Real Web Marketing Blog

Pay Per Click Advertising – an Introduction

by John Eberhard

Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of Pay Per Click Advertising. This term refers to paid advertising that a company can run on search engines such as Google or MSN, so that when a person enters a specific search term or phrase, your ad appears.

For instance, if someone goes to a search engine and enters "antivirus software", you will see regular search results that come up for this term, but on many search engines, you will also see paid advertising, usually labeled as "sponsored links." That means that some company that sells antivirus software has paid to have that listing appear when anyone enters the search term "antivirus software."

One can choose any word or phrase at all and choose to have your ad appear when people enter that phrase on that search engine. However, you want to select words or phrases that are at least somewhat popular, i.e. that a lot of people are entering. That way you get decent exposure for your ad.

One of the biggest advantages to pay per click (PPC) advertising is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and thus arrives at your web site. You start an account with Google or MSN, and every time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site, your account is debited. This has an advantage over most other types of advertising, where you pay whether there is any result or not. With PPC advertising, you only pay for actual traffic coming to your web site.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are currently including sponsored links as part of their search results. For Google, the most popular of all the search engines currently, the sponsored links appear in the narrow, far-right column (and also with the top three results along the top), whereas the regular search results appear in the wider left-hand column. Google’s PPC program is called "AdWords."

There are a number of other benefits to this type of advertising. First of all, with search engines, one always has the advantage that the web visitor went there specifically to get information on what you sell. If you sell antivirus software and you can put your ad in front of people that are looking for antivirus software, it doesn’t get much more targeted than that.

Secondly, it is very easy and quick to get started. You can start an account and have your listings up and running within hours. And you don’t have to struggle through and worry about the myriad requirements of the search engines in order for you to be listed high in the regular or “organic” results. Not to say you can’t do that too, but what we’re saying is that PPC advertising is a lot easier and is very effective.

Getting Started

Google is the largest PPC program in that it has by far the most traffic. Yahoo Search Marketing recently merged with MSN Ad Center, so if you start an account on MSN your ads will also appear on Yahoo.

Determining Your Best Search Terms

One of the first things you will have to do is to select the key words or key phrases on which you will pay to have your ad appear. Here’s how we recommend you do this:

1. Try to adopt the viewpoint of a person who would be looking for your product or service. Think about what words or phrases they might type into a search engine in order to find your product or service. Start making a list.

2. Go to the web sites of one of the companies competing against you. From your browser select View | Source. This shows the HTML source code of that particular web page. Near the top you will see a paragraph like this:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="pay per click search engines, pay
for placement, pay ranking search engines, bid position, pay per
click">

This is called the meta-tag area of a web page, which is hidden when you view the page normally but is visible when you select View | Source. Meta-tags on a web site help in order to achieve good rankings in the regular (non-paid) search results of a search engine.

After where it says CONTENT=, and within the quotation marks, are search terms or phrases that that company thinks are significant for their product or service. Those are phrases where they hope to appear near the top of the regular listings when people type those phrases into a search engine.

I used to advise people to go to a free site to see what the search numbers were for all the keywords before they got started with a Google AdWords account. Now I advise people to just put them all up in an ad campaign on Google and see how the numbers look after a week or so. Google also has a keyword tool which you can use once you start your account.

Bids and Bidding

For PPC advertising, during the process of setting up your account and your ads that are connected to specific key phrases, you will be asked how much money you want to bid for that keyword. In other words, how much money you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site.

In general, the higher you bid, the higher your ad will appear amongst all the ads of all the advertisers running ads for that keyword. It is definitely not necessary to be in the #1 position in order to get people coming to your web site.

In general we recommend bidding $1.00 per click when first setting up an account or new campaign. Then review your account over the next week and see how high that places your ads. And see if you are getting a fair number of clickthroughs. If your ad is appearing low and your clickthroughs are low, raise the bid.

Budgets

Google and MSN allow you to set a budget for your campaign. So figure out what you want to spend for your clickthroughs for a month and divide by 30, and that’s your daily budget.

I’m going to say some things that may discourage you from doing PPC advertising. In setting up and managing dozens and dozens of PPC accounts over the last 6 years, I have observed that you have to a monthly budget of a certain size in order for your campaigns to be successful.

In the beginning I used to have client accounts where their budget was $200 per month, $300, $400, etc. Hard experience has shown me that budgets of this size rarely work. For whatever reason, I have seen that accounts with small budgets like this have not had successful campaigns in about 80% of cases. I have seen that accounts with monthly budgets of over $1,000 have been successful in about 90% of cases.

I define a successful campaign as getting an adequate number of sales or leads, with a viable cost per lead or sale. So if you can only afford $200 or $300 per month, I’d advise you not to do PPC advertising. Wait until you can afford to do a larger budget.

Writing Your Ad

The next important issue is the writing of your ad. The ad will consist of a headline, ad text, and an Internet address. On Google AdWords, you get a strict limit of number of characters per line for the headline (25 characters including spaces), and two lines of text with 35 characters each.

The headline will appear in bold. So you want to grab the person’s attention with your headline. It is often a good idea to include the key phrase in the headline, though this is not a hard and fast rule.

One of the many advantages of pay per click advertising is that you can write your ad copy, and put the ad up, and then see what the response is, and if it does poorly, it basically doesn’t cost you anything.

You can experiment with different wording for your ad and your headline. Whenever you make a change, Google automatically records data on the change, so you can review your “change history” later to see which changes you made when. Then when your response goes up or down, you know what the change was that caused it and when that change was made.

Your Landing Page

When you set up your ad on Google or MSN, you will have to choose a "landing page" for the ad. That’s the page where the person lands when he clicks on your ad. A few tips on how to work your landing pages:

1. In all cases, it is best NOT to have the landing page be the home page of your site. We recommend to create a new page whose sole purpose is to be a landing page for that paid ad on one of the search engines.

2. Do not put navigation buttons on the landing page to the rest of your site. Design the page so that the only thing they can do on that page is fill out the form you want them to fill out. This will always increase response, and giving them full navigational buttons to every other page under the sun on your site will always lower response. Giving them only one option controls the process to a much greater degree.

3. Design the landing page so that there is a bit of sales text on the top of the page, including any graphics as needed, and then there is a phone number and a form on the lower part of the page. If possible, do not make them click through to yet another page to fill out the form or buy the product.

Geo-Targeting

Google and MSN now have a feature called geo-targeting, where, when you set up your campaign, you can select where your ads will appear geographically. So if you have a local business that sells to the public in the greater Los Angeles area, you can select the metro LA area and your ads will only appear there. This is very important so that you are not paying for people to click on your ads in places where you can’t sell your product or service to them.

Managing and Measuring Your Campaign

On Google and MSN, by logging into your account you can see various statistics on your account. Here are the most important things to look for in measuring how you’re doing:

a. Impressions: These are the number of people that saw your ad, meaning they entered one of your specific keywords or phrases, and your ad appeared. You can see the total impressions by day, for the week, and you can break it out so you can see the impressions for specific key phrases.

High impressions means that you have selected key phrases that a lot of people are entering.

b. Clickthroughs: This means the number of people that, having seen your ad, clicked on it and arrived on your landing page. The search engines will show the clickthroughs as a raw number and also as a percentage compared to the impressions.

High clickthrough percentages means you have been successful in writing an ad that a good percentage of people were interested enough to click on, to go to your site.

c. Conversion Rate: This means the percentage of people that clicked through and went to your site, that actually did what you wanted them to do. If you are selling products right on the site, the conversion rate means what percentage of people that arrived there actually bought the product. If you are advertising to generate leads, the conversion rate is the percentage of people that clicked through that filled out the form and sent you their information.
In order to have this conversion rate information, you have to put what is called “conversion code” on your “thank you page” that people come to after they fill out your form. Many people don’t know about this (both Google and MSN have it) but it is a vital tool in measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns.

The conversion rate is a measure of success of your landing page. If you are getting good conversion rates that means you have done a good job of writing and designing the landing page. If your conversion rate is poor, that means you need to look again at the landing page and figure out where you could change it to make it better, or at what points you might be losing people.

In our experience:

1. A good clickthrough percentage is anything over 0.5%. If you are getting 1.0% or better, that’s pretty good. If you are getting less than 0.5%, you should test some changes to your ad. Remember that a poor clickthrough percentage is a reflection of your search engine ad, not your landing page. So make changes to your ad, not your landing page, when trying to improve it.
2. A good conversion rate is anything from 3% to 5%. The highest conversion rate we have ever gotten on a web site is 50%. If you are getting 2% or less, you should test some changes to your landing page and try to improve it.

And likewise remember that a poor conversion rate is a reflection of your landing page, so make any needed changes there.

Summary

In the constantly changing landscape of the Internet and Internet marketing, pay per click advertising is currently a very successful tool. If you are selling a product or service that costs over $200, we recommend you try it.

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Pay Per Click Conversions

by John Eberhard

When you’re doing pay per click (PPC) advertising with Google AdWords or MSN Ad Center, the end product that you are shooting for is a conversion. If you are selling products on your web site, a conversion is an online sale. If you are doing lead generation on your web site, meaning you are getting people to respond and give you their name and contact info so you can call and sell them, then a conversion is a lead.

If you are using Google’s optional Conversion Code (which anyone should) you can see exactly which campaign and which ad and even which keyword your conversions are coming from. You can see your cost of lead as well, meaning your total cost spent on Google clicks, divided by the number of leads or sales you got.

Of course you want to get the most possible conversions in a given period of time and you want the lowest possible cost per conversion. The cost per conversion varies wildly according to the industry.

The very first thing to know about conversions is that it is entirely the job of your landing page to get the conversions. Assuming that your ads are working and that you have the right keywords and that you have an adequate number of people arriving on your landing page, if your conversions are still low, then you tinker with the landing page, not with the ads or the keywords or the bids.

For years I have advocated an approach of having a customized landing page and that is where you have your PPC visitors land. You do not have them land on your home page. This is the more or less generally accepted viewpoint today, with people who have the visitor land on their home page viewed as an “amateur.”

The reason why you need a customized landing page is quite simply that you will get a higher percentage of conversions if you do it that way. Here are the criteria for an effective landing page:

1. It should not be the home page, but a customized page made especially for PPC advertising.
2. It should have sales text and pictures specifically about the product being offered by your PPC campaign. It would be similar to a “product detail” page within your site that talks about this specific product. In other words, there should be a direct connection between the ad they saw on Google and what they see when they land on your landing page.
3. I usually put a form on that page so the person can fill it out right there without having to click to another page. That’s for lead generation. For selling products you want to allow them to buy the product right on that page if possible, or if not, have a large button “click here to buy” or something similar that links directly to the exact page of your shopping cart where they can buy that product. Make it easy and obvious for them on how to become a conversion.
4. No navigation buttons. I get more argument from new clients about this than any other topic. Over the years of doing PPC management (and before that email marketing which is similar when it comes to landing pages) I observed, when we studied the web statistics, that often people would land on our landing pages, then wander around the site, then leave. Rarely would people come back to the landing page, or go to any of the other form pages on the site, and fill one out. They wandered around, and left. So we tried it out with no navigational buttons, so the only choice they had was to do what we wanted them to do, which was fill out the form and become a conversion. Our conversion percentages went way up. But clients sometimes argue with me that they wouldn’t like it if they landed on a landing page and couldn’t wander around the site, so they wouldn’t want to do it to others. So if the client has been really insistent, we have set it up both ways and tested it. Without navigation works better in about 90% of all cases, with the other 10% being mostly companies that highly visible products like landscaping, where the prospect is going to want to look at photo galleries.

Remember, if you have an adequate number of people clicking on your ads and coming to your landing page, but no or few conversions, the fault is with the landing page. Make a change to the landing page, keep to the rules above, and see your conversions increase.

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Google AdWords Quality Score

by John Eberhard

Google AdWords has a sort of measuring stick they use called “quality score.” The quality score is applied to your campaign, and to your ad group within a campaign, and to your individual keywords within the campaign.

Your quality score is important because the better your quality score, the less you will pay for whenever someone clicks on one of your ads. And conversely, with a low quality score your cost per click goes up significantly.

Here’s what Google says about the quality score:

“The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

So we can see that your quality score is important because it affects how much you will pay for each click. This is vital because, especially with the amount of companies using Google AdWords today and competing for your keywords, if you’re not careful your costs can get out of hand and your campaign will not be viable. And when I say not viable I mean that you can end up paying too much for each lead or sale that you get.

“In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs and the better your ad position.”

“Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody -- advertisers, users, publishers, and Google too -- when the ads we display match our users' needs as closely as possible. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.”

It’s a little bit of work to sort through what they are saying and what you actually have to do in order to improve your quality score. So here it is simplified.

1. Relevancy: Your keyword, your text ad, and the content you have on your landing page have to all be the same topic. If for instance you have a set of keywords that are all very similar, and your text ad is about that same topic, and then the content of your landing page is all about that same topic, that’s good. You will get a good quality score. This also means that you should eliminate from your ad group any keywords that are only slightly related to what is on your landing page, as including them will lower your quality score.

1. Clickthrough Rates (CTR): In general, the higher your overall clickthrough rate is for a given ad group or campaign, the higher the ad group’s or campaign’s quality score will be.

There are several important implications for this. One is that between the search network and content network (which Google is now calling the “display network”) the search network always gets higher clickthrough rates, by far, than the display network. So it is best to set up one campaign that only goes to the search network, and another that goes only to the display network. That way, the quality score of your search network campaign will be much higher than if you just had both networks together in one campaign.

Another implication is that you should remove keywords from your campaign that have really low clickthrough rates, because including those in the campaign will lower its quality score. I called Google recently and found out from them that if you have a keyword which is getting impressions but has NO clickthroughs, that will not affect your quality score adversely. But as soon as that keyword gets one clickthrough, if the percentage is low, now it will affect your quality score adversely.

1. Search and Display Network: I recently read a book called the “AdWords Manifesto,” where the author said that for your search campaign, you should choose tightly focused keywords that are only on one topic, so that it has good relevancy. Then for your display network campaign, you can throw in related keywords and make it more broad. I actually called Google about some of the things in this book to ask if they were true. The Google rep said that this is not true, and the opposite is true, i.e. you can have a broader selection of keywords on the search network and a more focused group on the display network.

1. Landing Page is Not the Home Page: Many people put up a Google AdWords campaign and have their text ad set up so that when someone clicks on it, the visitor goes to the home page of the advertiser’s web site. This is not ideal and can hurt your quality score, because chances are your home page does not specifically talk about the specific product or service you are advertising in detail. This is especially true if your company has multiple products or services. So if the visitor lands on your home page and it doesn’t even mention the product being advertised, or just briefly mentions it, that hurts your quality score. Better to create a customized page for your Google visitor to land on.

1. Keywords in Text Ad: Including your keywords from your campaign in your text ad improves your quality score.

1. Keywords in Headlines: If you include your keywords from your campaign in the H1 and H2 tags, which are used to define your headlines in an HTML page, that helps your quality score.

Good luck with your Google AdWords campaigns.

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Handling Low Impressions in Pay Per Click Advertising

by John Eberhard

So you’ve gotten an account started on Google AdWords and gotten some ads set up, and people are starting to come to your web site.

One of the problems that can occur sometimes with a new pay per click ad campaign is that you will put up your new campaign, and the impressions will be really low. Remember that the impressions are the number of times your text ad appeared in front of someone. This is the beginning of the cycle.

If you don’t have good impressions, you will not have good results overall. Realize that you need thousands of impressions to get a certain percentage that will click through on your ad and then a certain percentage of those that will then become conversions.

There are six possible reasons for very low impressions:

1. You have chosen some really low traffic keywords, or you have only chosen a small handful of keywords, not enough to get good impressions.

The solution for this is to add more keywords. Just make sure your keywords are relevant to the subject of your ads. Google has a keyword suggestion tool that works quite well, suggesting keywords that are similar to the ones you already have in that campaign.

2. The keywords are not displaying because the bid is not high enough to put your ad on the first page.

The easy solution is to raise the bid for those keywords, or raise the overall default bid for that ad group. But the judgment here is how high do you have to raise the bid? If Google is telling you that you have to raise the bid to $25.00 to be on page one, and your default bid for that ad group is $3.50, then maybe you don’t want to use that keyword. Unless you really have to have that keyword, find others that have traffic but are less expensive.

3. The keywords are not displaying because your quality score is too low.

Google has what they call a “quality score” for a given campaign, text ad or keyword. If your keywords have a low quality score, this usually means that the system cannot actually find that keyword anywhere in your text ad or on your landing page. You can handle this by adding new text ads that contain the keyword, and adding the keyword to your landing page.

4. You have a really low daily budget so the ads can’t display very long.

If this is the problem then you need to raise the budget. For example, if your daily budget is $5.00 and the bids are $2.00, your ads are only going to be on for a short time.

5. Your text ads are disapproved.

This is something you have to check on when you put up a new ad group or new text ads. It may sound stupid but if you don’t check on your new ad group and/or new text ads a few days after putting them up, you won’t know or notice if your ads are disapproved. Google sometimes will disapprove your ads. If they are disapproved, you have to figure out why and fix them. One reason text ads get disapproved is if you are using a trademarked name in the ad. If this happens go to Google and enter one of your top keywords and see how other advertisers are wording their ads. You may be able to come up with a way that does not technically use the trademark, such as putting a dash in the name or something.

6. You are targeting too small an area with geo-targeting.

Geo-targeting is where you select the geographical area in which your ads will be displayed, such as in the metro Los Angeles area, in the state of CA, in several states, in the whole US, etc. As a business you want to use this tool to limit where your ads appear, because if you are a local business, you don’t want to be paying for people to click on your ads in Peoria if you only service Glendale. BUT, you always want to select the largest possible area with geo-targeting that is appropriate for your business. You may have a business that only services one small geographical area. But whatever the case, you want the geo-targeting to be set for the largest possible area that is appropriate for your business. If your impressions are really low and the geo-targeting is set for a really small area, you might want to consider increasing or broadening the area.

Good luck with your pay per click ad campaigns.

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Pay Per Click Advertising Definitions

by John Eberhard

One of the difficulties you can run into when trying to set up or manage a pay per click advertising account on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN Ad Center, is the definitions of words. If you don’t understand the words it will be hard making sense of what the report is telling you.

Here are some definitions for terms you will run into when trying to set up or manage a pay per click advertising campaign with Google.

1. Search: On a Google AdWords report, this refers to the search network. This is basically the main Google page where people enter search terms, plus some other search engine sites that Google has partnered with. See also “Content” below.

1. Content: On a Google AdWords report, this refers to the content network. This is where Google will put your pay per click text ads up on other sites. You see this sometimes on web sites where it says “Sponsored ads from Google” and there is a small strip of these ads. They put your ad up on a site that has elected to have Google ads displayed, and they put it up only on sites where the subject matter of your ad matches the subject matter of the site. The Content Network greatly increases the reach of your ads, but fewer people will click on your ads than with the search network. And generally the Content Network gets a lower percentage of conversions than the search network.

1. Clicks: This is the number of people who clicked on one of your ads. Also called clickthroughs.

1. Impressions: This is the number of times that your ad appeared, either when someone typed in one of your keywords on the search network, or on the content network when your ad matched the subject matter of another site.

1. CTR: Stands for Click Through Rate. This is the percentage of time that someone clicked on one of your ads (Clicks) compared to the number of times the ad appeared (Impressions). A higher clickthrough rate means your ad is more effective, so you want this to be as high as possible.

1. CPC: Cost Per Click. This is the average cost you incur each time someone clicks on one of your text ads. This is affected by how much you are bidding for the various keywords.

1. Cost: In this column we see the total amount of money spent.

1. Avg Pos: Stands for Average Position. This means how high up your ad is appearing. As there are almost always multiple advertisers, they are shown in an order, and being nearer to the top or at the top is desirable. So if you see an average position of 1.5, that shows that your ads were appearing some of the time in the #1 position and some of the time in the #2 position.

1. Conversion: In a lead generation campaign, a conversion is someone who filled out a form and became a lead. In an online sales campaign, a conversion is someone who bought the product. There is special code which you put on one of your web pages, that will then communicate back to the Google interface and tell it when a conversion has occurred. This is vital to do, and not everybody knows about this feature.

1. Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of people who clicked on your ad and came to the site, that then filled out the form and either became a lead or bought something.

1. Cost/Conv: This is the cost per conversion. For example, if you got 10 conversions (leads) in one week, and spent $1,000 on your clickthroughs, then your cost per lead would be $100.00 each. You want the cost per conversion to be as low as possible.

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Paid Search Engine Advertising – Updated for 2010

by John Eberhard

(This is an update of an article first written in 2007)

Over the last 5-6 years, we have seen the rise of a new medium which at the current time is quite effective in driving traffic to web sites: Paid Search Engine Advertising. This term refers to paid advertising that a company can run on search engines, so that when a person enters a specific search term or phrase, your ad appears.

For instance, if someone goes to a search engine and enters "antivirus software", you will see regular search results that come up for this term, but on Google, Yahoo and MSN, you will also see paid advertising, usually labeled as "sponsored links." That means that some company that sells antivirus software has paid to have that listing appear when anyone enters the search term "antivirus software."

Similarly, if you entered "golf equipment," you would see the regular listings but also a bunch of sponsored links from companies selling golf equipment.

One can choose any word or phrase at all and choose to have your ad appear when people enter that phrase on that search engine. However, you want to select words or phrases that are at least somewhat popular, i.e. that a lot of people are entering. That way you get decent exposure for your ad.

One of the biggest advantages to this type of advertising is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and thus arrives at your web site. You start an account with one of these search engines, put some money in it, and every time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site, your account is debited. This has an advantage over most other types of advertising, where you pay whether there is any result or not. With paid search engine advertising, you only pay for actual traffic coming to your web site.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are currently including sponsored links as part of their search results. For Google, the most popular of all the search engines currently, the sponsored links appear in the narrow, far-right column and along the top, highlighted in yellow, whereas the regular search results appear in the wider left-hand column. Google’s paid ads program is called "AdWords."

There are a number of other benefits to this type of advertising. First of all, with search engines, one always has the advantage that the web visitor went there specifically to get information on what you sell. If you sell antivirus software and you can put your ad in front of people that are looking for antivirus software, it doesn’t get much more targeted than that.

Secondly, it is very easy and quick to get started. In order to understand why I say it is easy to get started, we will have to explain a little about the regular search results on search engines, the way these have evolved, and what one has to go through in order to get listed high in the regular results.

Years ago, when search engines first started, the goal of the search engines was to provide relevant search results. And they have pretty much had this goal ever since. In this sense what they meant and what they were trying to do was to provide results that matched, as much as possible, what people were actually looking for when they entered a word or phrase. As an example of this, if someone went to a search engine and entered "Scott Brown," theoretically they would want to see as the first entry, a link to Senator Brown’s Senate web site. Similarly, if someone entered "Microsoft," the first entry he would hope to see would be the actual Microsoft web site, not a bunch of sites that were distributors for Microsoft products or a bunch of sites criticizing Microsoft.

The problem that has arisen is that, as in our above example with Microsoft, the people with the web sites who were distributors of Microsoft products, or with web sites criticizing Microsoft, wanted their sites to be listed first. They wanted more traffic, and the higher you are in search engines results, the more traffic you’ll get. So what happened is that the webmasters for those other sites would study the search engines and figure out what system they were using to decide which sites would come first. All search engines make the decisions on web site rankings automatically, using a mathematical formula or algorithm.

So those other webmasters would figure out what criteria Google and Alta Vista and other search engines were using to rank sites, and they would artificially change their sites to better fit the criteria and defeat the search engines’ goal of relevancy. In other words, sites ended up being listed as #1 or very high for certain key words or phrases, that shouldn’t have been.

As a result, the criteria of the search engines to decide the rankings for web sites in their regular search results have changed dramatically and repeatedly over the years. The result of this, for webmasters, is that you have to either spend about half your life studying the search engines and what their criteria are and how to achieve good rankings in the regular results, or pay an expert to do this for you. Plus, when you make a change to your site that is calculated to improve your rankings, you will usually have to wait about two months before you will see any improvement.

So compared to that, paid search engine advertising is a much easier and faster medium. You can start an account and have your listings up and running within hours. And you don’t have to struggle through and worry about the myriad requirements of the search engines in order for you to be listed high in the regular results. Not to say you can’t do that too, but what we’re saying is that paid search engine advertising is a lot easier and currently is very effective.

Getting Started

Google is the largest of the search engines, so we recommend that you start by setting up an account with them.

Determining Your Best Search Terms

One of the first things you will have to do is to select the key words or key phrases on which you will pay to have your ad appear. Here’s how we recommend you do this:

1. Try to adopt the viewpoint of a person who would be looking for your product or service. Think about what words or phrases they might type into a search engine in order to find your product or service. Start making a list.

2. Go to the web sites of one of the companies competing against you. From your browser select View | Source. This shows the HTML source code of that particular web page. Near the top you will see a paragraph like this:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="pay per click search engines, pay
for placement, pay ranking search engines, bid position, pay per
click">

This is called the meta-tag area of a web page, which is hidden when you view the page normally but is visible when you select View | Source. Meta-tags on a web site are important in order to achieve good rankings in the regular (non-paid) search results of a search engine.

After where it says CONTENT=, and within the quotation marks, are search terms or phrases that that company thinks are significant for their product or service. Those are phrases where they hope to appear near the top of the regular listings when people type those phrases into a search engine.

For your competitors’ sites, you can figure that the phrases within the meta-tags area might be good search terms for you. Go to the web sites of at least 2-3 of your top competitors and make a list of the key phrases they use in the meta-tags area.

Bids and Bidding

For paid search engine advertising, during the process of setting up your account and your ads that are connected to specific key phrases, you will be asked how much money you want to bid for that key word. In other words, how much money you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site.
In general, the higher you bid, the higher your ad will appear amongst all the ads of all the advertisers running ads for that keyword. It is definitely not necessary to be in the #1 position in order to get people coming to your web site.

How much you should bid for a given key word or phrase depends on several factors:

a. What is the price for your product or service and how much is the profit? For instance, if you deliver a service and the average cost of that service is $3,500, with a profit of $1,000 on each delivery of that service, then you can afford to bid some money. However, if you sell something for $12.99 and your profit on each item is $6.00, then you have to bid relatively low. In general I recommend that if a company is selling an item that sells for less than $500, that they shouldn’t even be advertising with PPC.

b. What is the conversion rate on your web site? In other words, of all the people that go to your web site or go to a specific page that sells a specific product, how many of them actually buy the product? Or for lead generation for higher ticket items, what percentage fill out the form sending you their contact information and thus become a lead?

The conversion rate is important, because not every person who clicks on your ad on Google is going to do what you want them to do on your site. For example, you might bid $1.00 for a specific phrase on Google. Then by monitoring how many people click on your ad, and then comparing that to how many actually become leads, you might find that 10% of the people who click through to your site actually fill out your form and become a lead. So each person who clicks through to your site will cost you $1.00, but since only 10% of them fill out your lead form, then each lead will cost you $10.00.

This relates to profitability and how much you can afford to spend per lead or sale.

c. How much do you want to spend? If you want to be aggressive and get a lot of people coming to your web site, bid higher. If you want to be careful and not spend a lot of money, bid lower.

In general we recommend bidding $1.00 per click when first setting up an account or new campaign. Then review your account over the next week and see how high that places your ads. And see if you are getting a fair number of clickthroughs. If your ad is appearing low and your clickthroughs are low, raise the bid.

Budgets

Google, Yahoo and MSN all allow you to set a daily budget for your campaign. So figure out what you want to spend for your clickthroughs for a month and divide by 30, and that’s your daily budget.

Writing Your Ad

The next important issue is the writing of your ad. The ad will consist of a headline, ad text, and an Internet address. On Google AdWords, you get a strict limit of number of characters per line for the headline (25 characters including spaces), and two lines of text with 35 characters each.

The headline will appear in bold. So you want to grab the person’s attention with your headline. It is usually a good idea to include the key phrase in the headline, though this is not a hard and fast rule.

One of the many advantages of paid search engine advertising is that you can write your ad copy, and put the ad up, and then see what the response is, and if it does poorly, it basically doesn’t cost you anything.

Bear in mind that these search engines expect you to get a certain level of response, so if your ads are doing poorly they will lower them in the rankings or even suspend your ads from certain key phrases. They are businesses of course, and have to make a buck too.

But the point is that you can experiment with different wording for your ad and your headline. Whenever you make a change, Google automatically records data on the change, so you can review your “change history” later to see which changes you made when. Then when your response goes up or down, you know what the change was that caused it and when that change was made.

Your Landing Page

When you set up your ad on Google, Yahoo Search or one of the other search engines, you will have to choose a "landing page" for the ad. That’s the page where the person lands when he clicks on your ad. A few tips on how to work your landing pages:

1. In all cases, it is best NOT to have the landing page be the home page of your site. We recommend to create a new page whose sole purpose is to be a landing page for that paid ad on one of the search engines.

2. Do not put navigation buttons on the landing page to the rest of your site. Design the page so that the only thing they can do on that page is fill out the form you want them to fill out. This will always increase response, and giving them full navigational buttons to every other page under the sun on your site will always lower response. Giving them only one option controls the process to a much greater degree.

3. Design the landing page so that there is a bit of sales text on the top of the page, including any graphics as needed, and then there is a phone number and a form on the lower part of the page. If possible, do not make them click through to yet another page to fill out the form or buy the product.

4. Create a separate landing page for each of your ad campaigns for each of the search engines. In other words, if you are advertising your widgets on Google and Yahoo Search, create a landing page for your ad on Google and a separate landing page for the Yahoo ad.

The reason for this is that when you create the form, there is a line in the HTML code where you can specify what the subject line of the email will be, when the person clicks "submit" and the form contents are emailed to you. We recommend giving 4-digit codes to all promotions that you, so give one code to the Google ad and a different code to the Yahoo one. Then when the emails arrive, you’ll be able to tell how well your ads are doing on each search engine.

Geo-Targeting

Google now has a feature called geo-targeting, where, when you set up your campaign, you can select where your ads will appear geographically. So if you have a local business that sells to the public in the greater Los Angeles area, you can select the metro LA area and your ads will only appear there.

Managing and Measuring Your Campaign

On Google, Yahoo Search, and MSN, by logging into your account you can see various statistics on your account. Here are the most important things to look for in measuring how you’re doing:

a. Impressions: These are the number of people that saw your ad, meaning they entered that specific key word or phrase, and your ad appeared. You can see the total impressions by day, for the week, and you can break it out so you can see the impressions for specific key phrases.

High impressions means that you have selected key phrases that a lot of people are entering.

b. Clickthroughs: This means the number of people that, having seen your ad, clicked on it and arrived on your landing page. The search engines will show the clickthroughs as a raw number and also as a percentage compared to the impressions.

High clickthrough percentages means you have been successful in writing an ad that a good percentage of people were interested enough to click on, to go to your site.

c. Conversion Rate: This means the percentage of people that clicked through and went to your site, that actually did what you wanted them to do. If you are selling products right on the site, the conversion rate means what percentage of people that arrived there actually bought the product. If you are advertising to generate leads, the conversion rate is the percentage of people that clicked through that filled out the form and sent you their information.

The conversion rate is a measure of success of your landing page. If you are getting good conversion rates that means you have done a good job of writing and designing the landing page. If your conversion rate is poor, that means you need to look again at the landing page and figure out where you could change it to make it better, or at what points you might be losing people.

In our experience:

1. A good clickthrough percentage is anything over 0.5%. If you are getting 1.0% or better, that’s pretty good. If you are getting less than 0.5%, you should test some changes to your ad.
Remember that a poor clickthrough percentage is a reflection of your search engine ad, not your landing page. So make changes to your ad, not your landing page, when trying to improve it.
2. A good conversion rate is anything from 3% to 5%. The highest conversion rate we have ever gotten on a web site is 50%. If you are getting 2% or less, you should test some changes to your landing page and try to improve it.

And likewise remember that a poor conversion rate is a reflection of your landing page, so make any needed changes there.

Summary

In the constantly changing landscape of the Internet and Internet marketing, paid search engine advertising is currently a very successful tool. We recommend you try it sooner rather than later.

Website Marketing Made Easy, Part 1

by John Eberhard

Most people who have a website for marketing their business have one of three problems with it.

1. The website is producing no leads or sales and they have no idea what to do, or whether anyone is even coming to the site

1. The website is producing a few leads or sales, but the owner doesn’t know how to increase it

1. The website is producing a decent flow of leads or sales, and the website owner wants to increase that, but doesn’t know how

Made Easy

The basic concept of website marketing is that you want to drive as many people as possible to your site and then you want to make sure the site is set up to actually convert those visitors to leads or sales.

There are essentially four methods of driving people to a web site:

1. Pay per click advertising (PPC)
2. Non-paid, or “organic” traffic from search engines
3. Driving traffic to a blog, then referring visitors over to the main website
4. Social media marketing

One vital thing to do to help you measure your progress is to ensure your site has a good web statistics program installed. Most free ones you get with your hosting plan are garbage. If you don’t have a good one, I recommend installing Google Analytics, which is free. It shows how many people are coming, what pages they are visiting, where they are coming from, and for search engines, what keyword they entered to find you.

Pay Per Click

Pay per click advertising through Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center is still the fastest way to drive traffic to a site. You can put up a few campaigns and start increasing traffic to your site dramatically inside of a week. And it is extremely effective. I always start a client with a campaign on Google.

Basically your text ads appear on Google, as one of the first three ads on the top, or in the narrow right-hand column, and when people click on those text ads, your account gets charged.

If you sell a low ticket item, however (let’s say under $100), pay per click is not usually the best way to go, because your Google charges for the people coming to your site will often be more than your profit margin for the item you’re selling.

But for high ticket items, pay per click advertising is ideal. And it has the added benefit that you can exactly target where your ads will appear in terms of geography, which makes it ideal for local businesses such as home improvement.

Organic Traffic from Search Engines

Organic traffic is defined as traffic that comes from the regular, non-paid listings on one of the search engines.

Google, Yahoo and MSN can bring a great amount of traffic, but only if your site is ranking well for keywords related to your topic that have some decent traffic (a lot of people searching for those keywords every day).

So how do you know if your site is ranking well for your keywords? And what do you do if it isn’t?

You can go to Google and enter a few keywords and search through the pages to see if your site comes up. I use software called Market Samurai for this because I deal with a lot of keywords.

If your site isn’t ranking in the top 50 results for your keywords on one of the major search engines, you’re not going to be seeing much traffic from that. If that is the case, the first thing to do is have some keyword research done, because you specifically want keywords that have traffic but do not have a ton of competition. And I find invariably that if people aren’t trained in how to do this, they will select single word keywords or other keywords that have a million-plus sites competing for them. And you’re just not going to be able to rank for keywords like that. So you need to select keywords with good traffic but low competition.

Once you select a good list of keywords, then you need to make sure those keywords are well represented on your site, including in some invisible areas of the code. This is called search engine optimization.

Next you have to engage in a program of link building, which means to get other sites to include a link to your site. Google says the number of links coming to your site from other sites is the most important criteria in their determining how high your site will rank for any given keyword. Most sites, if the owners haven’t done any link building, will have a few hundred links or less. You need thousands.

As you build up links, and if you have selected your keywords well, you will see your search engine rankings moving up for those keywords. This is a 6-12 month process.

Next week I’ll cover driving traffic with a blog and with social media.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

Pay Per Click Ad Management

by John Eberhard

If you have a pay per click advertising (PPC) account on Google AdWords or one of the other providers, chances are you have come up against one or more of the non-optimum manifestations that you can get with a PPC account. What do you do? Here are some tips.

Not enough impressions: Impressions is the pay per click term for how many people saw your ad. You need a large enough number of impressions to then have a certain percentage of them click on your ad and come to your site. So if your impressions are really low, you have to come up with a way to get them up. Usually this is a problem of not enough keywords, or the keywords you have don’t have enough people searching for them. Either way, add more keywords, preferably ones with lots of traffic. Use Google’s keyword tool which gives you ideas.

Not enough people clicking on the ads: This could be a problem with not enough impressions (see above). Or if your overall clickthrough percentage is low (that’s the number of people clicking on your ad versus the number of impressions), then you need to try some new text ads.

Google lets you put up multiple text ads on one campaign, and you can then let them run for a while and compare their statistics. This is called A-B testing. One Google searcher will see ad #1 and the next person typing in that keyword will see ad #2. They alternate back and forth. If you put up multiple text ads, you will see after a week or two that one of them tends to have a significantly higher clickthrough rate. You can then pause the ad that is not performing as well.

And by the way, if you want to make a change to one of your existing text ads, create a new one with the change, and pause the existing one. Why? because if you make a change to an existing text ad, Google will trash all the historical statistical data about that ad. It’s good to keep that historical data so pause the current one and enter a new ad.

Some people ask me what is an acceptable clickthrough rate. There is no cut and dried answer to that question because it varies a lot from campaign to campaign and industry to industry. Generally I think you should compare all your ads and see which of them is giving the highest clickthrough rate, and that should be your benchmark. But to give a broad answer to that question, I’d say that clickthrough rates of under 0.5% are pretty low and 2-4% is pretty good.

People are clicking on the ads but not enough are contacting us: The number of people that actually contact you either via email or phone are called “conversions,” and the number of conversions versus the number that clicked on your ad and arrived at your site is called the conversion rate. If you are getting a good number of people clicking on your ads but a low percentage are converting, this is a problem because that means you are spending money on the clicks but not getting the benefit of Google conversions.

The first thing to look at is the conversion rate. If the percentage is over 2% you are doing pretty well. I’ve read that the national average is 3%. So if your conversion percentage is below 1% you need to do something about that. You need to look at your landing page, which is the page you designate for people to land on when they click on your ad.

Many people make the mistake of just having a Google visitor land on their home page. You should create a customized landing page for your visitors to land on.

1. Make sure the content of the landing page matches what your ad says. This is especially important if your company offers more than one product or service.
2. The landing page should not have navigation buttons on it. I routinely get arguments from clients about this as they think it would not work as well as having nav buttons. So I have tested it repeatedly over the years and I would say that in 90% of all cases, it works best to not have navigation buttons on your PPC landing page. When I say “works best” I mean it gets better conversions.
3. The landing page should of course have your logo and company identification at the top.
4. Include sales text and pictures
5. Include a phone number and form at the bottom
6. Come up with some kind of special offer

Google gives you the option to put what they call “conversion code” on your “thank you page” (the page visitors come to after they click submit on your form). This is extremely helpful. That code will send a message back to the Google interface whenever someone fills out your web form, thus tracking the number of conversions. It will not only track the raw numbers of conversions, but you can see which text ads the conversions came from, which keywords they came from, and even see what your cost per conversion is. So it is vital to have the conversion code.

Good luck with pay per click advertising.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

34 Tips on Pay Per Click Advertising

by John Eberhard

Pay per click advertising, using Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Ad Center and Facebook’s pay per click program, is a great way to drive traffic to your site, and increase leads or sales.

1. Set up an account in Google AdWords first. Then when your account on AdWords is working well, add accounts with the other providers.

2. When you set up an account, put different products or services into separate campaigns. Do not try to cram all your products into one campaign.

3. A “campaign” is the top level thing in Google AdWords. It allows you to set such things as budget, geographical targeting, etc. An “ad group” is set up within a campaign. You can have several ad groups within a campaign. Or you can set up several campaigns.

4. Before you set up your first campaign on Google, you will need to write at least one text ad (headline of 25 characters, plus two lines of 35 characters each), pick a group of keywords, and select what page they will land on, on your site.

5. Make sure that your text ad that appears on Google matches the content of the landing page that the visitor lands on when he clicks on the ad.

6. Do not have the visitor land on your home page when he clicks on your ad. Set up customized landing pages. If you have several campaigns or ad groups for several products or services, each should have its own landing page, with customized content about that product or service.

7. Do not put navigation buttons on your customized landing page. I get arguments from people on this point whenever I set up new campaigns. “I hate that when I am surfing,” or “That would piss me off,” etc. But statistically it works better 80% of the time.

8. Put a phone number and a form on your landing page. Do not make the person click through to another page to fill out a form.

9. Google provides a feature called “conversion code.” This is HTML code that is placed on the page that the person comes to after they click submit on your form, which is called the “thank you” page. Putting Google’s conversion code on the thank you page sends back information to the Google system every time someone who came from Google fills out one of your forms. This tells you which campaign the person responded to, which ad he clicked on, which keyword he entered, and it will even tell you how much money you’re paying for each person who fills out the form (a “conversion”).

10. Set up your campaigns using Google’s geo-targeting feature, so you control in what geographical areas your ads will appear. This is great for local businesses. You can set it to a state or series of states, metro areas, or single cities.

11. Decide how much you want to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. I usually start with $1.00 or $2.00, then let the campaign roll for a week or so and see how high that puts me in the rankings. If my average position for the ads is below 3 or 4 and I’m selling a high ticket item, I’ll increase the default bid.

12. Set a daily budget. Once the daily limit is met your ads will no longer display. Decide how much you want to spend monthly, then divide that by 30 and you get your daily budget.

13. I would not try Google AdWords if you are selling a low ticket item such as books or CDs. Your cost per conversion (sale in this case) would be too high, usually above your profit margin.

14. Pay per click advertising tends to work very well for high ticket items. I have had really good luck with campaigns for home improvement products, even in the last two years with this economy.

15. PAY PER CLICK DEFINITIONS: Search: On a Google AdWords report, this refers to the search network. This is basically the main Google page where people enter search terms, plus some other search engine sites that Google has partnered with. See also “Content” below.

16. Content: On a Google AdWords report, this refers to the content network. This is where Google will put your pay per click text ads up on other sites. You see this sometimes on web sites where it says “Sponsored ads from Google” and there is a small strip of these ads. They put your ad up on a site that has elected to have Google ads displayed, and they put it up only on sites where the subject matter of your ad matches the subject matter of the site. The Content Network greatly increases the reach of your ads, but fewer people will click on your ads than with the search network.

17. Clicks: This is the number of people who clicked on one of your ads.

18. Impressions: This is the number of times that your ad appeared, either when someone typed in one of your keywords on the search network, or on the content network when your ad matched the subject matter of another site.

19. CTR: Stands for Click Through Rate. This is the percentage of time that someone clicked on one of your ads (Clicks) compared to the number of times the ad appeared (Impressions). A higher clickthrough rate means your ad is more effective, so you want this to be as high as possible.

20. CPC: Cost Per Click. This is the average cost you incur each time someone clicks on one of your text ads. This is affected by how much you are bidding for the various keywords.

21. Cost: In this column we see the total amount of money spent.

22. Avg Pos: Stands for Average Position. This means how high up your ad is appearing. As there are almost always multiple advertisers, they are shown in an order, and being nearer to the top or at the top is desirable. So if you see an average position of 1.5, that shows that your ads were appearing some of the time in the #1 position and some of the time in the #2 position.

23. Conversion: In a lead generation campaign, a conversion is someone who filled out a form and became a lead. In an online sales campaign, a conversion is someone who bought the product.

24. Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of people who clicked on your ad and came to the site, that then filled out the form and either became a lead or bought something.

25. Cost/Conv: This is the cost per conversion. For example, if you got 10 conversions (leads) in one week, and spent $1,000 on your clickthroughs, then your cost per lead would be $100.00 each. You want the cost per conversion to be as low as possible.

26. If your campaigns are not generating enough Impressions, try adding more keywords. Google has tools to help with this.

27. After your campaign has been online a month or two, go through your keywords, and pause any that are not getting any traffic.

28. If your clickthrough rate is poor, write some new ads and have them run in the same ad group as your current ad. Have them run side by side and compare the clickthrough rate on them in a week or two.

29. If your conversion rate is poor, then it is your landing page that is at fault. Change the landing page. Do not tinker with the ads to fix your conversion rate.

30. Many experts recommend setting up a separate campaign for the content network. For example, let’s say you have a campaign selling widgets. You have your regular campaign for widgets, then you set up a separate campaign for widgets on the content network. It would have the same settings for geography, the same ad group or ad groups, and the same keywords, but it would target just the content network. And you would disable the content network in your regular campaign. This allows you to more finely control the budget for the content network, plus it raises your quality score for the main campaign.

31. Set up your forms so that the subject line of the email you receive tells you which campaign or ad group they came from. I code these with a 4-digit code.

32. Use an online email and autoresponder service such as Aweber.com. Set up your forms so they dump into your online email database, but so they also email the form results to you (Constant Contact will not do this by the way).

33. Set up the autoresponder so it emails the person right away after he fills out your form, saying “Thanks for responding, we’ll get back to you right away,” or something similar. Then set up several autoresponders to go out to him on a timer, say 7 days later, 14 days later, etc., further selling your product or service. This helps with people that are hard to reach.

34. Use an experienced consultant to set up and manage your pay per click ad campaigns monthly, so that you get the best results possible.

Good luck with your pay per click advertising.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

Yahoo and MSN Combine Forces on Pay Per Click

Here's some important news from MSN and Yahoo on their combining their two pay per click ad programs. Note that they say this will not go into effect until the end of 2010 or beginning of 2011.

A powerful new choice in search is coming

The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is a major initiative between our companies to create a competitive choice in search for advertisers and consumers. The combined scale will assist both companies in speeding the pace of innovation to improve the search user experience, as well as help advertisers get better results and help improve monetization for partners. 

When the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is implemented, both companies will continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences. However, Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by adCenter) search results. 

Yahoo! and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments: Yahoo!’s sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

More volume, less effort.
Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace, giving advertisers of all sizes access to a combined audience of nearly 577 million searchers worldwide.¹

Timing
Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the US prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.