Don't Forget to Manage Your PPC Billboard!

This past week Google held its annual analyst day and they also recently reported their Q3 2007 earnings. Nick Fox, director of product management in the advertising division made the statement during Analyst day, “the quality of ads is still quite low”. He was referring to the sponsored ads displayed on Google’s search and content networks, and Nick was clearly telling analysts that Google Adwords can still bring in a whole lot of money for the search engine gorilla.

Now just as a majority of us tend to get sick of hearing about the “big dog” winning all the time, at first I cringed with jealousy at the thought of Google making even more money than they do today. But the reality is…he’s right. The quality of the majority of ads displayed is poor.

Why is this? Have people lost creativity in their ad writing? Maybe, but I don’t think so for the greater part. I think it is because people misunderstand the power of continually improving their pay per click campaigns. Most people seem to have a “put up a billboard and field the calls it generates” mentality when it comes to pay per click. That strategy only works for a lucky few, and even for those lucky few it can always be done better. The key to a good pay per click campaign is the pay per click management of that campaign.

It is how someone effectively oversees the ads and distribution of the bids continually. Managing a pay per click campaign requires attention at the keyword, adgroup, and ad level, and one of the most important aspects of the management is constantly improving the quality of the ads themselves with testing. Constant testing will improve your ad campaigns in their ability to (a) attract clicks and (b) attract clicks that are likely to convert. You need to be testing unless you are converting at 100%, which is highly unlikely. It makes simple business sense.

So if pay per click management is one of the most important things to do for your advertising budget, then why are people simply neglecting it? We believe it comes down to time and resources. Companies need to put in the resources to manage their pay per click campaigns to get effective results. Some campaigns need to be managed on a daily basis, and this can significantly draw time from a smaller business’s pool of people. If your business is having trouble finding the time and people to manage campaigns, then there are options that can give you an alternative to neglecting your pay per click advertising. WebShare offers different levels of pay per click management that can meet your needs, from training to active day to day management. We can provide your business the resources and consulting to effectively manage your accounts with Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing Solutions, or Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions.

WebShare is a Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador and Google AdWords Qualified Company, and can help you with your Google AdWords Management as well as your Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and Ask.com paid search accounts. We help clients maximize their advertising budgets with solutions that range from training to active daily management. We look forward to helping bring you to the next level.

Are you using the best tools for your search marketing and conversion marketing programs, and are you using them to the best of your advantage? There are a variety of applications offered by various vendors, however Google leads the pack with three applications in particular: Analytics, Adwords and Website Optimizer. It may not be perfectly clear as to how the Google applications work together and what the function of each one is. So let’s demystify the situation. Below we highlight a few Google applications, and each one can be used to help you create, manage and implement your search and conversion marketing program. Best of all, these applications are free or are available at very reasonable costs. As an added bonus, these applications are web-based, which means you don’t have to host them on your server.

Information is power, and from that perspective Google Analytics, Google Adwords and Google Website Optimizer together are a nuclear power plant! Together, these three applications can help you answer more than just how many visitors were on you site yesterday. They can help you answer as specific of a question as, “How many visitors from Chicago who speak Spanish clicked on my pay-per-click advertisement and actually converted?” And “Which version of the specific advertisement I showed them was more effective?” Furthermore, the tools can help you use the information from those questions to identify and create tests with your site to further improve your conversion rates. Now, that’s powerful stuff!

Google Analytics houses all of the information collected about your site’s visitors, and allows you to view it in hundreds of different reports. It costs nothing (other than your time) to open a Google Analytics account for your website. Think of Google Analytics as a giant database that allows you to collect loads of data about your site’s visitors, and perform highly specific queries to slice and dice visitor data in just about any way you desire. Google Analytics can be even more powerful when used in conjunction with another Google application (Adwords or Website Optimizer) to help you manage your search and conversion marketing programs. If you’re serious about increasing your site’s traffic and conversion rate, you should be incorporating Google Analytics into just about everything you do.

Google Adwords is Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program, and its interface allows users to manage the campaigns that drive traffic to Web sites on a cost per click basis. Opening an Adwords account is easy, and only requires $5 and a few minutes. In Adwords, users can implement new PPC campaigns, edit keyword lists, change ads, and manage their PPC budget. Additionally, Adwords gives you access to a number of tools than can give you insights into everything from seasonal trends across industries to keyword research. Adwords also provides a number of reports to view your PPC campaign statistics and progress, and your Adwords account can be linked to Google Analytics to give you even more data about your ads and paid traffic. The data available in Adwords are certainly extremely useful, but any organization serious about improving their search and conversion marketing program should be exploiting the wealth of information that a solid analytics package (like Google Analytics) provides in addition to the Adwords reports.

Google Website Optimizer allows users to conduct statistical tests on their site’s pages to determine which variables will improve the probability that a visitor will convert on the website’s goals. Website Optimizer is free, but as it is accessed through the Adwords interface, it is only available to users who have an Adwords account. So technically Website Optimizer costs you the $5 you need to open an Adwords account. The variables you can test are virtually unlimited - they can range from changing the page background color, testing different ad copy, different images, different headlines, different positioning, and different layouts and designs to the combination of size and location buttons, trust logos, affiliation links, and anything in between. Website Optimizer offers two statistical analysis methods (A/B split testing and full factorial multivariate testing) to help you design and implement tests that will determine what changes on your site affect the probability of visitors converting on your site’s goals. Website Optimizer uses Analytics-like tracking code to run the tests, and you can use Google Analytics to see the long term trends that result from your Website Optimizer testing. If you’re not converting 100% of your visitors, then you should be testing your website right now.

Still not sure where to begin? WebShare offers consulting and training services to help you make the most of your search and conversion marketing programs. Webshare is one of a handful of companies in the world that is an authorized consultant for Google Analytics, Adwords and Website Optimizer as well as a certified consultant for a number of other tools including Yahoo! Search Marketing. Without a doubt, Google Analytics, Adwords and Website Optimizer can be intimidating, and they do take time to master. However, if used to their fullest potential these three applications can help you improve your search and conversion marketing programs by leaps and bounds.

We often find ourselves wondering if among the things going on at Google is the ability to read our minds. We started looking for cost-effective, in depth, usable website analytics, and bang! Google buys Urchin and makes Google Analytics free to the world. As our multivariate testing algorithms became more time intensive and complex, Google rolls out the Website Optimizer, a tool that can help us automate much of the testing process. So I felt a sense of déjà vu when I was at Google last week and watched Avinash and the GA team show off the new Google Analytics Internal Site Search tool, since we have been recently writing metrics-laden site search tools for customers.

As with Analytics and Optimizer, this set of reports promises to be extremely enlightening, to the point where you will ask “How did I get by without this before?”

When advising consulting clients, we have long professed that motivation & intent are the most important factors—but how do you measure it? Clickstream data only tells half the story—just because they ended up on a page doesn’t mean it was what they were looking for.

Internal Site Search will certainly show you what keywords are being searched for on your site, but there are three other reports that I’m particularly excited about.

Search Exits is essentially the bounce rate of a search. This means a visitor searched on a keyword and was dissatisfied with the results and decided to leave. After all the money you spent optimizing your pay-per-click campaigns, it’s a shame to lose them here. Find the keywords that are underperforming and fix it!

Segmented Search allows you to segment your results by any of the standard segmentation options. This is incredibly useful for seeing what a particular segment of your visitors came looking for.

Finally, you now have ability to see how well your search tool is converting. The report will show results of searchers vs non-searchers on a collection of metrics, such as conversion rate, time on site, revenue, per visit value, and even average order size. I have yet to see a case where those who did not use the site search tool convert better than those who do, so if you don’t have an internal site search tool get over and snag one now!

For those that truly want to understand their customer, there are a couple reports that allow you to dig even deeper. Search Term Refinement allows you to drill down and see what were the next terms the person searched for after a particular keyword. For example, you may see that visitors that searched on “TrippLite UPS”, went on to search for “TrippLite UPS 1300W sale” and so on.

Another report for the analytics junkie is the Results Pageviews/Search. The idea here is to show you how far down the list a visitor had to go before finding the item that matched their search and tuning your internal search engine to deliver more relevant results near the top.

Event Tracking

One of the most common questions we get during an analytics consulting engagement is “How can I track AJAX & ‘web 2.0′ elements with Google Analytics?”

While there have been hacks and workarounds before, the announcement of an extensible event tracking model built into GA is a welcome addition. While I haven’t personally used it yet, we were given a demo last week by Phil Mui, who is a product manager for Google Analytics, and it was fairly impressive.

Look for a more in-depth post to come soon on this topic as well as the launch of the long-awaited Urchin 6.

Webshare is proud to be a Google Partner and Google Analytics Authorized consultancy. If you are looking to get the most out of your analytics, we offer customized analytics training as well as analytics consulting for projects of any size.

by David Booth
Founding Partner at WebShare, LLC

If you’re doing conversion marketing and statistical testing on your website and you haven’t explored trust logos yet, then you’re missing out. It’s no accident that you see the same logos appearing on more sites day after day - it’s because they’re working.

These little trustmarks have the ability to get more people to push the button, sign up for the newsletter, enter their credit card information, or even pick up the phone and call the number. We do quite a bit of testing with trust logos, and one of the most successful ones we’ve come across is the HACKERSAFE logo, an image that by now you surely recognize:

Want to try Hackersafe for yourself? Get started now at a discount!

We asked HackerSafe Senior Director of Business Development Cresta Pillsbury to talk about what’s new at HackerSafe and why this logo and program have been so successful in increasing website conversion rates:

One way to test out if the HACKERSAFE logo works for you is to get it at a discount through WebShare, and then use Google’s new Website Optimizer tool to set up and run a conversion marketing test. Whether you’re looking to increase leads, sales, downloads, signups, or clicks, it’s very likely that this little logo can help you make better use of the visitors you have on your site.Statistical experimentation can tell you if you gain anything (and how much) by making small changes to your website, and can be the most powerful tool in your search marketing arsenal.

For a business to get a search and conversion marketing strategy on the right track, a wonderful and essential step is to include a blog on the site. Whether you’re selling products, disseminating information, attracting email addresses for your mailing lists, getting leads, or anything else, blogs are a great way to get attention from the search engines and attract links to the site. Besides the website optimization benefits, blogs also provide a forum to communicate the company’s products and services. A blog provides a place for clients and/or people with similar interests of the company to dialog, and this dialog helps you grow and maintain a reputable site. Essentially, a blog can be an excellent tool to provide value to your visitors, show valuable content to the search engines, and promote your site for the keywords that are important to you.

To get started, there are really only two things you need to do. First, you’ll need to set up the blog, and set it up correctly. Second, you’ll need to start blogging!

Step 1: Set up Your Blog

Many organizations can get intimidated about setting up a blog on their site, and with good reason. Although getting a blog up and running on your site is fairly straightforward, you must spend some time choosing the right solution and installing and configuring the blog in a way that makes it most attractive to search engine spiders. Once the technical parts of the install are complete, you’ll need to develop a list of topics to cover in the blog. The topics can simply come from the company’s key products and services. Brainstorm within the company about what topics clients will be interested in. What are the common questions being asked about the company’s products and services? Why is the business better than other businesses in the same industry?

And always be thinking of how you can relate these topics to your core keyword target list. As the blog matures, topics will manifest themselves based on the feedback received. That feedback may even dictate new products or services. Logistically, you should make sure to link to your blog from your homepage, and you should make sure it’s set up on the same domain. A good tip is to use an RSS feed from your blog to show content from your blog on other parts of your site. Although there are a number of options out there for your blog solution, we like Wordpress for its search friendly configuration and add-on options.

Step 2: Start Blogging

Typically the hardest part about a blog is doing the writing itself and continuing it in a consistent manner. In order to have a successful blog, you absolutely need to be blogging! A company needs to recognize that the blog is important not only for the value it provides to its visitors, but also for providing search engines with keyword rich content that further describes your site. As your audience is two-fold, keep in mind that blog writing needs to be done in a way that supports both of these objectives. There are a number of ways to make sure that your blog gets written to consistently.

• It’s good to spread the responsibility of throughout the company. Have everyone in the company write a blog post once a day, once a week, or with whatever frequency they can support.
• Look to your local educational institutions for interns. Internships in technical writing can be an excellent way to ensure that your blog is kept up to date with fresh content.
• Have it done professionally. Outsourcing to companies that specialize in content generation can keep you on track with precisely calculated, keyword rich, search engine friendly blog posts, and you can have loads of content posted for you without taking a single minute out of your day.

Blogging is an absolutely essential part of your search marketing strategy, and the best time to get started was yesterday!

Find out how WebShare can help you set up, configure, and start populating your blog with valuable content. Contact us when you’re ready to take your search marketing strategy to the next level.

The mobile search market continues to attract more users. A recent study by Google researchers was featured in IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Magazine, and revealed some of the latest user trends in mobile search. Here are a few of the key findings from the study:

1. From 2005 to 2007 the number of mobile search queries resulting in users clicking at least one search result increased from 10 percent to over 50 percent. Furthermore, the percentage of mobile search queries resulting in users requesting “more search results” rose from 8.5 percent to 10.5 percent.
2. Since 2005, the number of queries per session has increased by more than 25 percent.
3. The average mobile query was 2.56 words and 16.8 characters, while smartphone queries were slightly longer at 2.64 words. In comparison, PC search queries are about 2.5 words.

The study also looked at what mobile users are searching. The table below is taken from the study which shows the top categories in mobile search. The results are based on actual query data from Google. The categories in the table are undefined, so it is difficult to determine exactly how the web pages were classified, but it offers an interesting look at what users are searching for on their mobile devices.

Whether your search marketing strategy targets natural (organic) searches or paid advertising, the addition of mobile-friendly web pages to your site is important. Note that mobile-friendly landing pages are required for pay-per-click advertising on Google’s mobile search engine. WebShare offers a variety of search and conversion marketing services that can help you improve your site’s presence in the mobile search market. You can expect to see more users searching the Mobile Web as wireless service providers continue to improve the speed of their wireless internet connections, making it increasingly more important to expand your search marketing strategy into the mobile arena.

Now that Google is moving away from a “monolithic” index, it’s common for people in different geographies to get completely different results from a Google search. So when discussing search results with a client or testing geo-targeted adwords, it’s often useful to have Google show me the results as if I were in a different area.

To accomplish this only requires a little manipulation of the query string parameters.

For example, a normal query for mangos might look like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=mangos

Note that the “q=” query string parameter tells us what the search term is. With the region parameters for San Diego, California added on the end, it looks like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=mangos&gl=US&gm=825&gr=US-CA&gcs=San%20Diego

The parameters are:

gl = Country code (full list here)
gll = Lat & Long
gr = Worldwide region code (full list here)
gcs = City (but gr must be set to the same value. Full list here)
gpc = Zip code (only works if country code is “US”)
gm = Metropolitan areas of US (full list here)

A handy trick is to let Google set them for you via their Adwords preview wizard . Simply go to:
www.google.com/adpreview

Specify the region and hit search. Then click on the frame properties on the bottom frame and copy the GL,GM,GR, & GCS params out of the URL and paste onto the end of your search.

If you’re interested in manipulating the other query string parameters Google uses, check out this handy cheatsheet.