Whilst falling prey to these sins is unlikely to see you in one of Dante’s nine circles; chances are you will be adversely affecting your campaign; and so, without further ado – I give you the seven deadly sins of PPC…

Wrath

Also known as anger or rage; wrath encompasses both actions against others, and indeed self-denial. It also includes the desire to seek revenge, and generally wishing to do harm to others. In PPC such acts of wrath might include clicking on your competitors ads in order to run down their budget…

Don’t do it. Google in particular are pretty good at spotting click fraud so chances are your efforts are being wasted in any case. Your time and energy would be much better spent focusing on improving your own campaign.

Avarice

More commonly quoted as greed, avarice is an excessive pursuit of wealth – perhaps at the cost of everything else. Now in PPC terms this perhaps isn’t quite so sinful; unless of course it’s misguided. Are you so busy ensuring you’ve covered every conceivable keyword that you’ve forgotten to optimise your campaign and focus on what actually works? If you’re in e-commerce are your prices competitive? Alternatively it may be that you’ve swung the other way entirely – in your quest for a perfectly optimised campaign you’ve created a narrowly targeted campaign which works brilliantly from a cost per acquisition/sale point of view; but fails to deliver the volume you really need.

Envy

Envy can cause poor PPC management decisions. You see your competitor consistently appearing for a set of keywords (often head terms) which despite rounds and rounds of testing you’ve never managed to make work for you. You think, how are they making that work? Why is it that they can make it work and I can’t? Focus on your own campaign and your own objectives. Many companies run ‘loss leaders’ within otherwise successful PPC campaigns. Maybe those keywords are just that – loss leaders. Are they something you can afford? If not, pause them. Similarly, some go to great lengths to copy their competitors landing pages, just because they assume they will convert better; rather than checking their assumptions by split testing first.

Sloth

Sloth is the most common of PPC sins. If you want your campaign to deliver, you’ll need to work at it. You’ll need to consistently improve and refine your campaign – you can’t just set it up and let it run…

Pride

Pride is described as an excessive love of self. In PPC those who are overly proud probably think that there’s nothing left for them to learn. They believe that their PPC campaign is so well optimised that it really couldn’t be improved. I’d suggest that’s unlikely. No matter how well your campaign’s performing there’s always something which could stand to be improved, so continually test and learn.

Gluttony

This sin refers to the over-indulgence and over-consumption of anything to the point of waste. In PPC terms this might be likened to those who regardless of the cost *want* to appear in the top spot. Appearing first isn’t always the most cost-effective place to be in terms of conversions. Sure in some instances there may be some excellent reasons for wanting to appear in the top spot; but to optimise a whole campaign with this goal in mind is wasteful in the extreme.

Lust

Ordinarily thought of as sexual in nature, I’m going to be use a little artistic license here and use Aristotle’s definition – ‘an excessive love of others’. Some believe that other people’s PPC ads are so good that all they really need to do is copy them. This is a little short-sighted – it may work in the short term, but without developing your own key selling points / benefits / points of difference etc you’re likely to fail in the long term.

Image credit Lori Greig

Whether this proves to be significant will depend largely on whether Google takes the reports submitted seriously. If there is a strong indication that submitting such a report leads to your competitors rankings suffering, it’ll become too tempting for many SEO’s to ignore.

As it becomes increasingly easier to analyse your competitor’s backlinks, it also gets increasingly harder to hide what you are doing.

Such a scenario create a tricky dilemma – are the benefits of reporting your competitors more significant than the drawbacks? While the benefits might seem obvious (your competitor could drop in the SERPS, possibly below you), the drawbacks are probably more complex than you might first think.

Firstly , the new form isn’t anonymous, meaning that you need to submit from an actual Google account , and whilst I’ve no doubt that most would-be-reporters will use a fake/spare Google account for this purpose, it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be traced back to your website. If there is any way of Google knowing who’s behind the report, then you better be sure your website would stand up to similar scrutiny.

Then there’s the problem of shared links – even if you have used a disconnected account to report your competitors from, you might still lose out if you have shared links with your competitor. Should the algorithm be used to apply penalties to sellers (and it likely will be), you might find that Google discounts all links from websites linking to both of you. Imagine you gained a natural editorial link from a website – it wouldn’t be unforeseeable in competitive industries for your competitors to have approached the publisher and ended up paying for a link; in this scenario it’s quite possible that both the editorial and paid links were invalidated.

The ultimate question in both of the above cases would be your view of the playing field – given most websites will likely have some questionable backlinks (even if you haven’t bought links or spammed blogs, there’s previous SEO agencies to think about, ex-employees, competitors, or just being unlucky enough to have attracted links from websites that are usually spammy), your strategic call would depend on where you see your websites links compared with those of your competitors. If you are low in the SERPS but have a much cleaner link profile than your competitors, then you are probably well placed to submit reports.

Even if you do judge yourself of having more to gain though – it doesn’t mean you will actually want to do this. I’ve never personally reported a competitor, and I know many others who would say the same – it just feels wrong. Even if you do feel it’s the right thing to do, do you really have time? It’s kind of like playing a game of Darts – you can try and put off your opponent, but may just prefer to focus on your own game.

All things considered, savvier SEO’s may come to another conclusion altogether – whether or not you choose to report your competitors, future proofing your own links has to be the way forward.

Image credit Drew_

Google Analytics is pretty easy to set up – you simply need to insert a small snippet of code into every page of your website. However, there are certain instances whereupon URL structure can adversely affect the data which you get out of the package.

For example, if you want to monitor conversions through your website via Google Analytics, the easiest way is to set up goals and funnels.

Goals are very easy to set up – all you need to do is insert the URL which all users who complete the goal hit. For example – if you were looking to track purchases, you’d probably use the ‘thank you’ page URL which users hit once the goal is completed.

Funnels are simply the steps a user has to go through in order to complete a goal. So, again taking our purchase example; step one might be a page where the user completes their name and address; step two might be where they insert their payment details; step three might be the confirm purchase page; and step four might be the thank you for purchasing page.

All of this sounds simple enough; however, you are reliant on all users hitting the same pages. Which, if a site uses Session IDs can be a problem…

We came across one such example a couple of weeks ago. We won ourselves a lovely new insurance client. Like many they were using a white label quote engine. Not unusually, the quote engine utilised dynamically generated session IDs. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem as the URLs are typically configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html?uniquesessionid

These types of session IDs are simply ignored by Google Analytics, and as such you can get aggregated data on all of the users who viewed www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html – this means you can track conversions by setting up goals and funnels as normal.

However on this particular site the URLs were configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

As such a new URL was being dynamically generated for each user. This was causing problems in Google Analytics, making it impossible to track conversions via goals and funnels in the usual way.

However, there’s a nice little work around – by using a filter you can solve the problem:

Let’s use this URL as an example:  www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

1. Login to your analytics account, however rather than clicking on ‘view reports’ click on ‘edit’.
2. You’ll be taken to your profile setting page
3. Click on add filter
4. Give your new filter an appropriate name
5. Select ‘Custom filter’
6. Select ‘Search and Replace’
7. From the Filter Field drop down list, select Request URI
8. In the Search String box insert:       quote-form/.*/
9. In the Replace String box insert:     quote-form/
10. Select ‘No’ for Case Sensitive
11. Hit ‘Save Changes’

Effectively this will filter out all of the Session IDs from the URLs – so rather than reporting on individual user’s URLs you will be able to view the data in aggregate, and set up goals and funnels as usual. Smart, huh?

]]> http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2010/03/using-google-analytics-filters-to-remove-session-ids-from-urls/feed/ 0 http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2010/03/should-you-use-facebook-for-your-business/ http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2010/03/should-you-use-facebook-for-your-business/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:21:28 +0000 admin http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/?p=910

This sounds like a great way to get content about your business immediately onto Google. So should you invest time and effort into promoting your business with a  Facebook Fan Page?

Of course, why wouldn’t you want to use a free service that can reach hundreds or thousands or even millions of potential clients? Many small to medium businesses benefit from having people following them on Facebook. Some usually start off by having the people they know become fans at the start. The friends of these friends can see that they are a fan of that business and the company builds small scale viral recognition.

Provided that a business can give people a reason to become a fan – e.g. a high street boutique may offer exclusive discounts, while a nightclub might announce events, offers, who is DJing at it’s venue each night.  If you can offer information that people might want to have then you could gain potential business.

However there is a lot that  could  go wrong with using Facebook as means of publicising your business.

If you read an article on Outspoken Media you can find out about American reality TV show Tabatha’s Salon Takeover. It followed small salon owner Nikki Mallon of Brownes & Co. portrayed on national TV as a cold hearted boss from hell. Most likely edited to make her look worse than she probably was. It was a PR nightmare. The Brownes and Co. Facebook Fan Page was ransacked with negative comments from outraged viewers of the show. Unfortunately it took  them 12 hours to moderate the damage done and they have garnered some much unneeded notoriety.

Now whilst this is an extreme case, and probably very unlikely to happen to your business, it is worth noting that as fans can comment on your page, you will need to allocate some time and resource to answer any queries your fans might have; take part in discussions and of course in some cases act as a moderator. If you can give people a good reason to “Become a Fan”; by all means use it as a tool to promote your business. Just remember to manage it, as your brand’s reputation could be at stake.

A typical ‘old school’ SEO keyword research technique would be to simply divide the volume of searches for the keyword by the amount of websites ‘competing’ for the search query, and find the keyword with the most favourable popularity/competition ratio. Whilst volume and competition should of course form part of the keyword research process,  this approach can be a little too simplistic.

As such, we typically consider the following factors when selecting keywords for our clients:

Relevance (and what converts!)

Before we even start looking at search volumes and competing websites we need to fully understand what kind of keywords would be relevant to our client – typically this involves looking at all the products/services offered and working out what a searcher might use to find the service/product in question.

The temptation here is to go too broad with keywords,  if you sell golf lessons, you’re probably likely to find that your best converting traffic comes from keywords like ’golf lessons’, or ‘golf lessons in <location>’. You might *want* to rank for ‘golf’  but unless you’ve a huge budget and have little or no concerns about seeing ROI from your activity, this probably isn’t the best choice of keyword.

If you’ve run PPC campaigns before, you should already have a goldmine of information to give you a good idea of which phrases are most relevant, and convert. If you’ve no such data, and poor rankings currently, it may be worth running a PPC campaign to test which keywords/phrases convert.

Commercial Value

This ultimately relies on having a clear understanding of the client’s business model – many businesses  either sell multiple products, or have multiple propositions for various  customer subsets e.g. for a site selling blue widgets – the keyword ‘luxury blue widgets’ might bring in higher margin business whereas ‘cheap blue widgets’ will deliver volume.

Volume

Once you’ve got an idea of what keywords might be feasible to target, the next thing you’ll want to consider is how many people are searching on the different variations – obviously more searches mean the potential for traffic is higher. Different variations can have surprisingly different search volumes even when the meaning is the same. For example, if you compare “caravan insurance” to “insurance for caravan” – 2 phrases which broadly mean the same thing – the search volumes are radically different.

Trends

Don’t overlook trends either – Google Trends is the most obvious source for information here, it’s not necessarily about only targeting keywords which are increasing in popularity but targeting a keyword in the descendance might not be the best use of time and resource.

Competition

Perhaps one of the most important considerations  – we basically consider this from 2 points of view:

1. What can be achieved for the budget available
2. What niches are being under-served

The budget , if known, will determine the absolute ceiling, while the keywords with low competition (yet reasonable volume and relevance) may represent easy wins. Assessing keyword competition can be tricky rather than relying on a purely arithmetic approach here we tend to look at several factors:

1. Strength of top sites (mozrank & domain mozrank of top websites)
2. What type of pages are ranking (homepage, powerful subpages or weak subpages)
3. Competing pages (allintitle search for the phrase in question)
4. Strength of sites at bottom of page one

There are more things that can be done (especially if the decision might require a high investment with a long payback), such as looking at whether the websites ranking have optimised anchor text or not, but it’s not always feasible to do this for every keyword.

Putting it all together

Good keyword research isn’t easy, it requires detailed thought and attention to get right, and when you have hundreds of potential keywords and many factors to consider it’s advisable to get the data into a format where you can make sense of it. There are many approaches but a balanced scorecard is probably the most obvious. An example might be as follows:

Your weightings will obviously depend on your clients priorities, and the data here is purely fictional, but hopefully it should give you an idea; in this case ‘Luxury Blue Widgets’ and ‘Dark Blue Widgets’ both look attractive, but given the competition differences it may be a wise strategy to target both ‘Blue Widgets’ and ‘Luxury Blue Widgets’ on the same page.

Even after you’ve done all of this work, it’s often just the start – combining primary keywords for pages (and secondary keywords you are able to pickup) will often follow this stage, as well as working out how to pickup mid/long tail variations of the keyword.

The one thing for sure though, is that if you spend the time to get this right from the start, you will be far more likely to see your efforts pay off….

A full job spec is detailed below; to apply please email a CV and covering letter to hannah@gravytrain.co.uk or to discuss the opportunity further call 020 8941 2364.

Reporting to:

SEM Team Manager

 Duties & Responsibilities

1. Assist in the management of our client’s PPC campaigns.
2. Assist in the planning, development and implementation of strategy to improve ranking, traffic and the conversion rates of our SEO clients
3. Identify and analyse key metrics and assess the performance of campaigns, providing clients with written monthly reports
4. Day to day client liaison via phone / email / face to face
5. Keep up with industry news and developments
6. Represent the company at industry events / conferences
7. Create new business pitch documentation and attend pitches

Person Specification

Personality

A self-starter you will be driven, positive and focused on delivering high quality results for our clients. 

Skills / Experience:

Essential:

1. A minimum of one year’s hands on PPC experience gained either client or agency-side
2. Excellent written and verbal communication skills
3. Strong analytical skills
4. A genuine passion for the web, online marketing and social media

Desirable:

1. University graduate
2. Be active within the online marketing community
3. Previous experience of SEO / social media / online reputation management / email marketing

Working Hours

Monday – Friday 9am – 5.30pm.

Salary

Up to  £26k per annum depending on experience

Benefits

Private health care and subsidised gym membership.

Every New Year inevitably brings reflections, resolutions, and commitments to self improvement. One of  my biggest faults, is that I will generally put off jobs I don’t want to do until I can’t put them off any more. This fault was highlighted to me when I caught a glimpse of comments awaiting moderation for my blog… 3476!

“How did I let it get this far?? How long is it going to take to moderate all these comments, of which 99.9% are likely to be robots from an ‘extension’ company offering ways to improve performance in the ‘evening time’! Is there not a remove all button?”… These and many more questions ran through my mind as I desperately looked for ways to avoid manually deleting the comments 20 at a time!

If you’re wondering if there is a button to press on  WordPress that mass removes all comments, the short answer is not at this time. However, I did mange to get rid of all the comments without having to do them 20 at a time. Here’s how I did it… (To do this you will need access to the cpanel where your blog resides.)

Firstly it is always a good idea to back up your blog before you do any fiddling with it. If you don’t know how to do this you can find instructions here on the WordPress site

1. Once you have  backed up your blog, go into PHP My Admin in your hosting’s Cpanel.

2. In PHP My Admin, to the left, you will see the blog database listed, click on it and a list of tables within the database will appear.

3. Now all you need to do is click on the tab ‘ SQL ‘ which is in the menu to the right in the main section. Clicking this will open the SQL command input area in which you should copy and paste the following command:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = '0'

That’s it, if you log back into your blog you will see that all the comments awaiting approval will have been deleted.

The slate is wiped clean and you can promise yourself you will make a concerted effort to approve comments on a more regular basis henceforth

But that would make for an extremely short, and frankly useless blog post, so I thought I’d note down the process I’d usually go through here. Hopefully you’ll find it useful

So, first things first – for those less than familiar with PPC what the devil am I talking about? Well, within a PPC (or Paid Search) campaign you select various keywords for which you’d like your ads to appear. So, if you sell blue widgets, you might decide to select a keyword like ‘buy blue widgets’.

Now any PPC manager worth their salt will continually test, learn and refine when tackling their campaigns. As such they will be experimenting with new keywords and measuring how effective (or otherwise) they are. Keywords which don’t perform get paused so ads no longer appear when a user types in that search query.

So, how do you decide when to pause a keyword?

Lets assume that you’ve been tracking conversions and you’ve a keyword which is either:

Before pausing a keyword* I’d consider the following:

1. Do you have sufficient data?

You won’t always be able to hold out for a ’statistically significant’ sample size before pausing a keyword, however if a keyword has had only ten clicks, the chances are that you’ve insufficient data to tell whether or not this keyword’s going to work out for you. Patience grasshopper.

2. Which actual queries is the keyword exposing you to?

Assuming the keyword in question is broad or phrase matched - have you checked out which actual queries you’re getting clicks from? It may be that the keyword itself isn’t a problem per se – it’s just that you need to add in some negative keywords to prevent ads showing for irrelevant terms. Within Google Adwords you can take a look at the actual queries which resulted in clicks from a particular keyword by clicking on the tick box next to the keyword in question, the click on ’see search terms’ and then ’selected’. You’ll then be able to see which queries users have actually typed in. If there’s something irrelevant there – add it as a negative.

3. Is your keyword in the right adgroup?

Take a little look and see whether or not the keyword in question really belongs in that adgroup. Is it really relevant? Could you write a more relevant ad? In some instances it’s worth moving the keyword (or indeed a group of themed keywords) into a separate adgroup; or even a separate campaign if you need to control the amount of budget you’re spending on it – with improved targeting you may find that results improve. 

4. How’s your quality score?

If your quality score for this keyword is poor then you’ll be paying more than you need to per click. If you’re paying more than you need to per click, then you’re also paying more than you need to per conversion.  Quality scores can be improved by making your ads and landing pages as relevant as possible to the keyword in question.

5. Have you tried tweaking your bids?

Your bid (combined with your quality score) will determine the position at which you ad appears. Average position can make a difference when it comes to conversions – if conversions are too costly when you’re appearing first experiment with different bids to see if you can get conversions at a lower cost by altering your position.

6. Are you sending the keyword traffic to the right landing page?

Double check that the landing page really is relevant. Could you send traffic from this keyword somewhere better?

It’s also worth checking out bounce rates via your analytics package – if bounces are particularly high then it may be that the landing page is the problem. If you suspect this is the case test out a different landing page.

7. Is that keyword commercially viable?

Let’s assume that we’re running a campaign for an e-commerce site – the keyword in question is ‘cheap ugg boots’. The problem is the prices on this site just aren’t very competitive. You can buy ugg boots cheaper elsewhere. In this instance unless you can get the product priced more competitively - it’s probably best to pause this one.

8. Consider user intent

Step away from those keyword tools. Yes, you. Just because a keyword tool suggested it does not make it relevant. You are a human being. Think like one. Does that keyword really express whatever product or service you’re looking to sell? Try googling it and see what other ads pop up. Now take a look at the natural results too. Now speak to some other human beings about what someone typing in that word or phrase is actually likely to be looking for. Oh and don’t just speak to people who also work in search, we’re not normal …erm, I mean representative.

*Just to be clear here - I don’t implement this process for *every* keyword… I’d go loopy…and there aren’t enough hours in the day. But I think nonetheless it’s useful to consider for higher volume keywords, and indeed those keywords that your gut tells you should work, but just don’t seem to be doing ‘the do’ right now.

So m’dears what did I miss out? If you’ve any tips of your own you’d care to share I’d love to hear them.

Image credit Valerie Everett

This xkcd comic seemed strangely appropriate… enjoy

SEO

Rand Fishkin explains how search engines judge the value of a link - essential reading.

Social Media

Over at 10e20 Rebecca Kelley teaches Social Media - McHammer style, 2 legit 2 quit - marvellous.

PPC

Chelsea Blacker shares an adwords tip – including your keywords in display URL subdomains - definitely worth a test, methinks. 

Usability

Tom Critchlow has penned an excellent post on improving conversion rates, and deserves a link for the title alone

Aaannnd Finally, Friday’s Saturday’s Funny

Courtesy of xkcd:

Image credit Flawka