Online Marketing Blog » AdWords

SES San Jose Session: Pay Per Conversion

TopRank Online Marketing — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:15:09 +0000

Many business owners and marketers can agree the current economy is having an impact on marketing plans, making every dollar and click matter. As part of the TopRank Account Team, I am excited to learn a new perspective to help clients increase conversions for their marketing campaigns.

Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder of Future Now Inc., along with Brett Crosby, Group Manager for Google, shared insight to identify missed conversations and how to improve your landing page and increase PPC ROI.

Pay Per Conversion, as explained by Eisenberg, is a shift from our Pay Per Click mentality. No longer focusing our efforts to just get the click, but rather transforming those clicks into a business opportunity or conversion.

If we were to compare PPC to a direct mail piece, the ad would be like the envelope, but as we all know, what really matters is the offer contained inside.

So, why do we fail to convert?

The offer is not relevant
The customers does not have trust

Eisenberg compared our customer’s search habits to that of a bloodhound, stressing the importance of relevance. Customers are searching for so much at any given time and are bombarded with a variety of results to choose from. As a business, you need to give your customers a scent to follow, providing what your customers are searching for, at the second they are searching for it.

If your customers loose the scent, the persuasive momentum is gone and they abandon your site.

10% of searchers abandon after the first click
55% of searchers abandon after the second click
16% of searchers abandon after the third click

The biggest opportunity to maintain the persuasive momentum of your visitors is after the second click. If they have found their way to your site, and leave after two clicks, the information on your landing page is not relevant to their search and they loose the scent.

If your ad copy claims you sell ‘pink roses’ and a searcher clicks on your site expecting pink roses but you provided yellow daisies, the searcher will abandon your site and continue their search for pink roses.

Eisenberg suggests we re-think the path of conversion. Different people come to a site with different needs, our job is to figure out what each person is looking for.

The Conversion Process:

Plan what to test
Measure success
Improve based on results

Brett Crosby, Group Manager with Google, urges business owners to always be testing to improve Conversions.

When considering what items to test, focus on high traffic areas with the biggest revenue opportunities.

To identifying testing opportunities:

Look at landing pages. Where are people entering your site? The biggest opportunity to improve conversions is typically the page with the highest entrance rate and the highest bounce rate.

Review Google Goal Funnels. Identify opportunities to improve copy and forms on pages where visitors are exiting the goal funnel.

Run a site overlay. Identify where people are clicking and where people are converting on pages with a higher bounce rate.

Identify internal site search patterns.Refine your web site based on the search patterns of your visitors. Understand where your visitors started their search on your site and their navigation pattern.

The first issue plaguing landing pages is relevancy. The key to relevancy is to understand what each of your visitors are looking for and what answer is most relevant to your business.

To increase conversion rates, visitors must trust your online brand. Building credibility for your brand is important to build confidence and trust with your visitors.

Visitors will not have confidence in your brand if your site does not:

Include an About Us section
Provide contact information
Have a professional appearance

To build credibility and gain trust:

Let visitors know what to expect with point of action assurance
Leverage the credibility from other partners
Provide customer testimonials

For more photos from SES San Jose, be sure to visit TopRank on Flickr.

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Session: Ad Copy & Landing Page Optimization

TopRank Online Marketing — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 19:21:28 +0000

This was an open discussion session where users submitted their sites to get the Google ad copy critiqued and the landing page looked over for quality and usability. Tips included:

Keep important information towards the top of the landing page.
Be detailed and don’t just assume your visitors know your services.
Simpler the better.
Put simple URLs in ads.
Try sentence caps vs small caps.
Image quality on landing page matters. Make it look good.
Whitespace is good.
Bullet points give a great way for users to scan information. Long blocks are bad.
Should be easy and quick to digest the copy.
Always be sure you know, and your visitors now, the target of the ad. What’s the call to action?
Testimonials are good to put on landing pages.
Consider your ad output. How it looks on 2 lines vs 4 line ads.
Keep forms short. Get the lead info then call for more details.
Label required fields.
No pop-ups or pop-unders on landing pages.
Scrolling is ok, but make sure users know that there is more information below the fold.

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Session – Vendor Spotlight

TopRank Online Marketing — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:46:37 +0000

The vendor spotlight session covered alternatives or additives to going with PPC campaigns from companies like Google and Yahoo. They discussed how pay per call was more effective and available in more areas like TV and print than pay per click was. It also doesn’t suffer click fraud and clients like it more as it’s closer to a sale.

Tools for managing your pay per click and pay per call accounts were also discussed. Zanox offers a one stop shop for managing all your accounts including Google PPC, Yahoo PPC, click per call and more. Since it’s available worldwide, it can even help you with international accounts and search engines. Lycos spoke on how there offerings and how they can be customized for verticals and you can even become a publishing partner to use Lycos tools while running your own ad network with your own look and feel. Both companies trying to make it easier on the end user and increasing ROI.

Overall the session gave light to some great alternatives to just using Google or Yahoo for buying ad space. There are many other areas that PPC can’t quite get like print and TV and there may be more than one service to meet your needs. Managing them to best fit your business and your needs is key.

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Site Targeting

Lee Odden — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 15:34:14 +0000

Google Blogscoped posts an interesting explanation of the browse sites to target feature on Google AdWords that Inside AdWords announced on Friday. It provides categories of sites with an idea of the number of impressions each site gets per day. Besides¬† browsing sites by category, you can also target sites by describing the topic, list URLs to check for availability or similar sites.

You can also target a campaign by demographics such as income, gender or ethnicity based on comScore data.¬† I am curious if there are any head to head comparisons of MSN AdCenter demographic targeting and Google.

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BtoC Search Marketing Tactics

Lee Odden — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 15:10:57 +0000

Many small and medium sized consumer products marketers strive for the biggest bang for the buck when allocating budgets. While our SEO firm specializes more in BtoB SEO, PR and blogs, there are some fundamental consumer product site promotion tactics we’ve found to be appropriate in many cases. Each is measurable to ROI and can be scaled to some degree.

Pay per click – Advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN
Site optimization – Improving “natural” rankings on search engines
Optimized press releases – Announce sales, contests or special offers via press release
Blog marketing – Add a blog to web site to encourage search rankings, incoming links, interaction with consumers
Paid inclusion and shopping feeds – Submit a feed of your products to Google’s Froogle.com, Yahoo Search Submit and possibly comparison shopping sites such as shopping.com, bizrate.com or amazon.com
Cross promotion and integration – online to offline or vice vesa promotions
Email promotions – Opt in for specials, announcements, closeouts as well as upsell with current clients. Augmented with RSS feed.
Affiliate programs – Allow partner sites to promote products for a comission or bounty

What additional tactics would you add for BtoC online marketing?

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Google AdWords Dayparting

Lee Odden — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 14:14:33 +0000

The Google “Inside AdWords” blog has announced the addition of “ad scheduling” or as it is more often know as, “day parting”.

“Ad scheduling can also help you improve your ROI by ensuring that your ads run when it makes the most business sense. For instance, a local business may only want to run their ads during business hours, or an online retailer may want to boost their bids during their busier-than-normal lunchtime shopping period.”

When Andrew Goodman spoke here in Minneapolis at the MIMA event this week, he mentioned the impending addition of this feature to the AdWords program, but I’m not sure how many people caught it.

Kevin Newcomb over at ClickZ also has more details including several quotes from Richard Holden, director of product management at Google.

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Paid Search Can Be A Bitch

Lee Odden — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:20:59 +0000

Yes dear friends, I’ve said it. Paid search can be a pain in the rear. But no worries, search engine marketing guru Andrew Goodman of Traffick and Page Zero Media promises to shed some light on the subject in conjunction with a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) seminar next week.

Goodman’s presentation, “IT’S NOT JUST YOU: PAY-PER-CLICK CAN BE A REAL BEAST” will cover examples of Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing challenges, SEM relations, click fraud, CPOs vs. market share growth, data privacy, auctions and more.

“Paid search listings now make up about 50% of all online advertising. Many companies are being lulled into running haphazard, ineffective campaigns because of the ‘self-serve’ ad placement models touted by Google and Yahoo,” warns Goodman.

“The reality is, Google’s AdWords platform is more complex than ever, introducing barriers to novice advertisers by way of ‘ad quality scores’ that take into account a range of factors, including content and quality cues Google’s spider analyzes on your website. MSN adCenter has introduced an exciting new product, and Yahoo will begin phasing in its completely overhauled ‘Panama’ search marketing platform this fall. Novices will find it tough going.”

“It now seems that experienced agencies and larger advertisers are learning how to leverage relationships with the major search vendors,” adds Goodman. “Now more than ever, only the strong and savvy will survive in search marketing. Consistent campaign optimization and measurement of ROI is part of that effort, but you also need access to resources and knowledge, and ongoing industry relationships.”

Goodman is the author of “Winning Results with Google AdWords“, which has been reviewed and endorsed by Google’s Matt Cutts as well as many other top search marketers. I did an interview with Andrew Goodman earlier this year as part of the Spotlight on Search series if you want to get the skinny on his background and sense of humor.

The MIMA event will be held at the Calhoun Beach Club near Uptown in Minneapolis next Wednesday, June 14, 2006. Registration and drinks are at 5:15 and the presentation goes from 6-7pm. As always, food, networking and more drinks follow the presentation. Cost is $20 for Members and $40 for Non-Members. Free parking tokens will be provided. You can also get all the event details from the MIMA site.

Everyone is welcome to attend, no MIMA membership is required. You can register online if you have a MIMA profile or you can just register at the door.

Hey Ed, will we see you there?

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Demographic Targeting with Google AdWords

Lee Odden — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 14:42:22 +0000

On the heels of MSN AdCenter’s demographic profiling aspirations, Google AdWords now offers demographic site selection with gender, age, and household income as the demographic categories available. The demographic information comes from ComScore. h/t Andy

Additional info from:

JenStar: “It will be interesting to see if advertisers find that the profiles are matching the resulting traffic from those sites. And I am sure some publishers will reverse engineer an AdWords campaign to see what demographic profile their own site is, and if it matches what they believe their traffic to be.”

Traffick: “Essentially what this means is an improved functionality for the site selection tool, only applicable to content targeting of the “site targeting” variety. It’s not a major foray into targeting search ads by demographics, then (yet).”

Does this take some wind out of MSN AdCenter’s sails? Well, that’s the power of Google. Once the demographic site selection gets significant usage along with MSN AdCenter, there will be some interesting feedback I’m sure. Seems like a good session idea for SES San Jose.

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Google Click to Call

Lee Odden — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 03:36:04 +0000

Hey, this is interesting. Google is testing some pay per call ads with a program called Click to Call .

“Here’s how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click ‘Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party.”

You can try it yourself with a search on Google for “New York Hotels“. See screen shot below:

Pretty interesting keyword phrase match on the part of Google, since the Search Engine Strategies conference is coming up in New York at the end of the month. Or am I giving Google marketing too much credit?

Hat tip to Graywolf at Threadwatch

Seth Godin puts in his two cents on Google’s Click to Call as well.

Tags: Google, Click to Call, Google Pay Per Call

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Google Advertising Tools

Lee Odden — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 22:12:38 +0000

I just received a review copy of the new book, Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with Adsense, AdWords and the Google APIs by Harold Davis, author of 20 books, (Googleplex Blog) and published by O’Reilly. Companion site here.

Chapters range from SEO and affiliate programs to “Profiting from Adult Sites” (hmmm) and of course whole sections on Adsense and AdWords.

It’s a bit techie, but I’ve not had a chance to go through it fully. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to post a review here when I get around to finally reading it. If you’ve already read it, feel free to post comments.

Tags: google, adwords, adsense, google advertising tools

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Google Roundup

Lee Odden — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 04:00:06 +0000

A few things on Google today that I decided to roundup all in one post:

Possible new Google interface. Anyone else seeing this? Via PC World

David Utter from WPN posts about an offline Google AdWords Editor application that is in beta, “invite only” mode.

“AdWords Editor is Google’s free, downloadable account management application for your computer. Now you can download your AdWords account to your computer, make your changes, then upload your revised campaigns”

Localizing blog points out an interesting TV commercial (notice the reflection in the TV) for Pontiac where at the end, the viewer is invited to search for Pontiac on Google. Business Week has a great article on Google advertising which includes a quote from GM’s head of sales/marketing, Mark LaNeve:

“We‚Äôre touting Google, frankly, because it stands for credibility and consumer empowerment, and we like the association.”

Nice combination of both push and pull marketing if you ask me.

Gary Price points out a new study by Google that looks at the most common characteristics for web page construction.

“Google engineers analyzed a sample of slightly over a billion document and extracted info about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.”

I have no doubt there are some insights into search engine optimization with this report. It just needs someone like Rand to decipher and reduce to a format that’s easier to consume.

Tags: Google, AdWords Editor, Google Advertising

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