Onset PPC Questions

Posted on May 15, 2013 by John Whaley

So, you have decided that it’s time to try your hand at PPC advertising to help you meet your business goals. But, 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

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Steve Wellman

I 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.

PPC Ad Group Segmentation, How Deep Should You Go?

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Steve Wellman

Developing keyword lists and building out paid search campaigns can be a very large and a very fun project. I believe there is some debate among paid search managers as to when you should be adding new ad groups and how many ad groups are appropriate based on the size of your keyword list. There is really no clear cut answer as to when it is appropriate to further segment your ad groups. Like most things in this industry, it depends. The further you can break your ad groups down the better your campaign performance can be. It takes more work, but it pays off in the end. You need to be able to analyze your keyword list to determine how many different groups of keywords you’re working with. Also think about the potential of using different ad copy to speak to each of these different searchers. Do these different groups of keywords show different user intent? Are these searchers asking a question, or are they looking for a specific product or service? Answering these questions will help you determine when you need to utilize some different ad copy to really speak to searchers in a different way.

Rules Of Thumb To Help

There are a few different guidelines that you can use to help determine when you should be making a new ad group or just adding a few different keywords to an established ad group:

Use a 2 root words guide.
Try to not have more than 20-25 keywords in a single ad group.
Different types of keywords that show different intent.

To help explain more about some of these guidelines I’ll use a few different examples. Let’s say you’re making a campaign to advertise your ppc management services. You may have a list of terms that include: ppc management, ppc management company, ppc management services, search marketing management, search marketing manager, google adwords management, google adwords management services, etc. Your ad group list should at least include 3 different ad groups with this small list:

ppc management
search marketing management
google adwords management

When you’re using more than 20-25+ keywords in an ad group you may have a specific reason you need that many keywords, but for most ad groups this seems like there could be further segmentation. Maybe you’re taking over a campaign for someone, acquired a new client or maybe it’s just time to re-review your ad group structure. Whatever reason it is I believe your entire campaign could benefit from this exercise. If there are more than 25 keywords in a single ad group it’s hard to believe that all those different searchers should be seeing the same set of ads, which is why it might be time to build some new ad groups and write some new ads.

There are a lot of ways that people search the internet to find an infinite amount of different things. This also means that we cannot think of all these searchers as the same. Some searchers are just looking for information, while others are looking for that product that your site sells. Professionals in search marketing have tried to group keyword searches into 3 different groups.

Informational
Navigational
Transactional

This is a good way to think about your keyword and where these people are within your sales funnel, or are they in your sales funnel at all? Based on the intention of the searcher you should have different ad groups with terms that have totally different ad copy which speak to that searcher on an individual level. If it’s an informational keyword then your ad needs to answer the question or promise more insight into what problem they’re looking to solve. If the keyword is navigational then your ad needs to direct that searcher to their destination. Lastly, if the search is transactional then your ad should grab their attention and offer them the product or service that you’re selling and close the deal.

Whether you’re a seasoned PPC manager or just starting out this exercise of segmenting or adding to your ad group list is a great optimization technique. Don’t get caught up in adding keywords over time to your existing ad groups to gain traffic and exposure be left with a small number of ad groups that all have hundreds of keywords in them. Your campaigns and business are going to suffer. Take the extra time to do it right.

Google Adwords Call Metrics Effectiveness and Billing Changes

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Steve Wellman

If you haven’t already been using Google’s Adwords Call Metrics feature then you really need to look into it. Sadly, if you don’t already know about it then you have missed some functionality that was initially rolled out as free. This will not be the case very soon. Let’s first take a look at the functionality and the value that it adds, excluding the cost initially.

Call Metrics & Its Benefits

If you’re driving traffic through any form of internet marketing you are always looking for ways to track its effectiveness and justify ROI for your ad $$’s. Often times we are all tracking conversions on sales leads and sales through e-commerce, but what about the person who also gets value from phone sales or drives user interaction through offline communication? This is a great way to justify the offline conversion of your traffic and add value to your clients by letting them know the real effectiveness of a campaign if you are ultimately driving sales leads or calls over the phone.

How To Setup Call Metrics

First, go into your Adwords campaign under the Ad Extensions tab and add a Call Extension to your campaign. The next step is to establish what the phone number you want those calls redirected to. Then check the box to use Call Metrics and you’ll be able to establish whether you would like a toll free number or a local area code number associated with your tracking that will be displayed. This brings up another factor of marketing and the local spin of your business if this applies to you. Users love to see local phone numbers and know that they are talking to someone local, so if you are a local business then I would recommend using a local phone number. Even if you need to start separating out campaigns for different geographic areas to achieve this the extra effort is worth it. Either way now Google will use its Google Voice platform to assign you a phone number and they will handle the forwarding and tracking of that number. Another thing I want to mention with this is there is also another feature I have skipped over. The Call-Only Format is only possible to use if your device is capable of making phone calls. This could be any mobile phone or computer with Skype or a VOIP system. This will disable the functionality to click the headline of the ad and go to the website, and give the user only one option to interact with the ad and that is using the Click To Call functionality. If you’re trying to drive sales through a phone number then who doesn’t love a 100% conversion rate. Also, if you haven’t broken out your PPC campaigns and separated out a mobile strategy then you need to do that as well, but I’m not really covering that whole concept in this blog post.

Call Metrics Changes Very Soon

What will be changing very soon is the way Google bills for this value added service. Soon campaigns will be charged $1 for every time this number is called manually. Now when I say manually basically I mean any time the number is called NOT using the Click To Call functionality. This could be when the user sees the number on an Adwords ad, doesn’t click, but calls the number. You would be charged $1 in that scenario. The worst thing about this is users who may call your business for the first time through a PPC ad and then save the phone number in their contacts list. Users could be using this number in excess and costing your campaign money. This is just one downfall to think about. I still believe the functionality is worth the cost and will be testing to see how many times users will actually be calling the number manually. We can measure this against how many users call the number and do not charge the additional $1, and make our judgments after we see more data.

Reporting On Your Call Details

An extra feature that makes this even more valuable is the way in which we are able to report on this data. If you go into your campaign and look under the Dimensions tab you’ll want to view the Call Details information. This will give you:

Start Time Of The Call
End Time Of The Call
Status – Received or Missed Call
Duration In Seconds
Caller Area Code

This information is very valuable because it gives you very valuable information regarding the effectiveness of your PPC budget. Also you should be using this data to setup your Day Parting strategy to further target your ads to drive the most ROI.

Google Adwords Extends Ad Titles To Test And Improve CTR

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Steve Wellman

Google is always making changes and testing the way they display results and ads. We all know about the change from a while back when they stopped calling ads “Sponsored Results” and starting call them “Ads”. This made a big impact, even though it was just a simple change. Well they’re at it again and this time they are testing extending the Ad Title’s of text ads. What they are doing is taking the first line of the ad copy and appending it to the title. This has a variety of things to take into account with this change:

Ad Titles are the clickable area of an ad, and extending it gives users a larger area to click and make the text appear as a hyperlink.
It will increase CTR and drive more traffic through paid search.
As PPC managers we will need to alter the way we write ad copy taking into account the mix of ad titles and ad copy.

To see Google’s post about this topic you can visit the Google Adwords Blog where they describe how they rolled this out and how your ad needs to be formatted to receive this change. You’ll need to end your line 1 ad copy with a form of punctuation. A period or question mark will need to be used to imply your ad has actual sentence structure. The example that the Adwords blog used to illustrate the difference in ads can be seen here.

The implication of this could be huge from a CTR stand point and the volume of traffic that can be driven to your site through paid search. We like when changes like this are made because when you know how to manage and optimize campaigns we can maximize results for our clients. If you’re not actively managing your Adwords campaign then you’ll miss the boat when big changes like this can affect results on a large scale. This is a good reason to have a professional manager of your campaigns that will stay up to date for you. The scarier thing may be that your competitors could be using this to their advantage, which will give them the better CTR and overtake your ads position with a higher quality score. You may be left in the dust.If you have seen this in your own campaigns and have noticed the differences in performance leave a comment and tell us how this has affected your results and strategy. If you haven’t made adjustments that take this into account… go make them now and measure the results for yourself.

5 New Features Google Analytics Offers In The New Beta AdWords Stat Tool

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Steve Wellman

A couple of us Internet Marketers here at Bevelwise were just talking about this a few weeks ago. I had even provided this as feedback to a Google survey a few months ago that I would like to see, specifically goal tracking day parting on campaigns. I feel like those Windows 7 ads – “I’m an Adwords Certified Professional and day parting of conversions was my idea”. Google has beta released the new stat tool for AdWords data in their Analytics package. This adds a ton of features and ways that we can look at Pay-Per-Click traffic and how it is interacting with websites. If you’ve never checked this section of Google Analytics out before then go under “Traffic Sources -> Adwords” you will see a wide range of new options under that.

I thought I would give a little more insight about about some of the new features I’ve enjoyed checking out this morning and point out my top 5

The new Adwords Overview looks at your CTR and Bounce Rate metric side by side and line graphs it for you very nicely by default.
You can now see your goals/conversions broken down by day-parting. This is something we’ve not been able to see until now, and lets you see exactly what time of the day is bringing you the best conversion rates.
The layout of your Destination URL’s are easier to get to now, and you can see the statistics breakdown for how each destination url on your website is performing. This helps even further when we are looking at conversion rate optimization
You can see your “Keyword Positions” performance, which lets you pick a keyword anywhere in your account and see how many times it is clicked when it is served in the first position, second, third, etc.
You can see statistics breakdown for each match type you use. This means that you can see the bounce rate if you want for all your broad match types, and compare that to your phrase and exact types to see what is bringing in the most qualified traffic.

As you can see this a big addition to their already great Analytics package. There are so many ways to apply this to further improve Google Adwords advertising, and websites in general when we are looking at conversion rate optimization.

If you don’t already have a company that helps you manage your search engine marketing or website analytics Bevelwise is a SEM firm that is utilizing these strategies and all of the most current techniques to drive our client’s business and have successful web strategy. Staying up to date with these great additions and changes is more than a full time job for us, it’s our passion – which makes us good and what we do.

Should I try SEO or PPC for my Website?

Posted on September 17, 2009 by bevelwise

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long-term investment. You’ll often hear it when an InternetMarketer sets expectations at the beginning of an SEO program. If someone promises “instant” SEO results, run to the nearest exit – it is generally not possible following ethical practices. Meanwhile, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) programs, a.k.a. paid online advertising, are known for delivering immediate returns on investment. But sometimes clients expect SEO projects to return PPC-like results, leading to unhappiness all around.

I have heard PPC vs. SEO to be described as a farmer and a grocer. This may help demonstrate the primary difference between results that can be expected from SEO and PPC advertising. A grocer buys a product, and then immediately turns it around for a profit. A farmer invests his time, along with seeds, water and fertilizer, and then, over time, harvests a crop that can be sold.

The grocer is dealing in PPC, while the farmer is taking on SEO. Both processes offer a return on investment, but success in either requires an understanding of what can be achieved. The great part about PPC is that you can adjust you budget anytime you want. You can also get a good idea of which keywords are getting searched the most on a day-by-day basis.

Your website is the best way to reach customers and prospects 24 hours a day. Working with the right search marketing firm will ensure realistic budgets and attainable targets. Search engine optimization doesn’t happen over night. Typically, a solid campaign takes a minimum of three months to move the needle and really 9-12 months to really of concerted effort to maximize your results.

Bevelwise Media can turn the faucet on with certain PPC, but true optimization will take more time and effort, especially on a national or global scale versus local, but the results can be incredible.

Can’t figure out what to do? Contact Bevelwise for a free Website x-ray analysis. We can check out how your website is performing right now, and give you steps to take to optimize for success.

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