Improve Your PPC Campaigns With Ad Extensions in Adwords

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Believe it or not pay per click ads have taken over the majority of the real estate on your search engines results pages.  If you don’t believe me then go take a second to do a Google search for some product you planned on going and buying this weekend.  There is a great infographic Google ads and the war on free clicks that Wordstream put together.  Aside from the fact that I love all the little pandas and penguins with deadly weapons that I think is hilarious the point of all this is that people searching the internet with a high commercial intent are most definitely clicking on PPC ads and they are converting to sales. If those aren’t your ads then they’re your competitors.   So let’s talk about how we can improve your Adwords campaigns using ad extensions.

Google Adwords Ad Extension Options

There are a couple different ways to enhance your ads and attract more attention from searchers.  The first question you need to ask yourself is what ad extensions will work best for you.  The answer to that question is based on the goals of your campaign and the type of business you run.  Here are your options and some applications for each:

  • Location Extension
    • If you run a local business where your address is important then this reinforces that you’re the business they want to work with.
  • Call Extension
    • If the goal of your campaign is to collect leads and you can close those leads on the phone then you need to be using this.  Also, anyone say mobile devices?
  • Sitelinks Extension
    • Basically if you have a website then this one is for you.  Any campaign can be improved by enhancing their ads with sitelinks.
  • Product Extension
    • One of the best tools for a PPC manager who runs campaigns for an ecommerce website.  Get your products right up there on the top with photos.
  • Social Extension
    • Has your company gone social?  Google+ is a great social tool and you can give your SEO manager and social media manager a little love by enhancing your ads with your business’ Google+ presence tied into your ad copy.
  • Mobile App Extension
    • If you’re promoting a mobile app then you can get direct downloads from your PPC ads.

Location Extension

To add a location extension with your ad you can either pull the information from your Google+ Local page or manually enter your address.  Once you do your ad could stand out from the crowd and look like this:

local yoga ad extension

Call Extension

When you add a call extension you have a few different choices you can customize.  You can use a Google voice tracking number so that Adwords will give you in-depth call detail reports (for a price), or you could use your normal business phone number.  This also works with campaigns that serve to a mobile device, which allow you to establish “click-to-call” ads that connect searchers right with the top salesperson in your company (of course).  This is what your ad will look like with a call extension:

auto insurance call extension

Sitelinks Extension

Pretty much every website can benefit from this ad extension and every campaign should have it included in some way.  This creates the same display affect that organic web listings have when they display sitelinks.  You can customize up to an additional 4 links that can be taken to other useful areas within your site.  Why offer 1 landing page to your customers when you can offer 5?

callaway drivers sitelinks extension

Product Extension

Do you have an ecommerce site?  Please see picture below.  Enough said!

lcd tv product extensions

You can link your ads with your Google Merchant Center and have full product listings with prices, photos and brands.

Social Extension

There are many benefits to growing your following on social media and getting more exposure for your brand.  When you setup this extension you’ll link it with your Google+ business page to drive your following.  You’ll have the ability to engage with your customers,share your message with social users and even get some SEO benefit from that Google+ exposure.

dodge social extension

Mobile App Extension

If you’re building exposure for a new mobile app your company has created then drive not only search traffic but also direct downloads using this ad extension.

mobile banking app extension

If you have had a great success story with your campaigns from using one of these ad extensions feel free to share it with us here in the comments.  We’d love to hear how you increased CTR by 2% using sitelinks, or that you drove 258 sales leads into your office using call extensions.  Hopefully you’re seeing the same types of successes we are.

Making Social Media More Valuable for Your Business

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So you have dabbled in this. You get some people to follow you. How do you know if it is worth your time and really, what can you do to maximize what kind of web traffic you get from these mediums?

What if you changed your website experience based on how the visitor found you? The data is there to do this, you just need to interpret it and adjust accordingly. Set up correctly, you would be able to profile how your Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube/Vimeo, Google+, Pinterest, and Blog readers all use your site and based on looking at your traffic’s referring source. You can then change the experience, path, content, etc that they have to maximize your conversions and exposure by utilizing what that data tells you.

Social Media 2.0 & Web 3.0

This is Social Media 2.0. This is web 3.0. Create a unique experience for every web visitor based on how they got to your site. Combine the social media elements listed above with Search Engine and Content related marketing – you have groups of keywords within a segment to promote something – based on keyword you could adjust what they see and the content they would get – changing their “path”. If they were from Organic search results – same thing – we all know that paid traffic typically differs 25-35% in what they do versus unpaid traffic – create specific content based on those patterns.

Every person, every way, every avenue and it allows them to use the web the way they want while still allowing you to reach them. Will every person do the exact same thing that visits from Facebook – no, but if you study the analytics, traffic patterns , implement goals, and adjust based on history – over time you will be able to predict relatively accurately what 70% of them do and improve their experience with your Brand and site.

5 Things About Using Social

You also need to realize the following things about social media:Social Networking by Device statistics

1. It might not work for you - not everyone gets the value they need out of it for the investment they make. Just make sure you give it a good try and analyze before making any decisions.

2. People access from Mobile devices most often - so everything should be mobile optimized and easy to consume – especially if you have a global reach.

3. The bulk of social media time is spent on Facebook, - with newcomer Pinterest climbing rapidly. It should be treated as the dominate force it is for any consumer related marketing efforts. B2B marketing should have more of a mix – but the referring traffic reports and analysis will tell you what you need to know and where to best spend your time.

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How SEO, PPC & Social Influence Each Other For Success

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Look out, the web is getting increasingly…webbier? What I mean is, no single marketing channel exists in a vacuum. Increasingly, different channels are relying on each other to further help push their own efforts. Truth is, that’s exactly how Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter and the other big players in search and social like it. The more signals they can get for your content, the better they are able to rank it, promote it, share it or even trash it.

In the early (good ole’) days of Google, links drove the majority of the relevance for a single piece of content in organic search results. Someone links to your page with the anchor text “discount shoes,” and Google counts that as one vote that your page should rank for a search for discount shoes. Simple, right? Now, a couple hundred factors influence where your page ranks in search results, including social signals—but we’ll more into that in a moment.

On the social front, Facebook and Twitter didn’t have much reach beyond their own domains. Then, the social graph was introduced, mapping out millions of pages and relationships on the web.

Today, SEO, PPC and social media are intertwined, and success in one channel can easily translate into success on another. In other words, without a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, you’re probably missing out.

How SEO Influences PPC

Someone asked me this question recently, which actually inspired this post. First, improving PPC performance can mean a number of things. Improved conversions, clicks, impressions, quality scores and lower CPCs can all be considered “wins” depending on your strategy and goals.

The first component is how SEO can improve your quality scores, which in turn leads to lower CPCs and higher average positions. Part of good SEO includes optimizing your entire website for a list of well-researched keywords and integrating primary pages well into the site. By choosing these well-optimized pages as landing pages for relevant keywords in your PPC ad groups, you can boost quality scores and positions while lowering your costs.

Also a key component of good SEO is eye-catching calls to action and easy site structure. These components can lower bounce rates and increase conversions, which are successes that translate into both SEO and PPC.

Lastly, it is important to keep in mind that SEO is the long term strategy and takes significant time and effort to build an effective presence in SERPs. When you’re still working your way up the organic rankings, PPC serves as the perfect short-term strategy for maintaining a presence on page 1 until your SEO efforts take over. Continue reading →

3 Tips for Improving Your Retargeting Campaign

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A retargeting campaign is exactly what it sounds like. It retargets people that have been to your website (wherever you put the retargeting code) by displaying ads to them throughout the internet. Retargeting campaigns can be run as a component of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns on networks such as Google AdWords.

You’ve probably noticed that after you visit certain websites – or search for certain products on Amazon for example – that you see ads for those items. Seeing those ads is no coincidence and it’s a great way to stay in the minds of people that have already shown interest in your business.

Here are some tips for improving and enhancing your existing retargeting campaigns.

1. Be sure to use frequency capping on the number of ads you serve.

While retargeting is a great way to keep connecting with your audience, nobody wants to be annoying. Serving an excessive amount of ads to your audience can be overwhelming. Using frequency capping will set a maximum number of times that people can see your ads throughout the Google Display Network.

To turn on frequency capping in Google AdWords, go to the campaign settings and look under “Advanced Settings”.

PPC frequency capping

Frequency capping can be set by day, week or month. There isn’t a set number of impressions to choose, and it can vary depending on factors such as your sales-cycle and the amount of competition in the industry. We like to use a baseline of 30 ads spread out throughout the month, so that each person sees about one ad per day if they are online regularly.

2. Place retargeting codes in places other than just your website

There are places you can put retargeting codes that you might be overlooking. If you send out email blasts or have a custom application tab on Facebook for example, a simple code can be put on it behind-the-scenes in order to serve ads to all of those people.

3. Use a combination of text and display ads

Display ads are the most common form of retargeting, but it’s also a good idea to incorporate text ads into your campaign. This will give you more opportunities throughout the Google Display Network to reach your audience.

Retargeting ads are most effective when you can change your images and messages often. Using a mix of text and display ads will help keep them fresh.

Implementing these 3 things will optimize and enhance your retargeting efforts. Leave us a comment if you’re using a form of retargeting in your search engine marketing strategy.

Designing Infographics with the 10 Second Rule

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Guest author Christopher Wallace, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Amsterdam Printing, has more than 20 years experience in sales and marketing. At Amsterdam, a leading provider of personalized pens, promotional pens, and other personalized items such as imprinted apparel and customized calendars, Christopher is focused on providing quality marketing materials to small, mid-size and large businesses.

Make Your Point, Fast! — Designing Infographics with the 10 Second Rule

It’s no secret that in today’s information age, where everything we need to know is literally at our fingertips, there’s an accompanying problem. With so much to take in, we’re forced to throw on our blinders.

Imagine if you took the time to read every word of every email — even spam and junk — that arrives in your inbox. That’s a full time job. Instead, we’ve learned to filter, at lightning speed. In less than one second, we can identify emails that deserve the ‘delete’ button before they’re even opened.

That same principle carries over into every facet of our lives, from media to advertising to thumbing through a magazine. Enter the infographic — in a world where we value aesthetics and the quick digestion of information, there’s no better way to tell a story (especially one with numbers) than in a picture. With attention spans at their lowest point in history (I’m just observing – there’s no science behind that claim), those pictures need to convey their primary message in ten seconds or less.

Let’s start with a recent infographic from CertaPro Painters in Louisville, Kentucky. Give it a ten second gander and then check back with me here.

designing infographics

There’s a lot going on there, but it’s very simple at the top. Where the roof awning peaks, we’re told ‘What colors to paint your home and why.’ That leaves six more seconds to notice that we’re being given reasons to paint each room a certain color — blue equals productivity, red encourages appetite.

You can click away from that without ever examining the rest of the infographic below the house, and you know the basic point: different colors have an effect on the mood and purpose of a room.

“Someone can look at it and go, ‘That’s neat,’ and then move on, but still get the message,” says Randy Krum, president of infographic design firm InfoNewt and the founder of CoolInfographics.com.

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How To Build A Link Building Strategy To Fuel Your SEO

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Anyone who talks to you long enough about an SEO strategy will surely bring up inbound links and how important they are to your website’s organic rankings.  This is surely one of the most important aspects to your SEO strategy and something that a lot of people leave off or don’t put enough intentional effort into, because it’s usually the most time consuming and challenging part of doing SEO.  Something I believe that everyone needs to realize is that no two companies are going to successfully implement the same link building strategy and see the same results.  Your business and your website have very unique and great things about it, and those are the things you should really try to leverage when putting together a link building strategy.

What does your business do best?

The size of your business may be one of the first things you should realize and take into account.  A small regional company is not going to be able to build the same kinds of links as a large, national or global company with a very powerful brand.  When you’re putting together your link building strategy, think about what differentiates your company, or what assets you have that make you worth linking to.  Also think about what assets you can repurpose into a content strategy or another asset to attract links from other people on the web.  Try asking yourself these questions:

  • Do you have great content you can provide in a blog format that will draw links into your website?
  • Do you have any research data or statistics you can repurpose into an infographic?
  • Does your company have a great web based tool that you can give to users for free that they can embed on their website that links back to your website?
  • Are there any strong relationships you have with owners of other websites or writers in your industry that you can reach out to acquire additional links to your website?
  • What industry organizations or associations are you a part of?  It doesn’t matter if these are local or national.  A lot of businesses receive links from local chamber of commerce websites in their area.

Hopefully these questions have helped jog some ideas in your head and will help you start to put together the base elements of a strategy.  If your mind was blank when asked all of these questions, then you might have a little further to go before you can start to put together a useful link building strategy.

What’s working for your competitors?

Some other ideas to help you get started might be to look at your competitors.  A lot of initial tasks that I do when putting together link building strategies for companies is to start looking at their online competitors or resource sites in their industry to see what types of sites have been linking to their competitors.  This can give you a great sample of what has worked for them, and what you can leverage to work for you as well.  You can use a tool from SEOMoz called Open Site Explorer to do this competitive link profile research if you have never done this in the past.  Another tool to help track records over time is MajesticSEO’s backlink history tool.

majestic seo link building tool

There are also a number of other tools (most are paid) that can allow you to look at what websites link to your competitors.  If you have a favorite tool that isn’t OSE, feel free to leave a comment with that tool and what you like best about it.

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Website Landing Page Optimization Based on Traffic Source

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Just reading through a Marketing Sherpa report on Landing Page Optimization and I thought I would share a few thoughts. They typically look at it from three types of landing pages; E-Commerce, Incentivized Leads, and Direct Lead Generation. These are, after all, the reasons you are out there with internet marketing campaigns – to drive leads and sales.

With the tools available (Google Analytics is perfect and FREE), you should spend some time figuring out who converts the best on your site from what medium of advertising. You also need to look at assigning a lead “quality score” in order to balance quantity and quality. Paid media, customers, e-mail blasts, social media referrals, and general organic traffic all do different things when they get to your website and you should be looking at the data to tell you what you need to do based on the source.

Which takes me to some work we did a few months ago for a big automaker here in Michigan. They created a comparison site for their brand site and wanted to know how it was working.  We helped them understand all the ways they could measure their traffic patterns and usage so they could make changes to improve performance based on EACH way someone got to that site – paid, social, Brand site, mobile, etc. for the next model year. This is extremely important to look at in order to make sure you are maximizing your opportunity with each and every visitor to your site based on how they get to you and what they do once there.

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The Latest in Local Search

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Remember the days of cracking into a fresh phone book, rifling through the yellow pages to find someone to fix your roof? Would that be under “Roofers?” “Contractors?” “Construction?” Hey, these people have a huge ad, let’s start with them. Or, maybe browsing through the pages of your local Zagat guide to find a restaurant?

Yeah, me neither (or at least I’d like to forget).

The reality is that the usage of traditional yellow pages is on a decline in recent years. Have you noticed your phone books getting considerably thinner?  With advancements in online local search, the swell of social media and our natural tendency to seek answers the fastest way possible, your potential customers are taking to Google, Bing, Yelp and a handful of other sites first.

If you have a local presence, it is absolutely crucial to build out your local profiles. Best of all, most of these channels are free. No more spending more for a larger ad; everyone operates on the same playing field. Only those with the most optimized pages, plenty of reviews and information gain the clicks. Your customers are looking for you, get in front of them!

That said, there have been some big changes in the world of local search as of late, so I wanted to bring everything under one roof.

Google Places is Now Google+ Local Pages

First on the list is probably the biggest change affecting local search. Google Places, the old go-to source for information on local businesses, has been migrated into the Google+ social media machine. This was a widely anticipated move, considering Google’s massive push to promote usage of Google+ and the addition of Google+ Business Pages.

Learn About Google+ Local

Google Places was well-known for general clunkiness when it came to managing your Place page (if you had multiple locations, your headaches only grew exponentially). From difficulties verifying your address, to potential bans for PO Boxes, virtual addresses, shady service areas and so on, and finally the ability for just anyone to move your location or close your business; Places had its fair share of issues. Continue reading →

How to Schedule Posts in Facebook without HootSuite

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Do you still use HootSuite or other third-party applications to manage Facebook? It used to be a strategic and efficient way to go, but if you’re still using these tools to schedule posts— you’ll want to re-evaluate your process.

There are several reasons why scheduling posts in advance using HootSuite is doing a disservice to your social media efforts. 1. First, as third-party management tools became popular, users got better at noticing and distinguishing between posts that were made in Facebook and those that weren’t. People simply weren’t engaging as much with Fan Pages that weren’t naturally taking the time to post in Facebook. 2. Facebook of course understood this, and developed their EdgeRank algorithm to reflect it. Fan Pages with stronger EdgeRanks are more likely to have their posts appear in fans’ News Feeds, and using third-party scheduling tools hurts your EdgeRank. 3. The best reason why you shouldn’t be using HootSuite anymore? You can now schedule posts directly in Facebook!

How to Schedule Posts Directly in Facebook

It’s really pretty simply once you know it’s there (and until a week or 2 ago, it wasn’t!—What took you so long, Facebook?). When making a post, click on the clock on the bottom left of the status update.

How to schedule directly in facebook

You can directly schedule posts in Facebook up to 6 months in the future and in 10 minute time intervals. You can also “schedule” posts in the past. If you choose a past date, it will appear on the appropriate date on your Fan Page’s Timeline.

Schedule posts in facebook

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How Content and Design Affect Website Conversion Rates

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Sam Mauzy is a blogger who also works hand-in-hand with a conversion optimization company that helps clients improve their landing page design in order to convert more browsers into customers.

Most companies have a website these days, or in the very least know the importance of having one. The purpose of having a website is to make people aware and interested in what you have to sell. Odds are that you’ve heard the term “conversion rate” before, even if you’re not really sure what it means or how to get it. When building a website, it’s important to understand conversion rate if you want to make your website work for you, rather than having it simply be a digital brochure.

Conversion rate works hand-in-hand with search engine optimization (SEO). By using well-targeted keywords, you can amp up how often your website appears in search engine results. The more your website comes up in results, the more likely people are to visit your website. A high amount of people who convert from visitors to customers starts with getting people to your page. If you’re unsure of how to write SEO content yourself, hire a content writer who’s familiar with search engine optimization.

Once people land on your website, you have the chance to boost your conversion rate. The home page is where you should concentrate most of your efforts to improve your conversion rate. If you don’t grab visitors’ attention on your homepage, you may never have another opportunity to turn them into customers again. You want to prevent visitors from closing your site before becoming a customer.

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