Category Archives: Paid Search

97% of Your Marketing Budget is Wasted

Posted on by
1

If you’re like most online merchants, you’ve got an SEO program and PPC campaigns running, maybe some banner ads and perhaps even some affiliate marketing. And you’ve been tweaking and tuning this for months, quarters, and years.Marketing Budget And still you’ve got a 3% conversion rate. Maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower.

There are many ways to increase your site traffic, and even to bring people back. And a whole industry around cart abandonment (the act of trying to bring back a customer who has decided not to purchase, and trying to get them to change their mind somehow). But at the end of the day, 97% of  site traffic leaves without converting.

Seems to many that having spent an enormous amount of time and energy and money driving the traffic to your site, making the most of the current state of technology ability to understand your visitors behavior in real time is a good investment. There’s a growing set of practices around understanding your visitors better, and converting them to customers, leads, or fans/followers.

If your conversion rate is an average of 2.4%, raising that to 2.7% is actually a 12.5% increase in conversions. Getting a little more detailed, lets say your 2.4% average conversion rate is made up of several different channels. Some have a high number of conversions, but at a lower revenue per conversion. Some have a low number of conversions, but a higher cart size. If you can determine the behavior of the low volume / large cart customers, you can positively impact their likelihood to purchase real time on your site by saying things to the right people at the right time. Similarly, if you could use behavioral targeting to focus specific messages on the lower revenue / higher volume customers, say by incentivizing them to increase their cart size at checkout next time they visit, then good things will happen.

There are lots of tools in your toolbox. Like building a store on main street, the first things you need are big, heavy tools: trucks to bring materials, saws and 2x4s and hammers, etc. No store, no customers. Same in e-commerce: you need a store, and you need to drive traffic to it. The big tools here are your cart platform, SEO, PPC. But once that’s done, and you’ve got traffic coming, you don’t use the hammer on them to get them to purchase. You engage them, interact with them, say and do things with them that are relevant to where they are in their decision process. For example, if you splash a discount across all products to all customers, you are leading with price and not with value. But the third time somebody visits your product page in two days, they are making a choice and are going to buy from somebody; closing the deal becomes important.

So rather than just keep hammering people through the front door and saying the same things to all visitors, perhaps do a little listening to what they are telling you in their behavioral clues. Then present them with content that is relevant. And take back some of your marketing budget.

Align Your Ads With Your Web Copy

Posted on by
Reply

As you grow your business in 2012, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Pay-Per-Imprint (PPI) advertising will probably be a major part of your marketing efforts. Both forms of advertising can be much more effective than organic search – because they bring in traffic that is more likely to be interested in your specific products and services.


The problem, however, is that PPC marketing can become very expensive and, if not done correctly, can fail to provide a decent return on investment. In fact, if poorly handled you could end up actually losing money on your PPC and PPI efforts.

Because you pay each time someone visits your site through either of these methods, you need to ensure you get the highest number of conversions possible. Remember, each click that fails to produce a sale is a money loser.

One of the best ways to ensure that your PPC and PPI ads convert most effectively is to make sure that your ads are coordinated and match your landing page, to create a common branding effort.

What does this mean in practice? It means that if, for example, you have a picture of a person in your display ad, make sure you have a picture of that same person displayed prominently on your landing page. Remember, that picture helped bring them to your site in the first place, so you know it has a positive effect on your potential customer. It will also provide a visual confirmation that they have arrived in the “right place.”

This is true with any type of graphics or images in your ad. If your ad is entirely designed in red and yellow colors, your site should be as well. If you use one font in the ad, use it on your landing page, and so on.

Even if your ad has no images at all but is plain text, you still need to follow this pattern. If you use a given set of keywords in your PPC text ad, make sure those same keywords appear in the headlines and other text in your landing page. Those keywords represent what people expect to find on your site. If they are not there, people will click away.

As an example, if your ad reads, “Savings On Canon Cameras! Christmas Is Coming” you could have a headline on your landing page reading, “Now you can find real savings on Canon cameras before Christmas.”

The key take-away here is consistency. The more your PPC or PPI ad is consistent with your landing page, the more people will trust it – and the more likely they will be to buy from you. And that’s going to have a positive impact on your bottom line.

 

The ABCs of PPC

Posted on by
Reply

Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to reach targeted users. You can bid on keywords that are aligned with your product or service, set a budget, and track the performance of your campaigns, but getting started can sometimes be intimidating for those who are new to paid search/pay-per-click advertising. Below are a few tips to help you get started.

Structuring Your Campaigns:
Adwords organizes your account by Campaigns with AdGroups, ads, and keywords within each Campaign.

For each Campaign you’ll want to create a couple of AdGroups with targeted ads and keywords for each. Keeping things simple by creating only a couple of AdGroups per Campaign, 2-3 ads per AdGroup, and 25-50 keywords for each AdGroup allows you to focus your Campaigns on a specific topic and create a consistent experience from the keyword to the ad, and onto the landing page. As visitors search for a keyword that’s related to the products or services you offer, they will see your ad and if it sounds interesting and clearly describes what they’re looking for, there’s a great chance they’ll click. That’s why this consistency is key and setting up your Campaigns in a way that are easily managed can help ensure this consistency.

Developing Your Keyword List & Determining Match Types
The first step is to develop a list of keywords that aligns with the products or services that you sell. Google provides a handy keyword tool that allows you to view ideas for keywords, their search volume, competitiveness, and the average cost-per-click for each keyword.

Writing Your Ads
There are a few key elements that you should include when writing your text ads for pay-per-click advertising.

  • Include the primary benefit of purchasing your product or service:
    Here are a few examples: “Increase your revenue and lower your expenses”, “Get More Conversions from Your Marketing Campaigns”, or “Turn Visitors into Customers”.
  • Including the keyword within the ad:
    By developing tightly themed, and smaller, keyword lists this will allow you to focus on a specific topic and include a keyword within the headline of your text ad. By including the keyword within the headline it will be bolded within the search results which can drive more click-throughs for your ad.
  • Include a call-to-action:
    Tell people what you would like for them to do next after reading your ad. Here are a few examples: “Download Here”, “Free Signup!”, “Learn More”, “Sign up Now!”, or “Get Your Free Account”.

Here’s an example from one of our campaigns:

Setting up Landing Pages:
Creating consistency from the keyword, to the ad, and onto the landing page is absolutely critical in converting more visitors to customers. There is an expectation the visitor has after clicking your ad and arriving on your landing page, so be sure to meet these expectations by creating consistency from the ad to the landing page.

Be sure to check out our 2 part article 8 Tips for Optimizing Landing Pages to read more details about optimizing landing pages.

Tracking Performance & Key Metrics:
Tracking the proper metrics for your campaigns is critical to understanding what is and is not working. There are a number of things you can track for your campaigns, but here is list of the most important metrics to better understand performance:

Spend:
When adding keywords to an AdGroup Google provides a tool to estimate traffic and factors in your max bid and match type. Set a realistic monthly budget that allows you to get enough volume to properly test what is and isn’t working. If you aren’t investing enough to drive volume for the most relevant keywords it will be challenging to establish results that are statistically significant.

Conversions & Acquisition Cost:
Obviously the number of conversions is a leading indicator of how effective a Campaign is performing for you and should serve as a litmus test for performance, however the cost per acquisition is critical to singling out those Campaigns that are performing best and most profitable.
Establishing a target acquisition cost is important and there are a few things to consider. If you are just launching your business there will be some “guesstimating” involved. If you have had several conversions use those numbers as a ballpark but if you have no conversions keep it conservative and constantly adjust as conversions increase.

Average Rate Per User/Average Order Value:
As conversions start to roll in keep a close eye on the average rate (if you have a subscription-based business) or the average order value. This will give you some indication as to the quality of customers you’re driving through paid search and help you understand how much you can pay to acquire a new subscriber or sale (acquisition cost).

Landing Page Conversion Rate:
Pay close attention to how your landing pages are converting and the quality of customers these pages are sending you. You can use Spring Metrics to easily see your top performing landing pages and drill down by conversions to understand more about the landing page that’s responsible for the conversion and detailed information about the customer.

There has been a lot written about pay-per-click advertising and advanced techniques and best practices, but for those of you who are just getting started we hope these basic tips help you get up and running and get more out of your investment.

Turning Web Garbage Into Gold

Posted on by
Reply

Many people think the holy grail for analytics tools is identifying which campaigns work and drive sales. You know, the stuff that ‘works’ and increases ROI. I agree that when current analytics tools can do this well, it will be a great day for everyone.

However, I would argue that finding problems and things that are lowering your total ROI is just as important —you know, finding the garbage that’s stinking up your campaigns, your traffic, and your site. Continue reading “Turning Web Garbage Into Gold” »