Marketing Hacks

Google Adwords

2015-12-13T23:26:00.000-08:00

Google Adwords is an online advertising service offered by Google which helps advertisers to reach their potential customers by creating web advertisements and competing for their display on SERP’s.. Advertisers pay the money for Google for displaying the ads on SERP’s of related search queries. These ads generally appear on top or right of organic search results. Selecting or defining the keywords plays an important role in adwords.In Google Adwords,the advertiser is free to select the budget for the ad or locations at which the ad is to be displayed or web pages on which ad is to be displayed. In paid search of adwords ,the Google places an small yellow coloured “Ad” label to these paid search ads. Not only Google, but other search engines also have their own paid search services like yahoo Bing Network.

Basic Principles of Adwords:

Before using adwords ,one should know how adwords works. Google adwords is the most prominent Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing and advertising service. Adwords displays the paid search ads by considering some key factors of an ad which are given below:

1.Bidding Strategy.

Generally, the ads are placed in auction. The advertiser has to bid to display their ad on SERP’s. This amount is decided by the advertiser himself. The advertiser can manually bid in the auction or google provides the advertiser an automatic option, where Google chooses the bid amount within advertisers budget. Not only deciding a bid amount is sufficient ,but also having a clear bidding strategy is important. The price advertiser is wailing to pay for each click is cost-per-click (CPC).CPC is the most eminent advertising strategy these days. There is also another advertising strategy called Cost Per Impression (CPM) for which advertiser has to pay Google for every 1000 times ads appear on SERP even the user doesn’t click through.

Not only highest bid amount is sufficient to display your ads on the SERP’s ,another key factor ”quality score” which is computed by Google is also important.

2.Quality Score.

Quality score is the measure of quality, relevance and performance of pay-per-click( PPC) campaigns which is offered by google.It checks whether the ad is realy useful to the customer and clicking on the ad takes them to the page what they are searching for .Even if your competitors bid amount is higher ,you can outscore the competitor with a better quality score. There are many uncontrollable factors in pais search advertising by Google, but you can have control on quality score of your ad and can take measures to improve it. Some of the factors that can influence quality score are Click Through Rate(CTR) of the ad , performance of the ad, better key word data etc.

3.Ad rank:

Ad Rank is the another important and dependent factor of google adwords.Ad rank is the ranking of the ads based on the quality score and its bid rate. Basically the position where the ad is to be displayed depends on the adrank.Adrank is generally calculated by a particular formula:
Adrank=Quality Score *bid.(Max CPC)

Actually, the amount paid by the advertiser to display the ad is not entire bid amount entered by the advertiser.Advertiser pays the minimum amount required in order to outscore the adrank of the competitor ad placed below them. It is obvious that quality score influences the ad rank of an ad. Other than quality score, some factors which can improve the ad rank are quality of landing page ,Ad relevance ,performance on targeted devices etc.

Paid advertising is not suitable for every business and everyone .There are as many advantages as disadvantages of using adwords and it is not easy to profit from Google adwords.So the advertisers have to be very careful while developing their advertising strategies for adwords.

Search Engine Optimization

2015-12-12T12:09:00.003-08:00

Everyday,more then 400 million searches are done on major search engines. If the website stands on top for search queries related your business ,then traffic will be easily generated to your website.SEO is much better and effective compared to banner or pay per click campaigns,because it provides the website with specific and high-intent traffic.Google is the most used search engine.Google displays two types of search results paid ads and organic search results. But Google search users ,about 90% of tem use organic search results than paid ads.Thats the reason we need to make your website SEO friendly.

How search engines work:

Its quite interesting to know how google searches and displays the results to the user. Actually there re five phases in between user enters the query and google displays the results. Here is the brief description about each one of them:

Crawl: Crawlers look at webpages and follow links on those pages, much like you would if you were browsing content on the web. They crawl to your site from webpage which contains a link to your website. They go from link to link and bring data about those webpages back to Google’s servers.

Caching: The search engine stores copies on their servers . Search engine crawl the website through the HTML code of web pages.If the search engine find the data is reliable and related to the query, then search engine takes a copy of the source code of the web page and store it in their server.

Retrieve: Generally the search engine stores the cached pages at the nearest data center to the user.After caching the web pages,the search engine retrievs the information related to search query from each cached page and display the results for a search query.

Rank: As we all know, there are millions of results for a search query .Its quite challenging for the search engine to sort out these results and display the relevant results for the user. Page rank which is calculated using page rank algorithm is the key element in google search engine. Google passes all the pages through the ranking algorithm and ranks all the web pages returned by the crawler.

SERP: After acquiring all the results and sorting out them according to the page rank,the search engine display the results on search engine result page. SERP’s depend whether the user is logged in or not, location of the user, the device on which user makes search query.

What is SEO:

SEO is the science of increasing the visibility of the webpage or website in search engine’s unpaid results by incorporating the search engine friendly elements into a website.SEO is generally broken down into two parts :On-site SEO and Off-site SEO. On-site SEO refers to the all measures that can be taken to improve the ranking of the website in the search engine.One simple example of on-site SEO is improving the content of the website.Off-site SEO refers to the factors which causes web optimization outside the website.Generally,these factors are controlled by the search engines.One simple example of Off-site SEO is link building.

On-site SEO:

There are several factors you need to consider while developing a search engine optimized page.These small things on your page may add up to huge SEO benefits. Here are the few factors to consider while optimizing a website:

1.Meta Descriptions.
2.Optimised URL.
3.Headings and Tags.
4.Focus Keywords.
5.Image Tags.

Off-site SEO:

Optimizing your website with Off-site optimization techniques is also as important as optimizing with on-site optimization techniques. There are several places users find the website other than google,so you should target to reach those places using off-site SEO.

Most important techniques of off-site SEO iare link building and Social media promotion.

Link Building: Link building is one of the most important strategy for off-site SEO .Link building is the process of getting links pointing to your webpage from quality and relevant sites related to your business. The focus is on quality and relevancy of links. Incoming links from an authority website is always awarded in Google search result. Effective link building doesn’t mean building unlimited links but it means getting genuine links from websites that are reliable.

Social media Promotion: Now a days, there exist number of social media sites like Youtube ,facebook,Linkedin,Google+ etc. Social media promotion must be definitely considered as part of SEO. Social media is a key tool for businesses helping to build and engage with a community of individuals. But you shouldn’t approach the social media with the social media with the perspective of better rank in SEO.It is the trust and relation with the customers that promotes your page in social media.

SEO is important in today’s competitive market.It is essential because the majority of users choose one of the first five results of a search query.So to help your business grow and reach the objectives,your website must be present in the top results, which can be done by using SEO.Search engine optimized websites gain maximum sales and customers than other competitors in the market.

Affiliate Marketing

2015-12-07T22:30:00.003-08:00

Affiliate marketing is one of the effective sources of income now a days.Affiliate marketing is a company signing up a affiliate(individual or organisation) for marketing the products of the company for commission.Affiliate marketing can also be called as performance based marketing because the company pays the affiliates based on visitors or customers obtained by the company through the affiliates marketing efforts.In simple terms,the company provides you with certain affiliate tools like links and banners which you can use them in your website or blog.If a visitor to your website becomes the customer of the company through the links on your website,the company pays you commission.

Most of the companies which prefer affiliate marketing provide the affiliates with links and banners and tracking URL with which the company can track which affiliate provided the customer or visitor.Email marketing and referral marketing are old techniques of affiliate marketing.These affiliate tools provided by the company have certain time of expiry.Most of the programs provide the affiliates with cookies with 60 day cookie period,which implies the affiliate gets commission through those affiliate tools for next 60 days.After the cookie period ,the affiliate tools expire.For joining an affiliate marketing program it doesn’t cost the affiliate much,except the promotional technique he choose to marketize the company product.

The commission offered by the company to the affiliates varies across different companies.The normal commision to the affiliate from the company ranges from 2% to 50%. Product development is the most crucial part of the developing company and this is the stage where more effort is put by the company.But in affiliate marketing marketers do not have the need to develop the product instead take the developed product and sell the product, which makes affiliate marketing as easy source of income.

There are some companies which built their revenue model completely from affiliate programs like coupons for e-commerce website.Different companies have different types of affiliate marketing schemes.But In general,there are three types of affiliate programs:

1.Pay per Click(PPC):In this program,the affiliate is paid according to the number of clicks on affilates links through which the user ends up in the landing page of the company.

2.Pay per Lead(PPL):In this type of affiliate marketing program,the affiliate is paid according to the number of successful leads the affiliate has generated.

3.Pay per Sale(PPS).:In this type of affiliate marketing program,the affiliate is paid according to the number of successful sales the affiliate has completed for the company..

Although,affiliate marketing techniques are also applicable on websites,blogs are the best sources to land affiliate links particularly in case of PPC.There’s also some risk associated with affiliate marketing if you low quality products and actually burn readers and hurt reputation and brand.Some well known affiliate programs in Inida are amazon affiliate program,flipkart affiliate,yatra.com affiliate etc.