St. Louis Pay Per Click

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.

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.

The last post covered the consideration and purchase stages of the consumer buying cycle. Once the client has moved through these stages, messages should concentrate on retention and company advocacy discussed below.  

Retention/Advocacy

Creating ads for customers at the retention stage means creating reasons for repeat purchases. One way to encourage repeat purchases is advertising complimentary products. With the dog collars example, if a customer just bought a dog collar from your store, it would only make sense that they would be in the market for a dog leash shortly after. Continue reading ‘Pay Per Click Ads For Buying Cycle Stages: Part III’ »

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.

When writing ads for your product or service, it is important to consider the buying process consumers go through when deciding to purchase a product. For instance, a consumer that is in the awareness stage is gathering information and is not necessarily sure what he or she is looking for. In this case, you would use general keywords to capture a wide range of possible consumer searches. On the other hand, if you sell dog collars and you should also be prepared with keywords such as “buy dog collars” to capture consumers in the purchasing stage. There are six steps in the consumer buying cycle: awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. This blog will appear in three parts. Below are some helpful tips for creating targeted ads for consumers at the awareness and interest stages.
 

Awareness/Interest Stages

The awareness/interest stages in the buying process occur when the consumer identifies a need that he or she desires to fulfill. In order to meet this need, the buyer is going to gather information to determine the product or service that will best address his or her need. Consumers today are much more technically savvy, so it is likely that the internet is the first place they will go to gather information. With this in mind, it is important to have a pay per click message that will grab the consumers attention from the beginning. The message at this stage should be informational. Going with the dog collar example, a possible keyword at this stage would be dog collar, with a broad match. This will allow you to capture additional keywords that consumers are searching for at this stage, as well as help to ensure that your ad is more likely to show up.

Once they develop interest in the product or service you sell, they will look for further information on both the products and companies. It is important to give them as much information as possible at this stage as they will compare your company to your competitors. The ad’s landing page should provide the consumer with an overview of your products/services and their features. During this stage, consumers will begin evaluating the information they have gathered. They have information on their top companies and a list of criteria to judge them against.

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. 

Tracking conversions generated by pay per click advertising is getting much easier for strictly e-commerce websites. Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, and other pay per click advertising networks are providing tracking script solutions to advertisers. Advertisers can place source codes in each ads destination url to capture information on click referrers. They can also use tracking scripts provided by the networks themselves or analytics packages they are using, in order to capture the conversion amount that is generated by a click. These two solutions allow advertisers to get a better idea of where the visitors are coming from and what they are buying.

But how do you track orders that are placed outside of the website’s shopping cart?

Many e-commerce sites allow customers to purchase products both online and offline. We know that several measures can be taken to track online conversions, but what about order that are made over the phone? Luckily several methods have been uncovered to assist advertisers in closing the conversion gap. Some of the solutions that advertisers have available to them include:

800 Numbers

Some advertisers are purchasing batches of 800 numbers to assist in tracking phone conversions. The numbers are assigned to individual campaigns, ad groups, and even keywords to track success and overall performance.

Analytics Packages

In addition to purchasing 800 numbers for the company, several analytics programs have been created for this exact purpose. Web-based analytics providers, such as ClickPath, provide phone numbers for a company, both local and 800 numbers, which can be tracked within the analytics platform. These packages offer advertisers the ability to track conversions, conversion rates, and capture information on customers. This call-tracking method can alleviate the work advertisers would have to perform when using their own 800 numbers, making it less necessary to go through the phone bill.

Google AdWords Number Tracking Solution

Google’s AdWords program also makes it possible for advertisers to track their success. Advertisers can assign both local and 800 numbers to campaigns within the AdWords platform. The numbers are free and can be used to track print, radio, and television advertisements. Google provides a reporting function so advertisers can track the traffic that is generated by each number.

Tracking pay per click conversions and overall advertising success can be challenging, especially for companies that allow both online and offline purchases. Even with some of the best analytics programs, information can fall through the cracks. Yet, although there is no one solution that will allow each advertiser to accurately track their pay per click performance, a combination of solutions can help to make the reporting gap smaller.

Consumers spend a large portion of their days texting, emailing, and searching for web pages, directions, phone numbers, movie times, and many other things on their cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices. With consumers becoming more and more accustomed to using mobile devices for internet access and everyday communication, advertisers are finding success in mobile advertising.

How the Google Ads Work

Google AdWords’ mobile ads are text-based ads that appear on mobile websites or when users access the Google search network from a mobile device.  Mobile text-ads follow the same keyword bidding model as standard text-ads, with pricing for a given keyword based on demand for the use of that keyword as a trigger for display of an advertsement. The ad can send users to a mobile website or allow them to connect directly to your company’s phone through a call link that appears in the ad. This is a great way to target your potential customers and promote interaction.

Through the AdWords platform, you can select the carriers you want to display your ads. Ads can appear on all or a select number of mobile carriers, which can assist with targeting. The ads appear on both the search and content networks, increasing visibility of ads on mobile website, and the traffic potential.

For those wondering how to create a mobile website, AdWords helps you create your own ad page. The business pages are free to create and can provide users with basic information including your business address phone and fax numbers, email address and other information about your company and the products and services it provides. In short, you give potential customers your contact information at the exact moment they are able to contact you. Sounds like a great way to connect.

This post is purely informational. This is still a new form of advertising that can prove to be very useful. For more information check out Google AdWords site.