If you thought Apple was going to go soft on Amazon’s Kindle think again (or Think Different…). Despite the fact that no one will get an iPad till March or April they have already started buying keywords like “Kindle” on Google.
I like it but am wishing that the 64GB memory was the base; 16GB seems too small for a device that does as much as an iPhone and more.
Pay Per Click advertisers only pay when an advertisement they placed on a Search Engine, Web Site or Blog is clicked to access the advertised content. From a cost perspective doesn’t matter how many impressions you receive since you only pay for clicks.
A PPC campaign is effective when properly managed. There are pitfalls which must be considered before initiating any Pay Per Click campaigns. These are:
* If not properly managed Pay Per Click can be expensive
* It’s possible to get involved in a bidding war drastically increasing PPC costs
* Advertisements placed on inappropriate web sites or content networks deliver un-targeted traffic, increase cost and lower campaign ROI
* As traffic increases so does the cost
It is imperative at the outset of your PPC campaign to prepare a budget for the advertising campaign based on profit driven campaign goals such as; increased sales, leads for the sales department or other objectives identified through business Strategic Planning.
There are many Pay Per Click providers available with the leaders being Google, Yahoo, and Bing. However Google has the most traffic and if you are tight for resources you can by with advertising just in Google as creating and maintaining a PPC campaign by yourself can be time consuming.
Although there are other PPC providers I prefer to work with the “Big 3″ as I have personally experienced “Click Fraud” and poorly targeted traffic when using other PPC providers. However, even when using the primary Pay Per Click providers, you must pay attention to where you ads will be displayed. The use of Google’s content network does have the potential to deliver poorly targeted traffic which is unlikely to convert into your company’s identified goals.
Watch out for “search network” or “content match” content on Yahoo & Bing as saavy black hat publishers have setup many sites that are 100% ads and often have offshore people clicking on ads all day. You can easily rack up $100s of dollars worth of useless traffic in a day. Yahoo allows you to blacklist sites, so keep an eye on your referrals and track traffic by keyword to be sure you are getting conversions on the right keywords.
The selection of keywords is critical to the success of your PPC campaign. The keywords are used to develop your ad title, ad content and landing page content, and therefore must capture your target audience’s attention immediately.
Investigating potential keywords is essential to obtain a reasonable ROI from your PPC investment. Cost per click varies depending on how popular the keywords are, and how much traffic they are likely to generate.
Paying for the #1 position is not always necessary, often the best strategy is to pay for positions 3 or 4 which are still highly visible and less expensive. You will receive less clicks but generally your conversion rate will be higher on the clicks you receive so the end result is the same and you pay less money!
To do more Keyword Research use a tool. Two very good services for keyword suggestion tools are Wordtracker and Trellian’s Keyword Discovery, both use different processes providing varying results. Another tool which should not be overlooked is Google’s Keyword Tool.
The key to effective Ad creation is writing ad title and copy that uses the keyword / keyword phrase in an attention grabbing manner using very few characters. You only have seconds to grab your target audience’s attention, thus the importance of writing attention grabbing ad copy.
The use of action verbs, limited time offers, specials and identifying the benefits of your service or product are important factors in developing your PPC advertisements to encourage the “click”.
For each ad campaign you can greatly improve your conversion rates by developing landing pages specific to the ad content.
There are two types of landing pages: Reference pages and Action pages.
Reference pages provide the visitor with detailed information about the ad offers and should be relevant and include the keywords and phrases used in the advertisement. Action pages should include motivation to encourage your visitor to complete the transaction or conversion identified in the Pay Per Click planning process.
Key items in a Landing Page Include:
* Headline – Relevant call to action
* Prices, bonuses and special offers appropriate to advertisement
* Page Body Copy – Easy to scan copy detailing product or service benefits
* Sub Headers and Tag lines – action orientated, problem solving
* Buttons and Links – Easily accessible and identifiable to encourage conversion
It is important to test the effectiveness of your ad and your landing pages. Typically A –B testing is the most informative, enabling you to compare results from advertisements and landing pages which are similar but different while targeting the same keywords and keyword phrases. However, it must be remembered that without significant traffic volumes A-B testing results can provide inaccurate results.
It is now time to try out your Pay Per Click strategies, one final comment is; Start your bids low and build, that is one key factor to keeping within your Pay Per Click budget and obtaining maximum ROI.
Matt Cutts from Google has mentioned that there areover 200 variables in the Google Algorithm that effect how your site shows up in their engine. Here are the top 50 that I could find:
Domain: Age of Domain, History of domain, KWs in domain name, Sub domain or root domain, TLD of Domain, IP address of domain, Location of IP address / Server
Architecture: HTML structure, Use of Headers tags, URL path, Use of external CSS / JS files
Content: Keyword density of page, Keyword in Title Tag, Keyword in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords), Keyword in KW in header tags (H1, H2 etc), Keyword in body text, Freshness of Content
Per Inbound Link: Quality of website linking in, Quality of web page linking in, Age of website, Age of web page, Relevancy of page’s content, Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text), Anchor text if link, Title attribute of link, Alt tag of images linking, Country specific TLD domain, Authority TLD (.edu, .gov), Location of server, Authority Link (CNN, BBC, etc)
Cluster of Links: Uniqueness of Class C address
Internal Cross Linking: No of internal links to page, Location of link on page, Anchor text of FIRST text link
Penalties: Over Optimization, Purchasing Links, Selling Links, Comment Spamming, Cloaking, Hidden Text, Duplicate Content, Keyword stuffing, Manual penalties, Sandbox effect
Miscellaneous: JavaScript Links, No Follow Links
Pending: Performance / Load of a website, Speed of JS,
Misconceptions: XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings), PageRank (General Indicator of page’s performance)
Have an hour or two to kill. Want to read something interesting?
Not much to do with websites (well except the last one) but I like to look at interesting things not related to my normal job to get insight and creative ideas that I can bring back. I hope you enjoy them.
If you have any interesting links post a comment.
I was thinking today about the “price war” marketing campaigns that TimeWarner Cable and Fox are running. Time Warner Cable says that “some networks” (like FOX) want a 300% raise. I didn’t research the exact amounts but lets just assume they want more money for their channels as a given.
Fox retorts with the fact that TWC charges up to $36 for six channels. I’m not sure what market that is in, but here in Charlotte the minimum cable package was $12: “Broadcast Cable – Your popular local, network, community and public affairs channels.” For $30 you received 180 channels.
With all the discussion about Net Neutrality going on the past few months I am wondering if we would be seeing these kinds of debates in the future with Internet networks. Fox Internet makes TWC and Comcast pay more to distribute their websites and videos. Google/YouTube makes DirectTV pay a premium for HD YouTube Videos, etc.
You can find out more on the debate on each site:
Personally I don’t know why Fox has to charge more than what they would charge to broadcast over the airwaves (i.e. $0). Don’t they make money off commercials? I’ll have to ask some folks I know at Time Warner to clarify that for me. I’m guessing TWC has the right to input their own commercials at sometimes or something. I’d really like ala carte pricing because even though I have 300+ channels and duplicated HD versions, there’s just a few that I watch.
If TimeWarner REALLY wanted to get tough, they would just let FOX drop, lower our cable bills accordingly, then give their subscribers FREE digital antennas.
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