reporting Center, but not in the Campaign Summary interface. If you’re doing lead generation and cost per conversion is your KPI, that’s easier- ads and keywords have that. But if ROAS is your metric […]

Hey AdWords, Do You Offer GeoTARGETING, Or Just GeoSUGGESTION?

February 2nd, 2009 by Brian Carter | 12 Comments

Google shows ads to people outside your geotargeting if they deem the search to be “relevant”.

What? Really?

Yep, I read about this recently and immediately called our AdWords people, and they confirmed it. AdWords parses all searchers’ queries- if a searcher is outside your geotargeting, but their search query appears to be relevant, they […] 

8 Ways Clients Can Help Their PPC Agency Succeed is a new article I wrote on Search Engine Journal- here's an excerpt:

After working with about 100 different interactive clients in various industries over the last five years, I can confidently say… When you work at an agency, there are things clients can do to help you succeed for them... read more

I got a gig writing Pay Per Click blog posts for Search Engine Journal, one of the industry's leading online publications.

Here are some of the recent ones:

Five Critical Pay Per Click Budgeting Problems

"Pay per click budgeting is not a topic I thought you could devote a whole blog post to, when I first started doing PPC in 2004. But I was wrong. Here are the five most important budget-related topics in pay per click advertising..."

Pay Per Click Budget Awesomization: How to Optimize ROI with Graduated Campaign Budgets

"Invest more ad spend in PPC campaigns that produce greater ROI."

PPC TLA’s: WTH are KPI’s?

"For some reason, internet marketing is full of TLA’s – Three Letter Acronyms. And TLA is my favorite TLA. One of those acronyms that frequently furrows brows in the conference rooms is KPIs..."

I spoke at ScarySEO about optimizing your pay per click advertising.  It was October 2008, not back in the 70's as the curtains to the left make it appear.

 The presentation was based on my 5 step process for optimizing anything. 

I created that process by analyzing everything I do to optimize PPC, SEO, social media, my driving, and my wife.

(Ok, no, optimizing my wife didn't work.  My SECOND wife however, is much easier to optimize.  Just kidding.)

Back to the presentation.

The slides are below, from slideshare.net... There's no audio and the slides are just talking points, so let me give you a summary... look below the presentation...

I'll talk about how the 5 Steps of Optimization apply to Pay Per Click in more depth here than I had time for at Scary SEO:

1. Decide On Your Goal

In pay per click, your goal could be as simple as to

• Get Leads
• Get Sales

Those are the most common goals (and the ones that make clients happiest), so let's work with those.

2. Establish a Key Metric

Quantify Your Goals.

• For leads, the best metric is Cost Per Lead (CPL)
• For sales, the best metric is Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)

Note: When AdWords is linked to it, Google Analytics currently shows ROI, while AdWords reports show ROAS (called value/cost).  I mentioned this inconsistency to our AdWords team... :-)

The most critical thing here is to quantify your goal. 

When working with clients, you need to agree with them what success looks like.  You can't keep clients happy or achieve their goals without clarity.  Some clients are easier to get this from than others.

Getting Target Metric Goals:

• Diplomatically push your clients for this.  Ask what their metrics look like for the other advertising channels they use (or consult your analytics coworkers if you're in an agency)
• You may have to wait until the campaign has been running a few months and has been optimized to see what's realistic.
• Ask them if the current pay per click results are satisfactory.
• Every few months, target a better number, and optimize toward it until you reach the asymptotes of awesomeness.

Results suffer whenever you test new keywords, new ads, new geotargets.  This is part of growth.  It's a necessary evil in the process of getting more.  After the new tests have been running a while, you can optimize them and decide if the optimized results are sufficient or if you should kill it. Don't let clients judge the results and kill a test too soon, unless they're absolutely horrible.

There are two phases to growth:

• Expansion
• Consolidation, or Optimization

You must expand (and spend) before you can optimize.  It's difficult to do both at once.  Sometimes clients want to make major changes AND get better results- explain to them that all new ideas are TESTS and take time to optimize.

3. Assess Where You're At (Status)

This means uncovering:

• Business intelligence: what does your client already know from other advertising efforts about the target market and what ad copy works?
• Website status: how good are the conversion events and landing pages?  It's not a bad idea to use web analytics to gauge the conversion rate of the key pages before starting PPC.  I like to see a sales site converting above 1% and lead conversions above 3-5%.  The Eisenbergs and conversion optimization will get you higher, but those are the minimums for PPC success.  Of course, this varies with the niche (cost per click is quite high in some).
• Expertise: if you're doing the PPC campaign yourself, how good are you at PPC?  Do you need outside training or PPC management?

4. Plan Strategies, Tactics, and Route to Your Goal

In pay per click, there has to be a balance between tests and running what already works.  Tests have a cost.  In more mature accounts, we use campaigns to decide how much to spend on proven results-generating adgroups versus new tests (you can only budget at the campaign level).  And sometimes, a client wants to just bang out maximum results for a while, so you do little or no testing.

If your account is new, setting it up properly will get you off on the right foot.  This is critical because poor account performance will be held against you.  In PPC work since 2004, I've seen MANY accounts that were not set up granularly enough and without ad testing.

Some tactics, used too soon, hinder results.  For example, you could get really excited about dayparting or geotargeting, but if you commence this without any historical ONLINE data, you might be missing qualified prospects.  And if you don't get enough data, you can't optimize.

You need to start with

• Good account structure
• Several unique ads per ad group

Don't neglect conversion tracking or not only will you be unable to optimize, I'll turn into the BRULK and hunt you down and growl at you.

5. Let Results Guide Your Progress (Optimize)

Here you use your quantified goal (from steps one and two) to judge the success of your pay per click tests.

This is an endless cycle that takes you back to steps three (status) and four (strategy).

What you see may tell you more about the website's effectiveness, or lack thereof, at converting prospects.  If you didn't get conversion rates before starting PPC, you'll see them now.  If CPL is too high, or ROAS too low, it may be due to a low conversion rate.  

Nonetheless, conversion rate will improve with optimization, because you'll stop sending unqualified prospects (by killing bad keywords) and you'll warm up good prospects more (with better ads).

NOW in order to optimize, you must look granularly at the performance of your ads and keywords.  If you're doing this with sales, you currently have to use AdWords reports to see ROAS. It doesn't show anywhere else.

Which ads and keywords you keep or kill depend on their performance relative to others in the adgroup.

Optimizing is complex, and will require another entire post- I've written about four single-spaced pages on that alone...

Conclusion

But this is enough to make sure you've set up a PPC testing laboratory that will work. 

And with that, you can be confident you'll get better and better results each month.
 

Have you ever found reporting in Google AdWords to be a little limited?  You're not the only one.  While AdWords' reports are pretty good, they're not always extensive and I sometimes hit a wall with what I'm researching.

Thanks to our friends at Google, our team has a new way of going more in depth with our PPC accounts: Google Analytics.  Now, I don't want this to sound like a sales pitch (as fond as I am of Google Analytics).  There are other analytics packages out there that are more powerful.  The reason I like Google Analytics is the ability to link to AdWords and actually use it in AdWords, without opening another window.

Here are three reports in Analytics that can enhance your PPC reporting:

Map Overlay Report (use with Geographic Report)

You can find this report under the Visitors tab.  If you do any GeoTargeting, this is a great report to use.  The Geographic report in AdWords is relatively new and has some shortcomings (e.g., you have to look at data split out by day).  The Map Overlay overcomes these faults by allowing you to set any data range.  From the world view you can drill down to Country, State/Province, and City.  You can look at a variety of different data for each area such as visits, bounce rate, and more.

The downside?  It reports on total traffic and doesn't separate into different traffic sources.

Referring Sites Report (use with Placement Report)

Those of you familiar with analytics packages probably know about referring sites.  These are sites that are giving you traffic.  But, have you ever thought that these would be useful for placements in AdWords?  If you're having trouble finding that next placement or want to know how your PPC placements are doing compared to the rest of the site, this is the report for you.

Keyword Position (use with Keyword Report)

This is a cool little report.  In AdWords, reports give you average position.  In the Keyword Position report you can actually see which ad position generated what amount of traffic for a keyword.  Now when you're planning on setting position preferences, you can take out some of the guesswork.

Anyone else have any tasty AdWords/Analytics tidbits?

There's a very small, simple, yet very important skill needed in PPC.  What is it?

Spelling

Whether it's a keyword, ad copy, URLs, or what, the simple fumble of a few letters can cause major damage to your marketing efforts.

Scenario #1: Misspelled Keywords

By (unintentionally) misspelling a keyword you miss out on traffic.  Yes, you can harness the power of misspelled keywords, but that's not what I'm talking about here.  I'm talking about mistakes in your main set of keywords.  Who's going to search for Myrtle Beach Glof on purpose?

In PPC, not only are you going to loose out on traffic, you're going to pay more.  AdWord's Quality Score is based on the relevance of the keywords, ads and landing pages with a nice mix of CTR, performence history, and a bunch of other stuff thrown in for good measure.  Misspelled keywords are usually going to have a lower relevancy and lower performance then normal keywords, negatively affecting quality score.  If you've got a strong, conscise keyword list, a simple spelling error can cause you to pay more than you should.

Scenario #2: Mispelled Ad Copy

Stupid.  Period.

Scenario #3: Misspelled URLs

This can be broken into too parts.  First, if your Display URL is misspelled, that falls under scenario #2.

Second, if your Destination URL isn't right, you might as well not run the add at all.  This should be a no brainer.  If searchers click on your ad in hopes of having you fufill their innermost desires (or at least their most pressing) and they get an error message, that's like you telling them that they're stupid and you don't care about them.  Maybe that's hyperbole, maybe not.

A simple mistake in your destination URL can screw things up bad.  Not only is that lost revenue, but how does that reflect on your brand?  It gives the cusomers a bad impression.  It's like running a newspaper ad saying that your store is open until 7pm.  When Joe the Shopper strolls down to the store at 5:30 and finds it closed, he's going to feel decieved and it's more than likely going to leave a bad taste in his mouth.

Conclusion

To sum things up: check your spelling!  Not only will you prevent some potentialy costly mistakes, it transfers well into other parts of your life.  Start checking your spelling and your coworkers will stop laughing at you behind their backs after reading your emails.  You know they do...

By the way, did u notise anythin?  I bet it was annoying, huh?