SPINN Media

12 Essential Google Adwords Rules

A DIY Google Adwords campaign is not easy to manage. It's not only about keyword selection or budgets....It's about having a clear strategy, establishing benchmarks, and analytics to measure campaign performance.   If you're managing your own PPC campaign in-house, help is at hand. Hollis Thomases, President & CEO of Web Ad.vantage, recently shared on Inc. these essential rules you must understand to ensure your campaign is well executed:

1. DO Understand How Your Ads Get Shown 
There are multiple factors influencing how your ads appear on Google: your daily budget, your maximum cost per click (or "CPC") per keyword, your competitors' max CPC on the same keyword, how popular your search phrase is, and Google's Quality Score. If you don't understand how Quality Score works, get familiar with it!

2. DON'T Send All Users to Your Home Page 
You need to think about your PPC campaign as a direct-response experience. If your ad succeeds in getting users to click, why dump them onto a home page without telling them where to go next?  Instead, steer them more clearly into the response you want by creating a unique "landing page." Google has deemed these pages so important that it has implemented "Landing Page Experience" into its Quality Score rating.

3. DON'T Rely on Broad or Generic Keywords
 Search engine users have gotten savvy over the years; many search queries now tend to be a few words long, rather than just single words or pairs. Bidding on very broad or generic keyword phrases is likely to be expensive because of either the bid price itself or by dint of sheer search volume and the traffic yielded may be lower in quality.  Unless you monitor these terms closely for performance, they can wind up generating negative ROI.

4. DO Organize Keywords Into Tightly Themed Ad Groups 
There are many benefits to having relevant keywords organized within their own ad group: Keywords can easily be used in your ad copy since they are relevant to the ad group. When the ads are more relevant to the audience, your click-through rate (CTR) will increase (and that is the goal, after all). Higher CTRs help your Quality Score, which in turn will lead to lower click costs for the same position.

5. DO Utilize All Match Type Options
 Match Type settings for each keyword help control how Google triggers your ad. If you don't specify a particular Match Type, Google defaults to Broad Match which generally works in their favor, not yours.

6. DON'T Overlook Negative Keywords 
Negative keywords are those have no bearing on the context of your keywords or words you want to be sure are not associated with your campaign. For example, in a campaign advertising windows for the home, you'd want to avoid anyone also searching for the word "Microsoft."  Ensuring that these words do not appear in your campaign can also help improve your Quality Score since you're not generating unnecessary ad impressions that garner poor CTRs.

7. DO Separate Your Campaigns 
Google's default settings at the campaign level include both Search and Display together, and do not separate out Mobile.  You should manually "opt out" of having your search keywords run on Google's Display Network especially if you want to preserve your budget exclusively for Search. I'd also suggest that you set up a separate search campaign for mobile users, to help optimize your visibility and click costs there, too.

8. DO Use Free Conversion Tracking
Unless you are running a branding initiative and don't care how much money you spend, you'll be flying blind if you run a campaign without conversion tracking to tell you how well your clicks convert into action. Use Google's free conversion tracking code to give you more insight and help you prune and optimize your campaign.

9. DO Test Different Ad Versions 
Even after you put all this effort into your campaign setup, you shouldn't assume you know what ad will actually attract the right audience. Instead, test different versions of ad copy or offers: Run three tests for each Ad Group for a week or so, determine the winner, and delete or tweak losers based on the results.

10. DON'T Stick With Under-Performing Keywords 
Keywords that produce clicks but don't convert eat up your budget and drag down your Quality Score. Routinely review your campaign and get rid of them!

11. DO Take Advantage of Ad Extensions
Google now gives you more than just 90 characters of ad text, if you know about and use Ad Extension options. With Ad Extensions you can show products, give locations and phone numbers, or list additional links, all associated with a single ad.

12. DON'T Forget to Connect AdWords to Your Google Analytics Account  
When you connect your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account, you can analyze your AdWords campaign data directly within your Google Analytics dashboard and see how an AdWords visitor affects your overall website activity.
 

In today's economy, you want to ensure that you get the best bang for your buck so follow these optimization tips for better results.

Email Usability: 6 Tips to get Your Email Read

You're probably speed-reading this blog post, so we'll get to the good stuff. Here are a couple of tips for getting the important bits of your email read:

Keep it short
Interest in the content of an email diminishes as the email extends, so cut the copy and keep the most important points of the message near the top.

Optimize your headlines
As the first two words of a headline are the most important, keep them informational. For example, a headline such as "3 tips for improving email usability and response rates" could be rephrased as, "Email usability: 3 tips for improving your response rates".

Get to the point
Most readers will skip any long-winded greetings or introductory text, so decide if it's worth including. If an introduction is necessary, avoid adding any important information to this section.

Focus the message
Where possible, avoid covering too many topics and keep the message simple. You're only going to have the reader's attention for a few seconds, so make it count by using a standout call-to-action.

Make it scan-friendly
Limit body copy to easily-readable paragraphs, preferably under 60 characters in width. Selectively use images to reinforce your message, as images often take less time to understand than words.

Align to the left
That's because readers of left-to-right languages (such as English) are accustomed to scanning from the top-left first.

Finally, your email design may only get an average of 51 seconds of fame per reader (if it gets 'read' at all).

How will you make the most of it?

New Facebook Timeline for Business

On February 29, 2012, Facebook announced that the new Facebook Timeline for Business Pages will be rolled out from 30 March. Like it or not, you can't stop it. Everyone is learning how the new changes will affect them. We listed out some of the key things you should know here:

Tip 1: Default Landing Tabs
 Facebook has eliminated the capability to set a published Tab as the default landing page for your Business Page. Your Timeline will now be the default view for your Page. All Tabs (now called Applications) have been moved to a prominent location just below your cover photo. The Tabs will also now be represented with much larger, attention-grabbing images. 

Tip 2: Cover Photo 
Pages will now feature a large image at the top of the Timeline. Choose an image that is representative of your brand and experiment a little! Cover photo dimensions are 851 x 315 pixels. 

Tip 3: Your Profile Picture 
This is the image that will be shown next to each of your updates on your wall and in users' news feeds, sponsored stories or ads you run. Choose an image that fits 180 x 180 pixels and also looks good when scaled down to a thumbnail size of 32 x 32 pixels. 

Tip 4: Policies regarding cover photos 
FB states that cover photos CANNOT include: * Contact information such as URLs, email, mailing address or any information that should go in the 'About' section. * Price or purchase information such as "50% off" or "Download it at our website." * References to Facebook features or actions, such as "like" or "Share" or an arrow pointing from the cover photo to any of these features. * Calls-to-action, such as "Tell your friends" or "Get it now." * No false, deceptive or misleading information and must not infringe on 3rd parties' intellectual property.

Tip 5: Pin Posts 
You will be able to "pin" your most important post for a period of up to seven days. This makes it possible for businesses to designate priority material and display it prominently at the top of the Timeline. It's an excellent place for businesses to direct visitors to applications that display sales, contests, open houses and more. 

Tip 6: Private Messages  
That's right! You can now interact with your fans directly via Private Messaging. 

Tip 7: Reordering Icons 
Below your cover photo are icons that link your photos, likes & apps. By default, your photos will appear in the first spot, but you can change the order of everything else. You can show a maximum of 12 apps so have a think about which you'd like to feature. To re-order the apps, expand the apps menu by clicking the drop-down menu to the right of your Page's apps. Hover over the position where you'd like to place the app & click on the pencil icon that appears. Then choose the app you'd like to swap into that spot from the menu.

Tip 8: Edit Images in Your Views & Apps 
Use the best images to represent the items in your Views and Apps. To customise the way these apps appear on your page, go to Admin Panel, click Manage and select Edit Page from the dropdown menu. In the Apps section, click Edit Settings for the specific app image (dimensions should be 111 x 74 pixels) and upload the new image. This will enable you to turn your featured apps into calls-to-action.

Tip 9: Publish More Visual Content
 The new design places more emphasis on visual content such as images and videos. As these images will now appear larger and more prominently on your page, post your best visual content to your page such as photos, charts, infographics and more.

Tip 10: Good to know before you rush off and publish to the new Timeline
 If you publish to the new Timeline now, ahead of the 30 March roll-out, you will not be able to revert to your old page. Our advise: Preview your changes. Don't publish it till you're absolutely happy with the look & feel. So get creative. You have till 30 March :) 

There is a lot to learn and get used to with the Facebook page design. Feel free to contact us at: info@spinnmedia.com.au if you have more questions.

What is Google Plus?

According to Google, the new Google+ service is, "Real-life sharing, rethought for the web."

Aimed at giving the rest of the social media offerings out there a run for its money or fanbase, Google+ brings together all of your friends in one neat package. It lets you easily organize all of your contacts into different groups.

Google+ is made up of the following five features or tools:
Circles
Hangouts
Sparks
Instant Upload
Huddle

Circles
Instead of grouping or sharing your 'life' with everyone, you can create different circles for the different types of people in your life. Circles will help you place your groups for friends, family or co-workers, into groups which you choose to share with. A little like creating contact lists in your email address folder. All you do is drag and drop.

Hangouts
You can broadcast to your friends that you're online and ready to chat face to face, and your pals can drop by your "hangout" to video chat with you. So much easier than FaceTime or Skype.

Sparks
Designate your interests in Sparks, and Google+ will collect articles, videos, and photos of the things you love from around the web to read when you're free (like an RSS reader). If you add say, 'holiday homes', you'll receive what Google feels is the most relevant content for that word or phrase.

Instant Upload
You'll need to download the Google+ app onto your Android phone. You will need to opt in to the Instant Upload tool if you want to upload your pictures. Google won't start uploading your photos without permission. Then all you do is snap pictures on your phone as your normally would and they magically get uploaded to your Google + account! From there you can share it with a specific person, circle or do whatever you want with your photos, when you next log into your Google+ account.

Huddle
This is the group texting part of Google+. At the moment, you can only access it on Android phones. iPhone users will need to wait until Google releases an iPhone app.

Not on Google+ yet? Drop us a comment below if you'd like an invitation to road test it. We have a few invites we're looking to give away.

10 Ways To Thrive In A Slowing Economy

With 2012 at a new beginning, your goals and strategies probably look a lot different than they did just last year. As your business evolves with the new economic realities, let us not forget that many of your prospects exist in the same state of insecurity.

It is time to rethink marketing materials that no longer speak to a customer's needs.
Cost-cutting is not the answer; re-engineering value is.

Here's a short list of 10 ways your company can thrive in a slowing economy.

1. Start from the beginning
Refreshing your brand will give you a good excuse to talk not only to all your existing clients but also will allow you to reflect on your communications and core message.

2. Reduce costs and improve your results
You have the choice to send 10,000 postcards or letters where you won't know if the recipients have read them for $1.50 each (total: $15,000 of admin, creative, print, postage) or send 10,000 emails for $100 and get instant analytics and results. It is time for you to start re-assessing. Don't stop marketing! Just spend your money wisely by using digital communications.

3. Make your website a real tool
Create interactivity with your target market. Use a silo marketing approach and create additional landing pages specific to each of your products or offers so that readers landing on your pages are not confused by the array of other products or services on your site. Keeping your visitors focused on your page will dramatically increase your conversion rate.

Ensure your website is current and has exciting, relevant content to engage your audience; use your content management system to optimise your Meta tags and key word density within your web pages so the organic searches can find your specific product or services.

4. More communication and more presence
Online strategies are the perfect vehicles for communicating with customers and generating additional purchases. Combine communications using emails, social networking, search engine optimisation, blogs, emails and websites to keep on growing your business and moving forward.

5. Target! Target! Target!
Online database management provides you superior targeting ability. With average conversion rate of around 1.5%, this is an ideal way to reach the other 98.5% that have taken the time to visit your site but haven't yet converted. So keep communicating.

6. Measure, Track and Survive
Online marketing offers greater measurability while allowing you to track behaviours in comparison to traditional media advertising.

Do you know who has read your advert in the newspaper or magazine? No chance. With email marketing, for example, you can! This is of course due to the awesome technology, where every mouse click is tracked, usually anonymously. Use this data to understand how much each lead and sale costs you.

7. Build your distribution network
Talk to other businesses, yes that's right you remember the old tool called the telephone...it's still works to build relationships. Call businesses and start cross promoting your services, develop a referral program and even a joint event with an associated business targeting the same customers and share the costs and the rewards!

8. Convert and manage sales efficiently
During tough times you cannot afford to lose leads and clients, make sure you are using an appropriate customer relationship management (CRM) tool, so you always stay on top of it.

Focus on increasing your conversion and not just the number of new leads or enquiries. Work on your client base as it is 75% easier to convert an existing client to a new sale than pitching to a new customer. Do some research on unconverted leads to find out why they aren't buying from you? Create an online e-learning centre for your staff and your clients. Providing education is a great way to build brand advocacy.

9. Listen to your customers and the market
Send a simple survey to all your clients with a great incentive (never forget the incentive). Read all media, books and relevant business articles to keep you thinking about your business and how you must adapt. If you keep learning through customer feedback and constantly think about how you can improve your offering, you will only continue to grow your business.

10. Forget about the world economy and all media hype
Journalist rarely deliver good news; they exploit the human nature which is constantly craving for sensationalism. Remember the James Bond movie "Tomorrow Never Dies" where Elliot Carver said "there is no news like bad news", well yes it was a movie but...

Think about it, it's easier for the media to sell newspaper or advertising if the Headline says "The World Economy has Crashed" than saying the "The World Economy is Great". The media always exploits negativity to build their own fortune. Stay focused on your business and keep doing what you do best or better yet, improve everything you are doing!

Now is a great time to reflect and re-invent yourself, to become more efficient and drive your business as hard as possible. What's stopping you from growing?

Contact SPINN Media today for free health check on your marketing activities.
Remember, standing still is not an option.

Simply The Best

"The one and only rule to remember when you are seeking to stand out from the crowd," says David Tyreman, "is [this]: Don't become part of the crowd in the first place."

Tyreman's book World Famous: How to Give Your Business a Kick-Ass Brand Identity is packed with suggestions to help your business gain a powerful presence in the market. The opening page of the book features a quote from Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead: "Success isn't about being perceived as the best at what you do, it's about being perceived as the only one who does what you do."

How do you set your business apart from your competition? Tyreman talks about the need to offer your market a distinct benefit or value. If you pin your hopes on "just buy from me" with no real value proposition, then you will suffer the consequences.

Marcia Lindquist says, "You need to focus on how you do business, determine if you are the best solution for your customers' problems, and then go out of your way to meet their needs." She has developed a 5 step process on how you can hone your customer focus for better results.

1. Focus on your customers' needs and wants.
2. Assess your own strengths and resources.
3. Differentiate with the customers' best interests at heart
4. Make a map of their needs and wants and record it
5. Focus! Focus! Focus! only on that map and don't get off-track

There are a lot of businesses out there offering the same products, services and even benefits. Understanding what makes you unique from these companies can help you better position yourself in the marketplace. This is where you convince your clients and prospects to actually buy from you.

What is your stand on this?
Drop us a line or contact us for a free consultation or a cuppa. We would love to meet you.