PPC

Using Long Tail Keywords Still Pays Off

February 14, 2012 By Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Is the use of long tail keywords in your paid search marketing and search engine optimization dead

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

tips on remarketing for maximizing your paid search needs.

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 1 Comment

Does Using An SEO Performance Based Company Work

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 Ad Copy Optimzation

June 20, 2011 By Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

paid search ads for atlanta home builders

Paid search marketing is a very “hands on” search marketing strategy and having a firm or a in-house person work on your PPC campaign is so much more profitable than allowing the search engines to do it for you. I am a big believer that the keywords you bid on and the ads you use are a key factor in conversions. I will go far and say that your business will not succeed in paid search if your keywords and ads are not optimized to their fullest. Today I would like to talk about ad reads in the home builder industry specifically for the Atlanta new homes term and how to optimize them for great click through rates.

So let’s start off by showcasing a few ad reads that have popped up when I do a search for the terms “atlanta new homes” and see how they can be optimized:

Ad Copy Strategy Using Atlanta New Homes

Use discounts or pricing – of course this can be great for any retailer but a great way to use this strategy for our example is to showcase home prices “from”. Something like “Atlanta new homes starting from the low 100′s” or ” Covering up to $10,000 is closing costs”.
Using the brand name – this is something that all home builders do very well as they are doing a tremendous amount of traditional and online advertising. The question comes into play when a builder who is not very well known is using their brand within the ad.
Google site links – if you are a premium advertiser, the ads that appear above the natural search results, not alongside them on the left, you can choose up to ten links to appear underneath your main ad – Google will automatically choose four and the settings are applied at campaign level. Many have seen an increase of 30% in their click through rates because of them.
Google extended headlines – as I talked in a previous post, Google has been implementing longer headlines in their premium ads. Ultimately Google will make the call on whether your description line #1 will be moved into the headline of your ad. While you can’t explicitly opt into (or out of) this, you can influence the probability of your ad displaying as such. By crafting your ad so that each line of copy appears as a distinct sentence that ends with proper punctuation, you’ll at least be in a position to have your ad appear with the extended headline.
Urgency/Expiration- I love using this one! Look at every infomercial you see on tv and notice the time remaining or items sold counter? This is exactly what they are doing by relying on your sense of urgency. Reads for our example can be:
1. Atlanta new homes – communities are 90% sold out!
2. We cover all closing costs till July 6th!
3. Over 4,000 new homes sold in Atlanta!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: conversions, paid search, PPC

How To Work With A PPC Management Company

February 21, 2011 By Frank Pipolo 1 Comment

So you have decided to put your trust a search marketing company. You have tried to use PPC for your advertising, and running these ad campaigns in-house but you feel it is time to use a PPC management company. Looking at this scenario, the end result is fairly easy for me to predict — the time and expertise you have means your keywords and ad copy will grow to certain really will not grow from there. So at this point you will see little success to drive sales and maximize the return on ad buys. Many small companies find themselves in this exact situation every year. Most understand that their PPC campaigns are under-performing, and that means it is going to be impossible for your business to create the ads and put the time in to optimize the ad campaigns.

Admitting to Outsource

The solution is to outsource your PPC campaigns to a PPC management firm who can leverage their expertise while maintaining control, and offer the opportunity to rapidly increase the size of the PPC efforts needed. Many will admitted they are not fans of allowing service companies to handle their PPC campaigns, but there is much to be offered by allowing PPC optimizers to handle this for your company.

Common In House Paid Search Mistakes

Most small businesses will not see the return on their PPC investment because of these:

Limited resources and knowledge means ad copy and keywords will not grow.
Limited budget means every advertising dollar needs to be well-spent and highly optimized.
Not only is copy and keywords an issue, there is no real tracking of each individual ad campaigns to ensure performance is optimized.
Depending on how many keywords you are promoting, scalability of the PPC campaigns becomes and issue.

Picking The Right PPC Management Company

Finding the right solution for any company is different for each. Some PPC companies will start you off with a limited budget and no contractual agreement. This can be a great option for the small business owner. You can set the PPC ad campaign and the paid search marketing company will work within the set budget to execute the campaign. The first step in this process involves a teleconference with you and a representative from the PPC company. Basic questions should be: “Do you have experience working with smaller companies that demand high levels of return working in the e-commerce space and have this particular price point?” You need to make sure the PPC company is upfront about their successes, but also about areas or industries where they haven’t been quite as successful, while answering specific questions about their process.

Questions Your Paid Search Company Should Ask You

What content do you want in your campaigns?
What is your best service or product?
What would you like to optimize the most?
Where is your competition?

What Are Some Things You Should Expect From Your Paid Search Company?

New PPC Keywords
New ads for your review
Weekly meetings
Landing page suggestions

Expected Results From A PPC Management Agency Of course this is where it can get very confusing as it really depends on so many factors. I think you should expect the following results from your PPC management service:

100% increase in your CTR (click through rate)
Top PPC campaigns should convert at 15+%
CPA (cost per acquisition) decrease by 50%
Increase conversion volume by 400%

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: campaigns, CPA, CTR, management company, management firm, marketing company, PPC, ppc management

Paid Search News – Google Testing Longer Headlines

February 8, 2011 By Frank Pipolo 1 Comment

google testing paid search marketing ads - longer headlines

I just recently created a post on paid search marketing 101 for the small business and thought this would be a great add on to that post. Google has been and always will be a big believer in conversion optimization testing. Think about it for a second. Why wouldn’t they be right?

a big advantage for your paid search ads

The more conversions, in this case clicks, the more they make. They have been testing over the past few weeks longer headlines within selected paid search ads. This is part of the blog post on their official blog:

“We’re continually testing variations of our search results page to optimize performance for both you and our users. Similarly, you’re probably always trying to find ways to maximize each line of your ad to get your message across to users. To help, we’ll soon be making a change to certain ads that will allow you to display more information where it’s most likely to be noticed–in the headline.” You can read the full blog post here.

How Do You Get Them?

You have to be one of the top ads for that search term and your first description line needs to have the punctuation. My research has show me that this is only happening to description lines that end in a period.

What Do I Have To Do To My Ads?

Nothing as long as your search ad has a the correct punctuation in the first description line.

What Is The Big Deal About This?

It makes your ads different and in the world of paid search this is a premium. Anything you can do to look different against your competition will help you drive more qualified traffic to your site and hopefully convert to more sales. Take a look at my example and notice the difference between the 1st and 3rd search ad from the 2nd one? It makes a big difference in how the ad stands out.

So What Can I Expect From This?

Google says that they have seen higher click through rates for these ads and that is about all they will give us on this topic. I can tell you that I expect to see a 10-15% increase in your click through rate but I do have a client that has been fortunate enough to receive this upgrade in their marketing ad throughout the past few weeks and has seen a 25-35% increase in click through rate. A very nice gain!

OK I Am Sold – What’s Next?

First of all, Google is NOT recommending you optimize your PPC ads for this upgrade. I would attend to agree as an overall search marketing strategy but would look at opportunities to do this now on a keyword by keyword basis. Ask yourself:

Is your ad already in the top spot for that keyword?
Does your first description line end in a period (or exclamation point)?
Are you happy with the results from this ad you are getting currently?

You may think the last bullet point is crazy. Why wouldn’t you want additional clicks of qualified traffic? Just remember that this is a test and you have to treat it as if you were heading off to Vegas with pocket full of money. There are no guarantees in gambling that your going to win and the same holds true for testing. Honestly, I am a gambling man (even though this is not a big gamble to do) so I would start researching your keywords, find out where you are positioned, and tweak those ads to make sure the first description line ends in a period. Hopefully the Google paid search gods will sprinkle down some magic dust upon you!

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: conversion, conversions, headlines, marketing 101, optimization, paid search, PPC, search ads, search term, small business

Small Business Paid Search Marketing 101

February 7, 2011 By Frank Pipolo 1 Comment

example site for paid search marketing post

I have such a love/hate relationship with paid search marketing. What is so great about it is that your are able to bring traffic to your website very quickly while you work on your search engine optimization to start to work. Yet, what is so frustrating about it is that it can be such a money pit that you do not have the opportunity (budget) to really have it be a successful part of your search marketing plan. Even worse, you hire a fly by night search marketing company to manage your PPC campaigns and you pay the majority of your money to them to give you less traffic than you would have gotten yourself. If you are planning to try to do it on your own here are a few things to do:

Set Up a Trial PPC Account

I can not stress this enough. You are not going to be any good at this at first and you do not want your account (and you) to pay for it in the future. This very easy to accomplish and will help you greatly in the long run. Start off by creating a Gmail account. Then, open a AdWords account under that Gmail account and start! Kind of reminds me of the days in sales at a pharmaceutical manufacturer years ago. When new sales people hit the sales floor we would give them the back of their client book of business (the ones that hated us or have not bought from us for years) so that they can learn how to pronounce the generic chemical names and get a feel of what it is like to perform this job. Of course the sales person was not very good at this and they were able to get their “feet wet” without hurting the front part of their book of business which was the ones who did buy from us.

List Your Conversions By Priority

We all want more money and that could be actual sales through your e-commerce or leads to follow up on. What about branding, newsletter sign ups, downloads of a PDF, webniars, videos, social shares, bookmarks? These are all conversions that will help make sales and you need to take at least the top three and use them as success metrics within your paid search campaign. If not, you run a very big risk (depending product or service your offer) of not seeing the value of your PPC campaign.

Build Your Search Keywords

Start with your website and find the main keywords within it. For this post, I am going to use Billiards Plus website. Billiards Plus is a company out in central Ohio that is a billiards supply store . As you can see from the picture, a pretty cool site that offers lots of different types of billiard and dart supplies. So how do you go about developing your keyword list for your PPC campaign based on this site? This site screams local and I would start off with keywords that will include the city (Dublin) and some surrounding cities such as Colony Estates and Coventry Woods into the more generic terms like pool tables, billiard supplies, pool table service, etc.

Account Category Setup

You have signed up for your AdWords account and you have a good sense of your keywords and conversions so now it is time to set up your categories. Give our example, I would use the following:

Dart Supplies – Local
Dart Supplies – General
Pool Tables – Local
Pool Tables – General
Billiard Supplies – Local
Billiard Supplies – General

At this point you may want to keep the budget more on the local categories than the general ones at first to see how well those general terms like “pool tables” will actually work.

PPC Keyword Exact Match Type

So there are 3 major match types out there across the search networks and I am going to talk about one of them called exact match. I am a big fan of using exact match on the majority of search terms especially when you are first starting your PPC campaign. Your visitors are highly qualified and you really limit your budget while keeping “window shoppers” from clicking your ads and having to implement advanced paid search marketing tactics. You can not go wrong with using exact matching to start off with.

Ad Copy Creation & Ad Testing

I think this is where the fun begins. Ask yourself these few questions first:

What is the motivation of my users?
What is my company’s unique selling proposition?
What makes my company stand out from the rest?
From a visitor’s perspective, what is in it for them?

I think our example site would want to promote that they are family owned, been in business since 1995, and offer all the name brand pool tables at below retail prices. In terms of ad testing I would start with at least 3 different ads and have the search network deliver the ad that is driving the most click through. You want to make the ad copy as relevant as possible to the keywords you are bidding on so make sure you are including the keyword you are bidding on within that ad. A good ad example would be the following:

Ohio Billiard Supplies

Name brand pool tables below retail

Family owned & operated since 1995

I would also implement geo-targeting testing within this campaign as well so that only visitors that are within a certain radius would see these ads. Again, your millage may vary but something you should test.

Landing Pages & Search Ads

One of the biggest mistakes from new paid search DIYs is that they send visitors to the incorrect page from an ad. So many of them send visitors directly to the home page as they feel that this will give them the best opportunity to find what they want. Depending on the ad and the keyword it can be but the best advise I can give to anybody on this is to say think “no click” meaning the best experience you can give a paid search (or SEO) visitor is to have them land on a page that is exactly what they wanted to see from the ad and not to have them click to find what they are looking for. Given the example ad and site I would test sending them to the home page (and the ad and keyword are very generic in nature) or pool table page.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: Account Category Setup, Billiards Plus, campaigns, conversions, google keyword tool, inbound links, keyword phrase, keyword phrases, link popularity, link search engines, optimization tactics, page optimization, paid search, PPC, ppc tips, search engine optimization, search engine optimizers, search marketing 101, seo optimization

Paid Search Marketing For Beginners Tips – Paid Search Advertising

December 16, 2010 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:

Paid Search Keywords

I can not stress this enough. With a small budget every click counts and by finding the right PPC 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.

Daypart Targeting

PPC 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 paid search 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.

Long Tail Keywords – Go There!

Longer Tail keyword 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 keyword would be ‘Big Teddy Bears’ or ‘Big Teddy Bear Delivery’. This will help avoid the high cost generic keywords and pick up traffic from people doing very specific searches. Not only will your cost per click advertising 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.

Adwords 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 these campaigns to accommodate for these content network traps by building campaigns specifically for these including Google Adwords Content Network.

Writing Best PPC Ads

One of the most important thing you can do to optimize your campaign is writing PPC ads . If your paid search 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 on specific paid search keywords. 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.

Add Adwords Negative Keywords

A core component to managing your keyword list and saving your budget is adding negative keyword to your ad group or campaign means that your PPC ads won’t show for search queries containing that term. By filtering out unwanted impressions, a negative keyword lists can help you reach the most appropriate prospects, reduce your cost-per-click (CPC), and increase your ROI.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: paid search, Paid Search Keywords, PPC, ROI