This week we were featured in Figaro Digital and Figaro Digital online. The article’s focus on a case study with regard to our work with QuoteSearcher and are examples of one of our very many successful paid search campaigns.

QuoteSearcher’s PPC account covers a wide range of insurance products, including Landlord, Caravan, Motor Trade and Taxi Insurance. The aim was to lower the average CPC and CPA, while increasing the volume of leads generated through PPC.

The big part of the strategy, as with every PPC account, was to test and refine keywords, adverts and landing pages. Although with the QuoteSearcher account, the main focus was around the actual profit margin of each lead that was generated.

In just 12 months, leads generated rose by 89% while the average Cost per Click dropped by over 65p.
To find out more about our strategy, execution and results, read the article on Figaro Digital’s website.

If you would like to find out how Gravytrain can help your business, please contact our Business Development Executive, Alex Moran, on 020 8941 2364.

One thing we love here at Gravytrain is proper thorough analysis, especially when it comes to saving money on PPC. So, one of the more common pieces of analysis we conduct is looking into all the Broad Match keywords in our clients’ PPC accounts and the actual search terms they are coming up for.

Too often we see PPC accounts where Broad Match keywords have been simply paused because although they were getting a high volume of clicks they were converting at a very low rate and just wasting lots of money. But there is another option to pausing them.

It is crucial, with Broad Match keywords, to not just look at them specifically but at the actual Search Terms behind these keywords that have been generating the clicks, as Google can sometimes have you appearing for some quite interesting and irrelevant searches.

What Am I Actually Coming Up For?

Last week we did a full search term analysis, over a 60 day period, for one of our Insurance based clients, in order to find search terms that were generating impressions and clicks but not actually delivering any conversions, and what we found was quite remarkable!

Over the 2 month period we found that our Insurance based ads had not only appeared for but had actually had clicks on searches such as “la senza in store returns policy”, “rugby ball shops”, “buy iphone 4 online” and “cher lloyds clothes”.

Now, I know that the idea of Broad Match is that it is ‘broad’ and brings your ads up for anything that includes one of your keywords, but some of these are still very baffling. “buy iPhone 4 online” could have been picked up by a keyword including “online insurance”, whilst “la senza in store returns policy”” could have been picked up by a keyword that included “Insurance Policy”, but “Rugby Ball Shops” and “Cher Lloyds Clothes” are even more broad and very far removed from any aspect of Insurance!

How do I stop this?

Well, the obvious solution is to add some of these search terms to the negative keyword list. Being insurance based, we were comfortably sure that by adding terms such as “la senza” and “iPhone 4” to our negative keyword list that we were not going to miss out on any conversions!

However, even if you do this analysis every month and add a bunch of negative keywords each time there is still the possibility that you will come up for others broad searches that are just as irrelevant (this wasn’t the first time we did this investigation!), and you can’t negative match every single phrase and word not related to insurance!

The other option is to not use Broad Match keywords at all. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “that’s mad” and of course I don’t think it is sensible to go and turn of all your Broad Match keywords and just have Phrase and Exact Match, as Broad is the best way to bring in a high volume of clicks and appear for a large amount of relevant search terms. But there is a compromise.

Broad Match Modifier

Yes there is more to PPC than Exact, Phrase and Broad Match! By simply adding a + symbol in front of a keyword you can make it a Broad Match Modifier. What this means is that you Google will show your ad for the exact keyword you have and close approximations.

For example, if you were to use the keyword +Car +Insurance, with the Broad Match Modifier, you would be able to appear for searches such as “Car Insurance” and “Cheap Car Insurance” but have no risk of coming up for searches such as “Car Parts UK” or “Home Insurance” which you may well have done if it was just a general Broad Match keyword.

Basically, the Broad Match Modifier gives you more reach than Phrase Match but without the random mess of searches you can get with simple Broad Match. So no more “Rugby Ball Shops”, “iPhone 4s” and “Cher Lloyds Clothes”!

“So what’s the secret with PPC?”

The question is usually something along those lines. I feel a bit like scrooge cancelling christmas writing this post (especially if you’ve found this post searching for the PPC silver bullet) because, quite frankly , there simply isn’t any silver bullet with PPC.

This is not to say that paid search can’t be complex (it often is) , or that there aren’t really any ways to make a difference to a campaign – just that there’s no 1 overpowering method to suddenly reduce your CPA or increase your clicks. You’ll need to do better than that.

There’s now more settings and options with adwords than there have been. Whether you want to add videos , text links or phone numbers to your ads, you can now do it. There’s new keyword match types, mobile device targetting, new ad formats and the ability to ‘remarket’ to people who’ve previously visited your website.

These changes , combined with future improvments, make PPC one of the most exciting areas of digital marketing to be involved in – it means that , increasingly , every paid search account is different not only just in the keywords and campaigns , but in a whole range of ways.It also means that we need to take even more time to understand not just all of the options available to us, but how we can apply these to the client account in question.

The impact on PPC is subtle, yet important. Any marketeers approaching PPC with a fixed methodology are likely to find their work increasingly ineffective. To give an example, I’ve seen checklists and process plans for PPC management – while best practises can be beneficial, a checklist applied to every client is a classic way to get things the wrong way round.

As with traditional marketing, the best way to approach a PPC is to start with the objectives of the  business in question – for us, it means understanding our client. It may sound banal to point out that understanding a client means understanding how best to make the campaign work, but it’s nevertheless the case. The most important part of the planning phase for a new PPC client is in being able to map activities according to the level of impact they will have on the client – how much difference optimising them will actually make. When you’ve done this, you know what you need to spend time on, and what you really need to get right.

For cleints, rotating ad-copy can make all the difference , while for others it’s all about conversion rate optimisation. If rotating ads frequently doesn’t make the difference, don’t feel compelled to do it every week. Equally, If reducing the dropout of a form doubles your return on the entire campaign, do feel compelled to spend every last hour trying to achieve it.

If anything, the ’silver bullet’ of PPC could be as simple as understanding the impact of your work, before you start.

Right, lets get to it!

Firstly, you’ll need to create an account… but I’ve already got one – I hear you cry!

Well, nonetheless I would strongly suggest that you create a separate account for Facebook advertising – just to keep it totally separate from your personal profile. It does look like you can allow other people access to the advertising part of your account, without them seeing your personal profile… But still – I’d consider it ‘best practice’ just to keep them separate – our account manager at Facebook recommended we do it that way too… Better safe than sorry, eh?

So once you’ve created a new account, click on the ‘Advertising’ link at the bottom right of the page. Should you wish to, you might like to checkout Facebook’s Guide to Advertising – probably worth a look; although it’s fairly straight forward.

The first step is to create your advert…

Pop in your destination URL – you’ll then see that there is an option to suggest an ad – click on it if you like; quite handily Facebook will grab a couple of the images from the page – which may be the ones you want to use.

Less handily the auto-generated ad text is pretty rubbish, but you can amend that

Bear in mind that your ad needs to attract attention, so don’t be afraid to get a little creative with your headline and body copy. Also, you can of course upload any image you like… Just make sure you own the rights to it!

Just for fun, I’ve created an ad targeted specifically to Coca Cola employees – (don’t panic all will become clear in a minute).

I’ll now click on continue, to move on to targeting options…

Targeting on Facebook…

Here’s where Facebook is actually pretty awesome.

Remember my Coca Cola ad? Well thanks to the magic of Facebook I can get it to show up only to people who work for Coca Cola.

There are tons of options here – you can target by location, age, gender, sexuality,  relationship status, languages, their likes & interests, plus education & where they work. So, you can be as targeted or generic as you like.

The marketer in me, says ‘be targeted’ – but I guess it really depends on what it is that you’re looking to do. For example – if you were running some adverts for an online job site which covers all sectors and locations – you might just elect to be pretty generic.

As before, when you’re done, click continue…

Campaigns, Pricing & Scheduling

This bit is pretty self-explanatory – just set your pricing, scheduling etc and then hit review advert…

You’ll then get the opportunity to either ‘place order’ (which is an odd turn of phrase, but heigh ho) – or go back and edit your ad.

Then simply lather, rinse and repeat to create as many ads as you like.

The targeting is set at a campaign level – but you can create as many campaigns as you like – just be a bit careful if you are creating multiple ads for campaigns – as if you’re not careful you can find yourself adding the adverts under the wrong campaign.

To be honest the system is pretty slow, clunky and has an irritating tendency to crash. It would be really handy to have an offline Facebook Editor (as with the Google AdWords editor) as I’m pretty sure that this would speed up the process – perhaps something for the future eh, Facebook?

So… hopefully you’ve found this useful – as usual, any feedback, questions or declarations of love via the comments please

A Brief History of PPC

The pay per click model came about in the late 1990s and differed from previous methods of advertising which were based on CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rather than cost per click. GoTo.com (later Overture, now part of Yahoo) were the first search engine to offer PPC in 1998.  Google were a little late to the party, adopting the PPC model in 2002.

Back in the bad old days it was literally an auction with the advertiser who was willing to pay the most per click securing the top position.

However, it quickly became obvious that this wasn’t the best model – a pretty irrelevant ad which gets only 1% of the clicks @ £10 per click generates less revenue than a relevant one which gets 10% of the clicks @ £2 per click.

As such in the mid-noughties Google introduced quality score – an algorithm which essentially ensured that most relevant ads (i.e. the ads which generated the most revenue) would get pushed to the top of the results. Yahoo and MSN later followed suit with algorithms of their own.

This changed the face of PPC – as instead of fighting an auction war, PPC-ers had to get a little bit cuter and make sure their ads were as relevant and attractive to users as possible in order to secure a decent position on the page and (potentially at least) reduce the cost they pay per click.

Quality Score Explained

Quality score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query – that is, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad.

So, how is it calculated?

Quality score on the search network is calculated based on the following metrics:

1. Historic click through rate of the keyword, ad and display URL
2. Relevancy of the keyword and ad to the term which is being searcher for
3. Relevancy of the keyword to the ad copy
4. Relevancy of the keyword to the landing page
5. Landing page quality
6. Historic account click through rate

You can read more here.

For obvious reasons Google don’t reveal quite how these factors are weighted, however it’s easy enough to guess

It’s pretty much all about click through rate.

This a nice metric as high click through rate indicates that users think that your ads are relevant/offer an attractive proposition AND of course clicks = money for Google.

Should you *always* worry about Quality Score?

Frankly, no. Whilst having a high quality scores is good from a cost per click point view (as you’re likely to be paying less per click) – you shouldn’t necessarily let it bother you overly. Obviously Google want you to play by their rules and create relevant ads that people want to click on so they can continue to rake it in; however – on some occasions you might want to bid on certain keywords, but limit the number clicks you get.

For many clients we use ad text to pre-screen clicks. For example, we may bid on a term like ‘taxi insurance’; but because our client only wants to insure taxi drivers over a certain age we might elect to run an ad like this:

Low Cost Taxi Insurance

Over 25? Compare Leading Taxi

Insurers & Find the Cheapest Quote!

TaxiInsuranceExperts.co.uk

Now here, we’re actively trying to limit the number of clicks which we’ll get – which of course may impact our quality score – however it’s far more important for us to deliver the right sort of leads to our client. So it’s not necessarily something you ought to be tyrannised by

Questions, comments, etc? Hit up the comments my dears.

Image credit KB35