Impact Media's SEO Blog

As Pay per Click (PPC) advertising becomes increasingly important, we look at why it is important that you choose a PPC management company who are qualified to manage your online marketing budget.

Online advertising is now one of the most popular ways to gain exposure for your site, company and the promotions you offer. It is unlike any other form of marketing, relying solely on a Pay per Click basis, which means that your adverts need impact and they need to be shown for the most appropriate keywords. More…

Now that you have set up your AdWords Account and have traffic going to your website, it is important that you know what all these people are doing on your website. That’s where Google Analytics can help you.

Analytics can separate the traffic you are paying to visit your site from the remainder of your traffic, allowing you to see if your advertising budget is converting to profit.

More…

To join search engine marketing in with the festive spirit, this blog post will provide you with 12 tips for optimising your AdWords Pay per Click campaign.

More…

This third and final post in the Quality Score series should provide you with a few ideas when to improving your current Quality Scores. Don’t settle with a Quality Score of seven or eight, set your sights higher and always aim for the top score.

To catch up on why exactly your quality score is so important you should take a look at my previous blog post – The Benefits of a Good Quality Score

More…

This is the second post in the Quality Score series and covers probably the most important issue, in my opinion.

Once you are aware of the benefits of having keywords with high Quality Scores, you should have no problem with making the changes required to improve your scores.

More…

Quality Score was introduced for Google AdWords to help Google decide which position an advertisers ad should be displayed and subsequently how much should be charged for each click on the ad.

Google assigns each keyword within an AdWords campaign with a score between 1 – 10 (1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest).

More…

In April, a new conversion column started appearing in AdWords reports and eventually the main AdWords homepage; it was called “Conversions (many-per-click)” and the old Conversion column was changed to “Conversions (1-per-click)”. This was done with no real fanfare at the time, especially considering the importance of the column. But what is “many per click” and is it better than plain old conversions?

More…

The ‘ad scheduling’ feature within Google AdWords has always been a fantastic way to extend the budget of your Pay Per Click campaigns. Rather than running an advertisement all day, every day, ad scheduling would allow you to define certain time parameters and ensure you targeted visitors at peak times.

Previously this was all done on a standard hourly rate. Meaning that your adverts could run it from 9am to 6pm on every weekday ,and 10am to 4pm on weekends without any problems. This was always a hugely efficient way to streamline campaigns; that was until Google updated the system, making it even more versatile.
More…

In the past, this blog article has explained What is a Click through Rate (CTR) and why is it Important?, so that is not something we need to explore further here. The purpose of this post is to help understand how exactly you manage the CTR and keep it at a good level.

Below we give you five top tips to help you along your way:

More…

One small move for Google, one giant leap for online marketing… well maybe.

It may only be a centimetre or two but Google’s decision to move their sponsored ads much closer to the organic listings could improve ROI.

The new Google layout definitely puts the sponsored links in eye range, which could only mean one thing – advertisers get a higher Click through Rate, a better quality score and more traffic.

It will be interesting to see just how much of an increase in traffic advertisers experience and more importantly how this affects the quality of the traffic they receive.

Only time will tell but this could be a win win situation for Google and Pay Per Click management.

Watch this space!

A new service has come to light further linking Google AdWords with Google Analytics and meaning that you can now import your Analytics Goals into your AdWords Account.

Goals are the primary measurement of a desired action on a website including:
•    Page views
•    Contact requests
•    Email registrations
•    Making a purchase
•    Adding product to shopping cart

More…

Google have just announced that their AdWords Search Query Report has been improved and will no longer contain the dreaded “Other Unique Queries“.

We’ve long advocated using the search query report to improve AdWords campaign performance and this will now make it an absolute must use for any advertiser interested in saving money and improving their ROI.

With these enhancements, expect to see longer keyword lists but remember, the devil is in the detail. Use with Excel and apply filters to spot negative keywords as well as fresh opportunities to expand your campaign.

On the 11th Day of Christmas, we bring you 11 AdWords Tips:

1. Invest time in researching keywords
2. Set-up conversion tracking from the outset
3. Move to a standard campaign from starter as soon as possible
4. Create separate campaigns if advertising on the Content Network
5. Ensure you understand the difference in the match types and use as appropriate
6. Use negative keywords
7. Test ad copy to see which is most effective
8. Ensure your landing pages are optimised for your keywords and ad copy
9. Improve your quality score by having a fast and reliable web host
10. Use the search query report regularly and often, particularly if using broad match
11. Use AdWords Editor to make life easier!

Google have just announced the release of version 7 of AdWords Editor.

Having just upgraded and followed the instructions, as always, to back up before upgrading, I was dismayed to find that when I went to restore the account snapshot, my local unposted changes weren’t there.

In addition to this, the proposed changes just had all of the existing campaigns in the AdWords account I was working on flagged as deleted.

There is a known issue that Google have given details of here:

Upgrading to version 7.0 known issues. Sounds easy enough but unfortunately this didn’t work for me.

Normally, I always ensure that I’ve uploaded local changes first but given that the backup option is documented as an appropriate method, I assumed I would be safe to do so. I hope this post saves you from experiencing the same problem.

You have a well designed website with great content and you’ve decided to use paid search to increase the flow of quality traffic to it. You’ve created an AdWords advertising campaign in an attempt to get the most out of your website, but there’s an important factor when using AdWords that you need to consider.

Google AdWords try to present ads by relevance and quality. To ensure this, one of the things they do is to make an assessment of the ad and your website and give an AdWords quality score.

Google Adwords Quality Score

What kind of things affects the AdWords quality score?

• The Click through Rate (CTR) of the keywords in your ad
• The past performance of the CTR to the URL in your ad
• The relevance of the keywords in your ad
• The relevance of the keywords to the ad and the search query
• The quality and performance of your landing page

The quality and performance of your landing page is a vital factor in Google AdWords determining your quality score. The benefits of having a good quality score are:

• AdWords decreases your CPC rate
• AdWords improves your ranking position

This means that your ads will cost less and your chances of being clicked on will improve. Without a good quality score, it will cost you more to get people to visit your site and there’s less chance of them finding you if your ad has a low ranking position.

So what can you do to improve the performance of your website and attain a better Google AdWords quality score?

• Ensure your site contains relevant and quality, original content
• Improve site speed
• Improve server speed

Your website’s content always needs to be fresh, original and well written. This shouldn’t be new to you; content is king and always had been. Google assesses the quality, originality and relevance of your content against the ads you place. One final thing on content-relationship to ads, if you want a good quality score, it helps if the keywords in your ads appear on your website. That might seem obvious, but many people forget to do this.

Your site speed is also essential, slow loading pages will kill your quality score and put off human visitors alike. If your pages are full of heavy graphics files, slow loading Java Script or CSS feeds, you will damage your quality score. Strip back everything non-essential from your website landing page; keep it simple and to the point, your search engine and human visitors will appreciate it.

Likewise, if you’ve hosted your website on cheap, slow servers with a budget web hosting company, your quality score may also be badly affected. If your hosting service is providing you with poor server speeds, it’s time that you moved your site to a new host.

Remember, by making web pages that load quicker, you will save money on you AdWords campaign, and more people will stay longer on your website, increasing the chances of converting them from visitors to buyers.

Further Reading:

Improve Your Landing Page Quality Score, Save Money!