As PPC advertising reported a turnover of 23.6 billion dollars in 2009, and as advertisers are bidding higher and higher PPC prices for their keywords, many users are starting to question the effectiveness of these programs.
Google has consistently advised its AdWords account holders, never at a loss to take advantage of PPC growth opportunities, that their daily spending limits should be increased. This is either because their current spend is only running X percent of the time or because they are told that by spending X dollars more per day, they will gain X percent more website traffic.
Google wants you to understand one central concept, and if you get it right, you’ll get lower prices per click while your new customers will grow incrementally. Alternatively, if you don’t get it right, you will end up paying more per click than necessary. For Google, relevancy is the most important factor.
It is Google’s mission to provide people with as much information as they can, as fast as possible. The first page of search results will show the very best and most popular butterfly sites if you search for “butterflies”.
Their PageRank process uses this mathematical formula to deliver highly ranked webpages to search engine users based on who visited the site and why.
Prior to the introduction of PPC AdWords advertising, Google was concerned that advertisers needed to provide highly relevant messages for a given keyword. People vote for you on Google when you’re relevant, and you’re rewarded for being relevant. Relevance is determined by whether you click on your ad. If you don’t, then it isn’t relevant.
Your click-through rate (CTR), or how many people view your ad and click on it, will determine how much you pay for a particular position. If your ads fail to engage visitors, Google may charge you more for displaying them.
The most important thing is that your ads and content are relevant to the keywords you are bidding on. Whenever someone uses a keyword to describe their requirements, you must match what the person is thinking.
You have to consider the relevance of your product or service to the consumer searching for a supplier on Google. Your site’s number of clicks will skyrocket if you place yourself in the consumer’s position and write ads that appeal to them.
There is almost never a direct correlation between what you bid and what you actually pay. Getting the bid right almost always means paying less.
The first thing that comes to mind is eBay. It is not the maximum bid that you pay, but one cent above the next highest bid. Another secret that is key to getting the lowest prices is: When other bidders start to jump in, there is one thing that is even more important:
Click-through rates (CTR) are more important than the amount you bid. A click-through rate represents how many people who see your ad actually click on it. In the case of one hundred people searching and one person clicking through, your click-through rate is one percent. For example, let’s say I am paying $0.50 for position number two and I have a one percent CTR.
We’ll say you have a CTR of two percent. By playing your cards right, you can get position number two for only $0.31, and you can knock your competitor off the top spot.
You were therefore twice as relevant and only had to pay half the amount!
Despite its simplicity, the implications of the rules are huge. Your bid price can be lowered as you achieve high click-through rates and still remain in the same position on the page, while your website traffic increases.
It can make a world of difference. As an example, here are two ads that look almost identical, but one got nearly twenty times the click-through rate as the other:
Sales Auditing
Let’s Build Your Business Together.
We Are the Sales Auditing Experts
www.onthemark.com.au
One Click —CTR0.34 percent
Sales Auditing
We Are the Sales Auditing Experts
Let’s Build Your Business Together.
www.onthemark.com.au
45 Clicks —CTR 4.44 percent
While both of these ads displayed the URL www.onthemark.com.au, both ads were directed to a landing page titled www.onthemark.com.au/salesstrategy.htm, which contained content regarded by Google as being highly relevant to the ad and the keyword searched.
Observe what happened: Two lines have been reversed and the click-through rate increased from 0.34 percent to 4.44 percent!
In other words, the second ad received 45 times more traffic than the first ad and, importantly, the cost per click (CPC) fell from AU$1.23 to AU$0.53. Considering you received more traffic for less than half the price, what could be better?
You might be wasting a lot of money if you ignore some very logical advice on your Google AdWords campaign. Drop your bid prices down, down, down to increase traffic. If you constantly change your ad to be able to outperform older, better-performing ads, you’ll be able to get more and more traffic for less.
Those with more money than brains subsidize those who learn to use Google to their advantage by ranking their ads higher as CTR increases.
For Google AdWords customers, maintaining a current ranking usually means increasing the bid price of the keyword. Besides increasing the cost of the AdWords program, this approach will eventually lead to more and more keywords being paused, since the cost of a click is rising to a point where the user cannot afford to pay that price.
When a person types the keyword into Google, they are likely to see ads and landing pages that don’t match what they were looking for when they were first searching. The reason people don’t buy from your website or contact you to learn more about what you have to offer is that the Google ads and the content of your website don’t match what the person wanted.
So goes the argument for webpage relevance to the keyword, “if it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, can be found in a pond, and has waterproof feathers, it is likely to be a duck.” As well as matching keywords to each AdWords ad group, you must also be relevant. The more you focus on the right highly searched keywords, group them into ad groups, develop ads that engage your target audience, and you are more likely to capture the attention of people searching for your real product.
The worst thing for me is to search for a keyword and find a Google ad that seems to meet my needs, only to find when I click on the ad, I am taken to a different website that does not offer what I was looking for. There’s no point in wasting time on it. Whenever you search for something on Amazon, eBay’s ads promise you that it has what you want, but when you click on the ad, guess what? They don’t actually have the product.
What are your options for fixing this problem? This can be done by organizing your keywords into narrow, targeted themes, creating effective ads that convince search engine users that you’re offering what they are looking for, and then continually testing different ads to improve your CTR. It is best to leapfrog the CTR-highest ads and pause the lower CTR-performers while you are trying to master this strategy.
As defined in Chapter Two, “Keyword Research,” a good place to start would be with your keyword research from Google.
To achieve the highest CTR and pay less than your bid price for each keyword, you will need to develop an effective PPC AdWords campaign that focuses on grouping similar keywords into specific groups called “ad groups,” and then developing two different but similar ads around these keywords for each Ad Group. AdWords provides you with the ability to display a URL in your advertisement, which in the example shown is (www.OnTheMark.com.au), while having visitors who click on this ad directed to a specific landing page instead of the home page. In the example shown in Diagram 11 under column C is an ad group called “marketing strategies,” and in this ad group, I have placed all the keywords relevant to this keyword phrase.
In order to achieve the highest conversion rate for this ad group, the visitor would land on the webpage www.onthemark.com.au/marketingstrategy.htm that has been developed specifically to provide information about marketing strategies.
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You can create different AdWords ads by following this simple guideline that allows you to clearly define the keywords and to avoid repeating the same or similar keywords in different columns. It is important to keep your AdWords campaign from competing against two different ads. Include the 88 characters that AdWords allows you to use for each ad in the first line with the keyword phrase that was most searched according to your Google keyword research. Using the first and second most searched keywords, create a second ad and let the public decide which one is most compelling. Ensure these keywords appear in the metadata, H1 headings, bold text, hyperlinks, and webpage URLs of each AdWords ad. Modify an existing page or develop a new one that incorporates these keyword phrases. Copy the AdWords account page into the Excel spreadsheet and paste it. By taking advantage of this feature, you will be able to create the various AdWords ad groups faster while creating a copy of your AdWords campaign offline. As soon as you create several ad groups for your AdWords campaign, watch how search engine users vote by clicking on the keywords that actually convert. The method is foolproof and will get you higher placement for your ads. The reason for this is that Google will always strive to balance PPC revenue with the need to deliver websites that are keyword-rich and relevant to search engine users. The success of your AdWords campaign depends on the following: • Your ability to select the right keywords. • Breaking the keywords into narrow, targeted themes. • Choosing enough keywords but not too many. • Bidding low to start while monitoring performance. • Developing multiple ads and always running two for each ad group. • Replacing poor-performing ads with new ads to test market acceptance. • Pausing old, poor-performing ads. • Pausing keywords that don’t work or have an unrealistic cost but not deleting them. • Developing landing pages with content-rich copy for each targeted theme. • Developing metatags for each landing page relevant to the page content and keyword targeted theme. • Constantly measure and improve your AdWords campaign. • Monitor keyword performance against the keyword file you downloaded from Google in the first instance. Bidding on too few keywords is the most common mistake most people make. It will be tough to succeed if you bid on fewer than 20 keywords. This is because the keywords you are bidding on are probably the same as those everyone else is bidding on. A minimum of two hundred keywords broken down into themes with a minimum of ten keywords per theme is recommended. Starting big, allowing the market to choose for you by its own choices, and pausing keywords rather than removing them is easier. This may be better explained by the following two documents made by Google. www.onthemark.com.au/AgencyOptimisationTips.pdf www.onthemark.com.au/SearchEngineOptimization/StarterGuide.pdf The online management of your campaign enables you to see the number of times your keywords are searched, the clickthrough rate, and the location of your advertisement in Google AdWords sponsored results. It is likely that your ranking on page one will increase the more traffic you receive to your website. On the AdWords site, Google displays messages stating what price each keyword needs to be bid in order to appear on page one and providing a method to add additional keywords to your campaign. When selecting keywords, ensure that they relate to the campaign’s theme. A very easy thing to do would be to combine keywords from multiple campaigns into a single campaign for a specific range of ads, thus diluting the effectiveness of your marketing program. You should turn on Google Analytics reporting if you are running a Google AdWords campaign. Google will verify that the code is visible by testing whether it appears in your top header. You have to add a little piece of code into your website’s header and then confirm that it is. Once up and running, the report will assist you in understanding how frequently people visit you website, what pages they navigate to, how long they stay on each page, where they come from, and what page they leave your website from. This information is a valuable asset that will help you improve website performance over time. I used to spend between $750 and $1,000 a month on Google PPC advertising. Keeping myself on top of the rankings required me to know what my competitors were paying for the same keywords and be ready to outbid them. Eventually I started to wonder if the cost of the website visit was worth the keyword. Instead of spending $10 to have someone click on my website when the keyword became too expensive, I simply paused the keyword. In the end, I had to decide how much I would be willing to pay per day to avoid paying higher and higher prices for the same keywords. Users can run Google AdWords campaigns at certain times of the day or night. In the two to six hour window after two in the morning, few people are looking for marketing strategies on the Internet, so using the remaining hours to optimize my efforts made sense. Alternatively, I thought that looking at CTR patterns to determine other times during the day when my prospective customers would not be surfing the web and my AdWords campaign could be turned off might be a good idea. Google AdWords also offers you the option of putting a daily budget on your ads, and once it is reached, the ads simply stop running. In all of these cases, I need my ads to be running when potential customers are looking for my products and services, so turning off my AdWords campaign when they’re not looking for my products and services seems a little counterproductive. Similarly, putting a limit on my spending meant that I would attract potential customers during one part of the day, and my competitors during the remainder. However, I did not like this compromise because it held my costs at a reasonable level, but I found it hard to accept. As a predicable pattern, Google would post notifications on my Google AdWords account website that I had been missing hundreds of visitors and had to increase my weekly spending by 30 percent, then 40 percent, and just before I suspended the account, 50 percent if I wanted the additional traffic. Every reader who employs the internet strategy outlined in the book will achieve page-one rankings and be less reliant on AdWords, enabling them to reduce or cancel their PPC marketing, saving tens of thousands of dollars a year thereafter. You should find a professional search engine marketer who can take care of setting up and managing your AdWords campaign if you do not feel that you have the skills to do so. |