Archive for the ‘Pay Per Click (PPC)’ Category
You’d be hard-pressed to have missed Paramount’s new ‘Monsters versus Aliens’ movie advert. It contains a suggested search keyword instead of a website address, advising viewers to “search for mva” to find more information on the new film about a girl who is hit by a meteorite, turns into a big monster, gets captured by the government and acquainted with a gang of monsters, and inevitably ends up saving the world from aliens.
Anyway, as Adam on One Idea pointed out, upon searching Google for ‘mva’, the film’s website is completely absent from the top natural search results. There is a pay-per-click ad at the top of the search results, with a messy url and ‘mva’ in the link text. Read on
If you think about it, linking your business with current affairs is a fast way to generate traffic to your site; the only snag is the news has to be relevant to you.
photo credit: franckdethier
When a news story or (competitors) advertising campaign (read about Orange’s latest advertising campaign mistakes) relating to your business gets released you can add new keywords to your campaign. News sends people to Google and Search Engines to find out more. For example, if you are marketing a credit card company, you probably would like your ad to appear when someone types in “credit crunch” or related terms. This gives you the opportunity to deliver a tailored and timely message i.e. “Beat the Credit Crunch with a 0% Credit Card Rate that lasts!”
Read on
In case you haven’t read it yet, Google is now unleashing some new improvements to its Quality Score. News from Google about changes to their algorithms or the way they rank and charge PPC ads usually creates a tidal wave of blog posts, comments and outbursts from the community that uses AdWords on a daily basis. I therefore thought I’d analyse this new development and share thoughts & case studies with our readers.
Google announced:
“Since 2005, we’ve improved Quality Score in many ways, such as the inclusion of landing page quality and landing page load time as factors. Along the way, we’ve also received much helpful feedback from both users and advertisers.
Today, we’d like to let you know of further improvements we’ll introduce in the coming weeks — based, in part, on this feedback. First we’ll outline the key points, and then dive into the details:
Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query
Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’
‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account”
The idea behind having the quality score calculated for every single search is that it will make Google’s PPC results more relevant and time sensitive. For example, if you competitor writes a compelling ad which most of the traffic for a given keyword, your CTR will reduce, and Google will see you as less relevant in the next keyword auction.
I wanted to check that my long tail keywords were still being displayed, and this is what I discovered:
Read on
I don’t like getting the tube in London, being a born and bred Brightonian I find it confusing. The one upside however is tube advertising is in my opinion some of the most innovative in the world. This Orange ad caught my attention this week for its attempted use of offline/ search marketing integration.
photo credit: markhillary
Anyway, waiting at embankment I came across the latest Orange brand campaign 30 foot wide in front of me. I’d seen the TV ad and already though this was a pretty stupid campaign. The premise is Orange are somehow sponsoring a chap called Mark Beaumont who is apparently cycling around the world. (It actually turns out he’s lied- he’s cycling around different parts of the world in 7 stages and I presume getting planes between continents, also he’s taken over 6 months to do it so I presume he’s stopped for food and sleep which for me defeats the point entirely!!!)
Read on
Optimising Pay Per Click accounts for KPIs can be a challenging task. Whether it be increasing traffic for the same budget, increasing the amount of leads generated by a campaign, or simply reducing the cost per lead of a given campaign, keyword and ad optimisation is a very important part of any SEM campaign that you should be undertaking on a (very) regular basis.
Now that’s a big mistake! (via flickr)
In order to “help advertisers present the most relevant ads to searchers”, Google has a wide range of reports and metrics that are the basis of any optimisation work. However, tired eyes and keyword blindness can lead you to include keywords in your PPC campaign that you never would have used had you had a double caramel latte from Toast by the Coast. Read on
The Olympics are currently captivating us all. The Opening Ceremony was an amazing display of lights and colors, and medals have already started being distributed to the Olympians. However, the Olympics are so captivating, that many (every) search marketer has missed out on an Olympic opportunity to generate fast and targeted traffic to their site.For about 4 days now, Google.co.uk has been adorned by lovely Google Doodles about the Beijing 2008 Olympics – these logos change everyday according to the daily discipline:
If you click through this Doodle, you will be taken to a page which is simply a SERP for “Beijing 2008 Olympic Games“. This page displays various news results, and the latest news on Olympic events. It also display links to blogs, photos… But no PPC ads! Read on
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is marketed as the best possible way of measuring your return on investment , you cannot question this. Where else can you see exactly where people have come from how much they paid to get there and what they done (bought something , contacted you etc). They key to establishing your ROI is with reporting.
The Google Adwords reporting tool is a huge asset to PPC management and is not bettered by any other PPC advertising programme (in my opinion). However I’ve noticed that when taking data from a scheduled report whether it be daily weekly or monthly that the date that is generated is not always factual.
Read on
After having explained why negative keywords are so important to a campaign, and how to do negative keyword research, this post will review how to add and optimize your negative keywords to be as precise as possible with your targeting. There are more advanced things you can do with negatives, and some ways you can research them not only based on the keyword tools’ estimations (ie average search volumes) but through the clicks you actually get on your ads:
“Photo: Bernat Casero”
Read on
Negative keywords can often be overlooked by search marketing managers eager to expand their keyword list and get as many searchers as possible to click their ads and follow through to their site. However, negative keywords can play one of the most important parts of your paid search marketing campaign by eliminating the traffic you deem not relevant, thus raising Click Through Rates (and therefore quality score), conversions and conversion rates.
“Photo: Bernat Casero”
For those unaware of negative keywords, these are elements in your PPC campaign that will ensure your ads are not triggered and displayed when this keyword is included in the searcher’s query: if I have the negative keyword “boat” in my “rentals” campaign, then my ads will not show when someone types “rent a boat” into a search engine.
[...]
Read on
Whilst setting up and optimising campaigns for job boards, I have come across some real problems paid search has with punctuation.
The two seem to not like each other, and search engines tend to remove the punctuation from your search query, or simply ignore it (even though it is still present in Google’s SERP URL). Even worse, if your search query has a hyphen (-), then the search engine might even think that you are trying to exclude a search term by turning it into a negative search term.
But what happens when 75% of the term you are bidding on is punctuation? Read on
