If you haven’t already seen the update in your Adwords interface, you soon should as Google is rolling out its enhanced campaigns. It should among other things simplify greatly the process by which digital marketers currently adhere to for properly targeting multiple devices in AdWords.
Here is how the Inside AdWords Blog introduces its latest product.
Making wholesale changes has now become a little easier to perform in the AdWords interface (as opposed to using Editor). The Inside AdWords Blog discusses how to go about expediting large changes conveniently.
It’s finally happened – the big shift we’ve been anticipating has now arrived. Google places is being “annexed” by Google+ Local read all about it here!
This is easily one of the best collections of local SEO, Google Places & local PPC resources I have seen this year. No surprise it comes from OptiLocal and Nyagoslav Zhekov. This guy’s always got his thumb on the pulse of the market – browse the amazing collection here! It also make sense that it’s his personal favourites from the year that was….
Google’s renewed efforts to gain a foothold in the Social Media world with Google + is putting a serious crimp on the available data for PPC’ers and digital marketers alike to aggregate data. Here is a great post (there’s actually two if you look carefully) that will give you the meat & potatoes of the issue at hand.
Wow, we always new PPC to be a powerful tool in the marketing mix. Now Google statisticians are stepping up and proving just how critical it really is to supporting traffic to your site. Read the results here: Inside AdWords Blog
Hi There,
No blog post but instead links to some of our favourite articles as we sort through our own RSS feeds. This link is to an article by Mike Boudet in the Search Engine Journal – “Top 5 DuhPPC techniques”. We think you’ll like it.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-5-duh-ppc-techniques/31156/
What’s in a name?
Is it called Paid Search, PPC marketing, SEM or is it (long form) Pay Per Click. Perhaps this is why people get confused when asked about (umm what should I call it?), let’s settle on “paid search” for the purpose of today’s blog. Seriously if you’ve ever been in the situation where you have approached someone who’s not necessarily “with it” from an online advertising perspective these are the responses you get when asked “Have you considered using (Insert any or all of the above) strategy”:
A1- we have an IT person to get us ranking on Google
A2- I never click on those ads….
A3- Don’t those take you to garbage sites?
A4- Isn’t it really expensive?
So let’s break things down and determine why paid search is a lesser known (dare I say lesser respected) form of marketing than its brethren Social Media and SEO. In a word, I think the problem is a word (maybe two). Starting with “paid” and ending with “marketing”. Sometimes I wonder if the name of the discipline should be changed. Seriously if anyone out there reading this thinks they have a better name for paid search I want to hear it!! I can’t really blame a prospective client for getting their back up a bit when they hear it…. It kind of sounds expensive (and I know it’s generally less expensive than SEO and Social).
Think about it, would you rather “Optimize” your site or participate in a “Pay per click” campaign. Human nature suggests 9 times out of 10 people are going to pick the friendlier, more appealing sounding option of optimization.
Let’s try another – would you rather participate in Social Media or engage Paid search strategies? I’m telling you (especially you marketers and purveyors of paid search) we are at a disadvantage because of the name)… I don’t want to come across as bitter here, because everyone and anyone who educates, consults or sells anything have challenges when delivering their message or value proposition. Really if you get the opportunity to speak to someone about the ins and outs of paid search, they will soon realize just how cost effective “it” is, especially when compared to SEO or an end to end Social campaign.
That said, I still vote for a name change or better a name makeover… something like:
“Query to Click” or “Search Inclusion” or something… Until then, every time I meet with a client I will continue to experience that last second anxiety as a result of debating which name sounds the least expensive.
Bye for now,
Ho, Ho, Ho, now you owe…. Let’s face it as PPC continues to grow in popularity, elements like Max CPC, CPA and daily spend budgets continue to trend upwards. Sooner or later (usually sooner) the big G come’s calling with their not so subtle messages “Limited by budget”, and you’ve already been scrambling around trying to determine where you can steal from Peter to pay Paul. So let’s look at some strategies to reduce CPA (cost per acquisition) so we don’t have to pillage budgets from other area’s to support our online efforts.
Landing Page – The key to the city…. The better we can construct landing pages for PPC efforts the sooner you’re likely to see all of the above mentioned metrics start to inch downward (take that Google revenue).. So let’s get into a few specifics:
Granularity – much as you want this incorporated into your AdGroups, ideally its best if you can replicate elements of that granularity on your landing page. So if you’re advertising hockey sticks for example, let’s not drive traffic to a generic landing page showcasing everything. Instead let’s ensure that the Bauer Total One stick in your ad copy, keyword lists and so on… at the very least lands you on a Bauer stick page (Santa if you’re reading this please take note). The Client may not end up buying that particular model of stick, but they clearly have an affinity with the Bauer brand. Higher CTR’s on relevant pages generally leads to more conversions, thus lowering your overall CPA…
Strong Calls to Action- K.I.S.S. keep it simple and make it loud and proud!! Ensure the cavemen from Geico can find your shopping cart, white paper, contact form or whatever tool you’re using to collect data or create a conversion goal. Design your pages so that these forms or buttons are at top right hand column of the page, this tends to be where the eye wanders.
Comfort – Lastly, create an environment on that page that makes the customer feel good about buying with you. Always input a message regarding the safety and security of the data the consumer is about to leave with you. Ensure inputting that data is quick and painless; this should definitely help in the total number of overall conversions you start to receive!
We’ll talk more about this as we move into 2011, the above mentioned strategies should at least in the interim help direct in the way of a lower CPA!
Paid Search is no longer just for search… That’s right, now that so many social media platforms are competing (and competing well) for time spent online, it has become a natural fit for advertisers. I should also mention that it’s the only viable way (to date) that social media sites have been able to back-up their tremendously high monetary valuations or generate revenue- so win-win all the way around right? The developers, investors, and programmers involved have a great opportunity to turn a profit, and advertisers have another medium to communicate to their customers.
Recently, while reviewing traffic popularity for Canada on alexa.com, I noticed that 4 of the top 15 rated sites (remember this for traffic) were social media sites. They included: Facebook(2), YouTube(4), twitter(9) & LinkedIn(14). In the U.S. the same 4 were in the top 15 with an honorable mention to the (in my opinion far from dead) MySpace at a respectable 19th. It’s important to note that all of these sites have or will have Ad platforms.
So why would you want to run a PPC campaign on one of these as opposed to say Google search? Well let’s look at the numbers.
Facebook – over 500 million friends and counting
YouTube – 300 million plus viewers
LinkedIn – operates in 76 countries
Twitter – 300,000 new registrants per day
The numbers are astonishing and so are the ways in which you can target ads to your customers! On engines, it’s all about language relevance. Bidding on key terminology related to what a user is searching for. But on social media platforms it’s the demographic information or content related (YouTube) information that you can leverage.
As an example, let’s say you had a product or service aimed specifically at women, and you operated in Southwestern Ontario. Facebook will allow you to target those women in that specific geographic area. You can also stipulate information such as age, marital status, education & more. LinkedIn, more of a B2B platform will actually let you select an audience by seniority level, or what position they hold within their company.
Of course critical skills like – ad structure, A/B & multivariate testing, analysis, bid strategies and tracking are all still very important requirements (otherwise you can blow the budget pretty quickly). But with more and more people spending more of their time on social sites – it presents a great opportunity for businesses to promote, engage & attract new customers…
Want to understand more about leveraging your brand on these platforms? Call or email Digital Clicks Marketing today!
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