Thanks to those of you who came to visit us at the TFM show. It’s the first time we have exhibited at this event and, hopefully, we’ll be there again next year.
We frequently speak and exhibit at marketing events across the country throughout the year, so keep an eye on our newsletter for details of upcoming events
My colleague John Heffernan, will be delivering a presentation on PPC at mad.co.uk’s Search Engine Marketing conference in London next month. So if you’ve ever wondered about the intricacies of Pay Per Click then get yourself along.
Last month I asked you to send me questions about Online Marketing which I’ve listed alongside the many questions that arose at the recent TFM show:
I thought I’d tell you about the different guises and experiments from the Google Lab you could be using to promote your website.
You may have optimised your website and have a Pay-Per Click (PPC) strategy in place to promote your site in Google already - but there are other tactics.
From AdWords to developing search through mobile devices, Google is constantly evolving to enhance user experience.
- Google Text, Video, Image and Mobile AdWords
- Google Search, Image Search, Mobile Search, Book Search and Shopping Search
- Google AdSense
- Google Maps/Local and Local AdWords
- Google Base
- Google Blogger
- Google Co-op
- Google Sitemaps
- Google Video
Check out Google’s Laboratory to get inside information on the next transformation from the search monster.
Find out about advertising using all of Google’s tools
Good content provides meat for the search engines to devour and as their tastes become more sophisticated they will spit out bad content faster than an entrepreneur leaves the Dragons Den (TV show).
Recent changes from Google confirm this, as the search engine plans to pay more attention to the quality of content on the pages which are linked from their PPC sponsored adverts:
“Landing pages with useful, informative content related to your keywords and ad text are considered to be of higher quality and will receive higher quality scores. This may mean lower minimum cost-per-click bids (CPC bids) for your ads. (The inverse is also true - poor quality landing pages will receive lower quality scores.)”
Source: Google AdWords Help Centre
“Content is King” and your online marketing efforts, from site development to online advertising, should reflect that principal.
Providing good content comes down to every element of your online presence from emails, blogs, online press releases, webpages and importantly the landing pages of your AdWords ads.
Writing good quality adverts and landing pages could lead to a cheaper advertising spend!
You can contact MediaCo to find out more about providing tasty content or read on for more details about reducing the cost of Pay Per Click Advertising through good content.
Here is a summary of the fundamentals in deploying a search engine marketing campaign:
- Set up an account with each search engine marketing provider you plan to use.
In order to start showing your ppc ads in their search results and on their partners’ pages.
- Manage your ppc bids.
It is not always important to be at position one and a search engine marketing campaign will be more cost-effective if you lower your ads to positions two, three or lower.
- Track the search engine marketing results.
Use the search engine marketing providers’ tools to identify which ppc phrases are performing well and which are not.
- Modify your ppc listings.
Keep tweaking your ads as required to gain performance improvements.
- Include your key phrases in the text and/or title of your ppc ads
By doing so, your readers will see the phrase they have typed in and, therefore, appreciate the relevance to their search terms. In a study, Yahoo! found that listings that include the search term in both the title and description have a higher click through rate (more than 50 per cent higher on average).
- Write clearly and simply
Simple language and short, non-repetitive sentences work best within search engine marketing campaigns.
- Reveal the attractive aspects of your offering
What is it? What are the benefits? Why is it better? Give the searcher a reason why they should click through to your site by telling them what they will achieve by visiting. Possibly even offer an incentive for them to click through.
- Be objective and informative
There is no place for hype within search engine marketing. While you want your ppc ad to stand out from the rest, you need to ensure you are giving the user what they want.
- Avoid superlatives
Greatest, Biggest, Best etc.
- Use attention-grabbing words
Free, New, Win, Offer etc are fine for search engine marketing if they are not misleading.
- Be descriptive
Making sure the readers know exactly ‘what’s inside the packet’. Again, in the limited characters that are available, show the user what they will find when they visit your site.
- Use a clear call-to-action
So your readers know what to do and why.
- Make every word count
Space is very limited so you should spend time honing your ppc ads.
- Target your ads to the phrase
Where possible try to write different ppc ads for each phrase to make the search engine marketing listings as relevant and targeted as possible. This also gives you the chance to trial different types of listings to see what works and what doesn’t.
- Direct the searcher to the relevant page
The landing pages within your search engine marketing campaigns should be relevant to the search phrase. Only send them to the home page if there is a suitable reason as to why they should go there.
In the next Search Engine Marketing post, we’ll cover Deploying your campaigns …
When planning a search engine marketing / pay per click campaign, the first step is to choose the key phrases that you want your ppc ads to appear for. These are the phrases that, when searched for, will lead people to your listings and your pages.
There are a few tools that can assist your search engine marketing key phrase selection. They include:
Search Engine Marketing - Campaign planning
Campaign planning is the next stage of your search engine marketing / pay per click activity. This involves taking your final list of key phrases and using the providers’ tools to calculate the amount of traffic you could expect from running the phrases and at what cost.
Search Engine Marketing Creatives – writing your pay per click ads
When creating your PPC ads the challenge is to:
- Create an ad which generates responses.
- Create an ad which generates as many quality responses as possible.
- Create an ad which generates as many quality responses as possible and as few untargeted responses as possible.
There are a few elements you have to take into consideration when creating your titles and descriptions in order to achieve the above.
The first consideration is character length. Each of the providers has character restrictions which must be adhered to. They are as follows:
|
|
Title
|
Description
|
| Yahoo |
40 characters |
190 characters |
| Miva |
50 characters |
200 characters |
| Google |
25 characters |
35 characters for line 1 and 35 characters for line2 |
The search engine marketing / pay per click providers also have guidelines regarding the content of ppc ads. They include:
- There must be substantial content on the site that is clearly and obviously relevant to the search term.
- Must include the search term in your title and description (this does not apply to Google).
- Must not use superlatives (e.g. World’s Greatest, Biggest or Best) in your title and description.
- Must not contain universal call-to-action phrases such as ‘click here’, ‘link here’ or ‘visit this link’ (Google only).
- Must not use exclamation points or unnecessary capitalisation (Google will accept one exclamation point in the description).
- Must not use symbols; e.g, & and £)(this does not apply to Google).
- Must not use repetition.
- Must have a functional URL.
In the next Search Engine Marketing post, we’ll cover Creative Top Tips …
Next, we thought we’d cover an introduction to search engine marketing and pay per click advertising.
Natural and sponsored listings
The natural (also known as ‘organic’) listings are those which appear within the main area of the search engine results pages (SERPs) and sponsored listings tend to be placed across the top and within the right-hand column.
Some 70 per cent of clicks-throughs are generated by way of the natural search engine listings.
Good positioning within them is primarily gained through:
- Optimised content (textual content enhanced through search engine optimisation to emphasise its relevance to targeted search phrases).
- On-topic page titles.
- Search engine accessibility (how easy it is for a search engine to “read” your pages).
- Inbound links (from relevant, third-party sites).
Search Engine Marketing
The term search engine marketing generally refers to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
As well as often appearing under a ‘Sponsored Links’ header, they also appear in the web search results that are presented by pay per click providers’ partner sites and within shopping-style business directories.
Leading pay per click providers include Google (AdWords), Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Miva (formerly Espotting).
How search engine marketing (aka PPC) works is:
- You choose relevant keywords and phrases which you wish to match to your ppc ads (so the appropriate ads appear when your words or phrases are entered as a search phrase).
- You create your own ads (titles and descriptions).
- You place bids against your keywords and phrases (how much you’re prepared to pay per click).
- The higher your bid, the higher your ppc ad will appear in the results.
- Each time someone clicks, you incur your bid cost.
In the next Search Engine Marketing post, we’ll cover key phrase selection …
