Competitor analysis ordinarily forms a key part of any marketing activity, however seemingly, when it comes too PPC, it sometimes gets forgotten. 

All too often I see campaigns with impeccable structure, great keyword selection, judicious use of match types and negative matches and yet; they stumble at the final hurdle. Their ads just aren’t standing up (or standing out) versus the competition.

Consequently, as their click through rates are poor, their quality score is suffering and they’re paying over the odds for their clicks. Bad times.

So, just how good are your ads?

Check out the competition:

So you need to look at your ads in situ – here you’ll be able to see what the competition are doing, and indeed how your ads stack up. Now, you don’t want to look at them live, as you’ll be generating impressions and no clicks, which might hurt your quality score even more. Google have a handy solution – the ad preview tool.

So check you’ve selected the correct geo-targeting options so you can see your ads alongside your competitors, pop in your search query and you’re good to go. Here are some things to look out for:

Offers:
 

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I’ve chosen to use ‘double glazing’ to illustrate my point as it’s a very competitive ‘offer driven’ sector. On the page you’ll see ads featuring 40% off, 35% off, 70% off, 65% off, buy one get one free, etc, etc.

Now, imagine that you’re offering 35% off – I’m guessing that your click through rates might just suffer in the face of such competition.

So what do you do? Assuming you can’t offer 70% off to stay ahead of the competition, what should you say instead?

My view would be to create a new ad to test. Avoid the whole x% off messaging altogether as it looks like you can’t compete. Instead make a general mention of low pricing, or a sale, then focus on another key benefit – e.g. interest free credit; no quibble guarantees; lower energy bills; etc. Test it versus the current ad, and see what happens.

Humour:

 

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Alternatively, you might look for other ways to make your ad stand out versus the competition. Above I’ve shown an example of a search for ppc agencies. Now to my mind, whilst the ads shown are fine, they’re a little bit dry for my taste. Therefore, when I was creating a campaign for Gravytrain I elected to inject a little humour into the mix. Now clearly, depending on the product or service you’re promoting that might not be the way to go, but we’ve seen some success, so I would suggest a test.

Be Topical:

Again here this won’t necessarily be applicable to all products and services, however sometimes mentioning something topical can make your ad stand out versus the competition. We tested a set of ads which referenced the credit crunch for one of our insurance clients, which saw significantly higher click through rates than their previous best performing ad. Interestingly conversion rates also held up well.

 

Whatever you decide to do, we wouldn’t recommend making wholesale changes to your ads – instead leave your best performer live and create an alternative and see how it works for you. In order to give your new ad some exposure you’ll need to select: ‘Rotate – show ads more evenly’ within the ad serving options of your campaign settings.

Hopefully you’ve found this useful – if you’ve some additional tips you’d care to share please let me know in the comments.

Welcome to the final part of our introduction to PPC. If you’ve not already done so you may like to look over parts one, two, three, four and five.

So, by now you should have your account structure nicely planned out – it’s now time to write your ads and get that campaign live.

Back in part three we talked you through setting up your account, so you’ll now need to either login to that account, or if you’ve not done so already create your account.

Step One – Targeting Languages & Location

First you will be asked which languages, and which locations you wish to target. So, pick a campaign and input the relevant details.

Step Two – Creating Adverts

You’ll then be asked to create your first ad. This feels a little backward, as you haven’t inputted any keywords yet. Don’t worry – just pick an adgroup – you’ll be asked to input the keywords after you’ve created your ad.

You’ll see that you have a strict character limit of 25 for the headline, and 35 for the following two lines. Ultimately it’s all about targeting. You want your ad copy to match your keywords as closely as possible. Try to:

1. Mention the keywords targeted
2. Make the ad relevant
3. Add in an offer or call to action to encourage people to click

It’s not a bad idea to have a look at other advertisers to make sure that your ad is competitive – for example offering a 10% discount for online orders sounds great, until your competitor starts offering a 20% discount.

It’s all about testing and learning. You won’t know what works until you try. Always create a minimum of two ads for each adgroup so you can see which ad performs better.

Step Three – Keywords

Now you can cut and paste the keywords which relate to the ad you’ve just created directly from word or excel. Or type them in if you’ve formulated your keyword lists on paper.

Step Four – Pricing

Again here – this is a little confusing - you’ll need to input the daily budget for the campaign, (i.e. the amount you want to spend on all of the adgroups in the campaign) and the maximum cost per click you are willing to pay for the keywords in your adgroup.

Right now I would recommend that you do NOT bid on the content network. To do this, simply leave the box marked CPC Content Bid blank.

Step Five – Billing

You’ll then be asked for your billing details. Again, I know this feels kind of strange – you haven’t finished setting up yet have you? Don’t worry. Just complete your billing details, and you’ll then get the opportunity to continue to build your adgroups and/or further campaigns.

 

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

You should now find yourself in the Adwords interface. You’ll now need to input all of your other adgroups and campaigns. Until you’re 100% ready to go I’d recommend pausing all campaigns – you can then go live once everything is inputted.

 

Track Conversions…

If your customers can convert online, it’s really important to track this. If you’re using the new adwords interface, click on the tools tab, then on to conversion tracking. If you’re using the old interface, you can click directly on conversion tracking it’s the fourth option on the campaign management tab.

 

Don’t Go Live Yet! Top Tips to Save the Pennies…

When you’re starting out, it’s easy to blow your budget on clicks you don’t want – avoid this by following our top tips:

1. Make sure you’re geo-targeting the right area – if you’re based in the UK, you probably don’t want US clicks – check your campaign settings
2. Check that you’re not on the content network (unless you want to be) – again check your campaign settings
3. Add negative keywords – remember when we did keyword research in part four we were left with unrelated terms? Add these as negative keywords to prevent your ads from appearing for unrelated terms – you can add negative keywords at a campaign or an ad group level.
4. Consider keyword matching options – for further details see Google’s explanation

Ok, so you’re good to go? Unpause those campaigns and make it live!

 

One Final Note

Remember – everything you’re doing right now is a test. You’ll find that some keywords work better than others, and likewise some ads work better than others. The key is to test and learn, then refine your campaign accordingly.

 

 

Image credit Miss Turner

Wow – we’re up to part five of the series! If you’ve not already done so, we’d recommend that you read part one, two, three and four.

So in our last post we dealt with keyword research – so hopefully you’ve now got yourself a lovely long list of keywords. Now it’s time to organise them into appropriate groups.

You might remember in part three we talked a little about account structure. To give a quick recap, an adwords account is structured as follows:

There are three levels account, campaign and ad group:

1. Account - this is the top level, your adwords account has a unique email address & password for access purposes and your billing information.
2. Campaign - A campaign is associated with your account. At the campaign level you set the daily budget, language & geographic targeting, distribution (where your ad is shown), when your ad is shown (e.g. particular days of the week, and timings) and if desired an end date.
3. Adgroups – adgroup are associated with a campaign. At the adgroup level you select appropriate keywords and/or placements, set the bids for those keywords/placements, and create appropriate ads.

At the adgroup level you control which adverts are shown for which keywords.

Ultimately you want people to click on your ad, then go on to convert (e.g. buy your product / service; sign up; become a member etc, etc). It’s therefore important that the ad (or ads) that you show for your keywords are relevant.

Let’s imagine that you sell fruit online. You might decide that you want to bid on ‘buy green apples’. Lets consider the following ads:

Buy Green Apples Online                                                             

Golden Delicious, Granny Smiths &

More. Free Next Day Delivery!

Buy Fresh Fruit Online

Huge Selection of Fresh Fruit &

Free Next Day Delivery!

Clearly the first ad is more relevant to the ‘buy green apples’ query. It’s therefore more likely to elicit a click than the generic fresh fruit ad. When it comes of PPC relevancy is King, both for attracting visitors, but also because of the way paid search networks calculate the price you’ll pay per click.

Quality Score

Google calculate the price you’ll pay per click based on a number of factors all of which contribute to quality score. Google say:

Understandably Google don’t want to reveal the precise weighting of their quality score formula, however the core components are:

1. The click through rate (CTR) of the keyword and matched ad on Google (i.e. the number of times the ad has been shown divided by the number of clicks it has received)
2. Account history – the CTR of all of the keywords and matched ads in your account
3. Historical CTR of the URLs in your adgroup
4. Landing page quality
5. The relevance of the keyword to the ads in the adgroup
6. The relevance of the keyword and the ads to the search query
7. The account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown

By taking the time to create your adgroups appropriately you give yourself the very best chance of achieving a high quality score, which will mean your ads will appear in a higher position, and at a lower cost per click.

Creating Adgroups

Now there’s no ‘ideal’ number of adgroups – it really depends on the account.

If we go back to the example of selling fruit online, I would create an adgroup for each type of fruit which I sold – e.g. apples, pears, bananas, peaches, plums etc, etc. I would then also create other adgroups for more generic search terms like fruit, fresh fruit, dried fruit etc.

When I’m trying to split keywords into adgroups I just try to think about the ads which I’m going to create – e.g. it would be awkward to create a good ad which simultaneously do a good job targeting those who want to buy apples and those who want to buy pears – hence I’d split those keywords into two separate adgroups.

 

Well that’s all for this week, next time we’ll cover writing your ads and of course getting your campaigns live on Google.

 

Image credit oskay

Welcome to part four of our introduction to PPC. If you haven’t already, you might like to read part one, part two and part three… wow, we’re creating a monster here

In the last post I looked at account structure, and today I’ll be looking at keyword research.

For the purposes of this illustration I’ll keep things fairly simple. Let’s go back to our example account Assured Insurance. They just want to focus on Taxi Insurance for the time being. So, how might we go about researching potential keywords for this niche?

Keyword Research

Well there are lots of keyword research tools out there – some are completely free, and others you have to pay for. I’m a huge fan of the Adwords Keyword Tool and, you’ll be pleased to know it’s free.

So, Assured Insurance want to sell taxi insurance. So, we need to think about what people who are looking for taxi insurance might type into a search engine.

The most obvious is of course – taxi insurance. Nice. But what else do people call taxis? Some people say cab, some say mini cab, some say black cab (and so on). So before I do anything else, I’d pop ‘taxi’ into the keyword tool.

This generates 137  related keywords, and a further 63 additional keywords. At the bottom of the first list there’s a blue link saying ‘add all 137′ – click it! Likewise click the link at the end of the second list to add all 63. On the right hand side of your screen you’ll see all of your selected keywords. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click download .csv for excel.

So you’ve now got a whole load of keywords – some better than others. Now’s the time to go through them and sort the wheat from the chaff.

First of all – think local. For example in London we have black cabs, in New York they have yellow cabs. Pick the term relevant to the location that you are targeting. Whilst you’re going through this list it’s also a really good idea to pull out the terms which are unrelated to your product or service.

So, I’ve been through my list, and here’s what I’ve got:

Related terms to taxi:

black cab, black cab taxi, black cabs, blacks taxis, cab, cab driver, cabs, mini cab, mini cabs, minicab, minicabs, private hire, private hire taxi, private hire taxis, taxi, taxi black cab, taxi black cabs, taxi cab, taxi driver, taxi drivers, taxicab, taxis.

Unrelated terms to taxi:

airport, bus, car, cars, chauffeur, fare, fares, limo, limousine, limousines, minibus, river, shuttle, transport, travel, used

NB these unrelated terms are going to be useful later on – so I’ll be keeping them safe.

So I’ve now got a list of the terms people might use when referring to taxis. Now of course you need to relate that back to insurance. So go back to the keyword tool and get keyword ideas for the search term ‘taxi insurance’.

I’ve now got 112 related keywords and 86 related keywords to taxi insurance. This time I’m looking at terms related to insurance that I can slot the terms which I’ve already got into. As before download all the keywords into .csv for excel and again sort the wheat from the chaff.

From this you can create yourself a pretty comprehensive list – e.g. for taxi:

taxi insurance, insurance for taxi, taxi insurance online quote, taxi insurance quote, best taxi insurance, budget taxi insurance, taxi insurance companies, taxi insurance quotes, cheap taxi insurance, cheaper taxi insurance, cheapest taxi insurance, compare taxi insurance, taxi insurance cover, taxi insurance brokers, etc, etc.

I’d then repeat this process for each of the related terms to taxi.

Other Keyword Research Methods

Now, the process above should give you a pretty comprehensive list – however there are still some other options open to you. If you’ve got an analytics package on your website you could use this to see which terms people are already using to find you.

You could also use a thesaurus – for this example, in addition to my existing options it also offered up hackney cab, and hackney carriage – possibly not the highest traffic terms, but nevertheless they might be worth including.

For some niches it’s also worth researching offline – e.g. reading around the subject, speaking to people in the market you are targeting etc.

 

That’s all (for now) folks! Don’t miss the next part of our series – we’ll be dealing with organising your keywords into adgroups (and explaining why it’s so important).

 

Image credit Jeffrey Beall

Welcome to part three of our introduction to PPC – not read part one or part two yet? Might be worth reading them in order… just sayin’ 

So, to recap, we’ve given you a basic introduction, and looked at the planning stages to go through prior to tackling your PPC campaign. Today it gets exciting – we’re going to set up an account.

Now, as previously mentioned, all of the major search engines offer PPC. However, when you’re starting out we’d recommend you choose just one search engine to focus your activity on – you can always branch out later.

Now, we’d recommend you start with Google. Why? Well whilst the cost per click on Google is often higher than on the other search engines, Google does drive the most traffic, and has (for our money anyways), the most user-friendly interface. It’s also a lot easier to control your campaigns via Google.

Setting up an Adwords Account

Click here to sign up.

You first need to decide whether to go with the starter edition, or the standard edition. We’d recommend you go straight to the standard edition, as you then get the benefit of the advanced features. However, if you do decide to go with the starter edition, rest assured you can switch to the standard edition at any time.

You’ll be asked to choose a username and password for your Adwords account. Once you’ve done this you’ll find your self on the ’set currency preferences’ page.

Now, be careful – you can’t go back and change this afterwards!

Here you set the currency which you want Google to bill you in. Clearly, we’d recommend you choose your native currency – e.g. if you’re in the UK pick British Pounds Sterling (GBP).

Your account has now been created. It really is as easy as that.

Now you need to start thinking about how to structure your account. Don’t worry, for now you’ve just created an account – you’ve no campaigns running so you’re not spending any money.

 

Adwords Account Structure

In part two of the guide we talked a little about planning your PPC campaign. We were dealing with big picture stuff – namely:

1. Key objectives – e.g. generate sales or enquiries, newsletter sign ups etc
2. Checking your website & internal processes
3. The price you’re willing (or able!) to pay per click
4. Overall budget

Now we need to start thinking about the minutiae.

Again here I’d recommend that you plan your PPC activity offline rather than online. A well structured account will work far more effectively for your business, so it really is worth putting in the time now.

An adwords account is structured as follows:

There are three levels account, campaign and ad group. The diagram below shows the account structure and the settings that are applied at each level. In summary:

1. Account - this is the top level, your adwords account has a unique email address & password for access purposes and your billing information.
2. Campaign - A campaign is associated with your account. At the campaign level you set the daily budget, language & geographic targeting, distribution (where your ad is shown), when your ad is shown (e.g. particular days of the week, and timings) and if desired an end date.
3. Adgroups – adgroup are associated with a campaign. At the adgroup level you select appropriate keywords and/or placements, set the bids for those keywords/placements, and create appropriate ads.

 

Now clearly every business is different, but we thought it might be useful to illustrate how you might go about structuring your account. We’re therefore using an imaginary business as an example:

Example Account Structure – Assured Insurance

Now Assured Insurance are an insurance broker. They offer insurance on a wide range of products, but for now just want to test the PPC market for taxi insurance.

They only wish to target English speakers, and in terms of geography they want to target the UK, but need to exclude the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, as they do not offer insurance policies in these areas. They only want their ads to run Monday-Friday from 9am-5pm.

This example is pretty simple. One product, with clear geo-targeting and timings.

As such we can set this account up using just one campaign, and multiple adgroups – E.G.

 

Tips for Good Account Structure

Obviously every business will be different, but broadly speaking we’d recommend the following:

1. You need a separate campaign for any product which you sell whereupon you want to either target a specific area or specific times/days of the week, as these settings can only be controlled at a campaign level, not at the adgroup level.
2. Budgets are also set at a campaign level, so if you need to be able to control your daily spend between your various products, set them up as campaigns. NB this is particularly pertinent if one product yields a greater return than another.
3. Try to future-proof your account – is it conceivable that you might want greater control over how your advertise certain products? Then set them up as separate campaigns.

That’s not to say that the rule is one campaign per product – you might consider theming – e.g. if your business sells flower seeds and bulbs you might have ‘Roses’ as a campaign, then have separate adgroups for each particular variety of rose.

Or if you run a job website, you might consider having a campaign for ‘Marketing’ jobs, then have seperate adgroups for key job titles – e.g. marketing assistant, marketing exec, marketing manager, marketing director and so on. Ultimately it’s comes down to whatever is best for your business.

We’ll leave it there for today, in our next post we’ll be talking about keyword research and creating adgroups – hope you’ll swing by and take a look…