Recently in Pay Per Click Advertising Category

    Facebook has been undergoing some big changes in the past year. You are no longer a 'fan' of a page, you simply 'like' the page. The pages themselves are getting a slight make-over; reducing the size of the tabs to give it a cleaner look, as well as removing the side boxes, which provides the administrator less opportunity for personalization. Let's not forget Facebook's newest addition to rival FourSquare, Facebook Places. The app essentially works the exact same way, except you use it through Facebook. Even the Facebook Places logo seems to be taking a dig at foursquare...(notice the number 4 skillfully in place)
Also, photo album browsing is now done in a single page, much like Google's new image gallery is fashioned.

    From Facebook's humble beginnings as a college networking site, in 6 short years it has become one of the most widely used websites in the world. In order to stay ahead of the curve, constant changes are necessary. Facebook is now not only seen as a college kids social network, but as an extremely valuable marketing tool for any tech savvy business.

    By having a simple (and not to mention free) fan page for your business, you are able to get a sample of your target demographic and broadcast to them directly, providing some of the most qualified marketing that you could ask for. Are you a jeweler who is having a special sale on solitaire diamond rings? You are able to target single males from 20yrs - 40yrs. Try doing that with a bill board.

    Although the Facebook account and fan page are free, one way to drive more qualified traffic or 'likes' to your page is by paid Facebook advertising. Facebook PPC works the same way as Google PPC in that you only pay if your ad is clicked. The Facebook ads however can be very specifically targeted due to the fact that every Facebook user has a unique profile. Some ways to create a successful Facebook ad are:

• Know your demographic and target it.
• Use relevant photographs.
• Create many ads and test to find best performing ad.
• General ads tend to work best. I.e. "Click 'Like' if you enjoy shopping" vs "Click 'Like' if you enjoy shopping at the Midtown Mall".

    Businesses can target their audience like never before to ensure that the right message goes to the right consumer. They can offer discounts to promote new business, and specials to those who are returning customers. Having a Facebook fan page these days is just about as valuable as having a page on the web. Some businesses opt for strictly the Facebook page, completely bypassing the domain page all together. After all, Facebook is free and more than likely, it is your customers home page already.

Product Extensions

We all know buyers love reviews and ratings.  It's the behavior that drives social proof, that when making a decision, people tend to rely on the wisdom of the masses.  eBay led the trend of seller ratings and many companies have followed suit.  What if you could harness that influence in a pay per click ad?  Advertising not only your product but your seller rating?  With AdWords product extensions, you can.

To be eligible for seller ratings in your ads, you'll need a few things:

• A Google Merchant Center account rated in Google Product search
• Four or more stars
• At least 30 reviews

Now, product extensions are more than just ratings.  After linking your Google Merchant Account to your AdWords account and activating product extensions, your ads could show a variety of products for sale.  Imagine having your products, complete with price point and links, on the front page of Google.  The click through rate and conversion rate benefit is tremendous.

If there's a hot item in your store or you're looking to offload something quick, you can even give certain products heavier weight on certain queries.

For more uses of Google Ad Extensions, look out for the other posts in our series:

• 4 Tactics to Immediately Improve Your CTR - Part 1 - Location Extensions
• 4 Tactics to Immediately Improve Your CTR - Part 2 - Phone Extensions
• 4 Tactics to Immediately Improve Your CTR - Part 4 - Sitelinks Extensions

Phone Extensions

Welcome to the second post in our series about how to leverage Google's Ad Extensions to improve CTR.  Last time we talked about location extensions.  In this post we'll cover phone extensions.

There are two main ways to utilize phone sitelinks:

1. Increase phone calls
2. Click to call on mobile devices

Increase Phone Calls

There are some industries that are still driven by phone calls.  Their customers are more likely to pick up the phone and call to make a purchase than purchase online.  An example we often deal with is golf packages.  Golf packages are complicated.  The coordination of multiple tee times, a place to stay, and getting the best deal can be difficult to do online.  Calling and speaking to a real person cuts down on complication and customers feel better talking to someone who knows their way around the area.  In this example, why bother sending that potential customer to your site when you know they will probably call anyway?  Phone extensions allow you to remove a step in the purchase cycle.

Click to Call

If you keep up with consumer trends, you're sure to know that now, more than ever, your customers are using their mobile phones to access the web.  AdWords has offered mobile ads for some time, but the space for ad copy is limited.  Now, with the advent of smart phones with full browsers, you can use the phone extension as a click to call feature.  Pair that with some kind of call tracking service, and you open up your PPC campaigns to new possibilities.

For more uses of Google Ad Extensions, look out for the other posts in our series:

• 4 Tactics to Immediately Improve Your CTR - Part 1 - Location Extensions
• 4 Tactics to Immediately Improve Your CTR - Part 3 - Product Extensions
• 4 Tactics to Immediately Improve Your CTR - Part 4 - Sitelinks Extensions

Google AdWords recently announced an update to their terms and conditions that will enforce more transparency in third party reporting.  What this means is that any company who manages your AdWords account on your behalf, whether it be an agency or a freelancer, is required to give you at least the following information: impressions, clicks, and spend.

What Google is trying to do is cut down on companies who say something like "Just give us the money and we'll handle it".  While this may work if you're hiring the mob to whack someone, it doesn't work when you have full right to see how your campaigns are performing.  There are more shady compaines out there that will take more than their fair share of your budget, or just set your campaigns and forget them.

Part of this is Google's own self-preservation.  When someone hires an agency that doesn't give full disclosure and the campaigns don't perform well, it reflects poorly on Google.  You may blame Google for the bad performance when it was, in fact, shoddy campaign management.  That's not what Google wants.  They want you to be happy and spend money which means they'll do whatever they can to make sure your campaigns do well.

Fortunately, we at Fuel Interactive offered full disclosure before Google decided it was necessary.  Our PPC reports are chock full of information including a full look at all important metrics from campaign, ad, and keyword levels.  We feel that by offering clients a 360 degree view of their campaigns, not only does it build trust and good rapport, it keeps us accountable and doing our best.  If your campaigns aren't performing well, we'll let you know that too, and work with you to develop better solutions.  Is it easier to take your money and run? Yes, but we don't just want your money, we want your business.  That means building a relationship.  And what's the foundation of any good relationship?  Trust.

In recent months, Google has rolled out some great tools to help advertisers immediately improve their CTR: ad extensions.  These ad extensions get tacked on to a high ranking ad and give searchers more options than a normal text ad.  By utilizing these extensions, you can attract more and better qualified searchers.

Location Extensions

Location extensions allow an advertiser to include an address in their standard text ad.  You can manually add an address or, if you use Google Places, link your Places address to your ad.  This extension is indispensible for businesses where location and directions can be a key selling point.  One of the main industries we service is the hotel/travel industry.  Here's a look at the local extension in action for the Hudson Hotel in New York City:

Notice the search results.  They own the results page for their brand in both paid and natural search.  The PPC ad with location extension, Google Places result, and two natural results create a synergy that shows a searcher that this company means business.

For more uses of Google Ad Extensions, look out for the other posts in our series:

• 4 Tactics to Immediately Improve Your CTR - Part 2 - Phone Extensions
• 4 Tactics to Immediately Improve Your CTR - Part 3 - Product Extensions
• 4 Tactics to Immediately Improve Your CTR - Part 4 - Sitelinks Extensions

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 […]