Search Advisory

This is the final post in my 18-part series called “Pulling PPC Levers” (click to see all posts).  I’ve saved one of the most important “levers” for last – custom landing pages.

When you set up your pay-per-click campaign, you decide where to direct a searcher who has clicked on your ad.  It can be to your website’s home page or a page deeper in the site.  Alternately, you can send them to a page custom-designed just for that search and that ad.  This way, your prospect doesn’t have to wade through your entire site to find what they’re looking for – the solution to their problem is right in front of them.

Typically, we put a conversion form right on the landing page so we don’t have to rely on the visitor clicking around the site to figure out how to respond.  Good landing pages usually have a brief amount of compelling copy (enough to encourage the prospect to take the next step), along with a short form to fill out and a telephone number for those that prefer to call.  The landing page normally does link to the main website at the bottom (for people who may need more information before responding), but people cannot navigate to the landing page from the main website.

Your PPC campaign probably has a number of different categories and ad groups within it.  Best practices call for developing numerous landing pages, each tailored to a different topic.  For example, if you provide EDI, broadcast faxing and telex services, you’ll want at least three different landing pages, one for each service.

We often see significant increases in conversion rates with custom landing pages, since searchers are presented with exactly what they’re looking for and we’ve made it easy for them to respond.  Another benefit of custom landing pages is that Google AdWords Quality Scores tend to rise, which will lower your average cost per click and increase your average position/ranking.  (More about Quality Score.)

Pay-per-click, like all things search marketing, is always changing, so now that we’ve laid the groundwork regarding the “levers” you can pull to improve your campaigns, stay tuned for PPC news and updates as they occur.

The search engines allow pay-per-click advertisers to automatically turn their campaigns on and off during certain days or times.  Google AdWords calls this dayparting feature “Ad Scheduling”.  It can be very helpful for products and services that are purchased more frequently during specific days of the week or times of the day.  It’s also a great tool to test if you’ve got a limited budget, when your ads are being flighted anyway.

So, if your ecommerce site sells consumer-oriented gadgets, it may make sense for you to only have your ads display during evening and weekend hours, when people are on the web during their leisure time.  On the other hand, if you’re a B2B company, you may want your ads displayed during normal business hours.

A number of caveats apply, however, including:

• Not everyone works Monday through Friday, 9 to 5.  So you risk missing some portion of your target audience if your ads only run during this time, or only outside this period.
• As I’m sure you’ve experienced personally, the distinction between work time and personal time is increasingly getting blurred.  People do run searches for personal reasons while they’re at work, and vice versa.  In fact, many B2B advertisers report getting a lot of website traffic and conversions on Sundays — perhaps workers are preparing for the week ahead.
• Time zones can impact this.  If you’re marketing nationally, keep in mind that there’s at least a three hour gap between when people are arriving at and leaving work across the country.  Internationally, of course, it gets even trickier.
• Be sure to pay more attention to when your conversions occur than when your clicks occur, since conversions are the ultimate end goal.  This can still be somewhat misleading, however, as some people may perform multiple searches (on different days, at different times) before converting.

Still, dayparting may be worth testing.  As always, keep a close eye on your results and adjust as necessary.  Here’s more info on Google’s Ad Scheduling.

In addition to having their pay-per-click ads appear in the search engine results, advertisers may also choose to have their ads appear on content sites (non-search sites — regular web pages).  These sites range from the well-known (The New York Times, Business Week, CNN), to vertical sites on narrow topics, to blogs.

In the past, the search engines’ content networks haven’t always performed well.  If you think about the mindset of someone browsing the web and reading content on a particular topic, it’s very different from the mindset of someone using a search engine.  The latter is quite likely to click on a relevant ad, and even convert (fill out a form or make a purchase) on the websites.  The former is less likely.  While reading an article on fiber optic cables, if someone sees a PPC ad from a fiber optic cable manufacturer, she may be curious enough to click the ad and visit the site.  But she’s probably less likely to convert than someone who is actively searching for “fiber optic cables.”

That said, the search engines have improved their content networks greatly to provide advertisers with more control over where their ads appear and better reporting data.  There are options for how your ads can be displayed (examples below from Google):

• Contextual Targeting:  Google displays your ads on web pages with content relevant to your keywords.  So if you’re bidding on “fiber optic cables,” they may place your ad on a CNN.com article on that topic.
• Placement Targeting:  You may select which websites on which you’d like your ad to appear.
• Both:  Google will select contextually-relevant web pages, but your ad will only appear if the site’s on your list of selected sites.

Text ads can be placed in the content network from your current AdWords account.  It’s a good idea to set up a mirrored campaign from your search campaign, however.  You’ll probably want to keep your bids lower on the content network to account for the lower propensity of visitors to convert.

Note that you may also run image ads and video ads, and in addition to paying on a cost per click basis, there are also cost per thousand impression options and cost per acquisition models.  More info on Google’s content network.

Content networks can be complex, but they’re worth testing, particularly if your goal is to increase impressions and reach new markets.

While I’ve already posted about writing pay-per-click ad copy, a recent article entitled “Tailor Your Ad Copy To Buy Cycle Stages” is definitely worth a read.  It gives specific examples of different ad copy that’ll be displayed for various keywords likely to be used by searchers in different stages of the buying cycle.

I’m a big proponent of launching large pay-per-click campaigns, watching early results, and then honing, tweaking, refining.  I’m also a fan of “long tail” keywords (multiple words, more narrow and descriptive).  Unfortunately, Google AdWords doesn’t always like long tail keywords due to their low search volumes.  My theory is that they use up more of Google’s server space and resources than Google thinks they’re worth.

It’s critical to keep a close eye on your PPC campaign and pause or remove any keywords or ad groups that are performing poorly.  Specifically, if there’s a low quality score, first try to solve it by (a) ensuring there’s a close fit between the keyword, the ad copy and the landing page copy, and (b) writing a compelling ad that garners a good click-through rate.

If that doesn’t work, pause or delete the keyword or ad group, no matter how much it hurts.  Believe it or not, a low quality score in one part of your campaign can drag down the performance of your entire campaign.  Unfair, you say?  I totally agree.  But it’s Google’s world – we just advertise in it.

Plenty more details about this, including tips to deal with it, are in my article “Rage Against the Machine – Tail Terms on Google AdWords.”

Some folks have been experimenting with inserting unusual symbols into their ads, such as bullet points, greater than signs (>), etc.  The theory is that this may draw the searcher’s eye to the ad and increase click-through rates.  I don’t know how long Google will allow this, but here’s a great article by David Szetela about it, with examples.  Shout out to Mark Sink for making me aware of this.

It may seem surprising, but many marketers don’t keep a particularly close eye on the keywords that are producing conversions for them.  This is something that should be done on at least a monthly basis, if not more frequently.  (Warning: be sure to gather enough statistically significant data to ensure that each keyword is truly a high converter — don’t react on just a handful of conversions.)

Here are things you may consider doing with high converting keywords:

• Flesh out your campaign to ensure that every variation of that keyword is included — add more “like” keywords.
• Experiment with your bids — would you generate even more conversions with a higher bid and higher position?  Or does that eat up too much of your margin?
• If high converting keywords are bumping up against a budget limit, take budget from lower-converting keywords so as to ensure your winners are displayed all the time.
• Relatedly, put the high converting keywords into their own campaign with their own budget.  This also makes it easier for you to keep a closer eye on them, while spending less time on less important keywords.
• Ensure your landing page is generating as many conversions as possible.  We’ll talk more about landing pages in a future post.
• Alternately, if you suspect the high conversions may be more from the landing page than the keyword, test versions of the winning landing page with other keywords.

Last time, I wrote about writing ad copy.  One tool you may choose to use is called “keyword insertion.”  This is where the search engines automatically insert the keyword into the ad’s title or description.

For example, let’s say you’ve got an ad group where you’re bidding on these keywords:  EDI services, EDI solutions, EDI online, EDI tools, electronic data interchange.  The ideal thing to do is to break these into different ad groups so you can write different ads using the keyword in each ad.

But another option is to use keyword insertion.  I usually use it in the title, but you can use it in the description as well.  The title could be this:

{keyword:Leading EDI Services}

The curly brackets tell the search engines to automatically insert the keyword as the title.  But, since titles have to be 25 characters or less, if a keyword longer than that is used (like “electronic data interchange”), the engine will serve up the “default title” (after the colon — in this case “Leading EDI Services”) instead.

There are a lot of things you can do with keyword insertion in terms of capitalization — more information from Google can be found here.

One word of caution — keyword insertion can become the lazy person’s tool to managing PPC.  Again, a better solution is generally to build very tight ad groups around a limited group of highly related keywords and hand-write all copy for it.  But it does have its place and is definitely worth testing.

One of the most important “levers” you can pull with your pay-per-click campaign is to be very deliberate with your ad copy (title and description).  A critical thing to do is to test different copy.  Google will allow you to run multiple versions of your ad at the same time.  Unless you tell it not to, after gathering enough data, Google will serve up the ad that generates the most clicks more than the other versions.  (Note, however, that the ad copy that generates the most clicks is not necessarily the version that will generate the most conversions on your site.)

Other things to keep in mind when writing ad copy:

• Stick to the search engines’ guidelines, in terms of character lengths, capitalization and other rules, etc.
• The title is generally the most important line.
• Tailor each ad tightly to the keywords in that ad group that you’re bidding on.
• Use your limited characters to focus on the most compelling benefit to your target audience.
• Use “action” words that entice people to click if you can.
• Include special offers and promotions, if you have them.
• Use credibility indicators (guarantee, in business for 25 years, etc.).
• Review your competitors’ ads to make sure that yours stands out (and that you’re not bragging about prices that are actually higher than theirs — we’ve seen this happen).

Next time, we’ll talk about keyword insertion, which is another important factor to consider and test when writing your ad copy.

Another pay-per-click “lever” is geographic targeting.  Google and the other search engines offer advertisers a variety of options in terms of where their ads may be displayed, ranging from different countries to states, metro areas, and more.  You can even draw a shape on a map to designate which searchers you want to see your ads, or enter your latitude and longitude.

There are two different ways to target searchers geographically.

1.  Using the search engines’ IP-targeting method, described above.  Let’s say you’re selling technical consulting services within the Atlanta metro area.  Here, you’d bid on broad search terms (such as “technical consulting”) and set the campaign to display your ads only in the Atlanta metro area.

2.  Using geo-targeted search terms.  Here, you may set the campaign to display your ads nationally, but bid on terms with geographic descriptors (such as “Atlanta technical consulting”).  These campaigns can get large if you add other cities and suburbs, such as Alpharetta, Roswell, Marietta, Norcross, etc., etc.

Note that the first method has its drawbacks.  While the engines are getting better at determining where searchers live and work, it’s certainly not foolproof.  One oft-cited example is that all AOL users are routed through AOL’s servers in Virginia, so the search engines think they all live in Virginia.  AOL users in Atlanta won’t see IP-targeted ads aimed at Atlantans.

And note that the second method makes a lot of sense for products and services that someone in one part of the country may be searching for in another part of the country.  This could be someone getting ready to move or go on vacation, a parent searching on behalf of their college-aged child (or vice versa), or a corporate buyer at headquarters searching on behalf of a branch office.

Which method should you use?  We prefer to use both to ensure that we reach as many searchers as possible.  We usually find that about half our clicks fall into each type of geo-targeting.