Google Bottom Placements – No Need To Panic

Last week Google announced that some side-positioned ads would now show at the bottom. It’s an interesting development and one that has some advertisers reeling, but what does it really mean? Here’s our take on it:

1. Most side ads have not been moved

The initial reaction to this announcement by Google seemed to be a lot of concern that CTR would die a death unless you weren’t in the top 3, that CPC would rise accordingly and the knock on effect this would have could be catastrophic. In reality, we’re barely seeing any bottom placement ads so no need to panic just yet. Even some of the most reputable sources, such as E-consultancy, are scaremongering that side ads are to be ‘dropped’. This is really slack blogging and isn’t true!

2. Google are sure they are increasing CTR

Google’s key statement here is:

On average, this placement performed better than side ads in terms of click-through rate in our tests.

Google have found that, in many cases ‘displaying ads below search results fits better into the user’s flow as they scan the page from top to bottom’. A bit more information about how and when this applies would be nice and this appears to be the seed of most online consternation… but we should trust Google on this as their overall objective has always been to increase ad impressions and user experience.

Our Advice

Our advice is to monitor your CTR, run weekly or monthly comparisons and see. We’ve heard of some users seeing a decrease in side-position CTR and an increase in top-position CTR. Much like when instant search came out, the bloggers are clamouring for a story when, in reality, barely anything is changing. Like all updates to the Google search pages, it’s something we should all be monitoring, but let’s not get carried away!

We believe that, provided you’re paying good attention to your quality score, then you’ll be fine. We can’t say for sure, but it does seem like bottom of the page placements seem to happen for broad searches such as ‘training’ or ‘presents’, where overall relevance and quality score would surely be low across the board. This by no means proven, but it is our early hunch based on a few tests we’ve been doing. Google will always reward a good quality score so always take the necessary steps to maximise it.

The New Google Analytics Dashboard – 5 Essential Widgets

The new Google Analytics dashboard is a killer feature and we’ve come up with 5 essential widgets to help you keep track of your online performance. Now highly configurable, it allows you to graph, table, pie chart or display the metric of pretty much any stat you’d like. Combining the features of custom reporting and advanced segmentation in the dashboard allows for some killer one-stop reports which could be the difference between your boss understanding or glazing over.

We’ve been using the dashboard for a while and here are some of the key stats we like to put on it for our clients:

1. Top-level metrics: overall traffic, bounce rate, pages per visit, goal conversions, sales, revenue, average value etc

We’ve grouped these into one although in reality you’re looking at a few widgets here that will display your core success stats – the final and most meaningful measurement. You might split these out by source or medium depending on what your main focus is at the moment.

2. Branded and non-branded organic traffic

You should measure these separately so you can see your brand popularity in a single metric as well as the success of your SEO. So many SEO companies still report on ‘organic traffic’ as their main KPI, which is crazy, as your real measure of organic success should be non-branded traffic only. Branded traffic is crucial and possibly the traffic metric that correlates most with sales, but its also the sum product of all your marketing, not just your SEO – which is why these two metric need to be measured separately.

3. Average page load time

This one is overlooked by about 99% of Analytics users. You do need to add the following line of into your Analytics code for it to work:

_trackPageLoadTime();

Once you’ve done this, you’ll start seeing site speed appearing in Analytics in the Content section and you can then add ‘Avg Page Load time’ as a graph in your dashboard. Google have publicly put quite a lot of emphasis on page load time as a ranking factor so this is something you cannot afford to ignore.

4. Exit rate of your key inner page(s)

For many sites, getting the conversion isn’t just about bounce rate and conversion rate – there’s usually some inner content that plays a huge part in persuading the user to develop a desire and then finally act on that desire. As we discussed in a recent post, this content is often ignored in favour of simpler metrics bounce rate but don’t forget one of marketing’s most crucial concepts – AIDA:

A – Awareness

I – Interest

D – Desire

A – Action

Your bounce rate will only tell you how much interest you’ve generated. Action levels are clearly measured by conversions but what about desire? This is all about the inner pages, which is why you need to graph the exit rate of these pages and put this info on your dashboard.

5. Blog visitors

If you’re serious about SEO, you need a blog that updates frequently with fresh content, just like ours. Aside from providing a valuable news service to your visitors, the ranking benefits can also be significant – fresh content and more indexed content are 2 reasons why Google will begin to like your site. A lot of companies treat blogging and article creation as a mundane, spammy process purely to please the Google robots – whilst this does help to a point, there’s no substitute for good content that’s well syndicated and bringing in real traffic to your site. Your blog shouldn’t just be a ‘because we have to do it’ function of your website, it should be a real and meaningful interaction with your visitors. More blog visitors will lead to more visitors to your main site content and it’ll also help your rankings – that’s why we think it should be in your dashboard.

We Want To Hear Your Ideas

Above are our 5 killer dashboard widgets but we’d love to hear what you’ve been putting on your dashboards. This is a great new feature and when PDF exporting and email scheduling are (finally) added in the next couple of weeks, the dashboard could be a really powerful reporting tool… and one that could help get your boss onside.

Display Ads Set To Be Supercharged By Audience Insight Reports

Back at SMX in June, Google announced audience insight reports – a new report that will soon be available in the Adwords interface. We think audience insight reports could be quite a significant development in display advertising and really help you supercharge your display advertising.

What Are Audience Insight Reports?

Audience insight reports will provide you with a demographical analysis of your remarketing lists and other audiences being targeted in the display network. This report will effectively tell you which demographics your existing visitors fit into and uncover great opportunities to then target these demographics with display advertising.

The Power Of Market Research

Until recently, PPC advertising has been a relatively direct form of marketing – you bid on a keyword on a placement and you get a sale or a lead. One of the main components of real marketing is research and this is something we’re very pleased to see Google promoting. As an Adwords management agency, we go to great lengths to know and understand our clients’ customers – you can’t write good ad text, good special offers or good calls to action if you don’t really know who your audience is.

Analytics has long provided us with some great insight into how is visiting a site and how they’re interacting, but now we’re going to get a top-level view of our visitors based on their browsing habits outside our websites. As marketers, we’ll know whether our visitors are male or female, what their interests are and what age category they’re in. That allows us to:

a.) Target these demographics with specific messages and hooks

b.) Prioritise ad spend more effectively

Google Is Watching You

Many might say ‘this is all a bit creepy’ as Google is watching you and making assumptions about who you are based on your browsing habits. As marketers, we think it’s great – the data is anonymous and it means the browser will see more relevant ads.

When Will Audience Insight Reports Be Available

Google are hoping to launch it very shortly – hopefully by the end of the year. However, we’re able to have these reports manually generated by our chums at Google on an ad-hoc basis and you should be pushing your agency to do the same.

How To Use Exit Rate To Discover Quick Wins

Exit rate is an often-ignored source of conversion rate improvement. Often overshadowed by bounce rate, it’ll tell you the performance of your inner pages, which is often where the conversion decision is made. Ignore exit rate and you’re only looking at your conversion process from afar.

Exit Rate v Bounce Rate Explained

Exit rate and bounce rate are often confused with one another and it’s usually the latter that gets all the headlines. Bounce rate is commonly regarded as the main early indicator of conversion potential, an approach which we fully agree with. However, what we’ve come to realise as an Adwords management agency is that most people don’t really know the difference between bounce rate and exit rate and, therefore, are missing out on an important part of the optimisation process.

So let’s clear up any confusion. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page and leave without registering any further pageviews or events (eg watching a video or any other event that you have manually configured). Exit rate is the percentage of people who view a given page and leave the site at that page.

The key difference to observe here is that bounce rate only applies to people who have landed on the page in question. When you land on a page, you either bounce or you do something else on that site. So exit rate and bounce rate may often correlate as they are both different ways of measuring the rate of people that leave the site, except bounce rate only measures those who have landed on that page and done anything else.

When To Use Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is great for measuring:

1. The quality of your traffic

2. The quality of your landing pages

It’s a fantastic early measure that is likely to translate to conversions and sales later on. A high bounce rate and you’ve got problems, a low one and you can be pretty confident you’re on the right track.

Use Exit Rate To Find Low Hanging Fruit

You should be using exit rate as a key measure of success for your inner pages. If, like most websites, the conversion doesn’t take place on the landing page, then exit rate is every bit as important as bounce rate. If bounce rate is the percentage of people who don’t want to navigate deeper into your site after first seeing it, then exit rate will tell you what happens when they do decided to probe deeper.

Exit rate is how you find the low hanging fruit.

If you’ve got a great bounce rate but a terrible exit rate on your key secondary page, then that tells you you’re getting good traffic in with a good message but your inner page is letting you down. In other words, you’ve got a great opportunity to improve your overall conversion rate by working on this page.

Final Thought

The best way to look at your inner page performance is through goal funnel visualisations but exit rate is a great way of measuring overall page performance. So many advertisers look at the bounce rates of their pages as key measure of success but some pages aren’t designed to be landed on, making bounce rate irrelevant. Try analysing exit rate on your inner pages and you might just discover some quick wins.

The Problem With Multi-Channel Funnels

We’ve been playing around with multi-channel funnels for quite some time now and, whilst we love it in the main, it does have one massive issue that you need to be aware of.

The 30-Day Lookback Period

Hidden away in Google’s documentation on this new feature is the following statement:

The Multi-Channel Funnels reports are limited to a 30-day lookback window on conversions. No lookback window exists for the other Google Analytics reports.

What does this mean? In short, it means that it’ll only capture the user path and assists that happened within the 30 days leading up to the goal conversion or transaction. This is fine for online retailers selling consumables or relatively low-ticket products, but what about the guys who sell high-ticket, high-involvement products that require large amounts of research before any interaction can be made?

Take the example of a company selling diamond rings. You don’t just rock up online and casually send over a few thousand dollars or pounds for a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. You’ll shop around, get to know your 4Cs, make a few calls, procrastinate a but longer wondering if you’re about to make the biggest mistake of your life, buy the new iPhone for yourself out of pity and then finally buy the ring. That takes more than 30 days.

It’s All Branded Searches

The problem manifests itself with Analytics showing all your conversions as coming from people who’ve searched for your brand – and all the conversion paths show repeat ‘direct’ or branded organic visits. We have a client who knows that PPC drives most business but Analytics gives it very little credit, with all assists and conversions going to direct or branded organic traffic. These people didn’t magically become aware of the brand, they were introduced to it with marketing – so it’s a shame that we can’t yet see how that introduction was really made but we live in hope that Google might allow this lookback period to be extended or at least customised.

How Have You Found Multi-Channel Funnels?

For the most part, we’re delighted with multi-channel funnels. It finally puts Analytics in a par with the more high-end platforms that make a proper stab at attribution measurement. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this and find out if you’ve got any recommendations – we’ll be speaking to Google about this in the next couple of weeks.

Are You Doing Your Negative Keyword Research?

Negative keywords are almost as important as normal keywords. If you’re serious about weeding out the best quality traffic, you’ll need negative keywords.

When we create new campaigns for our clients, we probably spend more time researching negative keywords than we do researching the main keyword list. Long-tail theory dictates that your highest-ROI traffic will come from niche, low-volume, high-quality searches – often 3 or 4 word searches.

The problem with low-volume keywords is that:

a.)  You can’t possibly research what these might be as they are so unique

b.)  Google won’t let you bid on any keyword that has low search volume.

What? Google won’t let me bid on the highest ROI keywords? To a degree, yes – but, as cynical as we are, we won’t hold it against them – server space and processing power would be decimated if these floodgates were opened and it’s simply not practical to even try to go there.

This is where match types come in – using phrase and broad matches, you can get your ads to appear for these searches, but in doing so, you’re going to be targeting a whole load of other searches too… hence the the importance of negative keywords.

Negative Keywords Allow You To Target The Best ROI Traffic

So the only way you can target all the unique, niche, specific searches is by using flexible match types like broad and phrase matches – but these match types require careful filtering using negative keywords, otherwise you’ll end up with a load of irrelevant traffic.

Do Your Negative Keyword Research

So when you’re researching a new campaign using the Google Keyword Tool, don’t just discard the keywords you don’t want – save them as negative exact match keywords instead.

Even this isn’t enough. You should then go through your negative keyword list and identify negative broad and phrase matches – core words or themes that should always be avoided.

Google Adwords: Why Isn’t My Ad Showing?

As an Adwords Management agency, a question we sometimes get asked by clients is ‘why isn’t my ad showing?’ There are plenty of good reasons why this might happen and its important to know what they are so you can rule them out.  These reasons include:

1. Your ads are set to rotate evenly throughout the day.
2. They keyword has performed badly and has therefore been paused

However, there might be a more concerning reason, such as :

1. Your daily budget has run out too early
2. An incorrect negative keyword is blocking good quality traffic
3. A good keyword has been paused
4. Low quality score

How To See Why Your Ad Isn’t Showing

Your first port of call should be the ‘Ad Preview & Diagnosis Tool’ that you can find in the ‘Tools’ tab in the Adwords interface. Here, you can search for any keyword and Google will either show your ad highlighed or tell you why it’s not showing.

The other way is to find the keyword in the campaign and hover over the speech bubble – here you’ll see if your ad is showing, why it isn’t showing and what that keyword’s quality score is. Much easier than calling up your Adwords management agency!

How To Optimise Low Conversion Number Campaigns

One of the hardest types of campaign to optimise is one that produces very few online sales or signups. Typically these campaigns will be ones selling high-value goods or services to a niche market. These campaigns are ideal for Adwords but they can also be very hard to track.

Statistical Significance

The problem with low numbers is statistical significance. If you have 10 clicks and you get 1 conversion, that’s a 10% conversion rate. Nice result but you can’t use that to forecast next year’s sales figures. In reality, you need at least 100 clicks on any given keyword, ad or search query to even begin to get an idea of what it can do.

We’d actually recommend 250 as a minimum optimisation benchmark but if your cost per click is £2 then that’s £500. That’s quite a lot of money to find out if 1 keyword works. Multiply that across your keyword-base and your boss’s face will turn very pale.

Choose Your Conversions Wisely

The best way to get around this issue is to lower the bar of what a ‘conversion’ is. Sure, we’d love to track the number of actual sign-ups or sales your site is producing but when that’s 5 a week then we have to rule that out.

Instead, why not look at the stages that a user has to go through to fulfill that ultimate goal? People don’t just arrive and buy or sign-up, they go through a funnel of core activities. These activities would typically consist of:

1. Viewing a key category page
2. Viewing a key product / information page
3. Viewing the contact form
4. Viewing the basket page (implying that something had been put in the basket)
5. Viewing the checkout page

Now we’re talking. The key point to remember here is that, the closer an interaction to your main converison goal, the more it will correlate with the goal. If you get more baskets, you’ll get more sales. If more people go to the form page, more people will fill it out.

Remember Your Objective

As the person optimising the Adwords campaigns, you might have targets to hit but your real aim is to simply pump out as much profit from this campaign as possible. In short, you need to establish a reliable system of prioritising where your Adwords budget is spent.

Whilst your aim is to increase signups and sales, your day-to-day focus should be on producing baskets and contact page views, or even just getting more people to look at products. Combine this measurement with bounce rate and avg pages per visit and suddenly you’ve got more than enough data to optimise with.

Average Time On Site: Why You Should Ignore It

One of the most intriguing metrics available in Google Analytics is ‘Average Time On Site’. At first, it seems like the most understandable metric out of the three main ‘engagement’ metrics of bounce rate, average pages per visit and average time on site.

However, when you learn how it’s calculated, you soon see that it is completely meaningless.

Problem 1: Time On Site Is Badly Measured

Time On Site = Time Of Last Interaction – Time Of Entrance

An interaction is a pageview or any tracked event (as configured with event tracking)

So Google measures the time you spend on a site by the time between the interactions you make on that site. Every time you visit a new page or trigger an event, Google time-stamps that action. Time on site is simply the difference between your first time-stamped action (ie when you first arrive) and your final time-stamped action.

The problem is that Google has no way of telling when you leave a site so measuring the difference between your first and final interaction with a site is always going to be an underestimation of what the real time on site is.

Problem 2: Bounces Don’t Count

Given the above point – that Google doesn’t timestamp when you leave a site – if you enter a site and then leave without doing anything (ie you bounce), then Google records your time on site as zero.

Problem 3: Google still counts bounces to calculate average time on site

If you have a bounce rate of 40%, which is quite common, then according to Google, 40% of people spend zero time at all on your site. Google then calculates the average time on site by including these people!

Final Thought

So, on the basis that your website probably has somewhere in the region of a 40% bounce rate, that’s 40% of your time on site sample saying zero. That’s ridiculous and that’s why we never bother looking at time on site. Instead – stick to bounce rate and pages per visit as accurate measures of engagement.

Adwords Management: 5 Essential Google Analytics Goals

As an Adwords Management agency, we always follow a few basic but essential procedures when taking on a new client. One of these is the setting up of Google Analytics goals, which provide critical indicators of source, keyword, ad and campaign success.

Google Analytics goals aren’t just there to give you a basic measure of conversions, sign-ups or sales, they’re there to allow you to measure all the intermediate steps that happen before the ultimate objective is achieved. Seeing sales and sign-ups is great but often it can be pretty clear much earlier whether what you’re doing is working.

One way to do this is look at measures such as bounce rate or time on site and these are great early success measures but sometimes they don’t tell the full story. We’ve seen instances where bounce rate has gone up and pages per visit have gone down for good reasons so it’s important to back these metrics up with other measurements.

The 5 Essential Google Analytics Goals

1. Baskets

For online retail sites this is absolutely essential. If you’re not measuring this key buying signal then you’re only looking at your business from a distance.

2. Product views

Not as critical as baskets but this is still a big one because it helps you measure the effectiveness of your product pages themselves. By looking at the percentage of people who view a product and then visit the basket page, you can see how effective your product and category pages are.

3. Your opening checkout page

This is a key  point in the checkout process and acts as an important marker – both in measuring the effectiveness of your basket page and the subsequent effectiveness of your remaining checkout process pages.

4. The page where the delivery charge is revealed

Delivery charge is one of the main reasons for cart abandonment and counting the number of people who make it to this point is therefore a key marker. You need to see what the drop off rate from this point to be confident you’re getting this crucial bit right.

5. Sales / leads

The final objective must, of course, be tracked but not just as a main KPI, but as a means of measuring the effectiveness of your final checkout page too.

Final Tip

You don’t necessarily need to look at sales and leads to measure success. Whilst these should always be the main KPI, they shouldn’t be relied up as the sole source of guidance for online marketing decisions. Sales and leads are the last figures to come through and often the actions you need to take can be very obvious from looking at some of the above, earlier arriving metrics.

How To Advertise On Trademarks With Adwords

Not many people know about this but the Adwords trademark rules have recently become slightly less strict than they were before… but to take advantage of them you’ll need to know a few things…

1. You Can Advertise On Trademarks

Bidding on trademarks is fair game in Adwords. Years ago this wasn’t allowed but now it is. Using trademarks in the ads themselves is a bit more tricky however – we’ll get to this in a minute.

2. You Can Use Trademarks In Display URLs

The rules on trademarks say you can use them in URLs but not in copy. Whilst we think that display URLs aren’t actual URLs, the lawyers disagree and who are we to argue?

3. You Can’t Use Trademarks In Sitelinks

As per the above statement, sitelinks count as copy and trademarks aren’t allowed in ad copy… or are they?

3. Actually, You Can Even Use Trademarks In Your Ad Copy… If You Follow The Rules

So here’s where the recent changes come into play. In the UK, North America & Canada you can actually now get away with using trademarks in your ads provided both the ad and the landing page is deemed to be highly relevant to the trademark you’re advertising. In other words, you need a landing page that is specifically geared around whatever it is you’re advertising and doesn’t talk about anything else.

So, as an advertiser, you’ve got to be aware of this and tailor your strategy accordingly. We suggest you put your trademarked ads in their own specific campaigns or ad groups so you can monitor and amend them.

You can see whether your trademarked ad is showing by going to the trademarked keyword(s) in the same ad group and hovering over the speech bubble – if your ad and landing page isn’t good enough, it’ll say so here. We also advise using the Ad Preview & Diagnosis tool.

The long-winded legal text can be found here:

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=145626

Broad Match Session Based Search Queries – Beware!

Broad match session-based queries are a a controversial addition to the Adwords platform and could cost you money if you don’t deal with them appropriately.

When you look at your search queries, you might notice some coming from the ‘broad (session-based)’ match type:

According to Google, these queries trigger your ads when ‘the search term is considered to be a variation of a keyword from your account, based on previous searches that the user has done during his or her search session’.

So, in other words, by bidding on broad matches, you’re not just opening up your ads to show on terms that are related to your keywords, but also semantically related ‘variations’ based on a user’s search history. Clearly this isn’t exactly the most popular thing Google have ever done but it’s all in the name of increasing their ‘ad inventory’ – ie improving the number of impressions displayed to users (and the number of paid clicks made).

What Should I Do?

Unfortunately, there’s no option to turn off session-based broad matches – all you can do is turn off broad matches altogether which, in many cases, will throw the baby out with the bath water.

What you can do is review your search queries and be on top of your negative keywords. By exporting your search query data to Excel, you can then sort or filter the queries by session-based broad matches and quickly find a good list of negative keywords. Who knows, you might even find some good performing queries (although that’s unlikely from our experience).

Final Point

Aside from the dubious justification for making session-based queries a compulsory part of broad matching, this rather annoying feature does add value to search query data. If you’re on top of this data, you’ll gradually generate a much better list of keywords and negative keywords. By adding good performing queries as phrase and exact match keywords, you’ll gradually reduce your dependence on broad matches and minimise this problem over time.

How Multi-Channel Funnels Can Make You Money

Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels really are a game changer – finally the level of detail we’ve all be craving and blogging about for years. Having read a fair few blogs about this topic recently, it’s clear we’re all very excited but it also appears that not many people have much of a clue of how to use this new goldmine of data.

So you can see ‘assists’, you can see path length, you can see channel overlapping – that’s really cool – but how about we actually use these features to make some money? The blog content on this seems to be a bit thin so we thought we’d put this right with 4 key pointers:

1. See the real value of your online marketing by measuring assists and first interactions

Ok this is a bit of an obvious one but we’re not just talking about looking at the new pretty flow-diagrams. No – what you should be doing with the ‘top conversion paths’ report is looking at first interactions. These are the interactions that got the ball rolling and these are the most valuable. In fact, the earlier the interaction, the more valuable its source should be regarded.

This is where the hard work is done and this is the bottom layer of your big house of online marketing cards. This isn’t to discredit the ‘last click’ but exposing your company to new users is a lot harder than closing the sale with the last click.

2. Make sure your message is clear – your users will visit you via multiple sources

What you’ll probably find in your report is that a fair few of your conversions, possibly even 50%, come from multi-channel conversion paths. A user might first come in via PPC and then find you via the organic results, which means you should make sure things like your ad text, meta tags, display advertising and social are all aligned.

Having an ‘integrated marketing mix’ with aligned messages is essential and using the top conversion paths is as close as you’ll ever get to seeing it.

3. Use Channel Groupings To Delve Deeper

Channel groupings are the hidden gem that turns multi-channel funnels from ‘interesting’ into ‘amazing’. To see what I mean, go to your ‘Top Conversion Paths’ report and select ‘channel groupings’ just under the graph. From here, select ‘copy basic channel grouping template’ and you’ll be able to add your own custom segments to the default channel list.

Things like organic branded, organic non-branded and specific campaigns / keywords are all examples of how you can use channel groupings to delve deeper, especially when you’re trying to measure the value of your SEO.

4. Measure your call-to-action effectiveness with path length

So what does path length actually mean? Sure, you can see that, for instance, 54% of visitors convert on their first visit, 23% on the second visit and so on but is this something you’re really going to tell your boss? If so, how would you make this relevant to anything? Our view on path length is that it provides a relative measure of call-to-action effectiveness. The longer the path length, the softer the sell. A soft sell can be the right way to go, especially if it boosts your engagement stats like bounce rate but ultimately you should be aiming to shorten the path without diluting your message.

So path length could be a great way to audit whether that new sign-up process or call to action message is working.

How have you used multi-channel funnels? Tell us!

We’d love to hear how you’ve used multi-channel funnels to improve your online marketing so please share them with us by commenting on this post.

6 Questions To Ask Before You Start A PPC Campaign

Following on from our post on how to tell if PPC will work for you without spending anything, we thought we’d take it one step further and delve into the key factors that determine whether a PPC campaign is going to be successful.

As an Adwords Management agency, we can usually tell if a campaign is going to sink or swim without even looking at the figures (well, not many!). It’s really just about ticking a few key boxes, and here are the ones we look for:

1. Margin: What’s the average profit per conversion?

This relates to our last blog but, in summary, your average profit per conversion is your break-even cost per conversion – the maximum you can pay per sale. If it looks feasible based on your expected cost per conversion (which you can calculate using our formula), then keep reading…

2. Focus: Is there a specialist / niche product or service on offer?

It’s not impossible to crack a mass-market item but it’s a hell of a lot harder. Going niche means you’ll inevitably get a better conversion rate and a lower cost per click – both of which are critical success factors when you’re paying for every click.

3. Differentiator: Is there a strong value proposition?

Would you but from you? Why? What is it that makes you stand out from the competition? You don’t *have* to stand out if you’re doing something very specialist already but, in general, the more mass-market your offering, the greater your need to tick this box will be.

4. Pricing: Is the pricing right?

We’ve had clients come to us in the past who are too cheap or too expensive. Too expensive and your conversion rate will plummet to virtually zero, especially in a competitive market. Too cheap and your pulling down your maximum cost per conversion to a really difficult level and, in doing so, preventing some keywords from being feasible. In other words, you’re destroying your margin AND your volume.

4. Range: Online retail: is there a large enough product range?

For online retail, product range correlates strongly and directly with conversion rate. It’s pretty obvious – the more products you have on show, the more likely a customer is to find what they want. A classic reason for low conversion rate (and often failure) is that there simply aren’t enough products.

5. Message: Are the features, benefits & call to action clear?

A pretty simply one but so many advertisers get it wrong or lose their message in amongst loads of copy. Copy should be there to expand upon the core message that you’ve already delivered – ideally through clear, visible bullet points or headlines… and don’t forget a strong call to action!

6. Website: Does the site look trustworthy? Does it function well?

You don’t have to have the latest, slickest interactive website to be successful, but you do need to look credible and trustworthy. Things like the checkout process and the overall navigation can make the difference…

Final Tip

When a campaign succeeds, it usually fulfills at least 5 out of the above 6 criteria. Don’t be put off, give it a go, but when you are trying out a new campaign, be aware of these points as they could give you an early clue if things don’t go as you expect.

If you’d like our opinion on your campaigns, feel free to give us a call on 0843 289 2336 or contact us online.

How To Tell If PPC Will Work For You Without Spending Anything

As an Adwords Management agency, we frequently meeting businesses looking to get started with Adwords – some dead-cert winners, some maybes and some are never going to fly…but how can we tell which ones are right for PPC, and which ones aren’t?

Look At The Competition

One of the most popular ways of looking at potential Adwords effectiveness is to look at the competition. This is certainly worthwhile – ‘if it’s working for them then it can work for me’ is the general idea. Sure, but unless you can see why it’s working for them then you’re entering into the unknown and taking a big risk.

Know Your KPI

If Adwords is going to work for you then, in raw numerical terms, it’s going to bring in more profit than it spends on clicks. In other words, it’s all about margin.

The first thing you need to do is work out:

a.) Your average order value

b.) Your average profit margin

c.) The resulting average gross profit per order – ie how much profit you make, on average, per customer

This figure is your break even cost per sale. For the sake of this next example, let’s say it comes in at £30.

Predict Your Conversion Rate

This is where experience helps and it depends on the type of business you’re looking for but here are our rough benchmarks to use:

1. Online, mainstream retail: 2%
2. Online, specialist retail: 4%
3. Lead generation: 7%
4. Lead generation (locally-targeted): 10%
5. Lead generation (free PDF download): 15%

These are rough estimates but that’s all we’ve got until we get started but you should be looking at something along these lines.

Research The Expected Cost Per Click

So you know your break-even cost per conversion, you know roughly what your conversion rate might be. All you need now is a decent stab at your expected cost per click, and for this you just need to go to the Google keyword tool to get an idea.

Use Our Prediction Formula

So let’s say your expected cost per click is £0.35 and you’re an online, relatively mainstream retail shop – a likely conversion rate of 2%. Remember, our average profit per order is 30.

For every 100 clicks you spend, 2 of them will become sales (because we’re expecting 2% conversion rate)… or we’ll get a sale for every 50 clicks we buy.

At an average cost per click of £0.35 and 50 clicks required for a sale, that’s £17.50 per conversion. With an average profit per slae of £30, that looks pretty promising.

Confused? Just Use This Formula

Cost Per Conversion = [Avg CPC] x (1 / [Conversion Rate] )

Profit Per Conversion = [Avg Margin Per Customer] x [Avg Revenue Per Customer]

Work these out, and you’ve got yourself a pretty good idea of whether Adwords is going to work for you. Of course, you never know properly until you try – that’s why we offer your first month free.

Seeing Beyond The Last Click: Google Testing Multi-Channel Funnels

Google Analytics has always had the achilles heel of only tracking the last click but it looks like this is about to end with the introduction of ‘multi-channel’ funnels. Whilst some think this will erode the value of the paid click, others think the opposite. One thing that is true is that multi-channel funnels are big. We should be getting our grubby hands on this in the next few days so check back for our thoughts.

What Are Multi-Channel Funnels?

Multi-channel funnels are a new form of reporting in Google Analytics that shows you the full conversion paths of your users. Currently all you can see is the ‘last click’ as the ‘traffic source’, but what you don’t see are intermediate clicks or ‘assists’ as they are sometimes called.

For instance, if a user visits your website via a PPC ad then comes back tomorrow via your organic listing and buys something, the traffic source will be ‘google (organic)’ as this was where the last click came from before the user bought. As a result, PPC gets no credit whatsoever for this. On a larger scale, this could affect how your marketing budget gets spent. Assists are valuable and worth knowing about and that’s why multi-channel funnels are a good thing.

How Will Multi-Channel Funnels Change The Way We Spend Our Marketing Budgets?

Until now, online markerting has been a pretty basic art. The idea that there is a single ‘source’ for your conversions is something we can all get our head around – but what if there are multiple sources, assists? If marketing source were football players, only the players that score goals would have any value – forget about the playmakers who get the move going. Withe multi-channel funnels, we’re going to have to be a bit more analytical.

We think that multi-channel funnels will add value to things like remarketing and the display network. These forms of PPC advertising have been dismissed by many advertisers as gratuitious branding exercises – and, in many cases, wrongly so. There’s been some limited ‘assist’ metrics for the contente network available with view-through conversions in Adwords but multi-channel funnels could really help sell this as an extra investment into PPC marketing.

Increasing The Value Of Expertise

So multi-channel funnels are coming and they’re effectively going to tell us that it’s a whole load more complicated than we first thought. Expertise therefore is going to rise in value – people who thought they could do it themselves will discover that there’s a whole lot more out there to be achieved by looking beyond the basic conversion statistics.

As an Adwords management agency, that makes us excited but it also means that some focus will inevitably shift towards the under-appreciated sources of ‘assists’, such as social media, blogging and email marketing. Understanding how each of these areas work is just the first step. Understanding how they can all work together is soon going to be essential.

Adwords Management: Why You Should Use Image Ads

Google image ads are possibly the most underused and undervalued pieces of marketing real-estate available but could take your business to the next level. As an Adwords management agency, we very rarely come across campaigns that use this feature. Why? Because most advertisers can’t be bothered – image ads require a bit of time and expertise and possibly a bit of money to get designed. How spoilt basic, text-based search advertising has made us.

Remember ‘Old School’ Marketing?

Let’s think back to 2000 when Yahoo Overture was just breaking through. In those days, your average marketing manager was buying banner ads, hard-copy advertising and doing this weird thing called ‘branding’. Remember that?! You’d actually pay for the advertising space on the off chance that someone might see you and follow-up on such a chance encounter.

Stats, Stats, Stats

Fast forward to 2011 and we all have a chance to plaster our logo, message and brand in front of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people without paying anything unless someone actually clicks on that ad to visit your site. In terms of raw reach, there has never been such a great advertising deal – yet so few advertisers take it.

Has The World Gone Mad?

The world hasn’t gone mad but it has become lazy. There’s now a notion that if a campaign doesn’t produce directly accountable, trackable ROI then it’s not worth it. Such a statement was unthinkable a little over a decade ago.

Image Ads Deserve A Bit Of Slack

We tend to find that stats such as direct traffic and organic branded traffic magically begin to increase gradually during sustained image advertising (ideally with a splash of remarketing). Of course it’s not magic, it’s entirely to be expected. If you’re targeting the right people, looking at your automatic placements and producing pretty, compelling banners then you’re going to attract some interest.

So even if your image ads showing fantastic costs per conversion, give them a chance. They deserve a bit of slack and are a must-have for any company that’s serious about growing a brand and reputation.

Adwords Management Quick Win: Why You Cannot Afford To Ignore Broad Matches

One of the key difference-makers in all campaigns is the use of broad matches. Handle this right and you’ll see your volume and cost per conversion surge in the right direction. Mistreat them and they’ll have your budget for breakfast. As an Adwords management agency, we’ve noticed that 99% of advertisers don’t know the value of broad matches and this is nothing less than a marketing crime. Here’s why:

Why Broad Matches Are Different

Broad matches are the only match type that really allows Google to ‘use its brain’ to decide where your ads show. For exact and phrase matches, the instruction is pretty simple – you’re telling Google to go out and show your ad for searches that either match or contain the term you’ve specified. With broad matches, you’re merely giving Google a theme to target. It’s no wonder, therefore, that handling this process is so critical to success. Anything could happen – you might discover some great gems or you might find your budget blown down the drain by irrelevant searches.

The Broad Match ‘Segment’

Think of broad matches as a market segment – ie the visitors that your relatively mainstream set of keywords have missed. Typically these are:

- Expert searchers

- People asking questions

- People looking for something specific

- People looking for something completely unrelated to what you’re offering

In other words, this ‘segment’ is everyone who doesn’t conform to the stereotypical searcher – it’s usually about 60-70% of the market.

What Do We Do With Segments?

That’s right. We measure them. Always. It’s a marketing crime not to measure your biggest segment yet 99% of Adwords advertisers don’t know how valuable broad matches are.

In PPC terms, this means putting broad matches in their own campaign, preferably with phrase match versions of each keyword as negative keywords (this shouldn’t be strictly necessary but we like to do it just to ensure there’s no cross-contamination between match types). Fore more info on this, read our separate blog post on campaign structure.

So you’ve got 2 campaigns – 1 for phrase and exact matches and another for broad matches. Both campaigns have the same keywords, ad groups and ads, just different match types.

Why You Cannot Afford To Ignore Broad Matches

Once you do this there are 2 likely scenarios:

1. Broad matches are really poor – easy – pause the campaign or lower your CPCs.

2. Broad matches are the majority of your conversions – this usually means your phrase and exact match keywords are underdeveloped. Take a look at your search query data in your broad match campaigns and see if there are some common themes which could become new phrase or exact matches. The aim is of course to sift out the good stuff.

Final Tip

Even if this doesn’t reveal an opportunity to improve your campaign’s performance, it’s vital that you’ve ticked this checkbox. For most campaigns, separating broad matches out into their own campaign unlocks some, if not a lot of optimisation potential so it’s well worth a go.

Adwords Management – Why Obvious Keywords Are Bad

For many new Adwords campaigns, the first keyword that we think of ends up being a negative keyword – and more often than not this makes the difference between success and failure. Why? Let’s find out…

As an Adwords agency, a question we frequently get asked by clients is ‘why don’t we come up for this keyword’? The answer is always the same – because ‘this keyword’ is too obvious and therefore too expensive and low converting.

We’ve got a client that sells photo frames. What’s the first keyword you’d write down on your keyword list for this client? Oh you didn’t – please tell me you didn’t write ‘photo frames’. Oh you did.

Problem 1: Obvious Is Vague

You see the problem with a photo frame is that its an abstract concept. If I sent you out to buy me a photo frame, and that’s all the information I gave you, you’d most likely come back with the wrong colour, size, material and style. ‘Photo frames’ is not very specific and someone looking for ‘photo frames’ is therefore not likely to be very serious about buying one right now.

In summary, you can’t buy a ‘photo frame’ but you can by a ’10 x 8 photo frame’ or a ‘wooden photo frame’ or a ‘poster photo frame’ – ‘photo frame’ – that’s just meaningless and therefore specifically targets people who haven’t made their mind up yet.

Problem 2: Obvious Is Expensive

Here’s the ridiculous bit. Given the above point about obvious keyword targeting vague, undecided browsing customers you would expect that advertisers would avoid them like the plague. Wrong.

It turns out that ‘photo frames’ has an approximate CPC of £0.43 whereas ’6 x 4 photo frames’ has an approximate CPC of £0.41… and you can be pretty confident which one will have the best conversion rate.

So the more specific, higher converting term is available for less money?! Bargain!

Long Tail Theory – Start From The Most Specific / Niche Keywords

So, for many campaigns, obvious keywords are the most expensive and worst converting… which means you might want to actively consider negative keywording the one phrase that most concisely describes what you sell.

A popular technique for doing this is to simultaneously bid on the phrase match "photo frames" and the negative exact match -[photo frames]. In other words, you’re bidding for all things containig the phrase ‘photo frames’ but not that exact term.

Negative keywording your core search terms – madness? Maybe – but prioritising the way your budget is spent on the lowest cost, highest converting keywords is the name of the game and should be every advertiser’s basic strategy. Ignoring this strategy and spending your budget on big, expensive keywords isn’t just madness, it’s potentially suicide.

Our Advice

Start with these blanket terms either negatived or in their own low-budget campaign. Aim for longer, specific keyword traffic first. If there isn’t enough then gradually drip feed your campaigns with bigger terms… but make sure you start from specific and work your way towards the more mainstream, blanket terms than the other way round.

Adwords Management – Why Bounce Rate Can Save You Money

A hugely important stat that is frequently ignored by even Adwords management agencies is bounce rate. It makes or breaks new campaigns and can save you a lot of money. We view bounce rate tas one of the most important stats and its usually the first one we look at after launching new campaign.

What Is Bounce Rate?

In Google’s own words:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. 

To view the bounce rates for your website, go to the Bounce Rate report under Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rate.”

So a bounce is when a user lands on your site and then leaves without any further interactions. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who bounce.

Why Is Bounce Rate So Important?

The reason we’re so into bounce rate is because it is the first statistically significant rating that a campaign or marketing source gets. Most advertisers (and even agencies) optimise by simply waiting for the conversion rate to become apparent. This means a couple of hundred clicks per keyword and therefore requires a lot of time and money.

So what if you can’t wait for conversion rate to arrive? What if you’ve got a limited trial budget and you need to push the campaigns as hard as possible? The answer – keep an eye on bounce rate. Bounce rate usually inversely correlates with conversion rate. In other words, the lower the bounce rate, the higher the conversion rate. You’ll see a stable bounce rate appearing long before a stable conversion rate becomes apparent and you can use this data to weed out the worst performing keywords, ads or ad groups early on.

What’s A Good Bounce Rate?

For most sites, a good bounce rate is anything below 40%. An ‘ok’ bounce rate is 40-50% and anything above 50% is likely to be a problem. So you should look out first for keywords with at least 30-50 visits that have a 50%+ bounce rate. These are the ones that need immediate sanity checking and possibly pausing.

Final Tip – The Different Between Bounce Rate And Exit Rate

The difference between these two stats can be defined as follows:

exit rate = exits / pageviews

bounce rate = bounces / entrances

In other words, exit rate is the percentage of people who viewed a page who then left immediately. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who landed on a page and then left immediately. You can only ‘bounce’ if you’ve just entered the site.

With that said, bounce rate is most applicable to looking at traffic sources, campaigns, ad groups, keywords etc and exit rate is best used to measure the performance of individual pages on the site.

Poor Keyword Relevance – How To Fix Your Quality Score

Poor keyword relevance is a common reason for low quality score but it really shouldn’t be the case because it’s easy to fix. We recently inherited an Adwords account that had been set up by another agency using modified broad matches only. In other words the keywords looked like this:

+ford +exhaust +system

+ford +focus +exhaust +system

Initially, we thought this wasn’t such a bad idea – they were bidding on terms that contained all the words given. Good idea right? Unfortunately not…

Keyword Relevance Matters

One of the key components of quality score is ‘keyword relevance’. When this is ‘poor’ your quality score is unlikely to rise about 4 / 10. Google’s own description of what ‘poor’ means is:

The keyword isn’t very relevant to users — it’s probably too general — and as a result may have a very high first page bid. Poor relevance is also a frequent reason why your ad may not show.

In other words, Google is saying the keyword is eligible for too many impressions from too many different searches to be regarded as ‘relevant’ to any one specific theme.

Increase Keyword Relevance With More Specific Match Types

The answer is simple – add phrase and exact match versions of any keywords with ‘poor’ relevance. We’ve seen modified broad matches with 3 or 4 out of 10 get 8 – 10 / 10 for their phrase and exact match equivalents.

When you consider that the majority of your clicks are likely to come from the phrase or exact match versions of your keywords, getting their quality score up is a big deal. It can make the difference between a profitable and unprofitable campaign.

Increase Keyword Relevance With More Specific Keywords

If you’re still seeing ‘poor keyword relevance’ when you click on the speech bubble next to your keywords, it’s probably because your keyword is too broad and attracts too many impressions. Try putting it into the Google keyword tool or the wonder wheel to see if it can be broken down into sub-topics.

Adwords Automatic Bidding – Beware!

As an Adwords management agency, we review campaigns all the time and one of the regular mistakes we see is the use of Automatic Bidding.

What Is Automatic Bidding?

Let’s have a look at Google’s own definition:

“Automatic bidding is the simplest of the AdWords bidding options. You just set a daily budget, and the AdWords system actively seeks out the most clicks possible within that budget.

With automatic bidding, you don’t need to specify individual bids for ad groups, keywords, or placements.

The AdWords system automatically adjusts your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids on your behalf.”

So Automatic bidding is telling Google to ‘seek out the most clicks possible’ within your budget… so why do we see campaigns that are blowing their daily budgets early with automatic bidding?

The Problem With Automatic Bidding

Automatic bidding seems to prioritise spending your budget over getting the most out of it, despite Google’s promise to do otherwise. Our advice, therefore, is to avoid it at all costs.

We regularly improve campaigns that have been running on automatic bidding, seeing drops in cost-per-click of over 25%.

So What’s The Best Way To Manage Your Bids?

Manually is the best way. We like to set bids as a factor of the first page bid estimate for each keywords. Depending on how large the daily budget is, we’ll set opening bids anywhere from the same as first page bid estimate to double this figure.

Thereafter, keep an eye on the ‘Lost Impressions (Budget)’ column on your campaigns (this is not enabled by default but can be by clicking on the ‘Columns’ button on your main Adwords campaign page). If this figure is over 20%, you need to lower your bids, perhaps by 10%. If it’s over 50%, you need to slash your bids by 30-40%.

Of course, if you can identify poor or zero converting keywords then remove these first.

These are just guidelines – there are no hard and fast rules, but the key thing here is that you’re bidding most aggressively on your most profitable areas and, within this premise, keeping your bids as low as possible whilst still spending your daily budget.

Recap

So don’t use automatic bidding unless you want to give away a good chunk of your margin to Google. If you want to use automation, look at automated rules or Google’s conversion optimisation bidding, but don’t touch automatic bidding with a view to ‘maximising clicks’. It just doesn’t work.

Instead, set your bids at somewhere just about their first page bid estimate, launch the campaign, check your average positions for your keywords and adjust with trial and error (Adwords Editor is good for this).

If your Lost Impressions (Budget) is above 20%, you need to either cut keywords or lower your bids on some or all of them.

Adwords Daily Budget – Advice From An Adwords Agency

When we take on new clients, a question that often comes up is ‘how much should we spend?’. In this article, we’re going to look at the pitfalls of spending too much or too little and offer our advice on what the right amount should be.

The Danger Of Spending Too Little

The thing to remember when tackling this issue is that:

money = clicks
clicks = data
data = optimisation
optimisation = money

That’s the wheel that we, as an Adwords management agency, turn every day. So when you’re trying to decide how much money to spend on Google Adwords, what you’re really deciding is how fast you want to turn that wheel.

They key thing to remember is that money is time and time is money. An advertiser who starts a new campaign spending £60 / day is going to get their campaigns optimised in half the time of someone who spends £30 / day. As a result of being optimised more quickly, they’ll make more money faster and be able to up their investment sooner.

Much like growing a business, progress is an exponential snowball. Once you’re turning £1 into £2, you’re gonna be turning £2 into £4 so, if you’re confident, don’t be too cautious. We’re not saying break the bank but, as this analogy shows, being too conservative can often cost far more money than taking an educated gamble.

The Perils Of Spending Too Much

Spend too much on an unknown quantity and you’re taking on a whole heap of risk. You’ve got to ask yourself some key questions at this stage:

1. What else could I spend this money on?

2. Can I afford to lose this money?

3. Given all the work to get the site up and running, is it really feasible to turn back now?

When you start to invest an anything new, your initial outlay should be seen as a research investment – it might break even, it might make a small loss or you might lose it. What you’re guaranteed is some quality research. As an Adwords mnagement company that offers the first month free, we can’t stress this enough. Many people pay thousands for consultancy based on other competitors and ‘the industry’, you can pay hundreds for consultancy based 100% on you. Just because it doesn’t bring in customer immediately doesn’t mean you’ve made a mistake.

So don’t spent too much – clearly – but make sure what you do invest initially you’re happy to use as a ‘research’ budget and aren’t depending on instant profits. Even if you do make your first £500 turn into £1000, the value of the findings that will have come from the optimisation process is likely to be far greater in the longterm.

Our Approach

Adwords management agencies like to promise the world based on little or no industry research specific to your business. Our approach is to look at 3 things:

1. What you’re comfortable spending (as decided using the above questions)

2. Our experience from managing similar Adwords campaigns in similar industries

3. The likely cost per click of the keywords you’ll be needing. A high cost per click will need a high budget because and Adwords agency needs a decent volume of clicks to optimise. By a decent volume we’re talking 500-1000 to start with over the first month or so, but ultimately a couple of hundred for all your main keywords.

The aim of any good agency should be to make you invest just enough for a safe but ambitious project. An amount that’s big enough for statistically significant data with which to optimise, and small enough to not be catastrophic if it fails. We don’t take on clients who we’re not confident of succeeding with, but this approach is merely good business practice.

Essential Adwords Negative Keywords For All Advertisers

In this post, we’re going to show you some quick and powerful ways to find negative keywords and save your campaigns some significant money.

Negative keywords are one of the fundamental building blocks of a successful Adwords campaign but, as an Adwords management agency, the majority of campaigns we inherit don’t have any in them at all… and sadly that includes campaigns we’ve taken on from other so-called ‘professionals’ in the field.

We’re going to skip negative keywords 101 (which you can read about in our early blog post on negative keywords) and zoom straight to the point.

Negative Keywords To Look For

When you’re doing your keyword research using the Google Keyword Tool, you should be going down that list and marking:

a.) Relevant keywords to be used in your campaigns

b.) Negative keywords

There are 2 main types of negative keyword:

1. Irrelevant keywords

2. Relevant but non-action or ‘reference’ words (as we like to call them)

Spotting irrelevant keywords is pretty easy. If you’re selling dog food then clearly ‘cat’ is an irrelevant keyword.

Spotting ‘reference’ words or non-action orientated words isn’t always so cut and dry. For instance, you might find that the search term ‘how much food to give a dog’ is popular or ‘which is the best dog food’ comes up.

Technically, these terms target the right demographic, but are they really targeting buying people? Most likely not.

How To Deal With ‘Reference’ Keywords

We advise splitting your tip-top buying keywords and the more woolly reference keywords into their own separate campaigns, with the reference keyword list also acting as a negative keyword list for the ‘buying’ campaign.

From here, you should start by only running with ‘buying’ keywords, saving your reference keyword list for when your business is so big and successful, that these types of keyword are the next logical step once the more attractive keywords are being exhausted. Don’t create this ‘reference’ campaign until you actually need it as its unlikely to help your quality score, even if its paused.

Negative Keywords That Everyone Should Consider

From years of adwords management, we’ve built up a list of killer negative keywords that could give your campaigns a real head start:

• What
• Why
• How
• Make
• Guide
• Torrent
• Free
• Cheap
• PDF
• Job(s)
• Position
• Vacancy

These are just a few but they show how people looking for reference material, freebies or jobs are the key areas you should be looking to avoid (except if that’s what you’re selling, of course).

By taking just a few more minutes doing some thoughtful negative keyword research, you could get your campaigns off to that head-start that could make or break whether they’re given the extra budget they need to prove themselves.

Adwords Management – Campaign Limited By Budget…

As an Adwords management company, one of the more cryptic messages that Adwords gives us from time to time is ‘Campaign Limited By Budget’.

But what does this really mean? In raw, technical terms, it means that you missed out on a significant number of ad impressions because your budget was too low. If you raised your budget, you’d get more impressions.

But what does that mean? Now we’re talking. You see it’s not quite that simple. If you think about it, how many impressions you get depends on a variety of factors including:

1. Your daily budget
2. Your average cost per click
3. Your click-through rate

Why have I brought these up? Because these are the variables you can change to get rid of this ‘limited by daily budget’ status that Google flashes up in orange as if to panic you.

There’s nothing wrong with being limited by budget. In fact, if you’re not limited by budget, that means you’re going all out to get every impression there is for your chosen keywords. Many advertisers probably don’t want that as part of the ir strategy, but instead just want to achieve a certain amount of revenue at a certain cost.

So Is It Ok To Be ‘Limited By Budget’

No – it’s not ok. People who get this message, get it because they are either under-spending or overpaying for clicks. The easy solution is to raise your budget as instructed by Google. That’s fine and if you want to grow your business quickly then that’s probably your best option, provided you’re seeing the ROI you’re after.

What If I Don’t Want To Increase My Budget?

If you haven’t got extra budget to hand, you can still take advantage of this friendly piece of advice because, if you’re seeing this message and you don’t have any more money to throw at Adwords, then you’ve got an opportunity to increase your campaign’s ROI instead. Remember, the problem here is that you’re using your budget up to eagerly, most likely because you’re:

1. Bidding high

2. Have a high CTR

Google has to display your ad sparingly because if it displayed it all the time your budget would be gone before the day is over. If you’re ads are set to accelerated delivery, your budget is most likely being used up long before their day is over.

In other words, you could still spend your daily budget with a lower CPC or a lower CTR. You are therefore overpaying for clicks or not being targeted enough with your ads.

The solutions:

1. Lower your max CPC 10% at a time, ensuring that your daily budget is still being used up each day. If you’re paying less for each click but still spending your daily budget then that means you’re getting more clicks for the same price. Result!

2. Lowering your CTR with more targeted ads. The lower your CTR, the more impressions are needed to get each click. Whilst a healthy CTR is always good for quality score, don’t be afraid to tone things down to make your ad more targeted. A more targeted ad might have a lower CTR, but it’ll also have a higher conversion rate.

Final Tip

Remember – the aim of the game is to spend your daily budget in the most cost effective way possible. That means keeping your CPC as low as possible and your conversion rate as high as possible. Whilst Google’s friendly ‘limited by budget’ doesn’t tell you the whole story, it does tell you that you’re not making the most of your campaigns.

How To Take Advantage Of Adwords Embedded Sitelinks

Google today announced the launch of ‘embedded sitelinks’ in Adwords ads – a neat little feature that automatically hyperlinks any ad text that exactly matches that of a sitelink. Embedded sitelinks should make you re-assess how you use sitelinks as there are some big benefits and pitfalls in this area.

What Are The Benefits?

The main benefit is that your ad will have several extra clickable parts to it. It’ll therefore stand out more, increasing your CTR (and therefore your overall volume) and, in doing so, will help your quality score and CPC move in the right directions.

As with normal sitelinks, you’ve got a chance to give users a choice of which page they land on, thereby increasing the chance that they’ll convert into a customer or a lead.

How To Take Advantage Of Embedded Sitelinks

Yes you should. It’s not just about having sitelinks, it’s about having sitelinks that exactly match parts of your ad text. Take Google’s example ad below:

The reason ‘Get Free First Time Setup Support’ is hyperlinked is because this exact text is set up as a sitelink already. You need to therefore follow these steps to make sure you’re taking advantage of embedded sitelinks:

1. Look at all your Adwords ads and make a note of any text you’d like hyperlinked – particularly your calls to action and key benefits.
2. Work out the best landing pages to send people who click on these links – don’t just go for the most ‘relevant’, use the strongest converting one (look at your Top Content report in Analytics for guidance here). Hopefully they’ll be the same but that’s not always the case.
3. Create a sitelink for in Adwords for all the text you identified in step 1, using the URLs you decided on in step 2.

Final Tip – Be Careful…

Don’t overuse this feature – it’s new and should be taken advantage of to strengthen an ad but if overused or incorrectly applied, you might just confuse your audience or send them the wrong landing page. It’s also worth noting that if you use sitelinks at all, you’re likely to push any seller rating stars you have out of your ad. Seller rating stars are, in our view, much more valuable than sitelink and much harder to obtain so don’t sacrifice all your hard work for a few links!

Improving Your Conversion Rate – 6 Killer Tips

Getting more leads from your Adwords campaigns can be done in a variety of ways. Today we’re going to focus on how to do this without needing to spend more money.

Improving Your Conversion Rate – 5 Killer Tips

1. Make Sure The Message On Your Landing Pages And Ads Match

It’s a no-brainer but so many advertisers don’t do this. Your ad text serves 3 purposes – a generate interest, qualify your visitors and set their expectations. If your ad text ticks all 3 of these boxes then you’re doing well. The final box you need to tick is on the landing page itself. Your ad should be a summary of your landing page. The features, benefits and call to action on your ad should be the same as those used on your landing page. It is, after all, exactly what your users will be expecting. If they’re expecting something, they’re going to be more likely to convert.

2. Make Sure You Provide Enough Information

So many so-called ‘gurus’ of PPC management claim that the best landing page is a call-to-action centric landing page that gives the user no distraction. Sure, it’s important to gently persuade the user to convert but don’t take your customers for fools. They aren’t goint to be told to convert, they’re going to be persuaded to convert. In order to do this, you need to provide good quality copy and a decent amount of it. This is especially true with lead generation – getting a user to fill out an online form is the very first step to making a sale. The more they know about your company when you pick up the phone, the more likely you are to make that sale.

Going for a ‘grabbing’ approach to conversion might drive down your online cost-per-sale, but almost certainly spending any saving made and more on the extra sales time need to wade through the low-quality leads provided. Low quality leads produce unhappy sales people and unhappy sales people aren’t usually good sales people.

3. Write Friendly, Empathetic Copy

Gone are the days of formal copy-writing. Friendly copy that empathises with the user in a frank and up-front way works. It depends on the industry of course never let formal English get in the way of conveying a clear message.

4. Set Up An Automatic Confirmation Email

Confirming a receipt of a form submission with a friendly and useful confirmation is a great way to lightly warm up your leads for the sales process. It also gives your leads a point of reference and increases the chance they’ll actually remember which company you are. You could set up a quick, automated email to be sent that thanks them for their interest, very briefly summarises the key benefits and tells them what’s going to happen next.

5. Use Objective Quality Statements Where Possible

Objective statements such as testimonials, client quotes or certifications are hugely important factors in site performance. For online retail sites, this will extend to security guarantees. Client quotes and testimonials are a must have because they not only add some objectivity to the message you’re trying to convey, but they can also contain interesting information about your product / service in their own right.

6. Most Buying Visitors Will Visit Your Site At Least Twice

People who go on to buy your product or service will almost certainly visit your site several times in order to make their purchase decision. Your site’s work isn’t finished until that sale is made so, even if adding extra information doesn’t explicity improve your online conversion rate, chances are it is making a positive contribution to your overall sales process. Go with your instincts, ask your existing customers which content they value and make your site not just a lead generator, but a form of sales support.

Final Point

As you can probably tell, we’re a big fan of doing things the ‘proper’ way. Quick, short-cut leadgen sites might generate good superficial stats but they usuall fail in real ROI terms. However, don’t drown your site in content. It needs to be readable, organised and clearly promote the next stage in your sales process. In short: be honest, be persuasive and keep it to the point.

Understanding The Adwords Broad Match Modifier

In early 2010, Google added the broad match modifier to the list of match types available to Adwords advertisers. As an Adwords Management company, we find that, over a year later, it’s still massively underused and that perhaps that’s because people don’t know what it actually is. In this article, we’re going to define what the broad match modifier is and show you how to use it to give your campaigns that extra 10%.

The Adwords Broad Match Modifier – Definition

The Adwords broad match modifier allows you to bid on a broad match term, such as ‘purple candy floss’ and anchor one or all of the words in it, telling Google ‘bid on all variations, orders and mis-spellings but make sure this word is searched for as-is’. Bidding on ‘purple candy floss’ would allow Google to show your ad for anything it deems to be related to ‘purple candy floss’. To quote Google, your ads will show on ‘similar phrases’ or ‘relevant variations’ of this term. This could include ‘purple candy’ or ‘purple dental floss’.

To avoid the obvious irrelevant impressions, you might want to bid on ‘purple +candy floss’. This tells Google to bid on relevant phrases and variations so long as they contain the word candy’. Instantly, you’ve refined your criteria to a more accurate list of potential searches.

The 2 Main Uses Of The Broad Match Modifier

There are effectively 2 main uses of the broad match modifier:

1. This is the obvious one – to make a broad match more refined and ‘anchor’ the most important words as seen in the example above.

2. The other way is to add the modifer to all words in the term – ie +purple +candy +floss. By doing this, you’re effectively saying to Google you’re refining your search to phrases that contain all of these words in no particular order. Many advertisers overlook this and cost themselves huge amounts in wasted clicks. Even those that manage to control this are munching up tonnes of low-CTR impressions, which hurts your quality score and effectively drives up your cost per click.

Final Tip: Experiment!

Working out gradually and carefully from phrase and exact matches, it’s often worth trying modifed broad matches and then, for your best performing areas, full broad matches. Don’t be afraid of broad matches – it’s often here where the long-tail, cheap conversions are lying… or where the scalability of your campaigns is realised. Just treat the broad match modifer as a separate match type altogether and test it separately and alongside exact, phrase and broad matches to see the best results.

Adwords Competitor Bidding – The Rules And Our Advice

As an Adwords Management agency, we regularly run into the question of whether or not a client should bid on a competitor’s brand name, or what should be done if a competitor is already bidding on there’s. In this article, we’re going to explore when and when it’s not advisable to bid on a competitor’s brand name and what to do if a competitor is bidding on yours. However, first we’re going to do a quick 101 on the rules.

What Are The Rules & Laws About Competitor Bidding?

For a couple of years now, competitor bidding has been completely fair game on Adwords. Originally, advertisers weren’t allow to bid on trademarked terms but this restriction was has been removed since 2008. It is still prohibited to use certain trademarked terms in ad text and your ad will be disapproved if this is attempted but provided you’re not using a trademarked term and you aren’t impersonating another company, everything’s ok.

The Legal Side

Legally, there have been a variety of cases about this, producing mixed results – all based on unique circumstance – but at the moment bidding on a non-trademarked competitor brand name is accepted by Adwords and by no means ‘illegal’.

What You Should Do If A Competitor Bids On Your Brand Name

Ultimately there are 2 options here:

1. Persuade the competitor to stop bidding on your brand name.
2. Counter-attack – bid on your competitor’s brand name.

Sometimes you might find that the competitor knows nothing about bidding on your brand name as their agency might have done it without even telling them – so don’t go in all guns blazing! The main thing is you do what’s most profitable for your business in the long term so that means you’ve got to decide which of the above options is going to add more to your bottom line… which nicely leads us on to the next question:

When Is It Advisable To Bid On A Competitor’s Brand Term?

All brand terms have a value and this value is measured by the number of searches it gets and the conversion rate of those searches. A big competitor that invests a huge amount on advertising is, by nature, going to have a lot of brand searches. A close overlap in services will produce a strong conversion rate should you decide to bid on that brand name.

The thing to remember is that, if they’re not already bidding on you, they certainly will once they see your ad appearing under their brand name. So when 2 competitors bid on each other’s brand name, who wins? In short, the competitor with the best conversion rate. If you’re going to go head-to-head with a competitor in the same advertising space then you’d better make sure you’ve got a better website and/or a better offer.

Final Tip: Size Matters

The more recognised your brand, the stronger your conversion rate. If you’re just starting out and nobody knows you, it’s probably best you don’t pick a fight with a big brand because when they bid on your brand name, that could cost you quite a bit of business.

Adwords Display URLs In Titles Might Get You Cheaper Clicks

Today, Google announced the introduction of display URLs in titles for ‘select top placement ads’. In summary, this means that, for ads that perform particularly well and appear in the ‘champagne box’ (ie top 3 positions), Google will add the domain component of your display URL next to your Ad’s title. Whilst this is a relatively minor change to ad formatting, it does illustrate how the best performing ads get rewarded with ‘freebies’ like these, which can further increase CTR and therefore further increase quality score… and we all know that a higher quality score means cheaper clicks.

Here’s an example:

Before:

After:

Note how ‘google.com’ appears next to the title, separated automatically by a vertical line. The display URL still appears in full at the bottom of the ad, as usual.

How Do I Get This To Work On My Ads?

We’ve noticed mixed results on our clients but it appears that Google selects ads based on keyword quality score and the CTR performance history of the ad. Ultimately, there’s not a lot you can do to enforce this change on your ads, other than continue to optimise your campaigns as you normally would. If you’re not aware of quality score and its close dependence on CTR, then we advise you take a quick read our blog post on quality score.

What Are The Benefits Of This Change?

CTR & Quality Score - the main benefit should be that your ad is more prominent – at least in the short term, whilst your competitors catch up. Google also says that it is possible to get both the display URL and the first line of ad text upgraded to the title line ‘as long as the resulting headline is sixty-eight characters or less’.  We’re yet to see both the display URL and the first line of ad text added to the title simultaneously. Ultimately, all these measures are designed to get your CTR up to push through more volume. A higher CTR tends to mean a higher quality score, which means cheaper clicks.

Wait a minute – there’s a bit of chicken and egg going on here – doesn’t a higher quality score help get your ad promoted into this new format, which then produces a higher CTR, which then produces an even higher quality score? Correct. Google likes to reward customers who use the Adwords service well and this is the most recent example. Bid competitively, get in the top positions and you’ll get a high CTR. High CTR = high quality score = free perks like display URLs in the title. It’s capitalism but them’s the rules!

Branding - this change also helps larger, more recognised brands make it clearer who they are and therefore command a higher CTR and also help smaller brands get their company name across more prominently.

Our Advice

Whilst we have seen positive improvements in CTR in ads that have their first line of ad text moved up into the title (this happens if you end the first line with a full stop of exclamation mark), we’re a bit sceptical as to whether adding the display URL will really change anything. We do believe that longer headlines are more prominent so potentially there are benefits for advertisers who can max out the 68 character limit with a title + 1st line + display URL combo.There is also the branding benefit as mentioned above.

That said, we always recommend taking advantage of Google’s innovations and should show you that, good CTRs and good quality scores get rewarded… which is why you should always use Google’s ad extensions and features to the full. Here’s a great example of and ad using both this new feature and the site links ad extension to command a strong quality score:



If you’re not getting long headlines (either through display or the 1st line being upgraded) and your not using one of the ad extensions (preferably site links), then your CTR is not as high as it should be. If this is the case, your quality score is most likely deflated and you’re therefore overpaying for clicks.