Get Found First

This week Paul Hartley at Get Found First posted part 3 of his 5 part series entitled: “5 Analysis Tools: A Conceptual Look at PPC.” This week’s topic was S.W.O.T. Analysis of Your PPC Advertising Strategy. In the article, Paul breaks down each piece of S.W.O.T. (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) and asks important questions to help you evaluate your ppc strategy in each of these areas. (For parts 1 and 2 of this series, check out PPC Market Analysis with PEST and PPC Analysis with Porter’s Five Forces also on the GFF blog.)

FBPPC

Over on the FBPPC blog, Alicia Antoniolli discusses her shift from search to social ppc. In The Shift from Search to Social – Translating Intent, Engagement, and Messaging, Alicia discusses the differences between user behaviors based on their platform. Give her article a read and make sure you’re targeting search and social users appropriately.

Search Engine Watch

Let’s be honest, we all love shiny new toys. Lucky for us, Lisa Raehsler has taken the time to put together a list of 5 Kickin’ New Google AdWords Features to Try. Each has a short description and links to helpful supporting text to get you familiar with each feature.

Search Engine Land

Enhanced campaigns are coming and with them come many changes in your account. Processes as simple as ad copy testing are now going to require a slightly different way of reporting. But never fear, Brad Geddes is here! In his Search Engine Land article this week, Brad shows us How To Conduct Ad Tests In Enhanced Campaigns to ensure we’re choosing the best ad for each device type. I definitely recommend this article for any one planning and preparing their accounts for shifting to enhanced campaigns.

The Drum

Over on The Drum, Craig McGill interviews Tim Barlow of Attacat. Their discussion covers topics ranging from budgets, to remarketing, to mobile as well as ppc as a whole. Personally, I’m a fan of getting to read opinions from other industry professionals. See what Tim has to say and maybe even leave an opinion of your own! Or not…it’s up to you.

PPC Hero

To round out today’s list is Proving the Value of PPC to C-Level Management from Kayla Kurtz over at PPC Hero. All of these tips, in my personal opinion, are must haves for anyone wanting to be a great ppc manager. Whether you apply these principles to face to face meetings with bosses, regular calls with clients, or the occasional email conversation with the person you’re reporting to, I think these tips essential to proving your worth and doing your job. Check it out and start putting these tips into practice today!

Well, that wraps up this week’s PPC News and Views. Tune in next week for more tips, tricks, and updates from around the ppc industry.

Me: I’m an internet marketer (try to keep it easy and hope they just roll with it, but usually you get the follow-up question)
Them: What exactly do you do? Build websites?
Me: I manage paid search advertising for companies.
Them: [blank stare]
Me: You know those ads you see on the side of search results or on Facebook? I write those.
Them: Oh, you’re that guy (obvious annoyance in voice)
Me: I only write the good ones .
Them: [laugh a little, move on to another subject]

While it may not be easy to describe PPC to most people, when you spend day after day poring over Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Avg CPC, Avg Position, Conversions, Cost/Conversion, etc. you begin to see search engines in a different light. Let’s take this example of a search for “verisign certificate”, which any new ecommerce site owner might perform:

You may look at this and see just another set of search results, but a PPC expert sees much, much more:

• Advertising on Brand Terms – Often clients ask me why they need to bid on terms for which they rank #1 organically. This is a perfect example of why. VeriSign is the #1 paid result as well as the #1 organic result. If they weren’t bidding on this brand term, competitors like GoDaddy & Register.com could have their listing *above* VeriSign’s #1 organic listing.
• Special Offer – Most likely, you picked out that box with the dotted line around it and button saying “View Offer”. This is a fairly new addition to the AdWords platform and it allows VeriSign to occupy even more of the page while pushing a special offer (which likely has a great CTR). This is taking full advantage of what Google gives you.
• PPC-only Promotional Pricing – In the second PPC ad you’ll see that GoDaddy is offering a special $12.99 price. Go to their website right now, hover over “SSL & Security” in the top navigation, select “SSL Certificates”. No mention of the $12.99 pricing anywhere (as of this writing). No need to give away the farm for someone who already knows about you. Right?
• Geo-targeting – Look at the left sidebar and you’ll notice it says “Provo, UT”. Google detected my location based on my IP address. This means that the results (and ads) I see may be very different from what you see based solely on where you are when you do the search.
• Wasted Spend – This is one of my favorites. Amazon is a great company and has an amazing selection. However, they don’t sell VeriSign certificates. So why do we see their ad on the bottom of the right side column of ads? And why are they talking about books? I know that the search mentions “certificates” but this is just a waste of money.

Just because a SERP seems simple and straightforward don’t forget how much information is being presented if you are willing to “read between the lines”.

The Power Editor allows for bulk edits of campaign settings, targeting, bids, budgets, and dates. Other great features allow for easy management of creative elements across ads, campaigns, and even accounts. Advertisers can also track performance of campaigns directly inside the Editor and find some hidden targeting gems which I’ll talk about in a later post. For now, I’d like to point out a few awesome time saving features that will save you tons of time.

Managing Promoted Posts

Promoted posts are a great way for advertisers to cut through the edgrank and reach a larger number of their fans. However, these can be hard to keep track of or manage across multiple posts and pages. Power Editor allows for easy inventory, performance review, and advertisers can even find post performance metrics housed right inside the editor to guide their promoted post strategies.

Labels

Similar to AdWords Labels, the Facebook Power Editor provides a Labels feature that lets advertisers organize campaigns into groups. When creating a campaign the option is available to add a label to the campaign and each label has a folder that shows up in the left navigation of the editor. Multiple labels may be applied to campaigns for easy organization of the larger accounts within the editor.

Campaigns are neatly organized by default into categories based on campaign status, but this feature comes in handy for organizing by goals, strategies, or for marking campaigns that need work.

Image Library

Power Editor saves all of your creative in one nice library so they can be easily applied to new ads for later use. Each image is also neatly cataloged with all of the ads it has made an appearance in for easy reference.

Saved Target Groups

Saved Target Groups allow advertisers to create audience targets and save them for later use. This is a huge time saver when creating a large number of campaigns with the same or similar target. Save each target as it’s created and simply apply it to ads as they are created later.

Excel Bulk Sheets

Power Editor also works with bulk sheets. Advertisers can use excel worksheets to create campaigns in mass quantities and upload or copy and paste them into the editor. Another great time saver.

If you haven’t tried the Power Editor, check it out. This tool can really help save time and frustration when dealing with large numbers of Facebook Ads campaigns. You can find it in the left navigation of the UI once you log into Facebook Ads Manager.

One of my favorite such principles is the AIDA Principle. It states that buyers go through 4 general stages when making a purchase: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. In PPC, the buyer goes through each of these 4 phases when conducting a search, clicking on an ad, and converting on a landing page. The tricky part (our job) is to make sure the searcher is relevant to the product/service we’re advertising, get them to click on our ad, and buy our product/service. Below is a breakdown of each of the 4 phases of AIDA and some items to focus on and enhance to make sure you get their business.

ATTENTION

When someone conducts a search, your first challenge is to get their attention.

Impression Share

Although a pretty basic point, it’s still worth mentioning- you can’t get anyone’s attention if you’re not on the page. Keep an eye on your impression share metrics and be sure you’re showing up on relevant searches.

Average Position

Generally the higher your average position, the more visibility and attention you’re going to get. The problem is that as your average position goes up, your price tag follows. Use the Top vs Side reports in AdWords to optimize your ads to show in the highest position that fits your budgets and KPIs.

Keyword Focused Headlines

When looking at a SERP, many of us tend to skim the headlines for relevancy before clicking. By having your keywords in your headline, you’re telling the searcher that you have exactly what they want.

Extended Headlines

These are a wonderful gift from Google. Simply by writing your ad copy to fit on two separate lines and having correct punctuation at the end of description line 1, your ads look much like an organic listing and have much more attention grabbing blue text.

Symbols

Any unique types of text (@, $, &, etc.) can help grab attention in ad copy. They can also help you save characters when writing ads.

Ad Extensions

a.k.a. Ad Bling. They grab your attention by taking up more space than other ads, having a picture to accompany your text, or simply by being different from other ads on the page.

INTEREST

Once you’ve successfully gained the searchers attention, the next step is to interest them enough to click on your ad.

Unique Value Proposition

Ad copy is where you have to begin to set yourself apart from competitors in a material way. If your service is faster than your competitors, say it in your ad copy. Do you have the best BBB rating in the industry? Call that out, too. Are you having a 20 percent off sale? Say it in the ad!

Vanity Display URLs

Here, I’m referring to the ability to write almost anything in the display URL section of ad copy. A quick, keyword focused addition to the end of your display URL can really help a searcher feel like they’re in the right place.

Write Ad Copy to Search Intent

This is not always apparent, but sometimes searchers give you clues as to what they’re looking for. For example, someone searching “best running shoes” is most likely in a researching stage whereas someone searching “buy nike running shoes” is- you got it- in a buying stage. Create ad groups that allow you to target these keywords differently and write your ad copy accordingly.

Symbols

Unlike the set of symbols above, this next group is not only for grabbing attention, but for reinforcing your relevancy. Using trademark (™), registered ®, or copy write ©, symbols can not only help grab attention, but make your ads seem more relevant and a safer choice than others.

Call to Action

This one is a bit unique to this group because here the goal is to weed out unqualified searchers. By adding in a quick “Buy Now”, “Call Us”, or “Learn More” in the ad, you’re not only helping the searcher know what to expect on the landing page, but you’re also excluding some of them by intent. Example, if the searcher who typed in “best running shoes” sees an ad that includes “Buy Now” they’re less likely to click.

DESIRE

The searcher has clicked on your ad. Now they’re on your turf, and your job is to get them to want your product/service.

Targeted Headline

The headline is your first chance to reinforce to customers that they’re where they want to be. Best case scenario (for congruity’s sake) is to have the same headline on the page that was in your ad, or at least something very similar.

Deliver on Your Value Added Proposition

If you tempted customers with 20% off in your ad, make sure it’s on the landing page as well. By putting your Unique Value Proposition on your landing page, you’re delivering the thing that likely peaked their interest in the first place.

Relevant Copy

Load your landing page with relevant ad copy to the product or service, but don’t drown your customers in copy. Give them lots of shiny and descriptive text, but only tell them what they need to convert. If you have other areas of info they might want, such as company info, terms and conditions, or product specs, link to those at the top and/or bottom of the page.

Pictures/Diagrams

People go window shopping for a reason, it’s fun to look at all the shiny new things! Give them a nice picture of what you intend to sell them, if you can. The drawback about shopping online is that unless you’ve already seen and inspected a product in the store, you’re left to guess what it looks and feels like. Pictures and diagrams can help bridge that gap and help them buy online, from you.

Customer Reviews

These are a great way to build trust with searchers unfamiliar with your company. By telling them others have had positive experiences with you, your’e helping them believe they too can have a positive experience.

ACTION

If you’ve done the first three phases correctly, action comes down to on-page experience more than anything else.

Obvious Call to Action

Whether you want them to fill out a lead form, download a white paper, or buy something, he needs to be able to clearly locate and understand his next step. Be sure your lead form or download/buy buttons are prominent on the page.

Use the Same Call to Action

If you told searchers to “Download a Whitepaper” in your ad copy, that should be your call to action on the landing page. Keep the message and CTA consistent throughout the search process, from query to conversion.

Form Length

If collecting leads, make your lead form as short as possible and collect only the info you need to follow up. Asking lots of unnecessary questions only makes the lead experience longer and more invasive to the searcher.

Checkout

The final checkout process should be just as short and painless as the lead form process. Don’t require buyers to create a profile on your site before purchasing. If they like your site and had a good experience, they’ll come back. Again, ask only the questions needed for conversion.

Transparent Check Out/Lead Process

In the final conversion process, be sure you clearly tell the buyer where they are in your process. If your lead form has multiple steps, tell them that up front. If your form is longer, buyers are more likely to fill out the entire form if they know it’s going to be long from the get-go. If you tell them up front there are 8 steps (yikes!), they will have a realistic expectation of the experience ahead. If you don’t tell them, they may be frustrated with the length and leave before conversion.

These points are certainly not the only way to improve each step of the AIDA process, but it should give you a good start. Leave your own ideas in the comments!

Clix Marketing has hired another brilliant PPC brain! Heather Cooan has joined our team of PPC experts as Director of Client Services.

Do you really need an introduction to Heather Cooan?

You have likely seen her present at multiple conferences. Or possibly read one of her many contributions to digital marketing related blogs or publications, or maybe you noticed that she served as a technical editor of “Google AdWords – Managing Your Advertising Program” (O’Reilly Media, 2011). Or perhaps you have just seen her around the last 10 years at companies like search engine giant Google and digital intelligence firm Cardinal Path.

If you have somehow missed seeing, knowing, or hearing of her before, make sure you keep an eye out for her now. We know Heather is ready to rock at Clix.

Leave a comment to congratulate Heather!

Search Engine Land: Toward the end of every year many marketers begin to speculate about what the next year will bring. Last week at SMX East, a group of expert panelists talked about just that. This week in his Search Engine Land article, Matt Van Wagner recounts the discussion allowing those of us who did not attend to conference to get in on the conversation. Some of the topics covered include the shift from desktops to mobile and tablet devices, tracking and attribution, and account complexity. Check it out. What do you think is in store for paid search in 2013?

Search Engine Watch: The annual Pubcon Las Vegas conference is taking place this week. Although this years sessions are noticeably lighter on paid search topics than years past, there are still great nuggets of information to be had. In her Search Engine Watch post this week, Lisa Raehsler covered the session titled Hardcore PPC Tactics with speakers Brad Geddes, John Ellis, and David Szetela. Check out what these guys had to say about account optimizations, the “creep factor” in remarketing, and the recent changes to the Google Display Network.

PPC Hero: Last year marked the first annual Hero Conf, a paid search conference by Hanapin Marketing that was focused 100% on PPC. And on April 8th-10th of 2013, they’re doing it again. As of this morning, the registration for Hero Conf 2013 is open at HeroConf.com. As an attendee last year, I found the conference to be very helpful and loved the extreme PPC focus. The conference will be held in Austin, TX at the AT&T Executive Education & Conference Center and promises to be even better than last year.

PPC Associates: A guest post today from Katie Saxon of Boom Online highlights some of the articles she believes to have the best Excel Tips for PPC Managers. I don’t know about you, but I use excel just about as often as I use the AdWords interface: all day, every day. We absolutely recommend this article for anyone trying to become more efficient and effective with Microsoft Excel.

That brings this weeks New and Views to a close. See you next week!

Wordstream: This week on the Wordstream Blog, Elisa Gabbert asked 24 marketing experts “What’s the most surprising or exciting result you’ve ever achieved in an A/B test”. This article serves as a great reminder that whether you’re new to the industry or you’ve been around since the dawn of PPC, there are still plenty of surprises to be had. Check out the article to see what the experts said and remember, always be testing!

Search Engine Land: Over the past few years, tablets have consistently increased in paid search audience share and have generally been treated as one large group. But in his Search Engine Land article this week, Mark Ballard of RKG tells us why it might be a good time to revisit your PPC strategy for tablets. He explains that some tablets perform very differently and provides a suggestions as to why and how to take advantage of those differences. Check it out!

Search Engine Watch: PPC marketers spend a good chunk of their time weeding through data. It’s evidence we use to make decisions and take actions we believe are best for the health of our accounts. But there is a segment of data that often gets overlooked: Analytics. Over at Search Engine Watch, Melissa Mackey talks about the importance of Using Web Analytics for PPC Optimization and walks us through some of her key measurements for PPC and how to interpret them.

Google AdWords Blog: On Monday of this week, Google announced a new proactive approach of enforcing their unique sitelinks policy. This policy states that all sitelinks must have a unique URL and page content. In the post, Google covers how this new enforcement strategy will work, impacts on format and performance, and future enforcement with existing sitelinks. We advise you to read the post and be proactive. Check your campaigns for improper sitelink use before Google does it for you. Take care of any issues you find so your sitelinks will stay eligible!

And with that, we close out this week’s edition of PPC News and Views. Tune in next week!

Anyway, apology accepted. Your warnings have been easy to spot, and I feel I’ve had ample time to prepare to not work tomorrow. And for that, I thank you. Save for some random client account meltdown during the down time, I’ll probably survive not being able to make changes during the PM hours of Saturday.

Oh, hey, while you’re working on things, there are few features I was hoping you could toss in there for me. Nothing too big. Nothing that can’t be worked around using Excel. (I’ll wait until Christmas to ask for those.) Just a few new ways of viewing data we’re already getting to make things go a little smoother.

Here we go, in no particular order:

1.) Filter automatic placements by the URL. This is a really easy one. We can already filter by stats for each placement. CTR greater than 0.10%, more than 2 conversions, etc. But sometimes I just want to be able to quickly filter for and exclude all URLs that contain the word “free”. Don’t get me wrong, I love free stuff. But what my clients sell is not free, and I don’t want people in the “free” state of mind when they click on ads. And, pretty please with sugar on top, maybe we can get a graph for automatic placements as well as managed? Or an option for either?

2.) Choose to see only active ads. This could be in the same fashion as the “All enabled campaigns” option or a simple filter like we have for keywords. My annoyance with this is mostly due to the way I do ad copy testing. But it would be great to not have to scroll past the graveyard of paused ads from past ad tests.

 3.) Select impression share as a metric on the graph. I know it’s not a key metric in most accounts, but for some it’s surprisingly important. Having the ability to see impression share numbers quickly over time while investigating without downloading a report and then creating a graph in Excel would certainly save me some time.

4.) Compare the stats of 2 elements in the graph. Whether it be 2 keywords, ads, ad groups, campaigns, anything.  We have the ability to segment the stats by day, week, hour of the day, etc and see the blow-by-blow data for each keyword or ad. But occasionally, it would really simplify things to be able to graphically see one keyword’s CTR over time vs another’s.

5.) Aggregate data rows for segments. I’m pretty pleased to have these nice, collapsable stats for the campaigns tab earlier this month. A simple breakdown of segmented stats based on a custom filter. I’d just like this to be available for the rest of the tabs. Easy peasy, lemon squeeze, right? Please?

6.) Data for individual sitelinks. This has been a dream of mine for a long time. Although there are ways to get around it using URL tags and Analytics, it would still be better if advertisers were just given the data in the interface. With the current setup, it almost feels like an ad group that advertisers can write four ads for, but we can only see the ad group level stats, not individual ad stats. If your goal is to give your customers (searchers) the most relevant and fulfilling results available, why not let advertisers optimize everything? Would it really be that awful? Doesn’t make sense to me.

Some of these might be pretty specific to me and my management style, but each one of these has been something I’ve wanted on more than one occasion.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my little wish list with you. I mean, you’re already going to be in the system fiddling around with thing to the point where we can’t make any changes, so why not give us (me) a couple things we (I) would like? Who’s with me?

And, hey, all of you other advertisers, what features would you like AdWords to add?  Add them in the comments. The more the merrier!

Search Engine Watch: At the end of May 2012, Google launched their new Auction Insights feature. You’ve probably seen it somewhere in your accounts and maybe even checked out the stats a few times. But with almost all Google launches, there’s the time when everything is new and shiny, then there’s the time to figure out how to make it work for your campaigns. In his article Google AdWords Auction Insights: How to Take Your PPC Campaign From Good to Great, Alistair Dent gives some good suggestions as to how you can use this tool to your advantage and gain insights into your competitors strategies.

Search Engine Land: We all know and love (at least I do) the graphs at the top of our data in Google AdWords and Bing Ads. They allow us to visually interpret how our campaigns are performing, one or two stats at a time. But do we always take full advantage of what these graphs are telling us? This week over at Search Engine Land, Matt Van Wagner provided us with a great guide on How to Look for Trouble & Find Opportunity in PPC Campaigns by interpreting these graphs and listening to what they’re saying about our accounts.

aimClear: Ever been curious about targeting your customers on YouTube? Well here’s your chance to learn how. Over on the aimClear blog, Manny Rivas has put together the Definitive YouTube TrueView Ads Guide: What Smart Marketers Need to Know. This is a great, in depth article that walks you through set up, ad units and specs, benefits and tips for each section, and targeting and campaign options. So let’s go through the checklist. Are you interested in putting your ads on YouTube? Yes, check. Are you a smart marketer? Yes, double check. Excellent! Enjoy!

We’re going to close out this week’s PPC News and Views with a few bits of info from the engines themselves.

Bing Ads: On Tuesday morning, Bing Ads announced the release of their new Keyword Suggestions tool. In a format very similar to what we’ve become accustomed to with Google AdWords, Bing Ads now provides bid suggestions, budget suggestions, and keyword suggestions based on areas of your account. With continued updates to the user interface, desktop tool, and account insights like this, it’s clear that Microsoft is working very hard to earn your respect and business.

Google AdWords: As PPC managers, you’re almost always given a daily or monthly budget to stick to. But it’s not always easy to find the optimal breakdown of budget percentage to campaign because of traffic fluctuations throughout the week. Enter Shared Budgets. AdWords now lets you create one budget for the entire account, and it will automatically allocate funds to each campaign according to that days traffic. As with any automation measure, we strongly encourage you to read through all areas of this feature before making any changes. Here is the original announcement post: New AdWords Budget Option: Shared Budgets. And it’s corresponding help center information: About Shared Budgets.

*Bonus Round*: We wanted to share WordStream’s How to Set Your AdWords Budget: New Shared AdWords Budget Option from Larry Kim. The beginning walks you through the set up and basics of the option, but he also makes some good points to think about before making the switch. A must read before enabling this new option in your accounts.

One last note: Don’t forget about the AdWords system maintenance on September 22nd. This is scheduled to take place between 10 am and 8 pm Pacific Time. YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SIGN INTO YOUR ACCOUNT TO MAKE CHANGES. No announcements have been made as to what is being changed, fixed, etc. Our guess is as good as yours, but we’ve got a few things on our wish list.

That’s all we’ve got for you this time. We’ll see you next week!

Microsoft Advertising: Over the past few months, Microsoft has really made large strides in making adCenter a much more competitive platform. As of this week, they’ve continued that trend and taken it a step farther.  On Sunday, Microsoft announced that Microsoft adCenter is Now Bing Ads. With a new name and very Bing-esque login page, it’s clear Check it out!

Luna Metrics: Last week Google announced they were making changes to their seller ratings ad extensions. While it’s great to keep up on changing qualifying criteria for the AdWords extension, it’s even better to get advice on how to stay qualified, right? We thought so too. Over on the Luna Metrics blog, Brittany Baeslack has put together a nice list of things you can do to keep your seller ratings fresh.

Certified Knowledge: Negative keywords are an essential element to nearly every PPC account. But blind negative keyword strategy can really hinder your accounts performance. This week, Brad Geddes gives great advice on Learning How to Control Your Negative Keywords. This is definitely a must read if you’ve never audited your accounts negative keywords. Or if you have, it’s a great refresher.

PPC Hero: We’ve all been there. You start working on a brand new account and you honestly have no idea what to expect in terms of performance, costs, anything really.  Well, never fear, Kayla’s here! Follow her step by step instructions on How to Use Excel to Estimate New PPC Account Performance to determine possible performance for your account. As the post states, these will really only give you estimates on how your account might perform, but something is better than nothing.

SEER Interactive: Not all PPC work is done in highly technical ways. Sometimes, all you need is something quick, simple, and effective to achieve your result. And Aaron Levy’s Spin Test for PPC Landing Pages fits perfectly into that category.  I mean, come on. The post even comes complete with a Homer Simpson .gif! So grab your favorite desk chair and give the spin test a whirl. (See what I did there?)

Well, that does it for this week’s round up. Happy reading!