Search Engine Marketing Blog

If you use Google’s Pay per Click service, it can seem at first that you’re on your own when it comes to getting help with managing your AdWords campaign.

Google make it really easy to set-up your account and, although they provide a comprehensive AdWords help section, it can sometimes seem quite daunting when you first get started with this form of online marketing.

So, what else should you do? Well, if you plan on using Pay per Click (PPC) consistently, you should invest in at least one good book. Just do a search of Amazon and check out the reviews. Perry Marshall and Andrew Goodman are two well respected authors on the topic.

You could also join the AdWords Help Group ‘though this may appear overwhelming at first.

Finally, you may decide that you want to spend your time managing your business rather than becoming an AdWords expert. If that’s the case and you plan on investing significantly in PPC then the answer may be to out-source your AdWords management to a qualified specialist. Clearly this will carry a cost but if you pick the right service provider, they should add significantly more value to your bottom line.

The main thing though if you plan on diverting some of your marketing budget online is to seek out appropriate help and not assume that just handing your credit card details to Google is all it takes to make a successful campaign!

Depending on whether your glass is half-full or half-empty, Google’s policy from the beginning of April 2008 to include your landing page load time in your Quality Score will either be seen as an opportunity to do the right thing for your web pages or bury your head and curse AdWords for charging you more per click.

It sounds obvious but, if you’re an AdWords advertiser, you want to ensure that the page your visitors arrive at (the landing page) after they click on your advert is not only relevant to their search and gives them a clear sales funnel to follow but also loads quickly in their browser. The fact most Internet users are now Broadband enabled is still no excuse for bloated code, massive image files and unnecessary on-page clutter.

Although you should always strive for creating well optimised pages, Google is now going to add an extra incentive by rewarding its Pay per Click advertisers with lower minimum cost per clicks (CPC). Now that makes perfect sense to me!

Although an AdWords Search Query Report can give you some idea of what search queries are triggering broad and phrase match keywords much of the useful data is hidden under ‘….other unique queries’ entries.

This data is an absolute gold mine for identifying new keyterms and negative keywords.

So how do we find out what some of those hidden terms were?

By using Google Analytics thats how. By following the simple instructions shown at www.semvironment.com you can easily start to use this vital data.

Perhaps a better question to ask would be, why wouldn’t you?

Many of our clients use our Google AdWords services simply because they don’t understand how Pay per Click works and take the pragmatic view that to get their campaign working well they could either go and study PPC or out-source to a company who specialise in search marketing and employ AdWords experts. We have 5 Qualified Professionals in Impact Media and the company is proud to be an AdWords Qualified Company.

Some of the accounts we manage and optimise have been wasting large sums of money regularly simply because the person who created the account didn’t understand the finer detail of assembling a campaign and how to make it effective.

As good as it is, AdWords is also deceptively simple to create an account, set-up a campaign, pop in a few keywords and add your first advert and lastly (but certainly not least!) update your billing details so your campaign can be activated (and Google paid). Then what? You look at your account the first day and see some impressions and a handle of clicks. Great! It’s working already. A week goes by and you’ve spent £200. This is the result of 400 clicks but have they been effective? How would you know? If the visits to your site were the wrong ones, how would you prevent it from happening again? How well did your ad copy perform? And so it goes on until you end up pausing your campaign, cursing Google and swearing that Pay per Click doesn’t work.

Using Google AdWords untrained is a bit like giving a car to someone who’s never driven and asking them to take a trip. They may get so far but it’s bound to end in tears!

We’re proud of our what we do and believe our professional AdWords services are a cost effective way for any UK business to maximise the return from their online marketing budget. We don’t tie anyone into a contract and even offer a free Pay per Click report for anyone wanting to have their current campaign assessed.

At Impact Media, we’re a Google Qualified company and everyone in the team who work on client accounts are Qualified Individuals.

So what? How could that make a difference to your AdWords campaign and, perhaps more importantly, your company profits?

Well, we’re independent of Google and work solely for our clients. Equally, our clients are never tied in to a long term contract so if we don’t add value, they are free to walk away.

Our process is very simple. Once we receive your induction form and have a thorough understanding of your priorities, we review your site and, if applicable, existing campaigns. We then perform comprehensive keyword research to identify both new opportunities and also irrelevant phrases to ensure your online marketing budget isn’t blown on wasted clicks.

We then set about constructing a highly effective campaign with multiple Ad Groups. We make sure that each Ad Group is tightly themed and targeted towards the most appropriate area of your site.

If conversion tracking isn’t in place, we will work with you to implement this so that you’ll be able to see which keywords are delivering sales.

Month by month, we will perform reviews of your site, running reports, performing new research and optimising adverts.

Our entire focus is all about driving your conversions up without simply resorting to throwing more money at waste of time clicks. Refinement is the key!

Hopefully, this has given you an insight into why we believe using a UK Google AdWords Professional could be one of the best investments you could make for your business. If you’d like to know more, request our free Pay per Click report.

As part of Impact Media’s ongoing efforts to ensure we provide our clients with a premium service, I was recently required to become a Google Qualified Professional (As will all new Impact Media sales people from now on). Having now passed the exam this adds further value and credibility to our offering, as a sales executive it allows me to provide our clients with the best possible advice with regards to Pay Per Click (PPC).

We believe in building lasting business relationships based on trust and results, if we add value to a business, they will remain a loyal client. We do not need to tie our clients into lengthy contracts and they are free to stop working with us at any time; in order for us to retain business on an ongoing basis we must ensure that the correct strategy is employed from the outset; and the desired results are achieved.

We are a team of dedicated professionals and prospective clients can contact us safe in the knowledge that they are dealing with someone who has gained Google’s recognition as a tested and proven AdWords expert.

Google are currently rolling out the new AdWords Local PlusBox which will now enable the top featured sponsored result in the Google search engine to display even more information.

This information will consist of a map, contact details, address and will even allow people to get directions. The best part is there is no extra charge for this and you will only billed by Google as normal, when someone clicks on your add and arrives at your landing page.

For local businesses looking specifically to target their particular geographical location this could prove very helpful in maximising the online visibility received.

More information can be found here at the Inside AdWords Blog

Google are well known for their technical innovations and when it comes to pay per click (PPC), their AdWords advertising system is the clear market leader.

However, they’re not perfect and recently seemed to have dropped the ball when it comes to using Broad Match. This is the most common type of matching used when you create an AdWords campaign with the others being Phrase Match and Exact Match.

In very simple terms, Broad Match previously meant that if you entered a keyphrase, e.g. England Football Team, those three words could appear in any order and still display your advert. For example, someone entering the search term, “What kind of football team is England?” could have displayed your ad.

In short, Broad Match has always given most exposures but not always relevant. To combat this, we add a large dose of Negative Keywords.

Now though, Google are developing their algorithms to enable synonym replacement on words. Carrying this example on, it may be that the system thinks ‘English‘ is a good swap for ‘England‘ and ‘teams‘ for ‘team‘ so someone searching for “English football teams” could display your ad. Not too bad? What about “England Rugby Team“?

Although this is a very frivolous example, last week we saw in our own campaign that we had paid for the click “John Lewis Website“. This had come from the broad term Website Marketing Company. Go figure!

The point here is that we’re seeing a lot of totally unrelated searches coming through and if you’re running your own AdWords campaign and have it full of broad terms, you may want to start running regular Search Query reports and scanning a critical eye over the search queries column. Go on, run one today… you may be in for a bit of a surprise!

At Impact Media we pride ourselves in helping our clients increase the return on their Internet marketing investment.

Of course there are many ways we accomplish this but even if you have no plans to out-source your pay per click management to a professional agency, there are still plenty of things that you could (should) be doing in order to help yourself and reduce the wasted clicks, aka cost, going though your AdWords account.

One of the most powerful, yet under-utilised, techniques to use is that of negative keywords. A negative keyword, what on earth is that? Well, simply put it’s a word or phrase that when used will prevent your advert from showing if used in conjunction with another word or phrase that appears in your campaign.

For example, let’s say you sell blue widgets and you’re using a combination of match types to get the maximum exposure for this product. However, your keyword research has thrown up that there is a lot of searches for ‘used blue widgets‘. In this example, you would add the word ‘used‘ as a negative.

Although important with both broad and phrase matches, with Google’s synonym replacement on broad matches, it is imperative that anybody running an AdWords campaign has performed thorough keyword research to identify as many negatives as possible. Failure to do so will mean a poorly performing campaign costing far more than it need.