PPC can drive traffic to a site - the cost will depend on the keywords you choose

Almost all businesses can benefit from increased traffic to their website. More traffic means greater brand awareness, and hopefully a larger volume of sales.

But it’s important to make sure that you don’t spend more on advertising your website than you can expect to make back in sales.

What are my options?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is, in theory, a free way to increase web traffic. However, in practice to do this well you’ll end up investing time and effort in optimising your website, and monitoring the effects. You’ll probably want to employ a search marketing specialist to make sure you’re not wasting your efforts.

Pay per click advertising is a good alternative way to attract traffic to your website while keeping control of your digital marketing costs. Unlike with SEO, the results are almost instant.

On most search engines, your pay per click (PPC) advertisements will appear above or to the right-hand-side of the organic search results – prime positions for attracting the eye. So if your site isn’t coming up on the first page of results for your key search terms, pay per click advertising is worth considering.

How does PPC compare to SEO?

It’s important to consider search engine optimisation (SEO) alongside your PPC campaign. However it takes time to achieve results. It also needs to be reviewed periodically as the search algorithms are constantly changing and other websites will always be competing against yours.

When your website is first launched it’ll take some time to appear in the natural search engine listings, no matter how well optimised your site is. In this case, pay per click advertising works to get your site coming up on the first page of results from the very beginning – so it can start repaying its investment straight away.

Equally, if your website has been online for a while and isn’t attracting as much traffic as you’d like, pay per click marketing is an option to consider. While it’s always good to improve your optimisation to boost your organic search rankings, PPC advertising could be a faster and more controllable and quantifiable way to get your advert seen.

This tool allows you to see search data trends within any given country over specific time frames – even down to the hour. It shows you the peaks in traffic and rising search trends. You can focus on one key term or compare the keywords against others.

For example, iPhone 5 – would expect peaks in traffic pre launch with a steady decline. Oh, look what we have here….

It also lets you plot this against other keywords, such as iPhone 4s. A prediction here would be that this traffic would start to decline on launch of the newer model. Insight here would be to ensure your iPhone 4s campaigns are live and have enough budget.

This is a great tool for identifying trends and for future reference. Also for ‘next steps’ and to show clients you are keeping up with the industry.

For example, Christmas, as we all know is coming up. Using this tool you can analyse the exact peaks in certain keywords, say ‘party dresses’ and you can ensure you have visibility post peak. This will allow you to gain history on these keywords before your competitors start going mental on them which should allow for a stronger ROI.

You can also break this up into keyword volume for the last 90 days, last month or even since 2004.

You can also break it into categories or location. Location is really handy for trends, especially if you are supporting a device which has initially launched in another country or doing keyword research for a campaign you wish to translate. What keywords had high volume in Spain or Mexico? – Assuming you are translating into Spanish!

Furthrermore, you can drill down to time ranges, allowing clever ad scheduling within your accounts – I would though, compare this to your real data for traffic and conversions.

You can also identify rising keywords. Again, brilliant insight for your campaigns.  Back to dresses, currently uplifts are seen for ‘dresses for party’ amd ‘party dress’ , Christmas is nearly upon us!

So, as Christmas is coming get ready for the PPC Santa!

So Apple, I predict will, in the not so distant future release a Search Engine or some form of PPC platform. Or, sell the data they gather from their Apple fans. Or, partner up with Bing to fight the uber Google.

I wrote previously on the potential for Bing to have more traffic through Apple devices, but now think there may be more to it then this.

Why?

Apple are in a perfect position. I have an iPad, an iPhone and use iTunes – obviously! Now, with the recent update, when you use iTunes they ask for you to login. This creates synergy between the device, especially when you sync your devices to iTunes which allows the potential for tracking and browser history or tendencies across all platforms. This would be pretty brilliant for online advertisers.

We could see initial moment of discovery on your phone, potential research on ipad and then conversion through brand on the desktop. You could also potentially remarket across them which would have high relevancy.

So, apart from the new ‘login’ to iTunes, IOS6 also blocks referral data from Google which is going to be a real pain for analysing traffic sources for both paid and organic endeavours so this is a slight against Google.

The new software also changes the ‘limit ad tracking’ from On to Off, and this is hidden within the settings on the iPhone and iPad, meaning most people won’t even realise this is running or have any idea how to turn it off. More data for Apple to use to develop ideas and get really precise demographic information.

Why would they do this though?

In my opinion, the main players online in terms of traffic are Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google. Amazon is taking traffic from Google with people using the site as a retail search engine in its own right. Facebook and Apple so far seem ok. Google and Apple – No.

Dropping Google Maps from IOS6 and then blocking the work around Application which uses Google Maps is a clear statement that they want people to use their own maps. If people use their maps they can also track location data which when tied in with the synergy across the devices, could be pretty powerful.

If they released a Search Engine they could do the same as they have with maps, force users to use it. As my friend said previously ‘I don’t care what I search on as long as it works’ so as long as they can get that right, they are going to get traffic.

If they don’t do a search engine, then they could do something display related with this data. Clearly it would be a while before they had anything like the size of the GDN, but they control the software that so many people use.

Remember, as always you heard it here first!

Google are paying more and more attention to sitelinks within the PPC realm.

Why?

Well, they tested them in the naturals, I’m sure they have a brilliant organic CTR and in the ever present idea to make PPC listings look organic, this is a natural step. Google want people to click on PPC adverts to increase their revenue. Pretty simple.

So, in the future sitelinks will be available at adgroup level. Heard that from the mouth of a Google representative so it must be true. This could be great news. Really refined sitelinks helping out your really refined adgroups and also increasing the test arena. You can test multiple sitelinks within one campaign now, plus the rumour also stated we will get click data per link, instead of an overview. It’s an early Christmas present I hear you murmur.

But, is this needed?

If you have a well-structured account, you are unlikely to have multiple themed adgroups all housed within one campaign. I know my accounts don’t. The theme is identified by the campaign name with the adgroups related. Say I had a campaign for iPad, generic keywords; my sitelinks would promote the different sizes of the device and potentially some accessories – whatever the theme of the campaign was and whatever matched my KPI and of course whatever works best or whatever I wished to test.

I can see why this would work for some, maybe if you have a fashion account and the campaign is ‘Boots’ a adgroup of ‘leather ankle boots’ could use the sitelinks to cross promote the different styles or colours, but again, this could be at adgroup level, i.e. shove them into a ‘Ankle Boot’ campaign with specific copy. Break the keywords up within that. w

Sitelinks, in the future are going to pull far more data through then the standard character limit. They are going to pull at adgroup level yes, but then an advert copy from that specific adgroup. So, back to the ‘iPad’, Google will pull through 4 sitelinks from 4 relevant adgroups, using the advert copy as the sitelink. I assume based on CTR, or potentially sitelinks will start to have their own quality scores. There will need to be a common denominator to deduce which sitelink performs best. Maybe a time to get AdWords conversion tracking on site to allow you easy interface analysis on this.

The presence of using adgroup level sitelinks is a pre-cursor to this ‘adcopy’ sitelink release.

Adgroup sitelinks sound like a step in the right direction, more allowance to test multiple links within one campaign, more refinement and more insight into when links are clicked on. This will also set your account up nicely for the second sitelink release, using the previously mentioned adcopy instead of a line of text.

This is great, *BUT* your account should always be as refined as possible for the best quality scores, especially in light of how competitive the market place is.

Thanks Google, this is cool, but I’d rather be able to have campaigns specifically targeting the search partners.

Those lovely things you can add onto your PPC advert to make it more shiny, informative, relevant and above all – more ‘clickable’.

Sitelinks, Paid and Organic

Sitelinks also give you a bigger search presence and in some instances, give you 5 urls on the SERPs over one. They also allow you to cross promote and promote seasonal offers, or push a phone number or a direct call to action such as ‘Call Us NOW!!!’ – well the exclamations wouldn’t pass approval, but you get the idea.

Sitelinks = good.

New Google policy also equals good.

Previously, you could have all your sitelinks pointing to the same URL. This could be handy say for example, for a new phone, lets go with the iPhone5 – this isn’t a shameless keyword stuffing, I have recently done some work on this bad boy, promise. So. Previously you could have had an advert for the iPhone 5 and then have your sitelinks promoting different tariffs or different features of the phone. All could happily land on one page and it would be fine.

With the new update though, Google are going to enforce the idea that the sitelinks *must* all land on unique landing pages. Assuming motivation here is relevancy, but thinking about it you would hope the user wouldn’t click on your advert multiple times to find out where they all went to.

Your quality score needs to be high enough to summon the sitelinks so mainly these appear on branded terms where you should dominate.  They can though also appear on generics, this is great if you work on a account with gender specific areas, maybe your keyword is ‘black shoes’ this doesn’t quality the searcher at all, this methodology for sitelinks is perfect for this, have sitelinks for men, women, boys, girls etc.

Google are giving you some time to sort this, a few months, as for some it can be a massive task, especially if you use dummy keywords for a 3rd party tracking. But, if you don’t do it, your sitelinks will stop appearing and your account can be negatively impacted.

So, to recap:

Sitelinks = good.

New Google policy = relevancy = good.

Your accounts = get amending them to meet the new policies.

Also as a sneak preview / view into my predictions, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next sitelink update is to match the PPC structure to that of organic. We have all seen in recent months changes to make PPC adverts look less like paid and this seems a natural evolution.

Woo – I was pleased when I first heard of this, muttering ‘finally!’

I manage a client with multiple campaigns with budget weighting throughout the month geared towards pay day and historically, better ROI metrics. As they sell clothes, search volume can realistically be pretty tumultuous. Bit of Sun and the dress campaign gets hit, bit of a cold front, jackets.

It’s for accounts like this that this option is great – a daily budget, not hit and missing it with campaign caps or requiring daily amendments.

But should you use this?

Anything which makes PPC ‘easier’ is something that automatically makes me go ‘hmmm’ in a doubtful chin stroking way.

Well an obvious one is that you potentially initially build your campaign structure this way to make sure you weren’t cannibalising the budget but letting all campaigns have a chance to perform, what if you have some search terms which get more volume in the evening? This way your budget could be spent before they get a chance to perform.You don’t want all this spend going to your broad campaign.

You don’t need to apply it to the whole account, so initially test it on a few campaigns. Just be aware your impression share might be impacted on some campaigns which don’t get the opportunity to have as much traffic coming through.

Be clever with it. Group campaigns by match type maybe or group the top converting terms together.

Another question is, what  if you have a low traffic campaign which converts really well? We all have one. A campaign with brilliant conversion rates but low traffic due to how specific it is. You always want this campaign to have a high budget cap to encourage visibility. If you place this with your other ‘shared budget’ campaigns this could go badly. Be selective in which ones you choose.

The budget splits the monthly spend by the days in the month – kind of in the name. But what if you have peaks in traffic you would miss out on, or weekend drops? My above example sell a lot of little dresses (black) over Halloween, this option could limit their visibility. Additionally they get a high amount of orders around pay day which this couldn’t account for.

Another point is…well, it’s your job to monitor the campaigns and spend right? Shouldn’t be an easy fix to not go in and amend budgets, additionally; budgets shouldn’t be 100% at campaign cap level but keyword level.

As a warning, if you apply this in the middle of a day, the system won’t consider what the campaigns have already spent. Be warned, you need to consider this to ensure you don’t go over budget and have that horrible, gut wrenching moment of ‘oh…’

Overall, I think it’s a dashing new setting, but of course my cynical side appreciates it makes more money for Google. No longer are you reserving budget for campaigns which might not spend but you’re allowing it to be taken by the campaigns you know will spend. Ka’ching.

As always, test it, see if it works and analyse the results.

Hence this blog.

Excel is great. It is your friend. It’s designed with tasty data in mind, so on that note my next few blogs are doing to be Excel tool based.

First one, pivot tables. Data summary on steroids.

Now, I worked in search for quite a while before I discovered this bad boy. Was at a seminar and we had a lot of keyword data we needed to quickly analyse. Boom, the presenter shoved it into a pivot and off she went. Much to my geeky starry eyed amazement.

So pivot table. Assuming it’s AdWords data, download it – good start. Then, CTRL + 8 to highlight all the data, then to ‘Insert’ far left, ‘Pivot Table’. Click ok on the next box and voila. You should get the below:

You should also get on the right a ‘Field List’ which allows you to select the data you want to analyse. It also allows you to place it in terms of how you want to view it. i.e do you want to see keyword activity by week, or campaign activity and associated CPC? Whatever is in the table the pivot can calculate. You can either chuck this straight into the table by dragging and dropping or drop it into the fields below.

Top ‘ Report Filter’ indicates what you can drag to the top box for later filtering. This is handy if you know you want to compare WoW or even campaign by campaign. Column indicates the values to the report filter.

Row labels indicates what you want on the left hand side, with values being the associated metrics to your row. I.E throw ‘Campaign’ into the Row column and then add impressions, clicks and ctr to the values and it will bring it up.

Once you have that sorted, open any drop tab next to the text and you should be able to further filter the data.

Best thing is to just have a play around with it. Figure it out.

Something you might notice is CTR summing, no problem. Just right click it, ‘Summarize Values by’ select average and if you need more options for decimal points, it’s at the bottom.

You can also summarise by value, i.e. top ten which is handy for top converting keywords.

Things that are needed are that your data needs to have headers on each columns. No merged cells and it doesn’t always like empty columns.

Word to note, if you amend data on the main source data sheet – the tab the pivot is pulling the data from you will need to refresh the pivot. It won’t automatically do this.

But that’s also easy. Just under ‘Options’ it’s the big refresh bar.

You’re welcome. Go forth and pivot that data.

Makes sense. If you’re not already doing mobile campaigns, why not?

Due to this increase it makes sense that Google’s CPC’s for mobile traffic are steadily increasing. More people are realising they need to be targeting mobiles. It’s also a very competitive arena with 3 adverts being allowed for the top fold of the screen. On some devices this could be all they see, never bothering with the organic SERPS.

So what’s this got to do with iOS 6?

Heard some rumours that a certain iPhone 5 *may* be released in September. If you are reading this blog you may also know that Google and Apple, the masters of iTunes and Android have had a bit of a falling out. As such, Google Maps and YouTube are no longer hard coded on their operating software. Safari will stay as it is Apple’s browser, but what will be the default search engine for Safari?

I’m not thinking Google.

I’m thinking Bing.

The default use of Bing being hidden behind the reasoning of ‘well this makes alphabetical’ sense; Bing, Google and then Yahoo!. I saw a friend using Yahoo! to search the other day on her phone. I asked her ‘Why aren’t you using Google?’ and she replied ‘It makes no difference to me’. This is going to be a pretty standard response. I don’t think people notice as much as others what they search on as long as they get the results. Also, how many people know how to change their default settings on their iPhone?

Already the iPhone 5 has more traffic than the Samsung S3 ever did, even pre-launch and it’s not even launched yet. So many people are going to want one. They’ve been holding out for it.

When it’s released, Bing is, I predict going to see a massive increase in their mobile traffic from iPhones.

So get your campaigns ready on Bing for the iPhone 5. I’m predicting more traffic and steadily rising CPC’s.

About time they had a bit of a break. Hopefully we might get lucky too, cheap CPC’s on Bing for mobile and decreasing CPC’s on Google.

Bit of a mouthy title, granted, but the question is does having a site with strong SEO help with your PPC quality scores? I know the official line from Google is that they have no direct correlation but logically, I don’t agree. I think it does help. In fact I’d put money on it.

SEO is all about having a nice, user friendly relevant website. Yes, some of the off page optimisation techniques won’t impact your PPC such as links and more technical elements but the onsite stuff will.

For PPC we know that having relevant content on the landing page helps with our quality scores. No brainer. Google need to protect their reputation for driving traffic to relevant websites and with so many competing business wanting to rank top for so many keywords, they need to be fussy about this. Any optimised page in terms of content and usability is good for the audience base, regardless of the search source.

This is also true with ‘friendly URL’s’. Having a friendly URL as your destination URL in your adverts, I think, helps your quality score. It’s just a place to further confirm relevancy.

Another factor.

A true PPC expert will not just consider the PPC side. They will also look at landing pages and how to improve the website. They want their traffic to convert. What’s the point of having a brilliantly structured PPC account with great adverts landing on a page with rubbish content and no call to actions which locks the user into the site?

Here the goal of SEO managers and PPC managers is the same. Better experience to drive a conversion. If the SEO recommendation is for better keyword driven navigation, navigation in the footer and side links this is more relevant keywords for our landing page and better time on sites, better bounce rates which should equate into a better conversion rate.

SEO and PPC need to be in synergy, not just in terms of ‘who bids on what’ – though that’s definitely a factor. I have discussed the importance of this before. Check it out.

So. Yes. For these reasons I do believe a well optimised website considering their target audience helps your PPC. If the landing page is better due to the SEO work it’s generally a better page for you to land paid traffic on.

Fact.

Search retargeting could drive interested customers to your website.

Increasingly, search marketing specialists are turning to new, more focused ways to reach consumers. Behavioural retargeting is becoming a popular way to reach specific consumer segments – improving conversion rates and boosting return on investment in search marketing.

How does behavioural retargeting work?

Behavioural retargeting is simply the practice of serving adverts to people on the internet based on their previous behaviour. For example, if somebody visits a business’ website and looks around the products – but doesn’t buy them – they will be shown banner adverts for that business later while browsing around other sites.

These adverts could even show the specific products that were looked at, along with a range of other related products – encouraging the visitor to come back and complete the sale. This is known as personalised retargeting.

How does search retargeting fit into this?

Search retargeting is a type of behavioural retargeting based on the words or phrases entered by people into search engines. Even if that searcher doesn’t then visit your business website, you can display your banner adverts to them as they continue to browse the web.

For example, imagine a person searches for ‘cheap oak furniture’, which your business sells. They don’t click through to your site from that search results page – they may even follow a competitor’s link instead. But as they visit other websites, they’ll be served adverts for your business, encouraging them to click through and see what you have to offer .

So how can search retargeting help my business?

Search retargeting has obvious implications for making your marketing more accurate and effective, as it serves your adverts to people who’ve already expressed an interest in buying your product or service, but might not have heard of your business.

It also offers the chance to get your advert seen more often, and in more places, than PPC adverts in search engine results page – where people won’t tend to spend much time. This helps build brand awareness and drives engagement.

Together with your pay-per-click and search engine optimisation efforts, search retargeting could help you maximise your search marketing efforts and reach specific consumer segments.

This is when your traffic isn’t contained in just one website. Maybe you have a subdomain, a payment gateway which directs people off site and then back on. Maybe you have forms which open in an iframe or a blog hosted by someone else.

You can still track this in Analytics. Never fear!

What you need to do though is set up cross domain tracking. This will mean you add GA codes to the pages of site one and the same code to the pages of the second site, or third.

It’s best to use async codings as it’s the most up to date. To pull the code, head into your GA account and to the code area, just select cross domain and enter the urls of the domains. Sorted. You must take out any previous GA coding on the site when you update it with this one.

You must also tag the buttons to carry the cookie across. So for example if the second site is a payment gateway, you need to tag the ‘Checkout’ or equivalent button to ensure it pushes the cookie through. Otherwise the second site will record the hit as ‘direct’ as it doesn’t know where the user originally came from. If for example, the original vist was from PPC, this will push the AdWords cookie through with the click allowing the payment site to identify the traffic as paid.

This is really important and you need to identify every button on site which pushes users to the second site.

If you don’t do this, every visit on the second site will be ‘direct’ and you won’t be able to optimise effectively.

The push code (onclick event) should look something like the below. You need to update the ‘link’ aspect to read the site domain of the site you are sending users to.

<a href=”http://example.com/test.html” onlcick=”_gag_push (['_link', 'http://example.com/test.html']); return false;”>click me </a?

You need to update the ‘link’ aspect – in bold. The first link shown needs to be the url of the 1st website they would have hit. The second link needs to be the redirect. The ‘Click Me’ aspect is whatever is written on the button you want users to click, so in this case that may be ‘Checkout’. Only add this code on the pages where a button is that directs to the next website in the customer journey.

You’re welcome.