Search Engine Marketing Blog

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.

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

Of course, there’s no absolute answer to this question as many search marketing agencies will charge for their PPC services at different rates.

With Impact Media, we work with our clients typically by charging an initial fee to set up their Google AdWords PPC campaign or to optimise an existing campaign. This varies based upon complexity and/or number of products or services but is flexible enough to accommodate most budgets.

We then work on a monthly retainer basis, the purpose of which is to allow us sufficient time to further optimise the account, develop additional Ad Groups and provide comprehensive reporting. Given that we see what we do as a partnership with our clients, no one is tied into any long term contracts and we only want our clients to stay with us if they feel we are adding value.

Some agencies will also charge a monthly service fee as a percentage of the spend they are managing through the pay per click search engine(s) and you should check the details if that is the case as this could develop into a hefty additional charge.

When shopping around for a company to use for PPC management, make sure you have a good chat with them to understand their approach and also ask for testimonials or case studies. If you find a good one, stick with them! Once you do this, the question will change to “How Much is PPC Management Gaining Me?”

———-

Impact Media provide AdWords management tailored to fit your needs.

We are pleased to announce we have been appointed as Simply Mirror TV’s professional search marketing partner.

Simply Mirror TV specialise in Mirror TV’s and that’s it, they also offer customised Mirror TV’s in unusual shapes with bespoke frames.

We will be running Simply Mirror TV’s Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign via Google AdWords to ensure it is both cost effective and efficient from the outset, providing the best possible return on investment.

We are very much looking forward to working with Simply Mirror TV on their PPC project.

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.