St. Louis Pay Per Click

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.

Having the ability to track your pay per click ROI is essential for running an effective advertising campaign. Many advertisers track click-through-rate or conversions to determine a campaign’s effectiveness. While these numbers do assist advertisers in determining which ad groups have the highest performance, there is still a missing link in determining which advertising outlets provide the highest return for overall spend. 

For example, we have seen that Ask sponsored listings tends to generate fewer clicks and a lower amount of conversion than that of Google. To an advertiser, it may appear that Google is the better performing advertising network because it generates more traffic and sales. However, traffic and sales do not necessarily indicate a better overall performance. Ask sponsored listings can generate a large amount of traffic at a lower cost per click. When comparing the overall advertising cost to the average conversion and sales amount, the ROI for Ask can actually prove to greater than that of Google.

Keep in mind that this is only an example. A well-optimized Google AdWords campaign can certainly outperfrom Ask and other search networks. The point is that a campaign with a large amount of traffic and sales does not always indicate high profitability.

For those advertisers wanting to track their ROI, here is a helpful tool from SEOMatric LLC. This PPC ROI Calculator, allows advertisers to enter their total monthly clicks, the average cost per click, the conversion rate, and average buyer purchase amount to reveal an estimated ROI on thier advertising spend. Advertising effectiveness does not need to be a guessing game. This and other ROI calculator tools can help you optimize your advertising spend to get a better Return on Your Investment.

Erica Scharringhausen is a Pay Per Click Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis Firm.

No two pay per click campaigns are created equal. Pay per click account managers pride themselves upon the fact that they create unique, specifically targeted campaigns for each account they manage. So where do the new Google campaign templates come into play? Who will actually use this function…and for what?

The Template Center allows campaign managers to create templates for both keyword-targeted and placement-targeted campaigns. The templates allow you to set the values for the various settings involved in campaign creation (you know: ad groups, ads, keywords, budgets, target languages and countries, and start and end dates). Once created, these settings are automatically applied to each campaign that uses the template. Campaigns can be customized once the template is in place. 

With so many differences between campaigns, including geographic reach, pricing, and budgets, is it realistic to think that effective campaigns can be created through the use of a single template?

To me, the answer is yes. While a template is certainly not sufficient to run an entire, long-term client campaign, the template function does offer some interesting possibilities when it comes to quick and efficient deployment of baseline and test campaigns. The templates allow quick and efficient set up of standard campaigns, with a budget, geographic reach, and other settings that would apply to each test campaign setup. This can help standardize initial testing and experimentation. 

This option is especially appealing to pay per click account managers acquiring clients that have existing pay per click accounts. When working with a new client, it is often hard to prove effectiveness during the beginning stage of the relationship. A repeating question that clients ask all the time is “What did you do for me that I wasn’t doing before?” In order to show the value you provide, it is helpful to run a similar campaign, with minor modifications. In theory, you are showing them that with all else equal, your modifications are improving overall campaign performance. That is if you are successful.

Erica Scharringhausen is a Pay Per Click Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis Firm.

In today’s business environment, conversion tracking is becoming increasingly popular. It is not enough to generate customer leads. You want to convert leads into sales. When measuring the success of pay per click advertising, a great amount of focus goes toward return on investment, generated revenue, and sales/leads conversions to determine which advertisements produce the most revenue for your business. Pay per click advertising can help drive traffic to your business, but you need to be able to track your success. The following are some important areas to consider when setting up conversion tracking.

Landing Page Layout

You cannot track conversion without providing an action for the customer to take (an action you deem a conversion). The landing page that the pay per click ad leads to is one of the most important factors in creating a successful ad. While the ad encourages a potential customer to visit your web site, it is the landing page that encourages potential leads to take the desired action once they arrive at the landing page. A common practice is to place a form, number, link to the contact us form, product the visitor wants, promotion, or some other means for the visitor to connect with your web site and its products or services.

Conversion Page

Equally as important as having a landing page that connects with the customer is having a page that entices the client to engage in your product or service. The best way to track conversion is through actions such as making a purchase, filling out a contact form, signing up for your company’s newsletter, or any other interaction that serves as a lead or sale on your web site.

Utilizing Analytics

In order to determine which conversions came from your pay per click advertisements, you need to have the tools in place to track the source. There are several analytics packages available that can assist you in identifying the source of the conversions you receive. Google AdWords allows pay per click advertisers to track conversion through its online platform. The tracking script is placed on the page that signifies a conversion. Through the Google AdWords platform, you can track the ads and keywords that provide the highest return on your advertising. This will allow you to refine your campaigns and utilize your strongest advertisements. Analytics services outside of the AdWords including Google Analytics, Hitslink, Index Tools, Omniture, and other packages, can also provide you with the tools to determine how you can get the most bang for your buck.

The key is to formulate a plan and then put your plan into action.  In order to develop a successful advertising campaign, you have to be able to track conversion.