These listings are fantastic ways to:

a.) Target your most precious customers – local people looking for you

b.) Dominate some key screen real estate for some extra search terms

If you haven’t done so already, we advise heading down to Google Local Business Centre. Setting up your listing as easy and takes just a few minutes. It’s a free service so we’re amazed at how many advertisers don’t take advantage of it.

I’d be prepared to wager a small sum that that’s the order of expansion for most Adwords clients – but should it be?

How Can I Advertise On Youtube?

Our work is revealing an increasing ROI for Youtube advertising, which comes in 4 forms:

1. In-ad overlay advertisements (text or flash ads)
2. Sponsored video listings
3. Youtube-targeted display advertising
4. Pre-roll and post-roll clickable ads (before/after targeted videos)

Is It Better Than The Content Network?

For many clients the answer is ‘yes’. We’re seeing some interesting results and we believe the early success of Youtube advertising is down to 2 factors:

1. Youtube content commands greater focus and engagement than text content. Ads placed before, during or after this content correspondingly achieve a great share of the user’s attention.
2. Youtube is still massively underadopted as an advertising platform and uses a CPC model for what should really be a CPM form of advertising. In other words, clicks are still relatively cheap and the branding opportunity is not to be ignored.

So Should I Be Advertising On Youtube?

If you already have seen success on the Content Network or you have a B2C offering that can support either yours or someone else’s video content – go for it! We have to put in a shameless plug for our own optimisation services, but if you’d like this service managed or just need some more advice, contact us now.

Youtube advertising is here to stay and click prices will only go up in the foreseeable future so be the early bird and catch this worm!

How Will It Work?

At the moment, users reveal the contact form by clicking on the + sign (see above) and enter their details before clicking on a ‘give me a call’ button.

As the advertiser, you then get a ‘Lead ID’, call a Google freephone number and enter that Lead ID to be connected to the customer.

Google give you up to 3 custom questions to use in the form and will display some or all of these based on their ‘quality algorithm’.

At the moment this test is restricted to phone leads and you are obliged to call the lead within 24 hours.

What Are The Implications?

The implications on this are potentially massive. Google are doing what business experts would describe as ‘moving down the value chain’ or ‘vertically integrating’ from providing website visitors to actually providing leads. Maybe one day they’ll call the leads for us too and we can all lie on a beach somewhere, waiting for business to drop into our cocktails?

But it’s much bigger than that… and it comes with a mixture of good, bad and ugly.

The good: it’s simple – more leads surely? If you’re selling widgets and convert a high percentage of all of your leads into sales, this can only be a good thing. Having this form will also be a good way to make your ad stand out. We also think this could work quite well on the Content Network, where clicks are usually far cheaper.

The bad: you don’t get the data – Google does. Google is going to charge you a per click/form fill to generate data that it’s not going to give you. Will Google start selling this data down the line?

Google also controls which questions actually appear on the form with its own ‘quality algorithm’. It’s one thing controlling ad positioning with such algorithm but to actually modify the content  is, to me, a bit much.

The ugly: Having structured their SEO algorithm and even parts of their PPC service (site links) towards incentivising website owners to make quality content and make a good user experience, Google are now offering a way for users to bypass this altogether.

What’s wrong with that? Well, if a percentage of users just fill out the form without reading all of your carefully worded sales pitch, your lead quality is going to plummet, while the number of clicks/leads you buy rockets.

The result? At first, lead generating advertisers will marvel at the how their CPAs are plummeting. Then they’ll walk next door and see a busy sales team and smile smugly. A few weeks later, they’ll look at their sales figures with shock as they realised that the sales team has actually been busy trying to sift out the low-quality leads that they’ve been given, rather than making money.

The Verdict

For some businesses, these leads will be a profitable source of revenue – these businesses will be those with relatively simple sales propositions that aren’t particularly niche – most likely the big boys.

For other, more complex businesses, Google generated leads won’t even be an option as there’s no way you can generate even a vaguely qualified lead with a few lines of ad text.

For most business, however, there will be a bit of both and it will require a careful internal lead management, qualification and auditing system to make sure that these leads become profitable – and its the hidden cost of these processes that is the real pitfall.

One thing that curiously doesn’t seem to appear often on PPC advice blogs is advice on bid management. Bid management appears to be very passe it seems yet it is still one of the cornerstones of PPC success – the others being the product itself, landing page conversion, good ad copy and relevant keyword reach.

At Managed PPC, we smugly regard ourselves as a little bit more ‘outside the box’ than most so hopefully you’ll enjoy this next tip.

Lowering Your Bids Can Boost Your PPC Performance

To some, the above statement seems obvious and to others, it may sounds ridiculous but it comes down to simple supply & demand theory.

Let’s take the following example, where your daily budget is £100 and, on average, it costs you:

£3/click for position 1

£2/click for position 2

£1/click for position 3

Clearly spending your £100 on position 3 clicks is going to give you 3 times as many clicks as spending it on position 1. Ergo, a lower bid is better. If you think ‘that’s obvious’ then you might want to back up your claim by setting your ad distribution to accelerated and see by what time of day your daily budget is used up.If you find that you’re spent by lunch, then either your bids are too high or your daily budget is too low. Clearly you could just raise your budget but what if you can’t?

In this instance, lowering your bids will make your budget last longer and, as we’ve seen above, get your more clicks. The bonus reward here is that, in many markets, customers who do bother to click on the lower ranked ads are often ‘higher quality’ and less impulsive. ‘Higher quality’ can mean ‘more likely to convert’ or simply ‘higher value’.

Adwords Editor will allow you to perform advanced bid changes so that you can modify your bids by a percentage so that you can gradually edge towards this ’sweet spot’ of bid management.

Quick Check List

1. Set your ads to accelerated in Campaign / Settings for 1 day.

2. See when your budget is being used up (this can be done precisely using Google Analytics but monitoring your campaign throughout the day will give you a rough estimate).

3. Lower your bids by 10% at a time using advanced bid changes in Adwords Editor

4. Repeat until your daily budget lasts the whole day (on accelerated)!

Disclaimer: Obviously you might want to consider implementing this on some keywords and not others. All campaigns are different and only you can decide what is exactly the best bidding strategy but, frighteningly, this concept seems to be outside the knowledge of most so just being aware of it could give you that competitive edge.

Have you tried this? Feel free to comment with your thoughts…

All you have to do is click on the arrow tab beneath any graph and the annotations field will pull down. From there, just click on your date on the graph to annotate it.

While this isn’t earth-shattering, more accountability is always a good thing and, with everyone holding out for the Christmas break, impressing your boss with a nice, easy-to-understand report of the year’s actions and results might just see you through!

Here’s Google’s video, explaining how it all works:

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What Is Web History?

Web History is not the same as your browser’s history. It’s a separate history that Google has collected independently. Privacy freaks – don’t worry – you can opt out of it.

What Are The Implications To The User?

The implications to the user are two-fold:

1. Users will now get search results that most would view as more relevant to their needs, as their past browsing behaviour has been taken into account.

2. Users will get less diverse search results and will become less likely to find new sites, as Google will now favour sites that have already been visited.

The Beginning Of The End Of SEO?

Dynamic, personalised search results surely spell danger for the SEO industry as ‘getting to number 1′ becomes even harder than it ever has been. Personalised search results effectively mean that your direct traffic is now a driver of your organic traffic – this is arguably the biggest change in the SEO process that we’ve seen for some years.

Essentially, Google wants users to have the best search experience possible. And this means personalised, dynamic and accurate search results. SEO agencies effectively exist to ‘hack’ (maybe a bit harsh) Google’s algorithms to make sure that their clients hit the top of the rankings. Whereas inbound links, site structure, keyword density and most other variables in the SEO algorithm are able to be manipulated by SEOs, presence in users’ web histories is very much impossible for an SEO alone to impact.

So What Does This Mean For The Future?

Ironically, Google has just handed a nice little lifeline to the struggling off-line marketing industry because, if direct, paid-for and affiliate traffic is now driving organic traffic (via the benefit of getting a site into users’ web histories), then the value of the drivers of non-SEO traffic has just risen – and this includes offline marketing.

So companies who can afford massive offline marketing campaigns, PPC and affiliate campaigns will now be rewarded with extra SEO traffic – exactly how much remains to be seen.

The end result – Google’s latest change to the search algorithm heavily favours anyone who is driving traffic via other means – the more traffic you have, the larger your SEO ‘Web History’ advantage. New businesses will find it harder to break through online and the big boys will get extra rewards for their critical mass.

Are we about to see the WWW enter maturity and consolidate itself? Is this the beginning of the end for SEO and the small businesses have propped much of this industry up?

This can be particularly useful if:

a.) Your website goes down (although we would advise contacting your ISP for quicker automatic notification)

b.) Your SEO traffic begins to rise or fall

c.) You want a holiday and you want to go to sleep without worrying that your developers have ruined your site

We recommend using these alerts, especially if someone else is managing your campaign. Overseeing your website’s basic health without needing to spend time on it is more than just one of Analytics’ bonus features – its hugely useful.

Check out this quick video from Google themselves to see how it works:

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You may have read my post on the benefits of Google Adwords Site links. To summarise – site links are a great new way for the lucky few to improve conversion rate and CTR simultaneously. In business terms, this means more volume at a greater margin.

One major gripe I have with site links is that they are only available to those companies who have a high quality score throughout their account. It’s either on for all your campaigns and ads, or it’s off. Why can this not be calculated at campaign level rather than at account level?

Surely if I can use site links effectively on the campaigns that are ‘high quality’ then it will make me clean my other campaigns up so I can buy more clicks?

Whether Google lowers the barriers for site links or calculates eligibility on a ‘per-campaign’ basis remains to be seen. The current setup appears to mirror the SEO equivalent, where only the high enough quality sites get the luxury of having a mini-sitemaps as part of their listing. The worrying thing is that, by operating site links on the current ‘all or nothing’ basis, they are effectively rewarding the big boys and the start-ups, whilst ignoring the ‘middle class’ of online marketing.

In other words, if you’re a big company you’ll be able to take the necessary landing page development steps to improve your quality score (and enable this huge feature on your account), if you’re small you’ll only be able to afford to advertise on high quality score terms anyway – but if, like the majority of online advertisers, you’re somewhere in the middle then you’re probably out of luck.

It boils down to the fact that many low quality score keywords are profitable – and these are the keywords that the big boys have the development resource to serve well and the startups aren’t able to get any profit from. Advertisers should not be penalised for having profitable keywords but rewarded for making them even more profitable. By preventing them from using site links on the campaigns (or keywords) that do have high quality scores, Google is effectively penalising advertisers who make profits in this way.

If this strategy continues, the landscape of PPC marketing could be in for some dramatic changes.

Should Google allow site links on a ‘per campaign’ basis or stick to its current ‘per account’ structure?

1. Save money, pay attention to quality score

Your ad’s ranking is determined by its maximum CPC, multiplied by the ‘Quality Score’. If you have a relevant landing page for your keywords and get high CTRs for the ads, you’ll get a high quality score, which will enable you to rank higher than your competitors with lower bids.

2. Always, ALWAYS be testing!

We recommend having at least 2 ads per ad-group running simultaneously, testing 1 ‘variable’ at a time. This can be a message, a feature, a benefit, a call to action or even a display URL. All these things add up to a high CTR but must be measured individually.

3. Save Money: Cut out the wastage with negative keywords

Negative keywords are terms that you do NOT want to appear under. Get this list right and you’ll save yourself a ton of wasted clicks. Start with some obvious terms and then run a Search Query Performance report to tell you exactly where those clicks are being wasted… and which words to block.

4. Scale It Up: Get more conversions with the Content Network

Google’s Content Network will get you more conversions by placing your ad on relevant sites, allowing you to target those that get you the best results. This isn’t for everyone but tends to work best in defined niches and often produces cheaper clicks.

5. Maximise Your Conversions: Ring-fence your top keywords

Put your top performing keywords in a separate campaign with a separate budget to ensure that other keywords don’t eat up their budget.

6. Improve Your Conversion Rate & Margin: Go for the ‘long tail’

Core search terms such as ‘tennis rackets’ come with high competition, high CPCs and non-commital customers. More niche terms with 3-4 words (eg. ‘kids tennis rackets’) are proven to have a higher conversion rate, a lower cost and carry lower risk. So the secret is to bid on as many cheap ‘niche’ long-tail terms as possible as it is these that will bring down your overall cost per conversion at the same time as providing your campaign with some extra customers.

Google Adwords Site Links

Site links seemed to have arrived without making much of a ripple but they are likely to be a game changer as this move is the most significant reward yet that Google has offered to those who are ‘playing by the rules’.

2 Reasons Why You Should Use Site Links:

1. Site links increase CTR… and CTR increases volume… and volume increases profits.Site links are your chance to have a more prominent ad with several different calls to action. This means that there is a far greater chance of a user clicking on your ad.
2. Site links decrease cost per conversion… and lower costs means higher margins… which mean higher profits.With a greater menu of links to choose from, the user is more likely to land on the landing page that suits them. In other words ‘one size fits all’ has been replaced by ‘choose from 4 sizes’ – and the result will be higher conversion rates and a bigger return for the clicks you are paying for.

In order to get this functionality, you’re going have to increase quality score – you can read all about this directly from Google.