Make Mine Instant!

So Google announced yesterday the launch of a service they are dubbing “search faster than the speed of type”! Calling itself Google Instant, it has had Twitter and the blogosphere flooded with people from the search industry fretting about how this innovation could affect their campaigns.

If you haven’t tried it yet, Google Instant automatically populates the results page (known in the industry as SERPs) whilst you type. No longer do you have to press the Enter key on your keyboard, or the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button to see the results of what you’re searching for. Google themselves estimate that Instant will save users anything up to 5 seconds per search. This may not sound like a lot, but these seconds all add up when you consider how many searches we conduct through the search engine each day.

But let’s face it; Google has done this for several reasons. Firstly, it’s innovative, and part of Google’s brand is based on their innovative and intuitive products. Automatic search suggestion as you type has long been with the three main search engines, but none of them have hitherto showed a full search result based on the first letter typed into the search box!

Secondly, it’s a time saving tool which will lure users back to the Google home page. Google search has been increasingly appearing on different corners of the web for a while (perhaps more prominently, in the right hand corner of our web browsers), and these handy shortcuts have steered people away from using the Google homepage as their search starting point.

This tool is highly dynamic and potentially game changing for those who work in search or even advertise on Google. It means that some Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts may only appear for a split second on the results page, as Google changes the visible results according to what the user is typing. This could affect PPC and SEO campaigns in three main ways. Firstly, it could mean lower Click Through Rates (CTR) on Google Adwords. For SEO, It could also mean increase the importance to rank high on short tail organic keywords. Finally, it could also further decline the importance of misspellings as Instant automatically corrects

At present, Instant is only available to users logged into a Google Account, who are located in certain countries, and who are searching from the Google home page. And because of its current level of restricted access it is hard to see Instant changing anything from an SEO and PPC perspective in the immediate future. But as with all things that Google does, the proof is in the pudding. Time will tell as to how this ground breaking change to Google’s core product will affect those who advertise with it, and wish to rank high in its search results.

Don’t feel bad, whilst the overriding concept is simple, in practise PPC Campaigns can quickly become complicated.

This free whitepaper explains all the key concepts you need to understand, and provides an easy to follow guide to create your own PPC campaign.

Click here to download our Introduction to PPC whitepaper.

If you’ve any further queries or questions feel free to post them here, likewise if you’ve any feedback on this whitepaper, or suggestions for other whitepapers you’d like to see in the future we’d love to hear about them!

Revenue per click is calculated as follows: Goal Value x Conversion Rate.

As such, ‘Revenue-per-click’ (RPC) simply allocates a value to every paid click.

Comparing what you earned per click to your average CPC will give you a quick indication on the profitability of a given keyword. As such, RPC can help you to identify ‘problem’ keywords that may be adversely affecting your campaign.

Example:

If you receive 10 clicks on a keyword and 2 goal conversions at £20, your revenue per click is

£20 x 20% = £4

i.e. each click is worth £4.

What does this tell me?

It tells you that if your website keeps converting at 20%, then you break-even at an average CPC of £4 on a conversion of £20 value.

However, if your average CPC for the keyword is £5, then you are spending £1 more for every click than you are earning from it. Therefore, you’ll effectively be making a loss of £1 with every click on your ad.

Conversely, if your average CPC is £3, then you’re making £1 in profit per click.

How to view ‘Revenue-per-click’ reports:

1. Log in to your GA account.

2. From the side navigation panel, select ‘Traffic Sources’, then select AdWords^Beta.

3. Select an option from the sub-menu to look at data in an overview or by campaigns (click on campaign name on the right-hand side to get data for the campaign ad groups), keywords, day parts, etc.

4. From the main view on-screen, select the ‘Clicks’ tab and find the RPC column on the right-hand side in the main view.

How do you make a loss-making keyword profitable?

a) Lower your average CPC. However, do bear in mind that significantly lower ad positions might also affect your conversion rate, thereby negating any potentially positive affect. Hence, we advise that if your average CPC is higher than your RPC, you should try lowering your CPC gradually to find the ’sweet spot’ which is where your keyword spends less enough per click but still converts at an acceptably high rate to start earning profits for you.

Alternatively, you can try to lower your average CPC by improving your keyword Quality Score. In the earlier example, you were converting on a keyword at 20%, earning £4 per click. If your average CPC on that keyword was £5, you were making a loss of £1 per click. If you can improve the Quality Score of the keyword, you may find that you can reduce your bids without necessarily dropping down to a lower ad position.

b) Improve your site conversion rate. You might do this by testing new landing pages, forms etc.

These methods can be tried alone but it is generally a good idea to try both (together or one-by-one) for best results.

What if I do not have goal conversion values, only target CPAs?

No problem. Just use your target CPAs as goal values in your GA account/profiles. All you have to do is work to break even.

A Word of Warning…

Before undertaking a major optimisation project make sure that you have a representative data set to balance out any peaks/troughs due to external factors.

Also, it is important to bear in mind that availability of granular data like GA makes possible can lead you to create an ‘over-optimised’ campaign that converts at fantastic rates and with low costs, but fails to deliver sufficient volume. A good adwords campaign will strike the balance between driving cost-effective leads/sales and driving volume.

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

This means that Google’s click measurement technology adheres to the industry standards for counting interactive advertising clicks and that the processes supporting the technology are accurate. It also covers how invalid/fraudulent clicks are detected and handled.

The audit was conducted by an independent firm on behalf of the MRC.

This is excellent news for advertisers who are concerned about click fraud, (when ads are deliberately clicked upon over and over again, simply to cost an advertiser money) as this accreditation demonstrates Google’s commitment to accurately reporting clicks, and handling fraudulent clicks appropriately.

Read Google’s statement on the Inside Adwords blog.

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

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

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…

So last time we gave a brief overview of what PPC is. Today we’ll be looking at the planning stages you should go through prior to setting up your PPC Campaign.

Before you rush straight in there creating your account, picking keywords, creating ads and so on, it’s a really good idea to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Now’s the best time to get your house in order.

So what do you need to do first?

Decide what you are trying to achieve…

Now this might sound obvious, but it’s a really important step. Depending on what sort of business you run you might be looking to achieve one or more of the following:

1. Sales / Purchasers
2. Leads
3. Email sign ups
4. Whitepaper downloads
5. User registrations

This is by no means an exhaustive list, your own objective(s) might be different – but now’s the time to decide.

Check your website & internal processes are up to the job

All too often we see clients whose PPC campaigns have been ill-fated from the start, simply because their websites and/or their internal processes weren’t set up to fulfill their objectives.

You need to get this sorted out now. As soon as your campaign’s up and running you’ll be spending money, and that money will be wasted if your website or your internal processes aren’t up to scratch.

For example if you’re running your campaign because you want to generate sales leads – here are some key things to double-check:

1. How can visitors register their interest in your product or service? If they need to complete an online form, does the form work? Is it easy to complete, or does it throw back endless errors? Does it ask for more information than you really need?
2. Where do the completed forms go to – make sure they don’t get ‘lost’?
3. What happens with the completed lead forms? How are they dealt with internally? Does just one person deal with the leads? What happens if they’re not in the office?
4. Are there other routes to conversion? E.G. can visitors call you to register their interest? How are you going to track that? How will those leads be dealt with?
5. How are you going to monitor how many of the leads turn into sales?

We really could go on (and on and on) about this – but I’m sure you get the general idea.

Think about what you can afford to pay per click

Again – this really is fundamental. So much so we devoted a blog post to the subject. You don’t need to set this in stone right away, but it is worth thinking about this now.

Agree Budgets

When you first start a PPC campaign it will be a steep learning curve.

It is unlikely that from the get go you’ll have a profitable campaign. You’ll need to test and learn as you go. You’ll also need to get commitment from others to do likewise.

As such it’s a really good idea to agree a budget from the outset. Ideally you should also gain agreement as to how long you’re going to give the trial. When we take on a new client we ask that they sign up for a minimum period of three months. This allows us to iron out kinks in the campaign, test, get rid of the bits that don’t work, maximise the bits that do and so on.

Above all, make sure that everyone’s comfortable with the budgets which have been agreed.

So, plenty to be getting on with

Next time, we’ll be looking at setting up your PPC campaign – same bat time, same bat channel (or something).

Image credits Cliff 1066 & goat_girl_photos.

Puzzled by PPC?

Don’t feel bad, whilst the overriding concept is simple, in practise PPC Campaigns can quickly become complicated.

But don’t worry, we’re here to help. Over the next few weeks we will be running a series of posts designed to give an overview of what PPC is all about, and give some handy hints and tips to improve your campaign along the way.

So, first things first. Are you sitting comfortably? Got your tea / coffee / water / G&T? Then I’ll begin.

What Is PPC?

PPC stands for pay per click. You might also see PPC referred to as Paid Search – it’s all the same thing.

So, you know what it stands for, but what does PPC mean? Well it’s advertising. Now where PPC differs from traditional advertising is that you are only charged when someone clicks on your ad (hence pay per click) rather than being charged for your ad to appear.

The PPC Model was created by Bill Gross, founder of GoTo.com (which later became Overture, and is now part of Yahoo) in 1998; and Google began offering PPC in 2002. PPC really changed the landscape of advertising on the internet – as prior to it’s inception most online advertising was based on ‘impressions’ – i.e. how many times the advert was viewed.

Why is there so much hype around PPC?

On the face of it PPC looks really good. PPC ads appear on search engine results pages, so effectively you are putting your message directly in the path of those looking for your products or services. As such – it’s a very powerful model in terms of targeted advertising. However, a poorly managed PPC campaign can burn through money and offer little in the way of return.

Which Search Engines Offer PPC?

All of the major search engines offer PPC advertising. however each search engine’s PPC programme has it’s own little nuances. We run campaigns for our clients on Google, MSN and Yahoo – however not all clients elect to run campaigns on all of the search engines.

Which Search Engines Do People Use?

In the UK, Google is strongly favoured – for the four weeks ending 9/5/09 Hitwise rank the top five search engines (measured by volume of searches conducted) as follows:

Google (.co.uk)   77.37%

Google (.com)   13.26%

Yahoo   2.86%

Ask   1.65%

Live (MSN)   1.49% 

As such, you can see that by advertising on Google alone you can capture over 90% of the searches completed in the UK. Therefore many clients elect only to run their campaigns on Google.

The UK PPC Market

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau:

So, PPC continues to grow – but how do you take advantage of this potentially powerful media without getting burned? Be sure to check out the following posts in the series – we’ll be talking you through the processes we implement for our clients, so you too can create a PPC Campaign that really works for you.

Image credits jhritz