Everyone Can’t Be Everywhere

Some products or services can only be offered to people within a certain distance from your actual physical location, so you better only show your ads to people either within that distance, or who are using search queries that contain your location. This is important to remember for local businesses, who often also have small PPC budgets, and for larger businesses with multiple locations. Targeting the people searching in a certain area with keywords and ads that are specialized for that area is much more likely to return success.

The World is Not Homogenous

In addition to the somewhat specialized case above, some…many…all? products or services are going to have geographical locations in which they sell better. If you use the data available to you properly, you can determine where these are and devote more resources to a population you’re more confident will convert.

There are a few ways to find out where your high-value location targets are. For one, you can use analytics data to determine continents, regions, or cities where your conversions are concentrated. Depending on the analytics package you use, you’ll have different levels of detail available, but in any case, this can be a helpful place to start. For those without analytics availability or who just want more detailed information, sourcing this information directly from your conversion data can be a viable option if you have the right tools.

For some people, leads come in the form of form submissions that ask for data such as city, state, and zip code. On top of that, for sales or revenue-based clients, you have shipping and sales address information available.  That means that you have all sorts of potential to geotarget your PPC campaigns.

So What to Do?

Almost everyone can get this data compiled into a spreadsheet, which is great but can be overwhelming. A year’s worth of conversion data? This could be 32,428 rows in excel, and sounds completely daunting to sort through to try and find conversion location patterns. Which basically gets us to the point I’m trying to make: the idea overwhelmed us, too, until a team member discovered this very neat website: BatchGeo. You just paste in your properly-formatted spreadsheet information and it maps the locations of your whatever- sales, leads, high-value customers- on a Google maps map. It can even handle missing information and can map city/state combinations, address/zip code combinations, and zip codes only. It’s free, and it has been an extremely helpful tool for us in identifying areas in which leads are concentrated.  Whether you’re using this kind of raw data for geotargeting now or not, it won’t hurt you to plug the data in and see how the map looks- you might get a useful surprise!

• Use your colleagues! It really doesn’t matter if they do PPC as well (though that helps)- anyone with familiarity with your product or service can give a new perspective, which can be very helpful when your ad texts all start to look the same and you can’t think of one more benefit for your landing pages. If you do work with other internet marketers, you can take this one step further and ask them to review your accounts for anything you may be overlooking, and for new ideas. This works beautifully and I think you should try it. Aside from actually having coworkers review your accounts, if you have access to theirs, you can also get ideas for settings or account structure changes by looking at what works for them and then applying relevant findings to your own clients.

• Remember there’s a world outside of your PPC account. It’s not all keywords and ad texts- don’t overlook landing page testing! Clients, even if wary of website redesigns, often will allocate budget for one-page design projects if you can adequately justify the increase in conversion rates they’re likely to see as a result.

• Think outside the PPC box- luckily, at Hanapin we have both PPC and SEO clients, so we have a bit of an advantage in this area, but if you don’t, you can still look at your website from a non-PPC perspective.  Improvements to your site’s structure, updated content or products, and social media integration can all translate into new PPC opportunities. Updated content can give you ideas for new ad texts and landing page messaging. New products translate to keyword targeting opportunities.  Understanding who your customer is and what they want from you via social media can help your messaging become more targeted as well. Meeting your visitors’ needs and expectations is paramount to success in all areas of internet marketing, and exploring how you’re doing that outside of PPC can open your eyes to a lot of possibility.

• You can ask search engine reps for help and ideas, particularly if you work at an agency and have dedicated reps for this kind of thing. I’ll just say a) they are extremely helpful, and sometimes have great ideas and b) you should always take their ideas with a grain of salt, because ultimately their first job is to increase their employer’s profit…not yours. If you choose growth avenues wisely, you can find a balance that does both simultaneously: lovely!

One last note: don’t let your desire to try something new win out over your ROI’s best interest…some ideas are more likely to have a substantial impact than others, and you know your account well enough to understand logically what’s most likely to be useful and what is just a pointless waste of time and money. Trust yourself, do your research, and get inspired. Everyone will be better off for it.

Happy New Year! 2009 was a rough year for the country with the economy and all, so PPC Hero is cutting loose! Okay, maybe a bit too loose! But you can’t blame him… he has the PPC world resting on his shoulders. He is the sentinel being, the chosen one, who watches over the land of PPC to make sure all is fair and just. That is a lot of responsibility! So, even our fearless hero needs to get gussied up and have some bubbly everyone once in a while! Have a safe & happy new year!

I have wondered at times for a particular account that recently lowered its budget if our positions are just too low now to generate the kind of sales we used to. Now, I should be able to find out this information using this report in Analytics.

If you find that you generate super high conversions in positions 4 – 6 over positions 1 – 2, that’s great evidence to your client that you don’t need to be in super high positions in order to convert well. Some people call clicks on ads in positions 1 and 2 curiosity clicks. Curiosity clicks are clicks from people who aren’t ready to purchase yet, but they’re in their leaning phase and click on ads in top positions just to get a further idea of what they want.

To run the report in Analytics, simply follow these steps:

1. Login to analytics
2. Click on traffic sources on the left hand navigation
3. Click on Adwords
4. Click on Keyword Positions
5. From there you can click on any keyword that shows up in the middle of the page.
6. The report by default will show keyword visits by position
7. If you want to get conversion rate by position, simply click on the drop down menu where it says visits, and click on conversion rate. (see screen shot below)

This report is also great to get additional budget from your client to get in higher positions in the SERPS. You can simply show your client that you convert higher in higher positions (if that is the case) and hopefully they’ll increase their budgets to get in those higher positions more frequently.

The more insight you have over your Adwords keywords the better decisions you can make on bid adjustments, etc. I love that Google offers these robust reports and will explore this in all of my accounts!

1.  Make Sure Keyword Research is Always the First Step
Whenever beginning a PPC campaign for a new product or site, explore as many keywords and themes as possible.  Do extensive research on the product, the industry or market in which it competes and the products it competes with.  When in doubt, ask for help.

2.  Always Test More than One Ad
Never run a campaign with only one ad.  Why?  Because it leads to missed opportunities for improvement.  Just changing a couple words in the ad text or title line can sometimes result in significant differences in click-through or conversion rates.

3.  Focus on Specific Goals/Metrics
The broad goal is always “As much as possible,” but it’s always easier to optimize for specific goals.  It’s most effective to pick a couple particular goals – i.e., increase CTR by 3% & reduce cost per order by 5% – and focus on optimizing for them.

4.  Analyze, Optimize, Repeat
Optimization is a constant process.  Don’t get complacent, don’t assume past success will lead to future success without adjustments, and don’t ever stop analyzing keyword and ad copy performance.

5.  Read Everything
The optimization tips from your Google or Bing rep, PPC tips from PPC Hero, SEO ideas from SEO Boy, industry news from Search Engine Watch… Never miss an opportunity to learn something new.

That’s all I’ve got today.  I hope I was at least a little helpful for some of you in the PPC world in 2009, and I look forward to being just a little helpful again in 2010.
Happy New Year!

Yeah! Perhaps we’re in the minority, but we love the weather at this time of year. You can have snowball fights, go skiing, make a snowman, go ice skating… and don’t forget sledding! Sledding is the best. It isn’t really a sport and it doesn’t require any skill aside from sitting and holding on, and you get to go really fast! PPC Hero is taking full advantage of the snowy hillsides, but Ms. Clicks looks unimpressed. What?! She’s hard to please! Happy holidays everyone!

This could potentially hurt some local advertisers, especially the ones who rely on the local business ads but do not run any PPC ads. However, if you are running PPC ads there is a mini solution to this issue until Google gets their LBA’s back up and running.

They’re called Location Extensions. If you’re running a PPC ad with a location extension your PPC ad will show the local address you entered as the extension in your PPC account as well as a map allowing customers to at least get your business name, address and even directions.

The location extensions will show your PPC ad with a plus sign below the ad text. Upon clicking on that plus sign your map will come up.

To enable the location extensions in your account, simply click on any campaign, then click on the settings tab.

Under ‘locations, languages and demographics’ you should see an option to ‘show relevant addresses with your ads (advanced). Click on that link.

Once you click on the link, another link will pop up saying, ‘add an address’. Click on that.

Then, you simply add the name of your company, address, phone number if you’d like, city, state and zip and hit save.   Your final version should look something like this:

These ads with address won’t replace Google’s LBA’s but they will help your customer see where you’re located. The location extensions won’t show up for searches located outside of your geographic location as well.  In addition to, if I’m not mistaken, the plus box allowing the customer to see your address is only available in positions right below the search box or in the shaded sponsored ad area in Google.

The multivariate testing allows you to add in a piece of code to your landing pages and test showing that change 50% of the time to your users.  Meaning, 50% of the time users will see the updated or changed landing page, and 50% of the time users will see the original landing page.

After a few days or weeks you can check on your multivariate test to see which version of your landing page is generating the higher conversion rates. So, what should you test you may ask? There is almost no limit to the things you can test on your landing pages.  But here’s a tip, test one element at a time. Or set up multiple multivariate tests so you can test one change on your landing page but have multiple of those tests running.

For example, with multiple multivariate testing you could have one test running where you simply change the headline, another test could be adding a larger call-to-action button, another test could be adding a form to your landing page rather than a link. All these tests can be run separately, but at the same time.

Here is a full list of items we came up with that we feel are important to test to help increase conversion rates:

PPC

1.Call to action

-          Location on page

-          Color of button

-          Copy on button

2.Form/Shopping Cart

-          Length of form

-          Link location

-          Content of form (required fields and such)

3.Headline

-          Color, size, font

-          Copy (including keywords)

-          Location on page

-          Subheadline – yes or no?

4.Copy

- Tone (Sales, Emotional, Urgency)

- Structure; a lot of copy, versus minimal copy

- Format (bullets vs. paragraph)

5. Trust Symbols

-          Testimonials

-          Case Studies

-          Trust Logos

-          Client Logos

Additional Test Elements:

Contact Forms

Colors on landing page

Images on landing page

Flash on landing page

Video on landing page

Drop-down vs. basic navigation

Offers/Promos

Conversion funnel (singe vs. multi step)

Featured Products

Shopping Cart Funnel

- Process

- Add to cart button

Before you begin testing these elements of your landing page, consider these tips first:

Step 1: Know what you are trying to achieve

• Conversion action
• Audience – Know your user intent

Step 2: Know your value proposition

• What are the product benefits?
• What is the benefit of signing up now?

Step 3: Layout your testing strategy + follow it

• What will you test at each stage?
• What is the objective of each stage?

Step 4: Landing Page Testing >> Where do you start?

• See list above!

Website optimizer is something everyone should be using especially in today’s economy. It’s not a difficult process to do the multivariate testing, Google even gives you or your developer detailed instructions on how to add the code to the back end of your landing page.

I have tested several different aspects of my client’s website and have found the tests to increase our conversion rates each time except for one which made huge leaps and bounds in the total number of leads we were generating.

For companies that handle all of their own search marketing internally, it’s possible, and likely, for the search manager to be an expert on not just the best practices for running a Google or Bing campaign, but also an expert on the product and target market.  However, working for an agency with dozens of clients and hundreds of products presents a different problem.  It has forced me to acknowledge the unpleasant truth that there are many things I know nothing about.  Among those things: construction, anti-aging skincare products, scrapbooking, all-natural male enhancement pills…

Despite my relative ignorance of those subjects, I can still devise comprehensive keyword lists for products that fall into those categories.  How?  Research.  There are countless keyword research tools available – Google’s Keyword Tool is particularly useful and convenient when setting up new ad groups – and it would be foolish not to take advantage of them whenever possible.  Those tools can be extremely valuable, as can soliciting advice in the forums of industry sites like Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch.  However, there’s another vast source of knowledge and useful ideas that most SEM professionals leave untapped: non-SEM professionals.

It’s easy to occasionally fall into a comfortable pattern, using similar keywords and themes that have worked in the past, and it can be difficult to think like the customers I’m trying to target.  So, instead, I find it very helpful to talk to those potential customers.  More specifically, I find it helpful to talk to people I know who are not involved in PPC search.  The same people who I see at parties or family gatherings and attempt to explain, without success, exactly what paid search marketing is are the people who can help me the most.

For example, maybe I’ve got to manage a PPC campaign for a new scrapbook tool.  I’m clearly not in the target audience for this product, but I know that my wife is.  Rather than spend an hour creating a list of terms that I think are relevant, I’ll send her a link to the site with the questions, “what would you search for if you wanted to buy something like this?”  A client selling an innovative new power saw?  That one goes to my brother, who works in construction and offers me a few suggestions about what he might call the saw and what kind of jobs it would be good for.

Sometimes these questions don’t lead to useful results, but sometimes they can lead to extremely effective general and longtail terms that would not have occurred to me or to the Google Keyword Tool.  The point is this: don’t assume you’re always an expert, and don’t ever ignore a potentially useful resource for good keywords.

General Holiday Shopping Stats:

• Women this year are planning to spend less.
• More comparison shopping will be done this year over any other previous year to try and find the best deals and offers. This means it’s likely your click-through rates will decrease due to an increase in impressions from consumers clicking on various websites looking for deals. This also means more shopping will be done on comparison shopping engines like shopping.com, pricegrabber.com and shopzilla.com to name a few.
• More shoppers are buying practical gifts/necessities as Christmas gifts. This could mean gift cards to a grocery store over a whimsical Christmas sweater with Frosty the Snowman on it.
• Online shopping does still continue to grow year over year. So having an online presence is critical during the months of November and December.
• 26% of men will be shopping online, while only 20% of women will be shopping online. You know what this means, electronics! Men love to shop for electronics online and look for the best prices. If you sell ipods, TV’s, etc. make sure you have a promotion going on like Free Shipping or a discount offer for these male shoppers.
• 25 – 34 year olds will be shopping online mainly. Older people still aren’t 100% comfortable shopping online and will likely make the trip to the mall instead.

Statistics on Categories of Gifts:

• Clothing and accessories trump Black Friday sales.
• Books, DVD’s and games fall in second place.
• Then electronics and toys fall in third place.

Peak Days for Shoppers:

“Cyber Monday” (busiest online shopping day of the year) is most popular for people who have access to the internet at work and shop during their 8 – 5 office job.

Christmas Day is large in sales for shoppers (mainly women) looking for sales!

What are women looking for:

• Clothing and accessories
• Jewelry and watches

Other categories of items have peak shopping days too:

• Books/dvd/video games = sales peak cyber monday
• Home category = Black Friday sales begin to rise, real peak is second week of December.
• Toys = sales peak Cyber Monday, sales begin to declines after Christmas Day.
• Gift cards = Sales peak Cyber Monday.
• Game consoles = sales begin to increase Cyber Monday, but largest peak is on Christmas Day
• Consumer electronics = largest sales peak is during first week of December.
• Computer hardware = sales begin to pick up Black Friday, Cyber Monday is highest sales peak.
• Sporting goods = sales peak is day after Cyber Monday
• Travel = searches for travel rise towards the end of December, but really picks up after first of the year.

Takeaways:

• If you think you can still make good sales without the use of promotions and incentives, think again.
• 1 in 5 shoppers will only purchase a product online when free shipping is offered
• Most retailers offer free shipping both ways, free shipping over a certain amount or free shipping when…
• National free shipping day – December 17

Consumers are mainly finding their Christmas Gifts via:

1. search engines
2. amazon.com
3. catalog
4. ebay

Search Statistics:

• 50% of black Friday terms contained 4 or more keywords in 08.

• Black Friday conversions increased 147% compared to a normal day in November.

• Cyber Monday conversions increased 73%

• Lower CTR indicate more comparison shopping and more research

• Yahoo strongly recommends more ad text testing and the use of the content network during these peak sales times.

• Yahoo also recommends using campaign scheduling, advanced targeting geographically, or demographically, and help with optimization by an account manager.

Yahoo’s Buying cycle:

• Step 1:  Learning:  What do I want/need, how can I learn about xyz.
• Step 2:  Shopping: What brands, features are available.
• Step 3:  Purchase:  Who stocks this model number, “I want that one daddy”

More Yahoo Tips:

• Take users to landing pages!

• Ensure you site has effective on site search
• Confirm prices/promos throughout all your pages.

• Enter a daily spending limit – you can see how many impressions and clicks you may receive

• Make good use of dynamic keyword insertion to target your ads better.

• Ads with slogans or too much sales jargon don’t perform as well. Simply state what is being offered.

• Read user ratings!!! Put this in your ads and you may see increases in CTR’s.

• Maximize your ad space, use all characters.

• Be specific in your ad, not general.

• The yahoo marketplace is underserved by sites that actually sell items. Most are sites that aggregate other sites, like parked domains.

Overall I thought it was a great webinar and very insightful. It’s important to keep in mind these are just Yahoo! statistics for previous holiday seasons. If there is any time to increase your budget for PPC advertising it would be during the end of November and all of December. If you have a travel related website, increase your budget after Christmas and during the month of January. Good luck this holiday season!