St. Louis Pay Per Click

Posts Tagged ‘pay per click’

Have you noticed several of the report options under the Reporting tab have been grayed out, including the Ad Group Performance, Campaign Performance, and Account Performance reports? These reports have now been moved to the Campaigns tab, under the Control panel and library section, where all your reports will now be stored and new versions of these reports can be created.

Creating a New Report

To create a new report, you must first go to the data under the Campaigns tab that you would like to report on and hit the button with the arrow. Make sure you have already chosen the date range that you would like in your report.

This will give you the option of naming your report, choosing the download format, adding segments such as month, day of week, click type, etc. You also have the option of choosing to have the report emailed to a user already specified in the My account tab.

Accessing Reports

Once you have created a new report, they will now be stored in the Control panel and library section.  All of the reports you have created in the past will now be shown here (and are not limited to the last 15 reports created as with the previous interface).

Dimensions

If you are creating reports with large amounts of data from a longer time period, you may need to use the Dimensions tab. (It can be found next to the Ad extensions tab. If it isn’t showing, click the arrow next to the Ad extensions tab and check the box.) If you try to create a report with large amounts of data without using the Dimensions feature, you may get a message that the report cannot be created. By using the Dimensions feature, you can view and segment data across an ad groups, campaign or your entire account.

Recently, Google made the broad match modifier available globally. Now that it is offered in the US, how can you use it in your campaigns? In short, it will allow you to be somewhere in between broad and phrase match with your keywords.  Currently, with broad match Google automatically runs your ads on what it deems “relevant” keywords, even if they aren’t in your actually keyword list.  For example, if you have the broad match keyword red cars, your ad has the potential to show when a user searches for blue cars, because broad match is just that: broad. But, changing all keywords to phrase match makes it nearly impossible to capture every version of a keyword, including plurals, misspellings, and countless other variations.

With modified broad match, you can still get the benefits of your ad showing on variations of your keyword without showing for completely different keywords. So, by adding a “+” in front of one (or many) of your keywords, AdWords will make sure that that keyword is within a user’s search query and only show for that word or a variation of (such as plurals, misspellings or acronyms).  For example, +red cars will ensure that a user searching for blue cars wont trigger your ad, your ad will only show for search terms such as red car, red cars, red vehicle, and red automobile.  And adding the “+” to both keywords, such as +red +car will trigger your ad on keywords such as red sport car and red sports cars.  More examples can be found this blog post from RKG.

This image from the Google AdWords blog post about the new broad match modifier illustrates each match type:

Websites have to accomplish many missions. One of the most important is being effective at getting people to perform. This action (conversion) can be  buying an item, submitting an email address, answering a survey, downloading a report or picking up the phone and giving you business a phone call. Your website conversion rate has a direct effect on your pay per click management campaign.

If a click on an ad costs $5 and you convert 1 out of 10 (conversion rate equal 1/10 or .10, then it costs you $50 per action. If you value that action at more than $50, it makes sense to use PPC in your Internet marketing strategy. Since PPC is an auction system and if the value of the actions are the same amongst competitors, then if you convert at a higher rate than your competitors, then you can bid a higher price per click and still achieve the same or better cost per action (cost per click / conversion rate = cost per action). Being able to bid a higher amount yields a higher position and more clicks which gets you more revenue than your competitors!

The Net Impact is a full service PPC agency, and our consultation and bid management services are designed to assist you in setting up your pay per click search campaigns from start to finish. Contact The Net Impact today to kick off your PPC Campaign!

Google AdWords has many different extensions that allow for increased versatility with your PPC ads.   I have been writing about these extensions in the last few posts, including local extensions, site links, and product extensions.  Google debuted yet another new extension earlier this year that is still in beta testing called ‘Contact Form Extension’. The Contact Form Extension will be an expandable feature in your PPC ad that will allow visitors to fill out a contact form directly from your ad, rather than clicking through to your site.

The following image from PPC Hero provides an example of what the drop-down will look like:

 

The form will allow you to collect information on the visitor, including name, phone number, address, and up to 3 custom questions, all for the price of a click. However, this will only be available to the ad in the top position. PPC Hero was selected to test this feature and explains in detail how it works in this blog post.

There are pros and cons to this new feature.  On the plus side, it can simplify the conversion process. However, you may miss the opportunity to draw visitors in to your landing page and provide additional them with additional information that may lead them down the path to conversion.  And, users might be reluctant to offer up contact information such as their phone number so quickly.  This might also mean an increase in the bid needed to maintain the number one position. For more thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages from ROI Revolution on this new extension, read this article from BGAmedia.  This is only in beta right and the time this feature rolls out to all, there may be some changes so it will be interesting to watch and see the effect this new feature will have.

Back in November, Google AdWords introduced two new features, Ad Sitelinks and Product Extension.  Both are tools that you can use to enhance your PPC ads and direct traffic to internal pages within your site.

With Ad Sitelinks, you can choose internal links to display beneath a new or existing ad in your campaign, up to 4 destination URLs.  Doing so will allow you to pick pages that you would like users to find easily from your PPC ads and direct visitors deeper within your site without having to send all users to the same landing page.

Currently, only some accounts are eligible for this feature, based on the quality of the ads in the account.  To check if this feature is available on your account, look under the Campaign Settings tab under the Ad Extensions section.

The Product Extension feature also allows you to direct traffic to internal pages by displaying images of your product. You can include titles and prices with your images. You are charged the same cost per click as other PPC ads, and are not charged if a user expands the ad to view the images but does not click through to your site.

To set this feature up, you must have the images, titles, and keywords in your Merchant Center account that you would like to use, and then link your Merchant Center account to your AdWords account. This can be done by adding your AdWords customer ID to your Merchant Center account.  Then, go to Campaign Settings and under the Ad Extensions section and select “Use product images and information from my Google Merchant Center Account”.

One of the most important aspects of a successful PPC campaign is choosing your keywords. Choosing the wrong keywords for your campaign can result in users never finding your site or can waste your advertising budget on non-targeted traffic.  But how do you choose your keywords? There are countless tools to estimate search volume and competition of specific keywords.  But, this research from Marketing Sherpa finds that looking at keywords that are already driving traffic and conversions is the best method of determining which keywords to choose.

Understanding the terms that your customers are using is critical to finding the best keywords and this research supports that idea.  Determining the keywords that actual customers are using is critical, and can be done looking at your analytics to determine keywords that are currently directing traffic to your site as well as your site search to find out what visitors are looking for when they are on your site.  Analyzing competitor’s sites is also an important tactic in determining popular industry-specific terms.  Using keyword tools is still one aspect of choosing the right keywords, but should be used in conjuction with many other research methodologies as well.

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, and 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.

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.