Digital Marketing Organizer

Why Everything You Know about PPC Ad Copy Review is Wrong

Within the complex world of pay per click management, everyone seems to agree that there are two basic strategies for improving performance: managing keyword inventory and bidding, and testing ad copy performance. It’s easy to find strategy tips, software, and consultants to improve your keyword inventory and bidding approaches. But while many people invest heavily in these areas, the same people utterly neglect their ad copies.

It isn’t your fault. Until very recently, pay per click industry professionals and leaders have failed to develop any serious tools or methodology for improving text ad copies.

Instead of solutions, there are myths.
Myth #1: if you develop multiple ad copies, you’ll eventually hit on the most profitable one.
Myth #2: the search engine will test and pick the most profitable ad copy for you, your conversions will skyrocket, and you’ll live happily ever after.

Wrong. And wrong again.

Testing more than three ad copies at a time is actually counterproductive. It makes it harder and more time consuming to evaluate your ads. In the meantime, you waste both money and time. Ideally, you should test two – certainly no more than three – ad copies at a time so that enough data can be collected to evaluate performance over a reasonable amount of time.

As for the ad evaluation feature provided by search engine vendors, it compares and distributes ad copies primarily based on clickthrough rates. As you probably know, a high clickthrough rate means higher costs for you, not necessarily more conversions. For the vendors, of course, an ad copy with high clickthrough rates (regardless of its actual returns) generates more revenue -- for them. They have no motivation to improve your returns.

So what can a savvy advertiser with an eye on the bottom line do? A successful ad copy is one that brings the most profit from the available opportunity. To evaluate ad copies properly, you need to sum up all opportunity, estimate clicks, and then estimate conversion and acquisition rates based on current performance.

Even if you’re a math whiz, this calculation is a little too messy and prone to error to be done manually for each of your ad copies in each of your adgroups. And unfortunately, very few pay per click marketing companies offer ad copy tools that will help you determine which of your ad copies is more profitable. But if you’re shopping around for PPC management software, one that has an ad copy evaluation tool is ahead of the curve. In this tough economy, it could just give your PPC ads the edge they need.

James Lee
Varazo, Inc
http://www.clicksweeper.com/

Pay Per Click Performance Management

If you are a serious search engine analyst, you probably would have spent many hours monitoring pay-per-click performance.

Basically, you monitor performance for two reasons. First, you want to identify external factors that affect your business, including keyword bid escalation by known competitors, offerings by new competitors, bidding strategy changes by other bidding tools as well as seasonal changes. The second reason is that you want to track the impact of the changes you've made to your own campaign including bid pricing, ad rewrites, landing page changes, campaign restructuring and redeploying the scope of your keywords.

From our experience, this task of performance monitoring is very demanding as performance or trend changes can be subtle, unpredictable and easy to miss. Unless you review and analyze your data daily, by the time you see the change it may be too late to respond effectively.

Let's examine two separate examples of trend changes. The first occasion was due to internal changes. One of our clients was in the lead generation business, selling these leads to business owners. Some customers had complained about the limited information in the leads and our client changed the signup form to include twice as many questions. Unfortunately, however, they did not tell us about the change. We have a daily routine to check basic performance criteria such as daily spending, click counts and conversion count. Since daily fluctuation between this client's conversion counts is proportionately quite large (between 2 and 8), it took us almost a week to realize the resulting changes were significant.

The other example resulted from external factors. In this case, we did not confirm the pattern for a couple of weeks. In this case the daily conversion count of the campaign ranged from 0 to 2, making it hard to identify trends within short time frames. Even a week of very poor performance may not be enough to confirm a significant trend.

Drawing on this kind of experience, we've added new features to ClickSweeper (www.ClickSweeper.com), our pay-per-click performance management tool that detect real performance trends almost as soon as they occur, drawing on pattern-detection analysis of earlier time periods.

We don't know of this kind of feature being implemented in any vendors or major bid management applications as of yet. However, as more professional marketers and agents are pressured to improve profitability and the performance, this kind of feature will become essential to keep the cost of review minimum while having a reliable review process with a timely detection.

James Lee
Varazo, Inc
http://www.ClickSweeper.com

Pay-Per-Click as a Marketing Lab

You've probably heard about engineering labs where experiments are performed or simulations are run and rerun. Labs provide tools and equipment to students and research staff allowing them to confirm or refine new product concepts.

In business, the same need exists to test the assumptions behind marketing campaigns - before they are released to the (expensive) major media outlets. But traditional methods of market research are costly and time consuming. Now, there exists a simple, accurate and affordable market research tool available to anyone - it is called pay-per-click advertising.

People who are familiar with this new technology often see it as only as an inexpensive online marketing method. However, what is not as obvious is that it is also an effective marketing research tool that is effective and just as inexpensive. Before full-scale campaigns are launched, concepts can be tested online, results measured and refinements made before the first formal appearance -- saving time and marketing dollars.

Now pay-per-click advertising provides an alternative to the choice between risky assumptions or major expenditures.

If you are interested in utilizing pay-per-click as a marketing research tool for your own enterprise, contact us at Varazo, Inc for more information.

Keyword bid optimization

By James Lee

Keyword bid management is one of most important activities of paid search advertising. It is probably the most time consuming and difficult task if you do not rely on the tool. That is why most advertisers with a large monthly budget rely on one tool or another. To understand the challenge of the task, let’s list out the issue at hand.

1. Google does not offer guideline on max keyword bid prices on search ranking like Yahoo does.

The result is customers end up bidding higher than necessary and it results in keyword price escalation on low search volume keywords. We did study on average Google keyword price on 3 keywords combination and 4 keywords combination. The result is 4 words phrase was not any cheaper than 3 words phrase. It caught us by surprise, since the common fact is low search volume keyword is cheaper than high search volume keyword and 4 word phrases are lower in search volume. However, in Google’s case, since advertisers bid keyword without a price guideline, they tend to overbid for low search volume keywords.

2. Finding optimum keyword price and updating them daily is impossible to do manually.

When you have hundreds of keyword and try keep up with keyword bidding strategy daily, it is beyond your capacity. That is why most advertisers who do not use the tool sets the maximum keyword CPC uniform within the same ad group, believing that search vendors do not overcharge them. However, with this strategy, customers end up bidding more than necessary for some keywords or unconsciously promoting bidding war.

3. There is not enough budgets to place all campaign keywords in a desirable ranking.

Average keyword price has been going up every year and many of keywords are out of reach for many advertisers. It means even if you have a tool that guides you optimal bid price for your target ranking, you have to give up on some keywords if you want to generate any significant visitor count. Unfortunately, most keyword bid management tools are based on search ranking and that means you have to bid for low ranking to generate more clicks. However, this is not a good strategy, since you don’t have to sacrifice ranking for low price keyword.

4. Keyword bid optimization is more than searching for keyword bid price to maximize click count. It involves improving conversion count.

Eventually, optimization effort is to generate most conversion actions on a given budget. Thus, once keyword bid price is optimized for the most economical clicks, the next step is to adjust keyword spending to promote more conversion. It is achieved by awarding high performance keywords and penalizing low performance keywords with keyword bid price. It also includes not spending more than ROI break point.

Google's penalty on poor landing page

Google has the policy to penalize keywords with low quality score by raising minimum CPC bid price as much as 10 times the average keyword bid price. According to Google, quality score is combination of clickthrough rate, ad text relevance, keyword performance and landing page quality and it suppose to encourage relevant ads for users. However, this policy can put Google advertisers left in the dark since they are not informed of how to improve the score or how long it take to recover from the penalty.

Our experience with this policy is horrible. We have serviced a pay per click client who was penalized for poor landing page quality. Before the penalty, the client’s average keyword price was around $1.00. After the penalty, minimum keyword bid price became $10.0. We contacted Google for advice first and were advised to figure out for ourselves. At this time, we were not informed why Google penalized the site. Thus, we did internal investigation and concluded it would have been a landing page while it was not obvious from non-professionals. Thus, we advised the client to improve the website usability with specific instructions. It is a risk for us, since the customer can blame us for giving inaccurate instructions if they do not get the client off from the penalty listing.

After a month, the customer came back with improvement based on our instructions. I called Google again, requesting a review on updated webpage. However, what I was told was disappointing. According to Google support team, it may take a month or much longer for the site to be reviewed and they cannot tell how long it takes. Until that time, minimum keyword price for keyword targeted campaign would remain at $10.0. Now, I have no choice but to advise my client to not depend on advertising on Google Adwords for a while, since I cannot predict when the review will happen.

From this experience, we all need to learn something. Advertisers need to realize high quality website is essential to keep Google Adword advertising economical. Agents and resellers have to be more diligent in recommending landing page improvement. Google also needs to improve their system in educating specifics of penalized items and reviewing penalized site with a predictable schedule. If businesses cannot rely on Google’s advertising, it would be a big negative to Google’s long term future.

High PPC Conversion Rates (part 3)

By James Lee

Continuing the discussion of the problem of low conversion rates, we’ll review the impact of our choice of keywords which are usually the most critical part of any PPC campaign.

Let’s look at some examples:
One possibility is the use of too broad a term. Let's say you relied on the keyword “loan.” There will be some viewers who will immediately click through, looking for a home loan, even though the following ad text clearly refers to auto loans. The more often this occurs, the further your conversion rate sinks.

Another example would be to use keywords that only indirectly refer to the target action. For example, suppose you want to sell auto insurance. You might use the keyword "DUI" to encourage visitors who has been ticketed for DUI and need to pay higher premiums. What may happen, however, is that those who click "DUI" may also include many who are only looking for a traffic school.

These examples may imply narrow keyword selection, yet we’ve been told the best strategy is to use a large number of keywords to lower our cost-per-click ratio. So, which is more important — cost-per-click or cost-per-conversion?
Since the “bottom line” can only come from conversions, when it’s a close call we’re better to tighten up the keyword selection, perhaps pay a little more, and maximize our conversion count.

High PPC Conversion Rates (part 2)

By James Lee

High PPC (pay-per-click) conversion rates cannot be achieved by luck. They result from PPC experience and a sound marketing approach. Let’s look at some basic ways you can improve a conversion rate.

But first, let's make sure you’ve run your campaign long enough to gather sufficient data. As conversion rates can range from 0.1 percent to over 10 percent, you’ll need at least a thousand clicks to really assess your campaign’s conversion rate. And if your product or service is an expensive ticket item and you can achieve a positive ROI with as little as 0.1% rate, you really need about 2,000 clicks to get accurate statistical data. If this is beyond your current click budget, you might want to temporarily suspend other campaigns to channel more resources into showing the high-ticket item so that you can get an accurate reading on its effectiveness.

Now it may be difficult to achieve a high conversion rate without experience in your market, but it’s not difficult to identify factors leading to a low rate. Here are some thoughts.

1. Insure that the PPC ad copy matches the content of its landing page. Become a user and enter a keyword into the search, then click on your ad when it appears. See how long it takes you to spot words in the landing page that match the keyword you started with.

Here are a few more tips to improve a landing page:
- Use a graphic that reinforces the solution offered on the page
- Use a headline that reminds a visitor of the subject of their search
- Include a testimonial or quote from someone satisfied with the results from the use of this specific product. Quantify these benefits if possible
- Make the terms of any special offer expire on a specific date

2. If there are multiple campaigns for the same product or service, compare the conversion rates among them. If other campaigns have higher conversion rates than the one being considered, you may want to tune your keyword choices or your ad copy. Details of a diagnostic process are too long to be described here, but this kind of analysis is available by consulting with a PPC marketing company like Varazo (www.varazo.com).

3. If the conversion rate is low for all your campaigns, check the websites of competitors whose bid ranking is higher than yours and decide how their offering may be more attractive. Don’t be reluctant to adopt a competitor’s good ideas.

4. If there is no obvious gap between your campaign and that of your competitors, try to find the average conversion rate in yours or similar industries. If nothing obvious emerges, it is worthwhile to have your campaign reviewed by a PPC marketing professional.

Scope of Pay Per Click Optimization(part 1)

By James Lee

As Google and Yahoo! have become household names for Internet Marketing, many are claiming to be experts in this field after only a few months of experience. However, when you have responsibility over a moderately sized advertising budget, you do not want to be pretending to be someone you are not.

I can say this; at Varazo we have been running pay-per-click marketing campaigns for over two years and are still learning to master the optimization process. Why does it take so long to master and what is involved in optimizing a pay-per-click campaign? At Varazo we have divided the PPC optimization process into 3 phases.

§ First, the campaign itself needs to be optimized. This means choosing the right keywords, campaign titles and descriptions. It also involves optimizing the scope of keyword matching and content matching for search-based or site-targeted campaigns.

§ Second, define a maximum bid amount which is effective and cost-efficient for each keyword – each day. This requires an automated process. Here at Varazo we believe we have developed one of the most sophisticated software tools (ClickSweeper) for doing just this.

§ The third, but most difficult optimization challenge is creating paths that are easy, intuitive and attractive from the landing page to the signup (conversion) pages.

Whether the landing page leads to a sales conversion or a product inquiry, it is important to know from which outside pages the visitors came and to which page did they go while on your site. This data can be captured by Google Analytics, but setting this up requires the insertion of tracking code on each of the site’s relevant pages. Conversion tracking on eCommerce pages can be especially complicated, since these pages may be located on other servers and may require interaction with several IT departments.

From our experience we know that proficiency in each area of the optimization processes takes time to master. Unless you or your staff have an advanced PPC skill-set, might be wise to outsource these services to a pay-per-click consulting company.

(http://www.varazo.com/)