Tag Archives: online marketing

Onset PPC Questions

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So, you have decided that it’s time to try your hand at PPC advertising to help you meet your business goals. ppc management strategies | BevelwiseBut, you’re having a difficult time deciding whether to hire a PPC agency, or keep your PPC efforts in-house by hiring someone full time to manage your program. Either way, you want someone working on your account that is diverse in best practices for PPC.

Yes, there is no doubt that this new addition or extension of your marketing team will do keyword research, set up your account structure, build out ad copy, adjust bids, test landing pages, and track conversion/goals with an ROI or CPA. But, even novice PPC managers know that PPC management goes deeper than adjusting bids or split testing ad copy.

Here are a few questions your PPC manager should be asking you.

What are your current business objectives?

I typically like to start with this question because it helps me get a sense of what their current business goals are, and where they want to take their organization over the next 12 months. If you can get your client to share their business objectives for the year, it can help you to develop their PPC strategy.

In addition to helping you craft your PPC strategy, this question also gives you a chance to ask how they measure goals internally. What cost per conversion targets do they have? What is their target return on investments?

Expect some push back from the client when asking these questions. If you experience some push back, explain to the client why it’s important to know what their business goals are and how it’s going to help you develop your strategy.

What are you looking to get from PPC advertising?

The second question I like to ask is, what are you looking to gain from PPC advertising? Are you looking to drive more sales? Leads? White paper downloads? By asking this question, you will find out whether or not your client has any predetermined goals set already.

This question will also give you the opportunity to uncover any unrealistic ideas your client may have. Sometimes clients get excited about their potential results that they come out of the gate with unrealistic goals. Don’t be afraid to “pop” that balloon.

What are your PPC goals?

Once the client has shared their business goals and what they are expecting to see from PPC with me, I asked them what their specific PPC goals are. A PPC campaign without goals is like traveling to a new city without a map. How can you expect to build a successful PPC campaign without identifying goals?

If your client sells products online, your goal(s) should be to drive more sales at a lower CPA and a higher ROI. If your client is lead gen, your goal should be to drive more leads to your client’s website. Either way, you should set PPC goals to help you gauge the success of your PPC initiatives.

What is your desired ROI or CPA?

After the PPC goals have been established, I typically like to ask the client if they have a target ROI or CPA in mind. Establishing a target ROI and CPA will help you gauge the success of your campaigns on metrics other than CPC or average position. Don’t get me wrong, CPC and average position metrics are important, but you cannot solely manage a PPC campaigns on those metrics alone. The additional metrics will help you determine in which ad position your keywords convert best.

Is there any Geo-Targeting?

The next question I like to ask is whether or not there is any geo-targeting that needs to be implemented. I like to ask this question because when you work with mid-size business, a few of them like to advertise locally or regionally. So, it’s important to figure out your geo-targeting to ensure you are driving relevant and qualified clicks and not unqualified clicks.

Making Mobile Paid Search A Priority For Your Campaigns

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making mobile paid search a priority for your campaignsI believe that if you’re in marketing or if you’re reading this that it’s not news to you that marketing to users on their mobile devices is a good thing.  I’m also not going to barrage you with the hundreds of stats that marketers have thrown out about how consumers these days use their mobile devices to do everything.  Chances are even very good that by now you’ve already rolled out some kind of specific mobile campaign in the last 12 months or so.  If you haven’t then I’d like to encourage you to take advantage of this segment of users.  You’ll want to approach this audience a little bit differently than you would approach those same consumers on other devices.  There are lots of ways to attack the mobile segment and get your message through to your consumers, but today we’re going to focus on using paid search to reach this audience.  Your website is an important piece of this puzzle.  Is the goal on your website different from a mobile perspective than the average visitor or are there any technical limitations you need to account for in where you send visitors and how you track conversions?  Should you bypass your website entirely and just try and make your phone ring?  Before you dig into some of the nuts and bolts of your campaigns you will want to assess your assets and how best to use them.

Device Targeting

First, you’re going to want to define the devices that you want to target.  For you this may or may not include tablets as well.  In my opinion, the tablet is more like a laptop or desktop than a mobile device and I think people use it more as a second screen than as a true mobile on-the-go sole device.  Time of day is also a large driver of that opinion I just mentioned though so take that into account.  You’ll need to decide whether you’re just targeting smartphones or if you also want to include tablets in that same audience.  You can also target more specific device makes and models depending upon whether you’re running an Adwords or a Bing Ads campaign.  Let’s match up some of these advanced targeting options.

Adwords lets you target

  • Operating System
  • Device Models
  • Carriers & Wi-Fi Networks

Bing Ads lets you target

  • Operating System

Keyword Targeting

When people are on a mobile device they aren’t using the same types of keywords that they use when they are on their laptop or desktop.  A lot of times they use shorter search queries because they aren’t using their thumbs to appease your long tail keyword strategy.  I know, I wish they would too…  Your keyword strategy may need to be more towards your head terms than your long tail terms.  Also, your negative keyword strategy might not help you as much as you’d hope because the more terms people use the more they explain their search intent.  We use this to optimize our campaigns using negative keywords to exclude searches we don’t want, but with less words we don’t get as much intent.

Let’s throw a new twist in here.  What if your products or service cater directly to the mobile search audience.  Do you sell cell phone accessories, and what if they’re just for a device like the iPhone?  Are you the company behind a new app or mobile game that you’re trying to market?  You may have an entirely different keyword strategy for your mobile campaigns than your other campaigns.  This may also help you target just the specific devices that you’re looking for.

Ad Copy Optimization

Another thing you should be evaluating is your ad copy.  Your ads should be saying something different to a mobile phone user than someone on a laptop or desktop.  The biggest difference in my ad copy that I’ve seen is our call to action and the use of ad extensions to attract calls and leads.  If you’re running a lead generation campaign then maybe getting a user with a click to call ad is a better experience than sending them to your website, or maybe you’d just rather give them the option.  Depending upon your business you can use Adwords to force a call or give them the option to call or visit your website.  Almost always you’ll want to say something specific to a mobile user giving them a phone based call to action.  Maybe that’s calling your business or downloading your app.  You could also investigate changing your products mobile check out experience to streamline your conversion process for a mobile user.

Enhanced Campaigns

If you haven’t been watching the developments from Adwords on the new Enhanced Campaigns then you will be forced in this direction sooner rather than later.  I’m not even sure that Google could have predicted how important mobile search has become in the last 12 months.  Enhanced campaigns are their effort to make it a bigger focus for everyone.  In their opinion it helps people optimize mobile campaigns more efficiently and at a better scale depending upon the size of your campaigns.  This whole topic has been thrown around the ring with PPC managers taking both sides.  Some people see the benefits and others say that they like their mobile specific campaigns being separate.

In summary, if you haven’t been giving the proper attention and optimization effort to your mobile campaigns then it’s time to reevaluate.  You’re missing out and it’s not like mobile campaigns are a fad that is going to pass.  Evaluate where your budgets are at and your management time should emulate the type of spread between where your budgets and ultimately your performance is coming from.

How Much Value Does Social Media Really Have?

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Many clients and conversations we have with marketers ask us: Is social media worth any investment? The answer is yes, but maybe not from every channel that’s available.  Just make sure you set up measurement data points, implement tracking tags from Google Analytics (or some other program), and post relevant content to your audience(s) and not just “clutter.”

You also have to look at what you deem as having value to your organization. If you see your audience, followers, comments, “retweets” are growing, and your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube/Vimeo, Linkedin and Instagram are all growing in numbers and in some cases driving people to your website, then it’s valuable and driving awareness. More than likely, you will find a few of them are not worth any direct time investment.
social media marketing
True, social media doesn’t allow you to measure it as closely as other Internet marketing pieces such as banner ads, Pay-Per-Click, or email marketing, but you can track direct leads and/or sales from each social media medium you use – if that is what you need to make sure the time, money, effort you spend on it is worth it.  One key piece…don’t be lazy.  Don’t just use a feeder system (like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite) that cuts off posts or uses hashtags where it’s not appropriate. Dedicated users will know you did not intend that message for that medium and it can lose some impact.

You also have to find what works for your organization – every business is different based on size, geography, client demographics, etc. You need to watch the data and optimize for what works specifically for your business.  We can tell you – just a bunch of self-promotion is NOT going to generate social media strategy that will maximize the efforts you are putting into it and there is no “cookie cutter” solution that will maximize results.

Social media also allows people to use the Internet on their terms.  They may never leave Pinterest or Facebook until they are ready to transact.  If you aren’t there in that space, you could be missing 10-20% of your desired audience that didn’t know about you because you weren’t there and part of “their conversation.” If you could get 10% more sales from having a solid strategy here, that could be a lot of growth – but it won’t happen overnight.

The ultimate goal is to get a post in front of thousands through their networks – through the use of tagging, timely posts, and community/industry cross promotion. Marketing is the sum of all parts and the number of touch-points – something known as frequency – the number of times someone has to be exposed to something before they are willing to take an action.  Through social media, you can increase those touch-points and be in front of them more often, which helps speed up the frequency time-period until an action will occur.

With an agency/resource who can monitor and report on social media for you (and also bring some creativity to your strategy), it can be the most effective $500-$1,500 a month (local-to-national type budgets) you spend out of your marketing budget and go a heck of a lot further than any advertising dollar could with reach.  Just make sure you give it a few months and your resource for this is showing you the data and how it is moving in the right direction on the way there.  Happy posting…

Local SEO Building Blocks

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If you are a local business owner that has a physical location, it’s important for you to optimize your site for Local SEO. A report from Chitika found that 43% of search queries on Google seek local results, which demonstrates the value of a Local SEO strategy that targets local customers.

Often times when you talk to local business owners and mention Local SEO or SEO in general, you get a blank stare paired with a look of confusion. This is your cue to educate the local business owner on what Local SEO is and why it’s important. It’s also important to explain the complexity of Local SEO in layman’s terms so the business owners can understand what you are talking about.

With that said, I wanted to take a few minutes and outline some important features of a Local SEO strategy that would be simple for any local business owner to implement.

Get your site up to speed

Since local search volumes continue to grow exponentially, it is important for you as a local business owner to make sure that your website is properly optimized to target local searchers.  Here are a few tips to implement on your site to help facilitate better rankings and increase search traffic: (1) optimize your site’s architecture to ensure that search engines can easily navigate your site and determine what it is about, (2) author good content that engages users and moves them through the sales funnel, (3) optimize your pages for 2-3 keywords paired with local geo-modifiers, (4) optimize your on-page content to incorporate local keywords as well as helping to build relevancy between the page title, description and on-page content, (5) make your content information easily accessible for users to find.

Claim Local Business Listings

Claiming your local business listings will help boost your local SEO search rankings because the number of citations, reviews, more specifically, how positive those reviews are will help boost your Local SEO rankings. You will also want to claim your Google+ Local Profile, which now is a combination of Google Places and Google +. Reviews left on your Google Local pages will help increase your Local ranking quicker than reviews left on other citation sites.

One of the resources I like to use when search for local business listings for clients is, getListed.org. getListed.org is a resourceful website that allows you to enter your business name along with your zip code to see how your business is listed on the three major search engines, as well as other second tier directories that can create good local citations.

Another great resource for building local citations by city is getListed.org’s “Best Local Citation Sources by City” webpage.  If you’re not comfortable building citations by city, you can build them by business category. Both of these citation guides are very helpful in building authority citations.

It is very important to make sure the continuity of your business information is carried throughout all of your local business listings and citations. Also keep in mind that local business listings are a support tool to your primary website. That’s why continuity is important.

Social Media for Local Businesses

Recently Facebook updated the “Nearby” feature within their interface that allows Facebook users to search for establishments near their current location. This update changes how local businesses should be utilizing Facebook. Local businesses should optimize their Facebook pages for the appropriate service category or categories; include their physical address, phone number, hours of operation, and a link to their site.

Social indicators are also an important factor in Google’s Local Search algorithm. It’s important to not passively watch, but to actively engage with users on your social media profiles.

Local Business Schema and Geotag

Local business schema and geotag essentially allows you to use schema markup for your business type, business address, business contact information, business hours, and much more.  Another great feature that Schema offers is giving webmasters the ability to specify your geographical location by including your longitude and latitude coordinates.

Google has favored structured and semi-structured data for years, and when reviewing a site, Google will look for structured or semi-structured data before review plain HTML.

Here is an example for Schema.org:

Local SEO Schema Example

 If you are a novice and would like to implement schema markup on your site, I have found Schema’s Local Business instructions to be very helpful with implementing this code.  You can also implement schema markup through Google Webmaster Tools with their newly released markup tool.

Mobile Versions of Your Site

Earlier I mentioned that 43% of searches done on Google are local searches, but what I did not mention is that the same study found that 27% of the 43% of local searches were done by users using smartphones.  With that said, it is important to not only optimize your primary site for local SEO, but it is equally important to have a mobile version of your site that is optimized for local search as well.

Not only do you want to optimize your mobile site for local search, but you will also want to make sure your site and your Google+ Local profile are listed on Google maps, and that you are listed on all popular local review and citation apps (yelp, Google+ Local, and so on).

If you are feeling up to the challenge and want to test a mobile site before having one professional designed, Google does offer a free mobile site builder that will allow you to create a mobile version your site. However, if you want a mobile site that is going to yield a return, as well as help boost your local rankings, I would partner with a firm that has experience doing so.

So there you have it. I have put together a simple list of tips that will help you make an impact in 2013 with your local SEO.

8 Ways to Improve Your Online Marketing Efforts in 2013

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With the end of the world behind us (we made it!) and 2013 just a few days away, it may be time for us to start looking ahead. In 2012, the world of online marketing took some hard turns and some trends have begun that will carry us into the next year.

I won’t ramble about what happened in 2012. Instead, I’d like to focus on some actionable items that will play a larger role in your online marketing success in 2013, based on changes and shifts we’re already seeing.

8. Pay per click

If you have been putting off pay per click (PPC) marketing, I have some unfortunate news for you: search marketing is increasingly becoming a paid game. First, Google announced that Google Shopping results are now “Pay to play.” Meaning, if you want your product feed to receive the benefits of higher clickthrough rates and conversion rates that come with Google Shopping results, you need to integrate that feed with your AdWords account.

Second, we’re seeing search engine results pages (SERPs) increasingly dominated by paid results. Between Shopping results, regular PPC ads and the increasing availability of rich snippets, organic results are being pushed out of view. Below is what I see above the fold (view of the SERP without scrolling) following a search for a new camera:

I see a total of eight full paid ads and just 2 ½ organic listings. Plus, how can I resist clicking on those Shopping results in the upper-right corner?

7. Company Blog

The trend for the past two years will continue: Fresh, quality content is crucial to maintaining favorable organic rankings. Search engines want to present sites that offer continuous and useful content for their audience. It isn’t always easy for what some would consider “boring” industries, but you need to find a way to always add value to your website. Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Should your business try Groupon, Living Social, & Google Offers?

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Looks like the online promotions space is thriving. More and more special offers sites are being created. Google even went and developed their Google Offers product after they failed to buy Groupon for $6 Billion – that’s right $6 Billion. So there must be some value in these promotional tools right? Otherwise businesses would stop using them and Living Social sure has a large advertising budget for themselves.

Let’s look at Groupon.  So if you have a $50 product/service, that you sell for $25 – (it has to be a 50% discount so it is a “good deal” to get approved) and then you get 60% of the $25 and Groupon keeps 40% of the $25.  You are really selling a $50 product for $15 because of the discount and the Groupon percentage – but they are opening relationships for you – and for the most part giving you an opportunity for customer relationship.  So is a $35 acquisition cost on a $50 product/service worth it?  Only you can answer that, but you should run the numbers.  Based on that, I can tell you, it is going to perform close to what it would cost you with advertising dollars spent at that level (but you can optimize for performance over time with advertising).

You will have some instantaneous Branding and recognition, not to mention customer traffic over the 6 months the Groupon/Living Social is valid.  You will always have some existing clientele who will always buy this so it doesn’t reach only new people – unless you are just opening your doors in the market.  This is unbeatable for the new business.

However, I have yet to see a second offer from the same business so you only get to use this once – so pick your timing – if you are not a new business try to use it to boost a slower period and make sure you can handle the demand during the 6 months without losing your shirt.

There is also the FREE money aspect of this.  Like any rebate that is offered, you get a % that don’t use it. So if we use the first example again, you got $15 off each sale and that 25-30% don’t end up using it, that is FREE money for you to keep, which doesn’t hurt and softens the blow – but then you don’t get that all important “new” customer relationship either so it is kind of a double edge sword.

Here is a great case study.  We had a client use Groupon in December 2010 – a single location Hot Yoga Studio as part of launching their business and they sold almost 700 at $39 a pop.  That is incredible for a small business that is just getting going.  Now, it gave them some cash in the door and created some relationships.  They considered it a huge success.

My take, if you are opening a new business or want to launch a new product or want some quick cash – put an unbelievable offer out there through one of these and you should get some traction. Also learn from one before you try to do another – Set up some tracking on your website that sees what these people do that come to your website via this campaign and track their habits.

Be prepared to use it as a loss leader to get access to new customers and get “legs” underneath your new product or location. Also make sure your ongoing marketing turns those new relationships into repeat customers so you can make some money back and it creates success for the long term. That might take a second promo for them for another visit – but you don’t have to give Groupon their 40% this time.

Let us know if you have had success with one of these services – please give location and product/service sold and if it has been successful in generating repeat business.

Analyzing your audience’s web habits to improve website performance

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How much actionable information do you have about your web visitors? Can you predict their wants, goals, needs and behavior? Are you using analytic data to improve website performance? Do you utilize any re-targeting, ad networks, Search Engine Marketing (PPC and Display) and social media to be collecting data across multiple external sites and clickstreams? If so, the potential to deliver targeted content and offers based on their previous behavior and referring traffic source is possible.

You can construct detailed matrix that serve up content based on the family of sites they have visited and the predicted traits and interests that visitors to those sites demonstrate. However, if the first known point of contact with your visitors is their arrival at your site, then predicting their targeted area of interest is a much more tricky proposition, unless you study your own analytics and data (Sitecore, Webtrends, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc) to come up with them and improve website performance.

Do you perform any A/B testing of two broader offers or content paths on your enterprise level site visitors and see which performs better (ie they look at more pages or end up as a conversion more often).  That is a good place to start, but more organizations have never consider split testing their own website. Doing this would ensure no audience gets excluded or misdirected–and it requires less historical data to drive the offer but allows you to profile how each “path” behaves.

Coming from purchased media like PPC or Facebook, can also shed light into keywords that have “special” needs to be effective, landing pages that get them to take desired actions and demographic profiles of who is visiting based on reporting. Again, this allows you the create a profile on each type of visitor and adjust the “path” accordingly – which will improve website performance .

You tie all of this data together to make the necessary changes to your website and content, navigation paths to drive more usability, click patterns, desired “conversions” that you have established for your website and/or campaigns.  Interpreting data is extremely important to ongoing web success – find a resource to work with that understands this to help set benchmarks and foundational strategy and it will help educate yourself and give you insights to things you could use across all mediums with your marketing and advertising.

Social Media & Online Advertising Help You Reach Your Audience

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Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of my friends complaining that they are “creeped out” when they see Facebook ads tailored to their demographics or interests, or when they see ads from websites they have recently visited on other websites. This is technology at work to benefit both the user and the marketer.

Facebook’s privacy policy has long been a controversial issue. In my opinion, if you put something on the internet (especially something about yourself) you need to have the mindset that it could be possible for anyone and everyone to read it. By entering your interests or personal information in your profile – even something as simple as your gender or marital status – you are making it possible for those advertising on Facebook to group you into a “category”, which is then used for marketing purposes.

Now, I don’t know what makes advertisements catered to my interests so creepy. Personally, I think it’s great. Do I want to see ads about fantasy football? Not really. Guys, do you want to know about a great deal on stilettos? Doubt it. The same principle applies to marketers. Why spend your advertising budget on an uninterested audience? Seeking out your target audience is certainly not revolutionary, but once it is applied to Facebook, it seems to make people unsettled. These strategies are done to help you get content you want and eliminate clutter.

How does Facebook target users?

The thing that I think people misconstrue about Facebook’s ad targeting is HOW they are actually getting targeted. It’s easy to think that “big brother” is scouring your every move trying to figure out what type of person you are, but in reality, the only information used is what you voluntarily supply. Let’s say I opened up a dog grooming salon in Detroit, Michigan. I would be able to specify that I want to serve ads to those who report they are living in Eastern Michigan and have dogs listed as one of their interests. Better yet, I could even be as specific as targeting dog owners with the breed of dogs that tend to give me the most business AND set a geographic distance from the zip code of my location(s). Talk about specific, relevant, and cost effective advertising!

Retargeting follows you around the web

Another effective way to advertise to a more appropriate audience is through retargeting. It’s not necessarily a coincidence to see an ad from a website that you might have visited a couple of days ago. Some websites set cookies through your browser when you visit a certain page(s) on their website and can then serve ads to you on other websites while you are surfing the internet after setting this cookie. This is also possible to do through Google Adwords via the Audiences functionality. After putting a tracking cookie on specific pages of a website, display ads will then be shown to individuals who have visited those pages as they browse websites on the Google Display Network.

Continue reading →

Social Media allows you to listen like never before & respond appropriately

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Social Media has made it easier than ever for consumers and business people to get their opinions heard and get them into circulation faster than ever before. It also creates challenges – like should you listen? or what should you respond or how do you get quality responses and exposure?

You have all heard the phrase that the “squeakiest wheel gets the grease”. These are the people who will be everywhere just posting about their experience – especially if it was not a good one. Does that make them less credible? If they are an active poster and only have “complaining” on their mind, they are already less credible and you cannot be worried about everything they say. You should also look to see if they have people agreeing, “liking”, or responding to their posts. If they do, then you have to take action.

If something positive happens, respond and ask for more by more people. If something negative happens, address it and find a way to take care of it – then ask them to post (or update the previous post) after you fix the problem about how you took care of it. Actually have your customer service people ask if you can share their experience with they solve or problem or get a rave from an interaction – it will go a long way to helping you have an unlimited supply of content to use for your blog, Facebook, or social media channels.

Build your brand around building your community of followers and dialogs – the ones utilizing social media are most likely to share experiences and they will be most likely to share – giving you further reach through their network and you definitely want them on your side.