PPC Advertising
Stop Paying for Bad Keywords in Three Steps
Web analytics reports can be deceiving. They’re great at showing you WHAT visitors did on your website, but they can’t tell you WHY they didn’t do what you hoped they would.
But with the right process and frame of mind, it is possible to use web analytics to get insight into “why” your traffic isn’t converting — especially if you do pay per click advertising.
Here are some ideas for attracting more targeted traffic in order to get higher conversion rates and a much better return on pay-per-click (PPC) spend.
One
• Look at your top traffic-driving keywords (PPC and organic).
Are they highly relevant to the industry you’re in and the products you sell? Do these keywords clearly indicate that the searcher has a motivation to find your solution to their problem? Some keywords may have double meanings and could suggest that the visitor had a completely different search intent than expected. Someone searching “training videos” might actually be looking for “workout training videos,” “management training videos,” or a variety of other things. If the traffic from these fuzzy keywords is converting poorly, don’t be surprised. Stop buying and doing search engine optimization (SEO) for ambiguous keywords. The ultimate goal should be to figure out which key phrases specifically relate to your industry, product or service, and do some PPC and/or SEO to get listed for more relevant keywords.
Two
• Don’t play the generic keyword game.
It both difficult and expensive to get traffic from the most generic keywords in one’s industry. Such keywords are much more competitive in the search engines. You pay more for text ads and it takes a lot of SEO effort in order to get listed organically for these keywords. A lot of these single-word keywords are really only attracting early-stage visitors who are not necessarily ready to buy, anyway! If I’m searching for “purses,” I probably haven’t yet decided on a brand or a style of purse and it could take me a lot longer to convert. When I search for “white Chanel purse,” though, you can be fairly certain I’m ready to buy. Focusing on phrases that are tailored to your product or service is what people really mean when they talk about “long tail keywords” [define] — and often it’s the difference between having visitors who are ready to learn and ones who are ready to buy.
Three
• Speak the customer’s language, not your own.
Sometimes, marketers get so focused on their own sales process that they convince themselves that would-be customers actually care about the words they use to describe their own products and services. When someone is searching for a solution to their problem, they enter search terms that sometimes don’t match up with what the company thinks people should be searching for.
Are you buying traffic for keywords that mean something to you but mean precious little to your customers? We’ve all done it before. Even brilliant marketers can assume that customers will think and behave as they do. This is what we like to call “Inside-the-Bottle Syndrome.” Although contagious, it is curable, but your web analytics reports alone can’t diagnose you.
Let us know if you’d like to optimize paid search from the customer’s perspective.
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Written by:Melissa Burdon
The Good, The Bad & The Pay-Per-Click Ugly
A few months ago, I showed how Dell had bought a PPC ad for “bestbuy Sony DSC-W80,” and although they were smart to buy this highly-targeted search term, there was no follow-through on the landing page.
Bryan Eisenberg bought the camera last year and was so happy with its performance that he’s been spreading the word around the office ever since. After doing a routine Google search, we noticed — unsurprisingly — that there are a lot of bidders for the term “Sony DSC W80″.
What we soon found was that, much like Dell, the landing pages these other e-tailers were taking visitors to illustrated everything from the good, to the bad, to the PPC-ugly.
Plenty of options…
Looks like there’s a lot of competition for this search term. If a searcher clicks one link and doesn’t find what they’re looking for, it will be easy for them to hit the Back button, to see if the competition makes learning about it — and eventually buying it — easier.
When customers have this many options, getting your link on the front page of Google isn’t enough; you have to bring them as far into the buying process as you can with the information you are given. Lets take a look at how well the different options presented here do at bringing the searcher closer to the purchase.
Make sure the Landing Page works
Walmart.com had one of the top 3 paid search results. When we click their link, we assume we’ll be taken where we’ll easily find the product that was advertised. Instead, the customer is brought to a non-working page (curiously titled “walmart9.com”), forcing them to click the Back button.
Obviously, Wal-Mart needs to update this URL. While it may have once led somewhere, it now only brings frustration to the camera-seeking masses. They’re losing sales and paid search credibility with anyone who clicks it.
Walmart.com surely has a massive PPC budget to oversee, and updates like this can slip through the cracks. But it serves as a good reminder to keep tabs on your paid search ads. If you notice one is converting poorly, or not at all, you should at least make sure the landing page works.
Give us a Brand or Category Page (at least)
Thankfully, Vanns.com doesn’t give us a broken link, yet it merely brings us to the homepage. This won’t do.
Since I typed in a specific brand and model number, I expect to be brought to a Product Page — or, at the very least, a Brand Page or Category Page. They have exact information about the product I’m looking for and they just drop me off on the homepage? Leaving it up to the visitor to first find a tiny “Digital Cameras” link, then navigate through the site to find the Product Page, is an unnecessary gamble, especially since the paid search link promised “Sony DSC W80 in stock!”
Why not take me directly to the Product Page instead of making me scan the homepage just to find a Category Page?
Sony’s word against Bryan’s?
You’d think the company that made the product would have something to say about the camera, even if it’s discontinued — which, apparently, it is. At this point, the halo from Bryan’s positive word-of-mouth is beginning to crack. (”Thanks a lot, buddy. Does this camera really exist?”)
SonyStyle.com is missing out on an opportunity here. Although they no longer make the camera, they could provide links to similar cameras, especially if there’s a newer versions of the same model — which there is. They could use this page to show improvements that were made to the newer model. This page provides visitors with nowhere to go besides Back.
• Manufacturers: It takes time to get the word out about your products. If you don’t take advantage of it, you’ll lose some sales from late adopters (a huge chunk of the market).
• Retailers: Don’t forget to capitalize on positive word-of-mouth from older model numbers. Turn would-be customers for those older products into buyers of the newer ones. If you still offer popular discontinued products, leverage that advantage with targeted Pay-Per-Click ads and Landing Pages.
Unscramble the Search
Finally, the product I’m looking for — and it’s right on the landing page. NewEgg.com has it down. They even show visitors the newer model on the same page!
NewEgg removes all the obstacles a visitor might go through to find the product (they’ve already clearly told Google) they’re looking for. They place visitors in the perfect place; this is where customers are in the buying process when they search for “Sony DSC W80″. It was a little harder to find this camera than it should have been, but ultimately, NewEgg shows how to get the most out of your PPC ads.
New research shows that fewer people are clicking Pay-Per-Click ads on Google. In past discussions on this blog, readers have expressed that they no longer use PPC ads because of numerous bad experiences. Perhaps that’s why so many companies out there aren’t optimizing or paying attention to their PPC ads, which — soon enough — affects how useful they are for consumers.
If Pay-Per-Click is part of your online strategy, make sure your ads are optimized. Otherwise, you’re leaving money on the table. PPC can be very valuable when used properly. But if you neglect it, and the experience isn’t useful for customers, these campaigns can negatively effect your business.
To be truly PPC- and Landing Page-savvy, here’s how to appeal to all buying modes.
. .
[Editor’s Note: Want to convert more customers with your Pay-Per-Click campaign? Contact us.]
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Written by:Daniel McGuigan
Just a Bit Off Target With Pay-Per-Click
Even giant e-tailers like Target.com can miss the mark now and then. Despite big budgets, keeping track of everything can be a nightmare to manage. But if you’re going to place Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, it’s absolutely critical to follow though and check the links. The customer experience should be as effortless as possible, and if PPC ads don’t bring the visitors where they intended to go, they’re just one click of the “back” button away from your competitors. And if you don’t fulfill their expectation on a landing page, it’s less likely they’ll click your PPC ads in the future.
Nice ad placement
Here you can see that Target is paying for their ad to show up on top of the list for my search for “Logitech Harmony Remote.” Target is a company I trust, and it looks like they have exactly what I’m looking for, so I click the link.
Looking good, until…
Instead of taking me to the Logitech-branded page from the text ad, I’m taken back to square one: Target’s homepage.
The more logical choice
This is more like it. Although you can’t quite see from this last screenshot, the remote I had searched for was just below on this landing page (click the image to go to the page). Actually, I found it by typing in “target.com/logitech” since I’d already seen it in the text ad. But my job is to analyze these types of things. And that’s just it: Even if they remembered the web address from the ad, most customers wouldn’t bother.
While this may seem like nitpicking, these types of oversights show how a missing link can ruin an otherwise decent scent trail.
(If you’d like to see more examples like this, check out Bryan’s screencast on conversion-boosting tips for Target.com.)
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Written by:Daniel McGuigan
Dell Loses its Marketing Scents
What if you knew exactly what visitors were looking for when they came to your site. Say they’ve even told you the exact model they’re looking for. All they want is to get some details about this product and possibly make a purchase.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads allow you to know the directions visitors are heading, and can help you plan and optimize the experience in order to guide them along their buying process. PPC gives you a great advantage by allowing you to bring the visitor directly the thing they’re looking for, bypassing obstacles that may prevent them from even finding a product directly from your homepage . The more you know about your customers’ needs, the easier it is to fulfill them. Although most e-commerce shops run PPC campaigns to some degree, most get hung up on the search and keyword element of it, and forget that this is really about eliminating steps for the customer. As a result, they end up losing out on a lot of revenue.
Being #1 is not enough…
If you think this isn’t just as much a problem for big-time e-tailers, with huge marketing budgets, think again. The paths that customers follow are called “scent trails,” and precious few online shops seem to know much about them. For instance, check out this search results page for the term “Bestbuy Sony dsc w80″.
Dell has cleverly bought a PPC ad for this term in hopes of intercepting a few sales from the competition. But take a look at where they bring you when you click the link (and, remember, they’re paying for this to be at the top of the page). The product that was searched for is nowhere to be found. They already know exactly which product the visitor is looking for. All they have to do is bring this person to the product page for the item — or at the very least, show the customer that they do in fact have this item by placing it clearly within the active window.
The landing page disconnect…
If you’re paying for PPC ads, you need to get your money’s worth by bringing the visitor as far as you can, given what you already know about their needs. With the right keywords, you already have some information about what they’re looking for; you might as well make it as easy as possible for them.
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Written by:Daniel McGuigan
Google AdWords Optimizer: Consulting In a Box
Google announced a new ad performance tool called Campaign Optimizer that you can find once you log into your Google AdWords account. Google’s Campaign Optimizer tool analyzes your campaign budget, keywords, and landing page to see what settings have or haven’t worked well for you recently. It then generates a customized proposal of ideas for your campaign aimed at improving your advertising return on investment. You can then select which of the ideas you want to implement by clicking on a check box. It’s most effective on campaigns with at least two weeks of history.
The Campaign Optimizer may propose any combination of the following changes:
- Change daily budget.
- Add new keywords.
- Delete keywords.
- Change keyword matching options.
- Adjust keyword cost-per-click (CPC) bids.
This is certainly going to help many of the people who set their AdWords account and have left them on autopilot, hoping to get a great return. Google acknowledges that they want to continue to increase the capabilities of the Campaign Optimizer. Of course, GrokDotCom readers know optimizing your ad spend is only half the battle. Once you get them to click on your Google AdWord, you need to provide them with the proper scent and persuasive experience in order to get them to take the action you want them to take. Very few businesses — other than Google — make money by getting people to just click on the ads.
This is another step in the right direction for Google.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
What Advertisers Should Be Measuring
Nielsen, famous for their television measurement service, has announced they will change the way they try to measure audience size on the internet. Previously, they were measuring websites by the number of pages visitors browsed or “page views.” Their new chosen methodology of “time spent” is likely to prove disastrous.
Anybody who browses with several open tabs, or walked away from their computer knows how big a mistake it would be to assume that, just because the website is open, someone is actually paying attention.
Advertising dollars are often based on where Nielsen’s numbers tell advertisers are the “prime” winning picks. If you’re higher up in the ranking, you can charge more for your ad inventory; just like Super Bowl ads and American Idol’s ads command a premium. The stock market analysis website Seeking Alpha asks:
What happens to ad dollars in this new environment? Who gets more and who gets less? Will this new approach chip away at Google’s ability to drive prices higher for search advertising keywords? Will it allow Yahoo and AOL to boost revenue by charging more for placement of banner ads?
The problem all these audience metrics have, whether you’re talking about an online website’s visitors, a magazine’s circulations numbers, or a television program’s gross rating points, is that none of them are actually reflective of how many people actually saw, listened to, or otherwise engaged with your ad.
By “engage” I’m not talking about ads people just love, or that win creative awards, but ads that, when run, consistently drive sales growth. But the people who sell ads love taking these very unscientific, inflated audience numbers and selling ads on a Cost-Per-Audience-size (often called “CPM“) basis.
Just say “no” to fluffy metrics.
Advertisers have been plagued with the issue John Wanamaker so elegantly pointed out about a century ago: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” What Wanamaker was describing, even back then, was how this traditional broadcast model of advertising is inefficient and nearly impossible to accurately measure. Maybe these panel-based metrics Nielsen uses worked when we were a more homogeneous mass culture — but today, we consist of many niches within niches, and a small panel cannot be representative of our diverse interests.
Although it’s easier to collect data online, individual websites have major issues trying to gather accurate metrics, so why would we fantasize that it is possible to measure anything accurately across the entire World Wide Web? The only metrics that can be measured accurately are how much the advertiser spends (expenses) and how much they make (revenue).
Advertisers have always been happy to spend money when they can see people react. It’s why Google (GOOG) has made so much money charging advertisers on a Cost-Per-Click basis. They knew that in a world where advertisers were feeling the effects of customers ignoring their marketing, having a system where advertisers were only charged when people clicked would be best.
Google also understood that the only time people react to an ad is if it’s relevant to them.
We know how hard Google works to continuously refine those results, keeping them as relevant as possible — even punishing publishers who try to manipulate the relevance of the system. They’ve even worked quite hard (not hard enough, in my opinion) to ensure their advertisers’ ads are as relevant as possible.
So, what do media outlets and advertisers do next?
Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking at DART Adapt’s first anniversary dinner, to a bunch of smart online media publishing outlets. I told them that if they don’t change the way they think of advertisers, and work with them directly, they’ll be tomorrow’s TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers, struggling with shrinking audiences and puny ad budgets. Publishers can’t keep following the rules of yesteryear if they want to continue to be relevant and demand prime ad dollars tomorrow. Einstein’s definition of insanity is “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Such is today’s process of advertising.
The responsibility to deal with these issues ultimately belongs to the media outlet. You can always find another advertiser, but history is full of publishers who’ve lost their audience.
Some of the issues these publishers must address…
1. They must continuously work with their audience to understand its needs and focus on providing relevant content and advertisements.
2. They must work with publishers to help them clearly define what they’re trying to accomplish. They must define key performance metrics (e.g., the actions that will define their success).
3. Work with advertisers so that the ads they produce are contextually relevant to the content they are producing.
4. Make sure advertisers continuously optimize the ads to achieve better results.
5. Constantly be in discussions with the audience so the promises that marketers make are being met (e.g., not pissing off YOUR audience).
Focus on all of these things, then you can go through the same issue Google’s advertisers are going through by trying to compete to get relevant ads in front of a relevant audience (see also: traffic cost inflation). If you’re a publisher, wouldn’t you like to have that problem?
If you’re an advertiser, and aren’t focused on maximizing the integrated experience from the ad (no matter what channel) to your website, then start by understanding what drives persuasive momentum.
Advertisers shouldn’t depend on some easily defined, but fatally flawed, metric to decide where to place ads. For now, I recommend advertisers get their own Web metrics in order, and learn how to tie them to the only reports that matter: P&L, Balance Sheet & Cash Flow.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
‘Universal Search’ Means It’s Time to Start Blogging
So, it looks like Google’s “Universal Search” is gaining steam. This is a good thing for those producing fresh, relevant content, and an, eh… maybe not-so-good thing for those expecting traffic from paid search to get the job done.
In his ClickZ column, Search Engine Marketing expert Mike Grehan–already pounced-on for declaring that “SEO is Dead”–explains why universal search is another nail in the coffin for Search Engine Optimization.
[…] I’ve written many times over the years that the term [”Search Engine Optimization”] is more suited as a description of a search-engine engineering function than the intermediate page-tweaking this industry provides.
Instead of trying to “optimize universal search” as the title suggests, Grehan recommends blogging and podcasting as the best ways to rank universally high:
[…] Google will be able to detect (with the tons of analytics and metrics data) which blogs and podcasts (audio and video) have large subscription bases. It could then integrate those elements into the SERPs along with the regular results, just as it’s doing with elements from Google Base and YouTube.
I have a feeling the really rich content sites, such as the 800-CEO-Read bookstore, with its focus on becoming a resource site full of books, blogs, podcasts, and other great editorial content, will become very popular with Google’s Universal Search.
Consider these Google results for “Web Analytics Demystified” (click thumbnail for full image). The organic links show everything you might want to know about Eric T. Peterson’s book by the same name. The paid links, by contrast, are a hodgepodge of stuff about “Web analytics.” Why would I click one of the paid links when my search was so specific?
Anyone care to demystify this for me? 
Sure, it makes sense that SEO and Analytics firms might want to associate themselves with Peterson’s book. It just seems telling that nobody’s bidding on “Universal Search” (see thumbnail). And if “blog postings” aren’t important, as Jakob Nielsen insists, why would a single Search Engine Land post rank higher than everything Google’s ever written about Universal Search?
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Holy Traffic Cost Inflation: Paid Search ROI Down 43%!?
With paid search, even the most shocking news isn’t really. Consider these figures just in from ClickZ:
Despite continued growth in search spending, ROI on search campaigns in Q1 was down 43 percent since last year, according to the latest search trend report from DoubleClick’s Performics unit. That makes sense when you think about it, since more and more advertisers are competing for the same limited pool of clicks, bidding up prices and squeezing their margins in the process. The winner in this bidding war is Google. The losers: everyone else.
. . . average cost per click and cost per keyword both spiked. Campaigns included six times as many keywords with a cost per click above $1 and used 54 percent more keywords than they did a year ago.
Isn’t it time marketers finally looked beyond paid search, and focused on organic? As overall traffic costs rise, businesses should take conversion more seriously; not just as a metric, but as an integral part of their strategy. What makes people convert? Well, relevant content that answers the visitor’s questions–and in her own language–is a start. As it happens, that’s also what boosts organic rankings.
Building a site that gets organic results and converts takes dedication–and may not come cheap–but it’s the surest path to ROI.
Has traffic cost inflation been a wake-up call for your business?
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Yahoo Highlights Conversion Rates With New Ad Pricing
Yahoo! just announced that they’ll now give advertisers discounts based on and ad’s “quality”–or, more specifically, how well it converts.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz puts the news into perspective:
Yahoo is looking at how a publisher may convert for advertisers and adjust the pricing of the ad based on that. I asked Yahoo to clarify:
Rather than the overall number of leads sent to advertisers (conversion rates), the publisher conversion rate is the number of leads that the publisher send to advertisers that actually result in a conversion (e.g., a sale, a sign-up, etc. - whatever the advertiser has defined as a conversion event).
So it is not based simply on click through rate. So I asked what happens when an advertiser doesn’t set a conversion metric? Well, since it is based on the “aggregate performance across the Yahoo network,” even if one advertiser doesn’t set a conversion metric, others probably will and they can use those data points in determining the pricing of the bids.
The publisher feedback and comments are definitely worth checking out. This news comes in the wake of Google’s announcement in March that they would offer a Pay-Per-Action model, which also (theoretically) promotes overall conversion.
Will these changes affect your advertising strategy? Are the big search engines just trying to not seem greedy, or do you see this as an honest effort to make ads more relevant?
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Does Anyone Really Click on Sponsored Links in Gmail?
My mom does! I don’t even pay attention to them, let alone click on them.
I set her up with a Gmail account over a year ago and she spends a good amount of time exchanging communications with friends, family and reading her newsletters. She also likes to read a few newsletters about self-motivation and self-improvement she’s signed-up for.
She was visiting with me recently and asked for my assistance to get out of a survey site she was on. I asked
how she got there in the first place and she told me that, while she was reading a newsletter, she noticed the link above the window that asked, “Are you a slacker mom? Click here to find out.” Genius!
She clicks and gets sent to AreYouASlackerMom.com; three pages of questions in a survey format without any explanation at the beginning of what this survey is, how it might benefit the visitor, how long it will take, or what the visitor will be asked to provide in return (e.g., personal information).
My mom, being patient, clicks through and answers the questions anyway. Until…
She gets to the final part, where she’s asked for her email address and name. There’s no privacy copy here
reassuring her that her information is safe. My mom has one email address, therefore she can’t do what a lot of us are guilty of; just giving our Hotmail “spam email” address. My mom wanted to bail, but what’s even funnier is how frustrated she got by wanting to bail, not even knowing how to get back to Gmail because the back button wasn’t bringing her back!
So, yes… obviously, people are clicking on sponsored links in Gmail, but what you choose to do with these visitors after they click is what makes me scratch my head.
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Written by:Melissa Burdon
