Paid Search Marketing Archives -

PPC Agency | What To Look For In Your Paid Search Marketing

February 19, 2013 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Pay Per Click Management Services

Pay per click marketing is a great way to quickly get your site in front of your potential customers. Skillfully handled PPC search engine marketing placement can save you lots of money and drastically increase your ROI. The question is what do you need to look for when researching and finding the best pay per click management professionals? Having the right partner will strategically manage your campaign (or offer pay per click consulting) so your message reaches the largest audience possible, while SEO and other search marketing strategies complement each other to generate revenue before and after you establish natural search engine rankings. This powerful marketing service can help you start building a strong customer base today.

Keyword Research:

The first step in SEO, PPC and other search marketing strategies is to identify the best possible keywords that your target audience is using to find products or services. Proper keyword research is critical to online success. Has your agency given you input on this? This is necessary for any pay per click service to help you with by choosing the right keywords that will convert visitors into paying customers. Carefully targeting your campaign from the beginning will save money and ensure greater success.

They should also give you some insight in how they have done this from various sources including but not limited to website copy, search engine tools, and competitive reviews. Broad match, Exact match, Phrase match, and Negative match types are utilized to ensure relevant queries receive maximum exposure. As keywords are tested and proven they will be organized into two levels:

Top performing – most likely these will be brand related terms, sku numbers, product names, etc.
Low performing – more generic terms – example running shoes vs nike running shoes.

Competitive PPC Analysis:

Do you know who is targeting your desired keywords? How many companies are competing for the same traffic? What is your competition doing? Are they missing opportunities on which you can capitalize? Are they doing something you can do better? All good PPC agencies will take an in-depth look at the competitive marketplace for your chosen keywords and help you develop strategies to reach the top of the rankings and stay there.

Contextual Advertising (Better Know Has The Content Networks):

Contextual advertising is about delivering the right message on the right website. This strategy places ads that appear within a website rather than on search engine results pages. A good search company will help you set up and manage your contextual advertising so you can target the right customers on the right sites. They will also continue to optimize this as time go on as the content network is always changing.

PPC Analytics & Reporting:

To make the most of your pay per click optimization campaign, a high level of studying website analytics is a must in order to make the appropriate changes. Studying the relevant metrics like cost per click, cost per lead or sale, and lifetime value must be related to the site to determine keyword performance. Your new agency must understand your business and provide the initial setup and then offer professional consultation and recommendations on how to improve your paid search marketing campaign. It is always better to find a PPC agency that has experience in your industry. Right off the bat they will know the KPIs and be able to optimize to them.

As data is collected, it is necessary to analyze results. The question to ask is – does your agency look at this on a daily basis at minimum. Daily review ensures trends are identified early on to improve campaign results. If your agency is looking at your account data less than once a day, run Forest run! They should also be giving you valuable performance insight into keywords, ad text messages, campaigns, ad group, and a wide variety of other important metrics. This should provided in detailed reporting on the most critical data points to help grow and develop your PPC campaign. The devil is in the details when it comes to reporting. If it is just an ad-hock report or just a bunch of numbers in Excel, that is not what your looking for. Ask your potential agency to give you sample reports from other companies.

Keyword Bidding:

As keywords are tested, appropriate bid levels will be established. Bid levels will be determined for each keyword according to performance. This will ensure budget dollars are spent efficiently. This is critical as mist agencies charge on the overall spend. This is also where it can be counter productive as your goal is to get the best ROI,and theirs is to get maximum revenue. Most good agencies will see the value in longevity, not the high billings. Push them in the interview process to see what their main objective are and ask them for case studies that show what they say.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: Keyword Bidding, Keyword Research, PPC, ROI

Misspellings For Paid Search Marketing

April 24, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

A few days ago, Google announced in their Inside AdWords blog, that it will automatically adjusting misspelled paid search terms and queries to paid search results. Google has been using this for their organic search now for sometime. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like on the organic side. Any user who enters a query with a misspelling or other variation on a common term will be returned relevant, correctly spelled paid search results.

Starting in mid-May, users who misspell a query or enter a singular or plural form of certain terms will see results most likely relevant to their search in both paid and unpaid listings. You may be asking why have they done this? Well, their answer is like it always is – for its users of course. Google says in early experiments they have seen advertisers getting 7% more clicks while keeping cost per clicks comparable. Of course you mileage may vary.

So are you stuck with this new misspelling technology?

Absolutely not. If you rather not have your paid search ads to show up there will be new controls that will allow you to adjust your keyword matching options. As you can see from the above screenshot, you will be able to control this in the campaign settings tab under advanced settings.

Stay tuned as in the next few months I will do a case study on this specific tactic and see if it works or does not!

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: paid search, search ads

OutSourcing Your PPC Marketing

April 11, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Really the days of segmenting your paid search marketing (or SEO for that matter) are gone. Most of the time, we working in an environment that has paid search specialists in-house and using us as well. With PPC having so many parts moving at the same time to determine the ROI, (such as landing page testing, ad writing, and other testing opportunities) it has become the norm.

Fact is, if your purchasing is over $10-15,000 a month, you really should be outsourcing some parts of your paid search advertising campaign, just as a business frequently outsources some sides of accounting such as audits, conventional promoting, and legal work some of the time. You could have an agency handling your campaign, you may be using paid campaign management technology, or a consultant.

Reasons Why Companies Done Not Outsource Their Search Marketing

Many companies have reasons on why they do not utilize outsourcing. They range from “to important to our bottom line”, “we are the experts”, “we got burned by one”, or the famous “they will never understand us like we do”. Some of these (and others) can be valid reasons but honestly the majority of the time it is about having the lack of knowledge of using an agency or feeling threatened.

Why Companies Should Use Outsourcing For PPC Purposes

Productiveness – Search management is a time-intensive activity as you are in what ever bid management tool going over ads, keywords, and bids all the time. Remove that function from your internal team so they can focus on more ROI focused tasks such as landing page testing or developing good ROI bait like a solid white paper. These are also tasks when finished provide further bidding leverage on keywords.
Speed to market – Most agencies have huge technical resources at their disposal, they can process even the most complicated campaigns at lightning-fast speed by leveraging bid management tools or just more resources at hand. They can also handle more dedication to your campaign at times when you need it like the holiday season.
In house knowledge development – A good search agency is transparent about their tactics. Your internal staff will benefit from this greatly.
Total accountability. Many of times I have seen issues happen like de-listings or lost of Quality Score. A lot of finger pointing goes on when this happens by the in-house team. If your campaign is mishandled, it is the service provider’s responsibility to mend things. If the supplier can’t ( or will not ) cure the situation to a satisfactory level, you can sue.
Cost – The big one! Agencies trump in-house search marketing departments as they simply have more resources. It really is a terrific example of economy of scale. Having an in-house ppc specialist that is salaried at $40-50,000/year to manage a $120,000 in total spend just does not make sense. The management cost of this is 30-40%. Outsourcing this will cost you between 8-10%. If your business spends less than $100,000 a month on Google, adCenter, and online display, there’s a strong chance you can economize by outsourcing your search and internet promoting management operations. Do the mathematics. Work out how many hours your workers are devoting to Google-related activities, work out how much you are spending, and compare the figure to the plans offered by 1 or 2 selling suppliers.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: campaigns, developing, paid search, ROI

Paid Search Marketing Tips – PPC Marketing Optimization

March 4, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Did you know the average paid search marketing account spends $2,500 a month? That should tell you that the majority of companies using paid search are small business. So with a budget how do you maximize these dollars? Here are some paid search tips that are a must:

Open a test account – If you are just starting out you are going to make mistakes, big ones. Ones that can really hurt your Quality Score and that will hurt your wallet with higher costs. Open a test account and have at it. Worst case will be you have done a great job on this account and you will then use it as your primary one.
Change devices to computers and laptops – By default, Google will opt your account into all devices such as mobile, tablets and computers. Yes, mobile is growing rapidly and you will want to have device specific landing pages or websites but focus on computers and laptops while getting your feet wet.
Choose the right keywords – I can not stress this enough. With a small budget every click counts and by finding the keywords that have less competition you will pay less per click and this will make your money go further. WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery, and the tools provided by Google and Yahoo! are all great starting points.
Exact match only – By doing this it will reduce your spending while giving you the highest quality traffic.
Daypart – Paid search marketing is one of the most competitive and tightly managed digital marketplaces that exists today. Yet in this world where daily micro-management of tens of thousands of keywords has become the norm, one of the simplest and most powerful strategies is often overlooked or underutilized. The art of dayparting is to shut down or start your campaign at certain times of the day to give your ads the maximium chance of being clicked by your targeted audiance. Cheryle Pingel, founder and president of Range Online Media, revealed what kinds of shoppers are on the Web and when. Men are generally buying before or at work between 6 and 8 a.m. Women, on the other hand, are shopping in the evening. So, if you’re selling football tickets you might want to boost your listings to a top spot in the morning. But if you run a woman’s shoe store, pause or delete your ad listings until after work hours.
Go Long Tail – Longer Tail terms are ones that appeal to users searching for very niche or specific items. For example, a generic term from the B2C world would be ‘Teddy Bears’. A Long Tail term would be ‘Big Teddy Bears’ or ‘Big Teddy Bear Delivery’. This will help avoid the high cost generic terms and pick up traffic from people doing very specific searches. Not only will the CPC be significantly cheaper, but you’ll tend to find that prospects know exactly what they want, and the quality and number of inquiries resulting from the clicks will be much higher.
Explore Content Networks – Personally I am not a big fan of content networks as they generally offer a lower quality visitor and will eat up your budget quickly. You can police and control campaigns to accommodate for these content network traps by building campaigns specifically for content networks.
Ad Writing – By far the most important thing you can do to optimize your campaign. If your ad copy is stale or less relevant, you may suffer from a low clickthrough rate, which in turn will hurt your quality score (in Google) and make you pay more for your clicks. You can also lose positioning which allows your competitors to have a stronger opportunity to take your visitors. The beauty of this is that you can always have ads rotating, and if your new efforts do not pan out, the major search engines will automatically stick to what was working.
Negative Keywords – A core component to managing your keyword list and saving your budget. Adding a negative keyword to your ad group or campaign means that your ads won’t show for search queries containing that term. By filtering out unwanted impressions, negative keywords can help you reach the most appropriate prospects, reduce your cost-per-click (CPC), and increase your ROI.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: campaigns, Daypart Paid, paid search, Range Online Media

Using Long Tail Keywords Still Pays Off

February 14, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Over the past years, there has been much talk by the PPC management & SEO communities about long-tail keywords. Do they still work? Are they worth the effort? I will tell you that without a doubt yes, but before we going detail let’s start more from the beginning.

What Are Long Tail Keywords Really?

Long-tail keywords are search phrases that tend to be longer than just 2 – 3 words. Often, a searcher will use a long-tail keyword in a follow-up search after trying a short, broad keyword phrase because the broad phrase returned only general results, not specifically what the searcher was looking for. For example, our friend Matt is looking for a new set of golf clubs. A head search (or general search) would be golf clubs, golf irons, etc. Now if Matt is looking for a specific brand of golf clubs such as Cobra, Titleist, or Taylormade he would be better suited to use a long tail keyword such as Taylormade r11 golf clubs instead. As a rule of thumb, long tail keywords follow these core features:

Consist of at least four words or more.
Have a higher degree of specification specifically to the searcher’s goal. Searchers who use long-tail keywords tend to be further down the purchasing funnel which is a good thing.
Have less competing pages and companies bidding on them. This does make it easier to rank higher for these terms in SEO and get a better results in your PPC management campaign.
Have far less popularity in terms of searches performed on them.
Send you a higher qualified visitor.

Like we discussed earlier, long-tail keywords have undergone some dramatic changes in the past few years in terms of how industry experts value them. These changes are reflected in how long-tail keywords can best be applied in both organic search and Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Let’s look at organic search first.

The use of long-tail keywords in organic search over the past few years has been affected primarily by these things:

The search engine algorithms have gotten increasing more sophisticated they way they display results has changed as well.
Increasing organic search competition due to the inclusion of “blended” search results such as images, videos, tweets, etc.
The increase in highly authoritative social media sites has created more competition for these terms.

Search engines have improved in their ability to determine meaning and intent from search phrases. For example, Google “Instant” really reduces the intent of a users searching behavior including misspellings. More importantly, search engines are better able to “understand” the meaning behind a long-tail search phrase and can present results that are highly relevant. From a SEO perspective this can be troubling as those relevant results don’t contain the exact phrase that the searcher typed and the search engines are improving in their ability to substitute content that has the same meaning as the search phrase without having to match on the exact words.

Second, blended search results, or what Google has called “universal search” do not only include web pages but also tweets, images, video clips, and location-based listings provide a richer environment for the searcher to choose from. Using long-tail keywords not only on your web pages, but on other social media sites as well, can provide a solid benefit in the amount of real estate in the organic results that you can gain ranking for and associate with your brand.

Also the way that social media has increased in popularity changes the way in which organic search is referenced. Highly authoritative and popular online social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn that simplify the creation of content and provide alternative ways to market your brand. In addition, the development of ordinary web pages is greatly simplified through blogging tools like Blogger, WordPress and Typepad. Social media sites provide additional opportunities to rank for long-tail keyword phrases, although the resulting increase in the number of pages indexed by the search engines can make it increasingly difficult to rank on page one for targeted keyword phrases, short or long, that are relevant to your brand.

What About PPC Management Of Long Tail Keywords?

The use of long-tail keywords in PPC management has followed a trend that’s quite the opposite from SEO. While each of the three major search engines has its own set of rules, let’s look specifically at Google AdWords and examine how long-tail keyword usage has changed.Before the day of Quality Score, Google allowed advertisers to sponsor thousands of keywords in an AdWords account. Most paid search marketing experts would take advantage of this fact and exact-match on thousands of long-tail keywords rather than a few short, broad-matched phrases. While most of their keywords would languish unused most of the time, enough clicks would come in to make the plan worthwhile for two reasons. First, long-tail keywords weren’t fought over, so the cost per click was sometimes mere pennies. Second, as we’ve already mentioned, long-tail keywords tend to be highly targeted, so the click quality was excellent as measured by conversion rates.

Of course Google went back to the drawing board and came back with the Quality Score concept, they began penalizing AdGroups that contained lots of low frequency keywords by reducing the overall click-through-rate of the AdGroup. This had the effect of pushing ad positions down while, at the same time, increasing the cost per click for the advertiser.

Today, Google has gone back and done some more tweaks by actually disabling long-tail keywords that were not generating enough impressions, in Google’s opinion. Infrequently-searched keywords generate few clicks and very little revenue for Google, so in a sense, one can understand this move. However, sometimes a low-frequency keyword phrase can actually deliver a few conversions before being shut off, and that hurts.

If you are one that believes in conspiracies, you would think that Google has done this on purpose or just the cost of doing business, but the net result is that Google seems to be forcing advertisers to sponsor mostly broad keywords, using broad and phrase matching options in their paid search marketing campaign. Broad and phrase matched keywords generate a higher number of impressions, but also a greater number of low quality clicks. Ultimately, this has led to higher pay per click costs for advertisers and greater revenues for Google.

In summary, the use of long-tail keywords has seen a shift that you need to be aware of. Today, long-tail keywords can no longer be targeted explicitly and profitably through your paid search marketing campaign, but they still have great shelf life for PPC management. Now with the organic search world, they still are a great sandbox to play in. By no means are long-tail keyword dead!

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: keyword phrases, paid search, PPC, SEO

Paid Search Marketing – Remarketing Tips To Get Visitors Back

February 13, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Google has been giving out free consultations to help with your paid search campaign so I figured I would take them up on it and schedule a call. One of the things they were pushing was setting up a remarketing campaign. Now even though I tried a remarketing/retargeting campaign with this client it started me to thinking about this post and what you can do to make a remarketing program work for your PPC marketing campaign.

Interest Based Advertising

When you think of pay-per-click advertising, you think of keywords, ads and paying every time someone clicks on your ad. That is all true. However, paid search has come a long way and is continually evolving. There have been lots of developments that could change your methodology, preferred tactics, and PPC management focus. One of the most interesting has been the development of interest-based advertising, which removes keywords from the PPC equation.

Interest-based advertising has a couple different name. Some people call it retargeting others called following but within Google it’s called Remarketing. There are a handful of 3rd party companies that provide this remarketing service such as Media Forge but I am going to focus on Google AdWords since this is the easiest entry point for most advertisers willing to try this strategy.

The PPC Methodology & Tactic Behind Remarketing

So the main goal of remarketing is to target a user who has already visted your website and to get them back so that they can finish what they started such as complete a lead form or check out their shopping cart. It might even be for them to sign up for your newsletter or repurchase. Let’s take an example of this process:

Matt comes to Frank’s Golf World and search through a wide variety of drivers. He put the new Taylor Made R11s driver in his shopping cart but did not pull the trigger and left.
Matt starts to visit other sites, some related to golf such as a cigar site or luxury watch site and he sees an advertisement from Frank’s Golf World about the new Taylor Made R11s Driver that offers free shipping!
Matt’s interest has been re energized to buy the driver and clicks on the ad to Frank’s Golf World and goes to the site to buy it.

In a very simplistic form, this is what remarketing is. Setting this up is very easy as all the code you need is done by Google’s interface. All you need to do is add a snippet of tracking code to your website (the code is provided by Google), when a user visits your website that code drops a third party tracking cookie onto their computer. Also, within the Google AdWords interface you just need to set the proper campaigns and advertisements.

You will need creative assets such as banner ads but once you have those assets added into your account your ads will appear on websites that are opted into the Google Display Network. These are websites that display text and images ads distributed by Google. You’ve seen the block of ads on a website that read, “Ads provided Google.” That is where your remarketing ads would appear.

Now you are going to pay per click for every visitor that does click on these ads similar to anyone who clicks on a text ads in the search network. The difference is that you are targeting or advertising to users who type a specific keyword but users who have already expressed an interest in your product/service by visiting your site (hence the name, interest-based advertising).

Tips & Tricks For A Successful A Remarketing Campaign

First thing you must understand is that the overall audience for a remarketing campaign is much different from your usual paid search audience. Most visitors who come from PPC are looking for a product/service such as “Taylor Made Driver” and they have not heard of Frank’s Golf World. Most don’t even care about who the site is they are going to buy the product from as long as the price is right. Now a remarketing audience, they already know who you are because they’ve been to your website – but now, you have to convince them to come back and take action (or take an additional action).

Something that is extremely powerful with remarketing is the ability to segment your audience and serve highly specific, targeted ads to individual users. This is where you can really get into each segment and maximize conversions. Let’s use my current Frank’s Golf World example:

Frank can target users who have purchased products already. Call it the “Two off the first tee” campaign and offer an additional 15% for return customers.
Frank can target users who did not purchase a product. Call this the “Mulligan” campaign and offer 20% off plus free shipping.
Frank can target users who visit specific brands or product pages. These campaigns can be based on “the largest selection of drivers online”!
Frank can also target users who purchased products that need to be replaced such as golf balls. Call this the ” Out of bounds” campaign and offer 20% off all golf ball purchases.

Again, these are basic scenarios, but they give you a good idea about showing you the level of segmentation you can do in your remarketing.

There are many great tips and tricks you can use to give your remarketing campaign that boost it needs and achieve success quicker. Here are some of my top ones:

• Image ads – They are a must as users who have been to your site may recognize and respond to your logo, color scheme, products faster with images. As mentioned in one of the examples above, if a user visits a product on your website, you can later serve them an advertisement that displays that specific product.
• Segmentation – The examples above describe why segmentation is so important and effective. With remarketing you can get really specific in regards to which ads are shown to which users. Take full advantage of this opportunity.
• Test different offers – It is not whether you have an offer or not but what offer works! You need to make your your target audiences feels special.

Final Thoughts On Remarketing

Make no mistake about it, traditional paid search marketing is where you are going to get the majority of your business from. However, now you can have a backup plan for users who don’t make purchase or users who are likely to purchase again. So, that initial click from the search engine actually gains a little bit more value. Using these tips on remarketing you can now go out there and make it happen.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: code, Frank Golf World, Interest Based Advertising, PPC

Top PPC Campaign Management Tips

July 8, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

If you are running any PPC (Pay Per Click) management campaign you must be aware of Quality Score and the effects on your PPC campaign performance it has. The main purpose of Quality Score is to award those advertisers who are providing the best experience to searchers from keyword query to landing page and not those who have the deepest pockets. If you provide a positive experience for searchers, you will find they, along with Google will reward you.

Quality Score is dynamic and is assigned to both the keyword and Ad Group level. It essentially affects your cost per click which in turn will affect your overall profitability. So for a higher Quality Score, you can achieve a paid search higher ranking at a lower cost per click than your competitors. There are three major factors that we know about that Quality Score is determined by:

Click Through Rate (CTR) – I don’t care what anybody tell you, CTR is by far the most important factor in your PPC bid management! If you were to pay two people to advertise to for your brick and mortar store. One had a great flashing sign and did magic tricks or another one that just brought people into your store which one would you reward?
Relevancy – What you PPC ad is related to the keywords with in that Ad Group- So many people confuse this with the keywords you bid on that are within the landing page but that is not what relevancy is about. Let’s use our brick and mortar example again, If one of our people advertising for us has a sign that says “free hamburgers – come on in” how relevant would that be if we do not serve hamburgers or food in general?
Landing Page – this one you can spend all day with and never come up with a true answer for. I have had many of discussions with clients on this and I can tell you that having a landing page that is on topic with the Ad Group is all you need. Google is the only PPC search engine that even cares about this and their main goal is to make sure that an advertiser has little grounds to claim click fraud. If you are bidding on running shoes make the page about that and other related items such as running clothing and you will be fine.

So with all that said, let’s look at some PPC bid management tips:

Smaller Ad Groups The Better

Keeping your Ad Groups to twenty five keywords or better has always been my sweet spot. Now I know some of you might be cursing me out when you read this as you might have a hundred thousand keywords you are bidding on but the facts are that smaller, targeted Ad Groups will do wonders for you. Your relevancy will be higher and you can offer more landing pages. Examples of typical Ad Groups I use are branded, non-branded, singular, and plurals.

Dynaminc Keyword Insertion Is Your Friend

One of the relevancy factors is relevance of the ad copy to the search query. This is a real time analysis and is not completely reflected in the number that is shown inside your AdWords account.

For DKI to be effective, there are a few things that need to occur:
The ad needs to stand out (if the ads blend into each other, CTR suffers).
The ad has to be attractive to the searcher (poor DKI usage often lowers CTR)
The ads need to be related to the search query (DKI does this automatically by adding the keyword).

Therefore, the use of DKI is more likely to affect you via the CTR factors and not the relevancy factors; however, DKI can definaetly improve QS as well now due to that change in the QS factor.

With DKI, it is useful to write two ads and test them out to see which does better.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: Ad Group, Ad Groups, PPC, Quality Score

Paid Search Review|Phoenix Personal Injury Attorney|Arizona PPC Marketing

May 18, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Paid search marketing is such a crucial element to many companies internet marketing plan and allowing someone or an agency to handle it is a very important part of the success of it and the success of the business from a Internet marketing perspective. I would like to do a quick paid search review using the term Phoenix personal injury attorney using the The Gillespie Law Firm.

PPC Marketing Landscape – Phoenix Personal Injury Attorney

I am a big fan of the the tool SpyFu as it really gives you a greater level of detail in terms of competitive analysis in the paid search arena. Using Spyfu, you can see that our example term is pretty expensive, around $12-15 bucks a click and the competition is heavy. Expect around 600 clicks a month if you are in the top spot and figure each position you are in after the number one position cut that in half. Their are nine major competitors in the space so making every click you get from this highly relevant term is a must.

Paid Search Review – The Ad

Given our example term here is the ad that was showing up:

As you can see this ad is way off the mark! Yes, they have searched for “Phoenix Injury Attorney” and have gotten an ad is about a law firm in Phoenix that could be about helping you with a personal injury case but this is causing a big waste in budget and due to the lack of clicks, will also impact the quality score of the account making this example pay more for a click. Here is a perfect example of letting Google manage your account. Here are a few things to do:

If you want to bid on this term, get an ad that speaks to it. I would suggest setting up a “personal injury” ad group and having all of those keywords reside in there with the appropriate ads.
Use negatives – tell Google that you do not want to show up for this term. If you set your match type to broad match Google is going to server your ad to what it feels is relevant or related to your term.
Use keyword insertion – even though the ad will still not talk to the visitor the right way at least the headline will match. I would consider this the last attempt should you not have the resources to do number 1 or 2.

Paid Search Review – The Landing Page

Here is the landing page that this ad goes to:

I have got to tell you that I really like this site. It is nicely laid out with some really nice conversion element baked into it. For the right terms (Phoenix based DUI attorney terms) I give high marks. For the terms that are not so targeted towards that, there is such a disconnect that it is just throwing money out the window! Let’s assume that somebody did click on the example ad and they land on this page. Is there way that they would call or fill out a form to inquiry about personal injury services? Slim to none and given this is a 15 dollar click, you can now see what I am talking about!

Here a few things we can do about this – 1) create a landing page that is specific to personal injury. Along with an ad this can be a very profitable keyword strategy. 2) If #1 is not an option-do not bid on these terms. Not to sound like a jerk but why even do this if you have no chance of succeeding.

Wrap Up

What it really comes down to is how bad do you want to be bidding on these terms and be part of this keyword market? For me, I do the following:

1) The site is so highly geared towards DUI attorney services that you are better off creating a new domain.

2) You to learn Google AdWords and the system. This is a perfect example of allowing Google to run your bid management and having them put you in places you have no right to be in. This creates multiple issues such as a lower quality scores and waisted budgets with little hope to achieving a positive ROI.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: paid search, Using Spyfu

Landing Page Quality Really Hurting My Quality Score?

May 2, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

This has been such a debate throughout the years. Whether it is with a client or within your company, landing pages and the quality of them and how this impacts your paid search marketing has always been something that has been talked about yet nobody really has had a good answer. Google has made this much easier now to find this out by telling you!

Landing Page Quality – How Do I Know?

Google wants your landing pages to be relevant, ulta relevant to the paid search keywords and ad. They want this so that you convert higher and want to spend more money while limiting any click fraud settlements they have to make. Most industry experts have always said if your search quality score for a keyword (or ad group) has been a 1 out of 10 there must be some kind of violation going on. I really do not subscribe to this theory because many keywords within a poorly structured ad group can give you a QS of 1 yet the overall health of the ad group is good. Google has not been very transparent about this and it has left you guessing as to why. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Notice how it clearly tells you? NICE! You have no idea how many “discussions” I have had with people about how landing pages are causing higher CPCs via bad quality scores. Now they tell you which is which. If you’ve violated an actual Google policy, you’ll get a “site suspended” notice.

My Landing Page Shows No Violation – Now What?

This is where you need to stop and re-evaluate you entire paid search marketing strategy! It starts with your keywords, flows to the ad reads, and converts on the landing page. If you have not adopted a paid search strategy that looks at these key elements as a whole, it is now the time to start! First thing you need to do is is review Google’s terms of service for landing pages at: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&guide=28439&topic=30210&page=guide.cs . Then I would dive deep into your paid search campaign and find where you are doing the right and wrong things! From here you can make changes and optimize.

Google’s offical announcement is located at: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/04/more-clarity-in-adwords-for-advertisers.html.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: paid search, QS, search campaign, search keywords

Search Engine Marketing – Paid Search Tips

April 14, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Did you know the average paid search account spends $2,500 a month? That should tell you that the majority of companies using paid search are small businesses. Paid search is a great way to jump start your business but without a solid strategy and at least the basics you can really go through your money quickly and find little results. So with a budget this small how do you maximize these dollars? Here are some paid search tips that are a must:

Choose the right keywords – I can not stress this enough. With a small budget every click counts and by finding the keywords that have less competition you will pay less per click and this will make your money go further. WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery, and the tools provided by Google and Yahoo! are all great starting points. Take a look at this example: The term I used is “Atlanta lawn mower service” and the number one ad leads to this site: This is a perfect example that can break your budget and give you little results.

Daypart – Paid search marketing is one of the most competitive and tightly managed digital marketplaces that exists today. Yet in this world where daily micro-management of tens of thousands of keywords has become the norm, one of the simplest and most powerful strategies is often overlooked or underutilized. The art of dayparting is to shut down or start your campaign at certain times of the day to give your ads the maximum chance of being clicked by your targeted audiance. Cheryle Pingel, founder and president of Range Online Media, revealed what kinds of shoppers are on the Web and when. Men are generally buying before or at work between 6 and 8 a.m. Women, on the other hand, are shopping in the evening. So, if you’re selling football tickets you might want to boost your listings to a top spot in the morning. But if you run a woman’s shoe store, pause or delete your ad listings until after work hours.

Go Long Tail – Longer Tail terms are ones that appeal to users searching for very niche or specific items. For example, a generic term from the B2C world would be ‘Teddy Bears’. A Long Tail term would be ‘Big Teddy Bears’ or ‘Big Teddy Bear Delivery’. This will help avoid the high cost generic terms and pick up traffic from people doing very specific searches. Not only will the CPC be significantly cheaper, but you’ll tend to find that prospects know exactly what they want, and the quality and number of inquiries resulting from the clicks will be much higher.

Explore Content Networks – Personally I am not a big fan of content networks as they generally offer a lower quality visitor and will eat up your budget quickly. You can police and control campaigns to accommodate for these content network traps by building campaigns specifically for content networks.

Ad Writing – By far the most important thing you can do to optimize your campaign. If your ad copy is stale or less relevant, you may suffer from a low clickthrough rate, which in turn will hurt your quality score (in Google) and make you pay more for your clicks. You can also lose positioning which allows your competitors to have a stronger opportunity to take your visitors. The beauty of this is that you can always have ads rotating, and if your new efforts do not pan out, the major search engines will automatically stick to what was working. Take a look at the ads to the left that came up for me when I used the search term “Atlanta lawn service. These ads lack the necessary attention grabber necessary in my opinion to get visitors to click on them consistently.

Negative Keywords – A core component to managing your keyword list and saving your budget. Adding a negative keyword to your ad group or campaign means that your ads won’t show for search queries containing that term. By filtering out unwanted impressions, negative keywords can help you reach the most appropriate prospects, reduce your cost-per-click (CPC), and increase your ROI. Take a look at this example: My search was for “landscaping software” and got the following ads: the third ad really needs to use negative keywords! The amount of unwanted clicks (if any due to a bad ad) can crush your budget.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: campaigns, Daypart Paid, paid search, Range Online Media