Archive for November, 2009

The Key to Effective PPC Campaigns

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

SEO Professionals are always looking to capture a valuable and relevant click throughout their pay-per-click campaign. Here are five ways to help target those all-important searchers through compelling and effective ad copy.

1. Utilize Your Product’s Uniqueness – Most companies already know what separates them from their competitors. For most, your company has already completed hours of market research, so you should use this information in your copy. For example, if you have a Volvo dealership, capitalize on the safety aspect of your brand; if you have a Subaru dealership, then you could target “bad weather driving.”

2. Turn a Feature into a Benefit – Features are easily identifiable – they are the adjectives of a product. “Stronger abs,” “anti-lock brakes,” and “diabetes supply home delivery” are all valuable features, but you must draw attention to the fact that they will also make you more attractive, keep your child safe, and be more efficient by saving you time.

3. Use Credibility Words – “Guaranteed,” “Authorized Reseller,” “Certified,” “Bonded,” and “Secure” are just a few examples. With the intense competition and overwhelming number of ads that most consumers are bombarded with in the search space, many are drawn towards an ad that provides them some peace of mind about their choice to make that click.

4. Include Keywords in Your Ads – With the flexibility of 25 campaigns per account and 100 ad groups per campaign, make sure to segment out your keywords into lists that are associated with as few keywords as possible. By incorporating the main keywords into all of the ads within that ad group, your ads will be more relevant to the searcher and more compelling by nature.

5. Strong Call to Action – This is common knowledge, but a strong call to action can make or break your ad. Second only to a PPC ad’s headline is line 2 of your description. This is directly related to the fact that a call to action is usually placed here. “Act Now,” “Subscribe Today,” “Learn More,” and “Book Today” are just a few examples of a strong call to action.

Of course not every ad will utilize every feature listed here, but by incorporating some of these points into your next round of ad copies, you will see a lift in relevant traffic which will shine through with an increased conversion rate and a higher ROI.

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Data Challenges for Small PPC Campaigns

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Small PPC (define) marketers have it tough. We have many customers asking if we can help them manage their small (under $5,000 per month) search engine marketing campaigns. I respectfully decline and often steer them to one of the technology or service providers focusing on the small business market. Some small businesses want tools to help them manage their own campaigns. Most, however, want to know that a SEO professional is handling it for them, because small business marketers believe search marketing to be difficult, and (depending on whom you ask) they may be entirely right.

Regardless of whether the small business chooses to manage its own paid search advertising campaign or to have it managed “professionally,” the reality is there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of businesses spending under $2,000 on PPC search and online yellow pages listings each month. These small business marketers face some unique challenges relating to their search spend. One big challenge they face is actually shared by larger-spending advertisers with very broad keyword sets and low data validity at the keyword (or perhaps even ad group) level.

Most of us have it easy. Spending sufficient funds on PPC means that we can watch conversions from our power keywords flow in on a daily or hourly basis. These conversions make it easy to calculate the appropriate bids for keywords given our ROI or profit objectives, because we’re generating a statistically valid sample of data. The challenge with low spending accounts in general is that statistically valid sample data takes a long time to generate, at every level of the campaign (from campaign to ad group, down to the keyword or phrase level).

With a bid at a specific level and an average position at a particular range, only three possibilities exist: the bid is too high, too low, or just right. How can one know if the data is missing or statistically suspect? One can’t, not really. But there are some solutions.

Wait it out: If you wait long enough, you’ll have statistically valid data (arithmetically) even on a keyword level. However, if your business is even slightly seasonal, the variation in the likelihood to convert (to an order, lead, or call) for clicks is changing over time. This makes waiting for valid data an iffy proposition.

Cluster “like keywords” together: Hopefully, you’ve done a good job organizing your campaign so that keywords in an ad group represent very similar search intent. This means searchers are likely to be very similar. Therefore, clustering the data at the ad group level or even combining ad groups may allow you to make a decision faster.

Cluster at the campaign level: The ad group level may not be enough for really low spending accounts. If the campaign was well constructed, one could make decisions at the macro level.

Try to attribute offline conversion behavior to the campaign at some level: While it may not be worth instituting phone tracking at anything other than the campaign level (or by simply asking customers which keyword they used to find you), chances are you don’t rank organically for most of your paid keyword choices anyway.

Use micro conversions or proxy conversions: If you have a site with a dozen or more pages, some pages may be used as a signal to indicate the click source was a good one, or at least better than average. For example, a “contact us” page or a product page might serve as a micro conversion. Using data from micro conversions will allow you to start differentiating between good clicks and poor clicks sooner.

Use the click-forward rate (opposite of a bounce rate): Users arriving on your landing pages can take only three actions: click back (bad), close window (bad), or click forward into the site. Like micro conversions, the idea of determining which clicks stayed (instead of left) can provide a valuable data set.
Even if you do all of these things, you probably won’t be changing bids nearly as often as a larger spending business would, so you may find that the bid landscape is swirling around you. Therefore, your bid velocities (speed of changing bids) are fairly low on a comparative basis. Eventually, as you learn more about what is working, your bids will align in the approximate correct range.

Dealing with data scarcity is a matter of trade-offs. The more keywords for any low budget, the longer it takes to move individual keyword bids to an optimal level. Conversely, high keyword click concentration can help speed up the process.

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SEO evens the Playing Field

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

The main reason small businesses stay small is because the owners maintain a small business mindset. For some people, being small works, it is what they want. But others dream big and want to accomplish their bigger goals, even though they continue to struggle to make it there. They can’t ever seem to get over that small-time hump.

If you want to be more than a small business, then it’s time to stop thinking like the small business you are and start thinking like the bigger business you want to be.

The first place to start is with your online marketing campaigns.

There are a few exceptions, but search engine marketing has leveled the playing field significantly for small businesses. However, as more companies make online marketing more of a priority – the playing field is becoming slanted again. More recognizable brands and companies with larger budgets, and a larger team of people to manage multiple online search engine marketing campaigns are gaining an advantage. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for small businesses to make headway into competitive fields against this rush for a greater online presence.

All that being said, it can be done. There are still plenty of opportunities for small businesses to succeed, even against well-financed competitors. But to do so it requires some clever thinking and swift moving – two things which big businesses are generally not great at.

Be smarter than a big business

Online Marketing and SEO success is not always about achieving number one rankings. It’s easy to determine which of those businesses that come to SEO House are serious about their success. Those who “want to be #1″ are looking for a quick fix. Those that want to build visibility and improve conversions and sales are looking at the bigger picture. Rankings are a means to an end, not the end itself.

Is a #1 ranking still possible? Of course. Is it always the best idea? It depends. It depends on the phrase, the targeted traffic it draws, the conversion rates it achieves, and the amount of time and money it takes to get it there. There are a lot of great #1 rankings that can be achieved that can do great things for your company, yet many business owners focus on getting #1 rankings for specific keywords that don’t give them a good return on their investment. What’s the point?

Even if you already own the top positions, as long as you still have the small business mindset you’re going to find yourself disappointed. You can only hang on to the tops spots so long with a budget of a few thousand a year, when some upstart comes along and throws tens of thousands of dollars a month at their online marketing campaigns. Enjoy the success while you can, but don’t expect to hold onto that forever. Rankings change.

Success, like everything else is relative. A small business does not have to spend $10,000, $7,500 or even $2,500 per month in order to do well online. Most small businesses (even if they had such a budget) are not set up to handle the same kind of success as large businesses. You have to grow into that. But every small business owner investing in online marketing needs to keep their expectations in line with what can be done and what kind of success they can handle. Budget doesn’t always make or break success, but it does play a role in it. The key is to find the areas where your budget will see the most return.

Organizing Time

Whether you are a big or small business owner, obviously it is important to determine how your own time is best spent. Do you have time to do it all yourself or can you hand that responsibility to someone else? Delegating responsibility is one of the biggest differences between big and small businesses.

Most small businesses hire help as needed but when it comes to their online marketing they want to cut costs by doing it on their own. Why is the SEO marketing any different from the other jobs you hire for? Would you try to do everything yourself? And if you did, would you be able to grow your business as you want? The answer is likely “no.”

Part of thinking like a bigger business is being willing to put responsibilities into the hands of those who can handle it. Letting skilled people do the jobs they are good allows you to focus on the job you’re good at.

Move more swiftly than a big business

While small businesses can’t always hire everybody for every job, they do have one advantage over the big business that can work in their favor. That advantage is being able to adapt. Big businesses usually move too slow, but as a small business you have the luxury of being able to adapt and move fast.

You can have a big business mindset but take advantage of your small business position. Moving quickly into new areas of marketing brings huge rewards as you invest in areas your competition is overspending as well as under-performing, without having to go through layers of approval and red tape.

This is where outside consulting can come in handy. Having someone take a strategic look at your online marketing efforts and help you identify your own and your competitor’s weaknesses can really open up your eyes to new opportunities. Of course, you then have to be willing to do what it takes to invest in those opportunities.

Small businesses have to stop letting the small business mindset keep them from performing big. You don’t have to be a big business to win in the online marketing game, but you do need to get out of the “mom and pop rut.”

Be willing to take risks, but do so wisely and well-informed. And like big businesses – be willing to fail a little here and there if it teaches you how to succeed bigger later. You don’t have to spend like a big business, but you won’t go far so long as you keep thinking like a small business.

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