Search Advisory

Earlier this month,

Google AdWords announced that it’ll be rolling out “enhanced campaigns” over the next six months.  Enhanced campaigns are designed to do two things:

•    Provide more targeted ads to searchers – the example Google’s giving is if you’re searching for “pizza” at noon on your work PC, an ad driving you to an online ordering form or menu is probably most relevant to you.  But if you’re searching for “pizza” at 7 pm on your smartphone and are a half mile from the restaurant, a click-to call phone number or restaurant locator may be more appropriate.

•    Make it easier for advertisers to serve up appropriate ads to searchers based on the device they’re using, their location, and the time of day, by automating and simplifying the above.

Sounds good, right?  And a lot about it is good.  We’re all increasingly using different devices throughout our day, and often for different purposes.  Advertisers can bid higher for more valuable searchers (based on device, location and time), or lower for those they value less.  Enhanced campaigns also come with better reporting that measure new conversion types, including phone calls, app downloads, and individual sitelinks.

But…where Google giveth, Google taketh away.  Read more…

SEMPO Atlanta has another informative event planned for next Thursday, November 1. Join

us to hear a panel of experts speak about the latest and greatest with paid search, focusi

ng on the Display network and Retargeting (aka Remarketing). Here are the details:

We all know paid search and display ads are pillars of effective online advertising programs. Now, search retargeting has emerged to leverage the best features of search and display to deliver better clickthrough rates and brand value. Search retargeting can be predictive based on recently conducted searches or it can be contextual, targeting users who have recently clicked on a search ad.

Join us November 1st as experts from Yahoo, Simpli.fi, Magne+ic and Performics share insights and recommendations for using search retargeting to stretch online budgets, improve reach, ROI, CTR and deliver better online advertising results.

Speakers:

• Craig Osika, Director of Solutions Engineering, Yahoo
• Gus Spathis, CTO, Magnetic
• Dana Todd, SVP of Marketing & Business Development, Performics
• Donny Dye, VP of Strategic Partnerships, Simpli.fi

When: Thursday, November 1, 2012. 6:30 – 9:00 pm

Where: Ravinia Club, 2 Ravinia Drive, Suite 100, Atlanta, GA, 30346

Cost: Free for SEMPO global members, $25 in advance or $35 at the door for non-members

Parking: Free

Register here today!

By Star Bradshaw, Senior Conversion Rate Optimizer

Marketers have come to embrace the remarketing capability within Adwords as an invaluable market segmenting tool. Remarketing, or retargeting, allows companies like yours to conti

nue

to show ads to people who previously showed interest in your product or service but did not take action, such as contacting you or making a purchase.

For

example, a visitor to a B2B lead generation site may have spent time researching the content of a particular area on the site, but left without contacting the company to inquire about their product. If this same visitor saw an ad several days later offering a free trial, they may be likely to return to the site to take advantage of the offer. Or a visitor to a B2C ecommerce site may have added several products to the shopping cart, but left without buying. If this visitor saw an ad within the next week

for a 10% discount and free shipping from the site, it could compel them to return and complete a purchase.

Remarketing has just become available within Google Analytics. Although it has been available in AdWords for several years now, this change is significant as it expands remarketing’s capabilities and allows for easier implementation.

Read more…

Paid search – also known as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – is much more complex than meets the eye. I’ve always said it’s “deceptively simple” – while anyone with a credit card and Internet access can get a campaign up and running quickly, that doesn’t neces

sarily mean they’ll

do a good job. There are so very many “levers” (as we call them) with PPC that it’s hard to keep track of them all. It’s even harder to know when to pull which lever in order to get the best results.

Last spring, we wrote a newsletter about getting back to the basics with Search Engine Optimization (read “SEO: Basic Blocking & Tackling”). Consider this post the equivalent for paid search, and consider using it as a checklist when managing your own Pay-Per-Click campaigns. PPC levers include: Read more…

If you’re a Google shareholder, perhaps (like much of the investment

community), you’re concerned that Google reported their average AdWords cost per click declined during the last quarter of last year.

But if you’re a marketer, you probably rejoi

ced at this news – what an unexpected treat after the seemingly inevitable climb of average CPCs!

So why the dip? Could it be the beginning of the end of Google’s dominance? Well…no. The short version of the story is that Google is offering many more options to both advertisers and searchers, and many of these new techniques come with a lower average CPC. So as the volume of cheap clicks goes up, the overall average CPC for all clicks goes down.

These more affordable options include:

• PPC Sitelinks
• Location
  buy viagra online pharmacy

  extensions

• Product extensions
• Increased use of mobile search

Kevin Lee goes into more detail in Solving the Mystery of Google’s Q4 CPC Drop on ClickZ.

I’m asking this as a personal question about your search habits – this isn’t a blog post on how to actually conduct an online search.  Stop and think about it for a second.  Step back a bit and think about how you use search on a personal basis on the weekends and at night when you’re not working.  And this isn’t a rhetorical question – really think about it.  You might learn something.

My search habits have evolved quite a bit during the five years I’ve been a search marketer.  I used to pride myself on the number of ways I could conduct a search on the same topic and find all sorts of different results.  I’d show off to my family – “Look honey. Here’s a BETTER way to search for a condo at the beach.”  And then I’d launch into a tutorial of how to conduct searches and get the most relevant results.  I’d explain about relevancy to the search query, ramble on about backlinks and how sites get ranked organically, and pontificate on the differences between paid and organic results.  My family and friends were astounded by my abilities – or at least I think they were.

Now, however, I must admit I’ve become a lazy searcher.  Read more…

Ad Extensions in Google AdWords are an immensely helpful tool that provides more useful, relevant ads to your target audience searching for information on Google.

Whereas paid sitelinks extensions allow you to display additional URLs leading to specific and related content deep within your sitemap, location extensions lets you include your business address and phone within your ads.

Of course, this feature is especially useful for advertisers with a local business presence who want to generate brand awareness to users already close enough to visit their location, as well as users who are browsing for related businesses in their area.
Read more…

We’ve always said that smart marketers should undertake both Search Engine Optimization AND Pay-Per-Click campaigns together.  (In fact, one of our newsletters last summer was on this very topic – check out “Why Should I Run PPC Ads On That Keyword? I Already Rank High On It Organically!”)

Our friend Lindsay Blankenship at Razorfish, along with her colleague Sonali Sureka, backs us up with an excellent article based on primary research:  Paid and Organic Search: Why the Marriage of Both is Important.  Key findings include:

• Over half of conversions and revenue that are credited to Paid Search happen after the customer had previously found and visited the site from an Organic listing within the previous week.  In other words, prospects are searching and clicking on organic listings first (there’s your SEO), and later searching again and clicking on a paid listing (there’s your PPC) to make a purchase.
• This effect is even stronger with branded keywords – 81% of those who converted on a Paid Search ad running on a branded keyword had already found and visited the site through an Organic listing.
• The value of taking a Paid Search spot away from a competitor can even be measured in terms of revenue – for every increase in a PPC ad’s ranking (that generated a click), revenue increased 10%.  Alternately, it decreased by about 12% when competitors ads were more prominent, showing a sharper decline in revenue when you let competitors trump you.

Don’t miss additional details in Paid and Organic Search: Why the Marriage of Both is Important.

Let’s say you set a goal of doubling the number of leads your website generates. Sounds ambitious – how are you going to get there? There are two very different approaches:

Double the amount of traffic coming to your website, or

Double the conversion rate (so that twice as many visitors become leads).

It’s generally easier to do the latter than the former.  Doubling website traffic – assuming you’re not starting from zero – can be quite daunting.  As well as potentially expensive.  But often, doubling your conversion rate is attainable (again, depending where you’re starting from).  And…they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.   Let’s look at a couple of examples. Read more…

We reported yesterday about PPC Mindmeld and its two minute audio clips about “What Makes or Breaks a Successful PPC Campaign” with 60 industry ex

perts, including Stacy Williams. For those who prefer to read rather than listen, here’s a transcript of Stacy’s brief talk:

Successful PPC campaigns have one thing in common, and that’s a great landing page. You can do everything else right, but if searchers end up on a landing page that doesn’t inspire them to take the action you want them to take, well then, you’ve wasted their time as

well as your own.

So what does it mean to have a “high quality” landing page anyway? We look at it two ways. Read more…