Happy Friday! It was a short week here at Trada but the internets were still buzzing. Here’s what we read this week.

1. June has arrived and Father’s Day is right around the corner! adCenter’s blog is giving Tips and Trends for adCenter Advertisers. Did you know that total Father’s Day spending was expected to reach $11.1 billion for 2011? Will you be searching for Father’s Day gifts online this year?

2. SEOmoz is discussing How to Evaluate Guest Post Opportunities. Tips for how to find quality guest posts that will be great additions to your blog.

3. Crowdshifter wrote about How to Kill Your Brand in 5 Easy Lessons.  One lesson learned – If you push too many benefits or pursue too many market segments your brand will die.

4. Social Media Examiner talks about 19 Ways to Build Relationships with Blog Comments.  Great advice including write in a personal voice and ask questions.

5. Search Engine Land reports that Google Product Search will become Google Shopping, Use Pay-to-Play Model. In this new model, merchants will only be listed if they pay. The goal is to improve te searcher experience, but what do you think?

That’s it for today! Have a fantastic Friday and safe weekend!

It’s a scary thought, isn’t it — that your paid search advertising could be counter-productive to your overall marketing plan? Fortunately, the consensus among industry watchers is that PPC gives a substantial boost to traditional mass media or other marketing efforts.

Each has a role, and PPC’s unique targeting capabilities certainly warrant continuing to include it in your marketing mix, even when advertising your brand words. Integrating PPC can give you the best of both worlds – traditional and online – helping all channels perform as complementary elements to reach your marketing goals.

The key is consistency.

Using the same key images and keywords in all your marketing is essential. Assuming you do multi-channel traditional advertising, you wouldn’t consider (at least we hope not), producing a TV commercial that looked different and used different language than your print ads. Your PPC needs to match, too.

It’s called reinforcement. Presenting your messages and images in multiple media has long been a fundamental tenet of advertising and promotion. Mass media are great for building brand recognition, whereas PPC takes it one step further, repeating your message or offer and also giving the audience a way to respond, right away.

Web optimizers call this the “scent,” and note that there’s a direct correlation between scent leading from one medium to another and conversion rates. Without a scent trail, your audience merely becomes confused. Making sure your visuals, keywords and other language match is what enables your online ads to augment your other marketing efforts.

In some ways this may seem redundant. Why pay to advertise your own brand words, especially if your organic ranking for them is already very high? But it’s not that simple. These two channels reinforce one another, generating results neither could achieve on its own.

Strategically speaking, you should be bidding on your brand terms anyway. If you don’t, your competitors surely will take advantage of the opportunity. So using those terms in your PPC advertising benefits you in two distinct ways.

Google put it to the test.

They compared click-through-rates from organic and paid search, using paused PPC ads. And while a Google study of PPC results could be described as self-serving, experienced online marketing experts agree that PPC provides definite synergies rather than spending your advertising dollars unnecessarily. Besides, the study was so extensive one can’t help but take note of the findings:

Yes, some of your clicks are visitors you would have attracted organically anyway. But a significant portion of them are new visitors. These are “incremental” visitors.

If both your paid and organic rankings are in top position, the study showed “incremental CTR” to be about 50%. Not bad at all. And that rises dramatically, to more than 90% for positions five or lower. That’s a lot of additional traffic, visitors you would have missed with only organic search.

Prove it to yourself.

Measuring your actual cost of conversion should take this differential into account. You can devise your own tests based on position rank for specific keyword phrases, pausing the PPC and then noting the change in clicks.

Everyone is interested to see if Google continues this research. The initial study, although meticulously conducted, was done during the year-end holiday period, so the question remains – would results be similar under more “normal” sales conditions? We’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, if you were to just discard your PPC, you would likely see a drop in traffic – perhaps a precipitous drop — because many visitors wouldn’t find you via organic search. Do you really want to take that chance?

Photo courtesy of Flick user Zen Cupcake.

Is PPC overwhelming you? Let Trada help.

Happy Friday! It’s almost the weekend, and for those of us in the United States, this means a holiday weekend (a whole extra day!). Check out what we read this week before enjoying your long weekend!

1. Google AdWords to add Auction Insights. Check out our post about this new report!

2. Business 2 Community posted “There’s No Finish Line in Website Optimization.” Boy, do we agree! Just as with paid search, you should constantly be optimizing and testing your website.

3. Our friends at Unbounce are talking about “8 Ways to Market Your New Startup.” Tips include word of mouth, social media marketing, and creating content. Couldn’t agree with you more!

4. Search Engine Watch wrote about “The Future of SEO: Investment, Innovation, and Integration.” Includes this awesome diagram, along with some great insight.

5. Our neighbors at SendGrid know a LOT about email delivery and “Three Misconceptions About Deliverability That Simply Aren’t True. For instance, did you know that changing your IP address will not improve your reputation immediately? It’s just going to put you back at square one, and no reputation isn’t any better than poor reputation.

Friends, have a safe and fun weekend. Enjoy!

As announced on the Inside AdWords blog on Tuesday, Google will introduce the Auction Insights report. Now what does this mean?

“With the Auction insights report, you can compare your performance with other advertisers who competed in the same auctions as you. You can see how often your ads rank higher in search results than other advertisers do, and how your share of total possible impressions compares with theirs. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices by showing you where you are succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance.” (From AdWords Support)

If you’re competing for keywords with other advertisers, you want to know who they are and how they stack up, right? So basically, AdWords will now give you insights into your competitors’ strategies. You can now compare your performance with similar advertisers who compete in the same auctions as you do. While it won’t help with strategy for bidding, keywords or otherwise, you will be able to see how your performance compares with others and maybe give you some insights into what strategies you’re not taking advantage of yet.

So what data will you see?

• Impression share – The percentage of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.
• Average position – The average rank of the ad in the auctions, which determines the order of the ads on the search results page
• Overlap rate – How often you and another advertiser received impressions at the same time for this keyword
• Position above rate – How often another participant’s ad was shown in a higher position than yours was in auctions in which you both received impressions
• Top of Page Percent – How often your ad (or the ad of another advertiser, depending on which row you are viewing) was shown at the top of the page, above the organic search results

(Click to Enlarge)

Google also notes:

“This report provides information on other advertisers that participated in the same auctions as you. This does not indicate that the other advertisers have the same keywords, match types, or other targeting settings as you. The other advertisers’ metrics shown are based only on instances when your ads were also estimated to be eligible to appear. These reports will not reveal the actual keywords, quality, or settings from your campaign, and it will not give you insight into the same information for others.

While this information is already available by performing queries on Google search — and many already attempt to estimate this data by scanning the ads that appear — this report will make it easier to access and understand this information. It is available at no additional cost to advertisers whose keywords have a minimum threshold of activity.”

AdWords will roll out Auction Insights reporting over the next few days with data available back to the  beginning of May.

Will you use Auction Insights? Leave your comments below!

As marketers, we are challenged to work in many mediums, use myriad tools, thoughtfully record and utilize data, and meet aggressive goals. And we must do all of this in a carefully orchestrated manner with great attention to detail to be successful: so it’s easy to make mistakes! Today we will outline some common marketing mistakes – and how to gracefully fix them.

Mistake: You don’t follow up right away

If your marketing focus is lead generation, you put a great deal of work into bringing in quality leads.

Fix: Work with the sales team to follow up within 48 hours

Research has shown a drastic decrease in lead-to-close rate when leads are called/emailed more than 48 hours late – and it’s diminishing returns after that. Call when leads are fresh and if possible, implement a lead nurturing program (like an email drip campaign) so you don’t lose leads that aren’t ready to commit. 

Mistake: Starving the budget

In order to get the word out about your company, you must allocate money to marketing.

Fix: Test what works!

Choose only marketing channels that are measurable, like paid search, and pay close attention to the data. To stretch your budget, try cross-promotions with another like-minded company; build out a referral program, and ask customers/fans to generate content.

Mistake: Wearing competition blinders

You can learn a lot from your competition- about how to differentiate, which keywords to target, and new markets to go after.

Fix: Use these tools to gain insight into the movements of your competitors. 

Try keyword research tools like Spyfu, Keyword Spy, or Raven to see which keywords your competitors are targeting in PPC and SEO. Then build out your own keyword lists. To keep an eye on your competition’s social movements, build a “competitor” list in Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.

Mistake: Counting on one touchpoint

Consider the “rule of five”: the idea that a customer must come into contact with your brand five times before he or she will convert.

Fix: Use “assists” to keep your product or service in the mind of the user.

Market across multiple channels. Try using display advertising, Facebook ads, and retargeting as “assists” to keep your brand appearing again and again.

Mistake: Selling only to your new customers

Upsells and loyalty programs are the “low-hanging fruit” of marketing.

Fix: Your customers are already your fans: it’s easier to keep them engaged.

Use the thank-you page to offer a coupon for next time and to get social media follows. Or use a gamification tool like Big Door, which increases loyalty and engagement using game theory and incentive techniques on your website.

Mistake: Doing it all yourself

Many of us are marketers on small teams – but your can’t do everything yourself and be effective.

Fix: Use crowdsourcing tools to affordably hand off some of the work.

Using a crowdsourcing tool or platform, you can hand off content generation, SEO, paid search and Facebook ads, translation, message testing, graphic design/video and microtasks- and get incredible reach with limited resources (time and budget).

 Let Trada help with your marketing mistakes! Learn how Trada can be an affordable and successful option for you!

You’re meeting all your goals and expectations. You’ve attained paid search perfection.

Really? Your paid search advertising could well be monumentally better than what you had before, but it’s probably still not quite perfect. Unless it converts 100% of the time – all the way to sales – you still have room to improve.

We love PPC as much or more than anyone, but we know there’s always a way to do even better. That’s what excites us so much about coming to work each day. Besides, your consumer base is sure to fluctuate a little or a lot, depending on your company and product type, so sitting around on your laurels celebrating your paid search perfection may soon cause problems.

Are you really making the most of paid search?

If your business stops growing, it will stagnate. But there’s nothing static about the PPC environment. What’s near-perfect today could soon become marginal. You have to be crafty and vigilant to out-smart your competition, so don’t let up. Think about this:

• Even if it’s going glowingly well, what business couldn’t use even more sales from upselling, more or more frequent repeat sales, more referrals?
• Cost-effectiveness increases your return on investment, for sure. But what you pay per click is relevant only as it compares to what your paid search advertising is bringing you in sales revenue.
• How can you maintain perfection but spend less time on it? Time is money, too, and you or your staff could be doing something else if you really believe you have PPC under control. But remember you can never set and forget paid search.
• Generating more traffic has value, but it’s conversion rate optimization that helps make the most of your existing traffic. Your goal should be maximizing sales while spending the least amount of money.
• Do your customers or clients have needs you’re still not meeting? There are valuable clues in the information you glean from tracking and analyzing your paid search results, information you can use to improve or design new products, upgrade customer service or support.
• You can use analytics to delve even deeper and learn even more about your customers or uncover new peripheral markets. Work to fully integrate PPC measurement with your other sales and marketing analytics so you can track more, more deeply.

Sharpen the details.

Keep playing around to further refine and, well, perfect your PPC. Think of it as a treasure hunt, with you in the starring role as the Indiana Jones of paid search.

Try branded keywords, misspelled keywords or incorrect punctuation. Searchers are in a hurry and sometimes make mistakes. Oddly, statistics show capitalizing every word generates more clicks.

If one of your landing pages suffers from a higher-than-you’d-like bounce rate, could it be price-related? If maybe, try including prices in your ads to weed out shoppers looking for lower-cost products.

Follow the money. It’s easy to love the keywords that generate the most clicks, but look past that to see which ones are generating the most money. After all, that’s why you’re in business, isn’t it?

If your paid search advertising has paid off well so far, you should indeed be proud and pleased. But now it’s time to consider expanding how and where you’re using PPC. So take a minute to celebrate your success, then create some new, more lofty goals and expectations. Raise the bar, then get back to work reach a whole new level of paid search perfection.

Haven’t perfected PPC yet? Learn how Trada can help!

You shouldn’t be disheartened, even if your paid search advertising campaign is a dismal failure. There is much to learn. It’s not really any different than anything else in life – you have to start somewhere and learn as you go. PPC can give you a big boost, but it’s also an intricate process.

Not unlike any other aspect of managing your business, it takes time and effort to learn about PPC itself and also about your customers, in order to achieve success.

What can go wrong.

High bounce rates or clicks that don’t lead to conversions are a sure sign your PPC campaign’s not working. Causes could include:

• Failure to use or test all keyword match types.
• Overly-general keywords or competitive terms.
• Overly-broad geotargeting.
• No ad-specific landing pages, wasting clicks by merely dumping then onto your home page.
• Mis-directed targeting.

Even if you have a well-thought-out campaign, good landing pages, great ad copy and a well-optimized website, if you don’t know your potential customers well enough you can make some dreadful – and potentially costly – mistakes. You need to examine all aspects of your failed campaign to understand where you went wrong.

Keyword management is critical to paid search success.

It can also improve your website SEO. The right approach to keyword selection can make a big difference. Be sure to use:

• High-performing organic search keywords, including branded keywords, because they can optimize relevance and improve ROI while also helping control your budget. Using these proven keywords supports and protects your position with respect to those terms, enabling you to monopolize page one results for both organic and paid search.
• Top-assisting keywords, important because they attract initial click-throughs even though they don’t necessarily drive conversions. They can be either broad match or phrase match.
• More specific keywords and phrases. They’ll help increase exposure as well as conversions, especially if you use them consistently to create coordinated landing page and overall website content.

Consider all these PPC keyword match options:

• Broad match, for broader exposure even though audience relevance will be lower.
• Phrase match, for greater relevance even though exposure will be smaller
• Exact match, which produces lower volume but very high relevance and can help lower costs thanks to less competition.
• Negative match, which can be very important in any of the other three match options.

Don’t ignore landing pages.

You PPC campaign is doomed if you don’t direct searchers to the right place. You need landing pages that directly reflect the keywords that drive traffic to them to keep visitors engaged.

Test and track to see what’s working.  

If you aren’t going to bother testing and refining your paid search advertising, you might as well not bother, because you’ll assuredly waste a substantial amount of time and money, with little result. Make sure your paid search tracking is thorough and properly designed, so you can get the information you need to make smart and timely decisions.

Since you can monitor and change PPC in real time, you can immediately replace non- or under-performing keywords or match types.

Get back on that PPC bike and go for another ride.

Paid search advertising can be wonderfully productive for your business, especially if you’re in a niche market. But it’s definitely not for the lazy. And like any advertising, PPC should focus on achieving your specific business goals.

When you take the time to learn from your mistakes, you’ll have the information you need to move forward intelligently and profitably.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user griffithchris.

Tired of doing PPC on your own? Learn how Trada can help!

When it comes to PPC advertising, there are many important components. One of these is Ad Copy. Ad copy is what faces users searching for your product or service, so it’s vital you write compelling ad that they will click.

There are some variations for how these ads appear on different search networks:

Here are 10 tips for maximizing your 70 characters:

1. Use all 70 Characters. You probably have a lot to say about your brand: so use all the space you’re given.
2. Leveraging all the hard work you’ve done in offline channels. Amplify brand voice and messaging- concepts you’ve already spent time developing- within your paid search campaigns.
3. Create a sense of urgency with promotions and end dates. Online shoppers are different from those found in brick-and-mortar stores- they’re looking for deals and they like to compare prices.
4. Always, always, always use a call to action. It encourages people to be active within your site, and it also lets them know what to expect post-click.
5. Use title casing. Search are drawn to ads with title casing because they command more of a presence on the page.
6. Keep the grammar tidy. If an ad with poor grammar isn’t rejected, it’ll make your company look disreputable and careless.
7. Let people know you are the “Official Site”.  This lends credibility.
8. Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion – but use it carefully!
9. Be conversational. Maybe ask a question: Like shoes? Get 15% Off at Shoe Castle. Shipping is Free!
10. Be Smart and test, test, test. Try different approaches in your ads and see what performs best. Never leave your campaign unattended!

While it seems small, 70 characters is plenty of room to attract your customers to your site. If you follow the tips above, you will surely be attracted quality traffic to your site.

Need help with PPC? Trada to to the rescue! Learn how we can save you time with our PPC solutions for Google and Yahoo/Bing!

It’s Friday, finally! With a busy weekend of graduations and Mother’s Day, we’ll keep today’s post short and jump right into some of the awesome blog posts and articles we read this week.

1. Search Engine Watch is talking about Optimizing to lifetime value of customers to maximize SEM performance. We could not agree more! As they state in the article, “Wouldn’t you pay a higher CPA to acquire a customer who buys three times a month with no coupons over a customer who comes in once for a great deal?”

2. Unbounce has a great article with 3 tiny tweaks to shoot your conversion rate up (a little).  Read this blog post for how to build a better headline, experiment with design, and moving around elements on your landing pages.

3. Our friends at Gnip wrote this great post about Social Data: A Beacon in Natural Disasters. It’s amazing to see how social media has played into natural disasters- making it possible in many instances to prevent more deaths, report accurate news and numbers, and more.

4. Search News Central wrote about SEO Excuse #143: The other guy is doing it, so it must work.  If you’re a marketer, you better believe SEO is important, but you must do it the smart way.

5. Finally, we have this infographic from Tasty Placement.

Infographic authored by
TastyPlacement, a web design and SEO company,

Happy Friday and Happy Mothers Day to all moms out there!

Four elements comprise a paid search strategy: keywords, ad groups, landing pages, and ads. In order to excel at PPC (and to take advantage of the leveled playing field of paid search to beat your competitors) you must make sure that these four elements are relevant to each other. This can be time-consuming, and requires thoughtfulness.

Keywords

In order for the ad to relevant to the search query (the search query is what a searcher types in to the search engine- it’s important to note that this is different from a keyword, which you have created), it should contain the actual search phrase in some form.

This is the single easiest way to bolster your quality score, which will ensure that the ad is ‘healthy’ and will be served on Google and Yahoo/Bing. But that’s not the on ly reason to insist upon relevance: a great benefit of using paid search is the ability to capitalize on people’s actual interests, desires, and needs. A searcher has indicated that she wants something- and as an advertiser, you are helping her find it! The clearer and more direct the search ad is- especially if it includes the actual search term- the more likely you are to see clicks.

Ad Groups

Remember that ad groups are for organizing ads, not keywords. An ad group is a group of keywords who will share a set of ads. Again, relevancy is cardinally important. Each ad group should be small (20 keywords or less), focused, and driven to its own landing page. Establishing ad groups is a key part of paid marketing. When you’re making ad groups, you also set the price you’re willing to pay each time your ad is clicked on – your cost per click, or CPC.

Landing Pages

You’re doing all this PPC stuff for one reason: to get people to your website! So don’t ignore the importance of the landing page. Once on your site, a searcher should never be more than one click away from finding their product. And relevancy is key here again, as well: highly relevant copy on your landing page can drive up your quality score. For information on landing pages, check out our recent blog post on creating effective landing pages. 

Ads

Focus on relevance, and as yourself these five questions while writing ad text:

1.  Is the keyword included in the ad text?
2. Are you driving to the right landing page?
3. Are you echoing language from the landing page?
4. Is your display URL category-specific?
5. Have you differentiated yourself?

The paid search game is highly competitive, but if you build upon this four elements, you’ll have a great foundation to be successful in ppc advertising.

Learn how Trada can help YOU with paid search advertising!