St. Louis Pay Per Click

According to Google, Quality Score is determined by a variety of factors and that a higher Quality Score will result in higher ad position at a lower cost-per-click.  Clearly Quality Score is a vital component of any successful AdWords campaign.  But, how can you improve it?

 Here are some steps to increase your Quality Score:

1.)  Organize your campaigns and ad groups well.  Make sure your keywords within an ad group are related and relevant to your ads.

2.)  Use negative keywords to increase your CTR and decrease unqualified traffic.

3.)  Bid on your brand to increase CTR since your ad will most likely be relevant to those searching for your brand.

4.) Move underperforming keywords to their own ad group and write new ads for them.

5.) Manage your ad copy so that all ads in an ad group are closely related to the keywords in the ad group.

6.) Test destination URL’s to determine which ads produce the highest CTR.

7.) Test different ads to determine which produce the highest CTR.

8.) Make sure your landing page is relevant to your ad and keywords.

9.) Test different landing pages to determine which produces the highest CTR.

10.) Optimize your landing page, because Google also looks at landing page load time, navigation, links on the page, etc.

Increasing your Quality score is critical if you want to increase ad visibility and decrease your spend at the same time. The most important thing to remember is relevance.  Make sure your keywords, ad copy and landing pages are all relevant to each other.  This will increase both CTR and Quality Score and improve the success of your overall campaign.

Google AdWords allow you to choose how your ads show; you can choose to have all ads within an ad group rotate evenly or let Google optimize by showing the “better performing” ads more often.  But, Google defines “performance” as the ads with the highest CTR.  This makes money for Google, because they are making money every time an ad is clicked, so showing the ads that get clicked the most makes sense. But, what about conversions? You may define “performance” as ads with the highest conversion rate, not ads with the highest CTR.  There are many reasons why you may or may not want to optimize your ads.  Here are a few pros and cons to help you decide:

Even Rotation

Pro: You have control of your ads and define “performance” how you choose.

Pro: You can fully test which ad variations for many factors besides CTR – also for conversion rate, ad text, landing page success and more.

Con: AdWords looks at CTR when determining Quality Score, and a higher Quality Score means better ad position and a lower CPC.

Optimize

Pro: Because AdWords does a great job showing the ads with the highest likelihood of being clicked, you can quickly tell which ad has the best CTR, rather than waiting to see results with even rotation.

Pro: Continually showing the ad with the highest CTR results in a higher Quality Score, which again, means better ad position and a lower CPC.

Con: You may end up spending money on ads that aren’t converting.

The common school of thought is to maintain full control of your ads and the ability to test them by choosing even rotation.  That said, you may choose to start your campaign on optimize to let Google tell you the ad with highest CTR quickly while improving quality score.  Then, with that information you can tweak ads, based on what worked while on the optimized setting, then switch to even rotation to fully test all ad variations.

Earlier this year, Google AdWords added another way to track conversions other than the 1-per-click method.  The many-per-click method allows you to see the overall number of conversions occurring, but may cause some confusion.

First, conversions can be many things besides someone purchasing an item from a site.  You can choose an action you would like to count as a conversion, based on what is important to you.  For example, you can track purchases, form completion, or a certain page view as a conversion.  You can also track more than one of these types of conversions simultaneously.

With the 1-per-click method of tracking conversions, a user is only counted once within a 30 day period.  For example, if a user clicks on your ad, fills out a form and makes a purchase, it only counts as one conversion.  If that same user bookmarks your site, and returns the following week and makes another purchase, it does not count towards the 1-per-click conversion number.  So, within a 30 day window, all conversions one user makes only counts as one conversion.

With the many-per-click method of tracking conversions, every conversion a user makes is counted within a 30 day period.  Using the same example as above, if a user clicks on your ad, fills out a form on your site and makes a purchase, the many-per-click conversions would be two.  If that same user bookmarks your site, and returns the following week and makes another purchase, the number of many-per-click conversions would increase by one.  So, within a 30 day window, all the conversions that user made count, adding up to three many-to-click conversions.

If the number of many-per-click conversions seems too high to be true, it probably is.  There may be other things triggering this conversion, other than the ones you intended.  If a user refreshes the page or hits the back button to continue browsing your site after the conversion was completed, this may lead to an increase in the number of many-per-click conversions.  If a user bookmarks your converting page and returns to it within 30 days, this will also result in a conversion, although no purchase was actually made.  There are some ways to improve your code to prevent some of these issues, click here for more detailed information about how to do this.

If you are unsure about what you’re seeing, it’s always best to do a little research and look into Google Analytics to see if everything is matching up.

Under a new 10 year, $275 million dollar agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo!, Bing will power Yahoo! search and Yahoo! will sell all the search advertising through adCenter. This agreement has yet to be approved through the regulatory system, but is expected to go through in early 2010. After the deal is approved, it still may take months for the transition to occur. However, with this new system, utilizing adCenter in addition to Google AdWords is even more beneficial and will help you expand your target audience. But, learning two PPC platforms and understanding their differences can be tricky. Here is some information on a few of the differences between the two to help you get started.

Search Engine Options
With AdWords, your PPC ads will show up on Google, AOL, Ask, and a few other small search engines, with Google far and away the largest. You can choose however, to show your ads on Google Search only if you choose. With adCenter, ads will show up on both Yahoo! and Bing, and you will not have control as to which search engine your ads appear.

Targeting Options
With AdWords, all targeting options are done at the campaign level. For example, enabling content, targeting time of day, changing bids by time of day or day or the week is all done at the campaign level. However, with adCenter you can choose these targeting options by ad groups.
And, with AdWords, you can only target geographical location, time of day and day of the week. But adCenter allows you to target all of those elements, as well as by gender and by age group.

Ad Types
AdWords allows for text, mobile, video, and image ads. With adCenter only text and mobile ads are available.

Ad Options
In AdWords, you can choose to rotate or optimize the ads within your campaign. adCenter will automatically optimize ads to show the ad with the highest CTR most frequently.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion
With AdWords you can use dynamic keyword insertion in the title of your ad. In adCenter, you can apply this to many more parts of the ads, including the title, the body of the ad and the destination URL based on search queries.

Dynamic Text
In adCenter, you have the ability to use placeholders to change many ads simultaneously. For example, many of your text ads for a hotel include rates that change frequently. Instead of changing each ad manually every time a new nightly special occurs, you can use a placeholder and update all ads at the same time. Click here for instructions on inserting dynamic text into your ads.

Copy Campaigns
You can automatically import your Google AdWords campaign into adCenter. Click here for step-by-step instructions.

adCenter Resources
Brand new information is available on the adCenter fall 2009 upgrade, including a tutorial and feature guide PDF for adCenter. Check out the Microsoft Advertising Community blog for all of this information.

The Geographic Performance Report in Google AdWords allows you to determine how your keywords and ads are doing by location. You can analyze your impressions, clicks, and conversions by their geographic distribution by the account, campaign, and ad group levels.  You can use this report to calculate data on a daily basis by Country, Region, Metro, and City. 

Currently, the report only gathers data on a daily basis.  According to Google, reporting across multiple days would result in an under-representation of impressions. This is because there is a threshold on impressions in the reporting calculations.  But the number of clicks would be accurately counted, resulting in an inflated CTR.

However, due to the large amount of information being compiled in this report you cannot run a report for the current day.  Complete data for a given day isn’t available until 3 PM PST the following day.  To get the daily report for your campaign, wait until after 3 PM the following day and then choose the “Yesterday” option in the “Date Range” drop-down menu.  Click here for step-by-step instructions from Google on how to create the report.

Based on what you see in your report, you may want to separate your campaigns into several smaller campaigns, specifically targeted to different locations.  For example, if clicks from a certain location aren’t converting, you may want to create a specific campaign targeting that location and try a new tactic, or you may want to exclude areas that don’t convert altogether.  On the flip side, you may consider separating top performing locations into their own campaigns.  This way, you can create ads customized to that audience and direct more of your budget towards these higher converting locations.  This report allows you to breakdown your campaigns in a way that will help you fine-tune keywords and ads targeted to a specific location, while making the most of your budget in the locations you want to focus on.

Cost Per Action (CPA), also sometimes referred to as Pay Per Action (PPA), is a way to advertise that allows you to only pay for each conversion instead of paying each time someone clicks on your ad with Pay Per Click (PPC).  An action is determined by the advertiser and is whatever the desired outcome is, for example, it might be making a purchase, filling out a form, taking a survey etc.

CPA allows you to have a little more control of your advertising budget allowing you to only spend money on terms that are driving lucrative traffic to your site.  Since you only pay when certain actions are performed CPA is a low-risk advertising investment.  This allows you to have more control of you ROI (Return On Investment).

To meet your ROI objectives you need to have successful CPA bidding.  There are three ways to do this:

By Hand – Determine your CPA goal and raise and lower your bids in order to reach that goal.

Paid Tools & Service – There is an array of bid management services and tools that will help you meet your ROI goals by automating the bidding service and managing your bids.  This can save you time as well as help you to minimize conversion costs.

Google’s Free Tool – If your account qualifies Google has a free conversion optimization service that you can take advantage of.

Here are a few pros and cons associated with CPA (Cost Per Action) that should be considered before buying into a new advertising plan.

Pros:

-    As an advertiser you can be sure about your investment and ROI.  It is easy to see how effective the CPA is based on the money you are spending versus the money you are making.
-    Can avoid click fraud sometimes found in Pay Per Click advertising.

Cons:
-    You have to have an impressive website and site history in order to be eligible for CPA network membership.
-    You have to get traffic to the CPA offers.
-    It can be difficult to manage and requires good tracking technology.

If you are considering a change in your advertising campaign look at your goals and then consider giving CPA a try.

The last post covered the awareness and interest stages of the consumer buying cycle. Once the client has moved through these stages, they move into the consideration and purchase stages discussed below. 

 Consideration/Purchase

The consideration stage occurs when the consumer is considering the purchase of a product or service. Consumers at this stage have done their research and are ready to determine if the purchase is worth it. It is at this time, that your ads should reflect valuable features and advantages that your product offers, using keywords such as “high quality dog collars.”

When consumers are in the purchase stage of the buying cycle, they know the exact product that they are looking for at that time. It is at this stage that keywords should be targeted directly to a specific product or action the consumer is going to take. For example, if a top seller is your 100% cotton dog collar; your keywords would reflect that search. Action keywords can be good performers as well. For instance, a keyword such as “buy cotton dog collars” can help to speed up the conversion process, appealing to those customers ready to buy. The landing page for this ad would take the consumer directly to the product page to make purchasing easy. Including the price in the text ad can be helpful as well, helping to weed out unqualified clicks from those unwilling to pay that price.

Online advertising is seeing new methods for placing ads within the content of other sites. No I am not talking about Google’s AdSense program, which displays an advertiser’s ad on other sites within Google’s Content Network. I am referring to the in-text form of advertising that allows advertisers to bid on in-text links on other websites. We have all seen the links within blog articles that show a pop up window when they are scrolled over. The in-text form of advertising allows advertisers to bid on keywords that appear on other websites. The difference between this program and the content ads seen on AdSense, is the ads are shown when a visitor scrolls over an in-text ad link, rather than having the ad appear automatically on the page.

One program that offers this type of advertising is Kontera. The company offers in-text advertising for advertisers, through a bidding platform similar to other pay per click advertising programs. The platform gives advertisers control over their keywords, bidding, and ad creative. In text ads are a great way to get your message and products out infront of potential customers at the exact time they are looking for information.

We will be testing out this new form of advertising on one of our sites. Over the next couple of months I will reveal more about our findings.

Advertising on Google AdWords’ Content Network has created mixed emotions among pay per click advertisers. Many have seen their ads receive thousands of impressions, but few clicks. Others have seen hundreds of clicks, but few conversions. With mixed results on the success of content network ads, some advertisers have turned away from advertising on this network. Up until a few months ago, I had similar feelings. With increased concentration on conversion tracking, content network ads offered no real security for overall ad performance. Recently, however, I have seen the possibility of utilizing content network ads as a branding effort that could generate an increase in direct traffic. Below is a discussion of some of the results I have come across.

Looking at Impressions as a Measure of Success

Today’s advertisers place a great deal of importance on leads and click-though-rates to measure the success of their advertising, however, impressions can indicate success as well, and at a lower cost. After recent changes to an internal pay per click campaign, it has become apparent that branded content network ads can assist in generating traffic to a website, without necessarily causing you to pay for clicks.

Method

The goal our campaign was to see if we could increase site traffic to the site at a low cost through branding efforts only (without offers or competitive advantages). We created a content network campaign with a relatively low content network bid of $0.25 per click. The content network ads were geared toward branding, with the company name as the ad title, and a general overview of our services as the description.

The Results

The results of the test have been very encouraging up to this point in time. Our site has seen an increase in direct traffic, with a reasonably low increase in cost. So how are we measuring success? Impressions do not readily lend themselves to tracking as adequately as clicks. However, through our analytics program, our team has been able to identify an increase in direct traffic, through the variables of bookmarking and direct site entry. Comparing stats over a year’s time, we saw an increase in direct traffic during the two months the campaign ran.

Through our testing, we have seen that content network ads can lend themselves nicely as a means to increase brand recognition. Although users did not click on our ads, they were exposed to our brand. Though this is not a sure fire way to increase conversion, it can be a cost effective way to get your company’s name out on the web.

Many advertisers have seen a large increase in their AdWords advertising expenses due to a sudden decrease in quality scores on their keywords. Keywords that once saw low cost-per-clicks and great quality scores have suddenly paused because advertisers can’t afford to pay the minimum bid. With the quality score being one of the largest factors in the minimum bids and ranking of keywords in Google campaigns, many advertisers are wondering “Should I begin looking to a new pay per click network?” While advertising on other networks can help extend the reach of advertising messages and present lower-cost alternatives, abandoning your AdWords account is not necessarily the best answer. There are several factors to consider when trying to improve a keyword’s quality score. Consider the information below when evaluating your Google campaigns.

What Google Looks For

Quality score is a measure of the user experience. Google reviews both the advertiser’s campaigns and landing pages to ensure that they are both of high quality. In measuring quality (according to Google AdWords), Google looks at:

• The keyword’s historical click-through-rate (CTR) on Google
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• Other relevance factors

All of these factors are used to determine the quality score for each keyword within a campaign’s ad group. With these factors in mind, here are some tips to help improve your campaign’s performance.

Relevance

This is one of the most important factors of the user’s experience, and one of the easiest for the advertiser to control. Make sure that the keywords within your ad groups are assigned to a specific landing page for the product or service you are offering. If you are advertising a specific shoe, you don’t send the visitor to the women’s shoes category page.

Ad Content

Make sure that your keywords are mentioned in your ad text. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but many advertisers overlook this when creating their ads. Although a generic ad about the company is great for branding, it doesn’t necessarily your quality score. Assigning a few keywords to each ad makes this task easier.

Original Content

Just as it is important to keep site content updated for SEO purposes, advertisers should keep original content on their site for quality score purposes. Google places a great amount of importance on unique content on a site to help improve the user experience. Although this task may seem time consuming, there are some ways to accomplish this task without a large amount of additional effort.

• Blogs – This is a great way to continue to add fresh content to your site. Having an RSS feed on your blog on your site can create fresh content every time you post.
• Product reviews – Not only are these great for the user experience, this is also a good way to have your visitors provide content for your site.
• Testimonials – These are always great for conversion purposes and can add fresh content at the same time.

 Although there is no sure fire way to guarantee a “great” quality score, the methods discussed above can help you get one step closer. Google is constantly changing the way it judges sites within your network, which makes it hard to keep up with the latest criteria. Just continue to update your site and your content, which helps with SEO too as a bonus.