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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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?
Google continue to haemorrhage key staff at an alarming rate. Today Business Insider announced that Google Adwords Operations Chief Grady Burnett is to jump ship and move to Facebook to head up their advertising arm.
Burnett’s departure is one of many high profile cases over the past few months, which have included David Rosenblatt, Tim Armstrong (CEO of AOL) and the suitably named Larry Brilliant, who was in charge of Google’s philanthropic section and now works for Skoll in a similar role. So maybe all isn’t as peaceful as it seems on the good ship Google. That said, ambition and skill set poaching are probably more accountable than any real underlying issue.
These days, when someone has a problem, they go to the Internet for the solution. Smart Internet marketers have learned to offer their products and services in the form of solutions to those problems. Nothing could be truer than the area of health and healthcare. These days, before they even think of calling the Doctor’s Surgery, many people Google their symptoms to see what they can find out. Even when they’ve been to the Doctor, people still search for more information around what they’ve been told by their physician.
UK Healthcare Spend Continues to Rise
The average family in the UK now spends £1200 per year on private healthcare. Where do those families look for details of private healthcare providers? The answer, of course, is the Internet and the companies that appear on the first page of Google for the search term they used when looking for their solution.
In the past few years at Impact Media Ltd, we’ve seen an increase in companies looking to us for help in marketing their healthcare products and services online. Why? Because quite rightly, they want to share in the £15 billion spent each year on private healthcare!
Marketing Healthcare Online Works!
Many of the big companies have already got their Internet marketing organised, and by people finding them first when searching online, they’re taking the lion’s share of the healthcare target market online. But SMEs don’t have to sit back and take their meagre leftovers! Many smaller and medium-sized healthcare businesses are fighting back, using the latest Internet marketing techniques that can really help them compete with the big boys.
There’s no point signing up with a company that’s offering you quick success. First of all, there’s no such thing. Guarantees are worth nothing when it comes to Internet marketing; what counts are the results. Always look for a company that allows you the time to assess results and doesn’t tie you into a lengthy contract.
Even if you’re confident about designing and building a website and selling from it, you might not have the knowledge to promote your business effectively online. Traditional marketing techniques need an overhaul when applied to the Internet and specialist skills and knowledge are now required. What you need is month by month support and assistance in building your company’s online presence and very soon, you’ll start seeing results: Increased Google placement, improved traffic to your website, new sign-ups, orders and sales.
Whether you want to start off just improving your natural search results, or start paying for online ads to massively ramp up the flow of traffic to your site, an online marketing agency can meet your needs at each stage of development.
The best approach to Internet marketing is a blended one. By combining SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for a higher Google ranking, plus carefully crafted keyword targeted AdWords for an increased supply of qualified traffic, you’ll see more and more customers arriving at your site. Of course, this means your company website needs to be ready to handle qualified traffic from people interested in your buying your product or services. So, now’s the time to update your site if it isn’t ready!
If you’re a marketing professional looking to promote a healthcare business online, take a look through some of our SEO case studies to see how we could help your business attract more qualified leads.
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 AdWords is Google’s paid search advertising system where you pay only when someone clicks on one of your ads.
AdWords ads are displayed to the right hand side and sometimes above the top of the natural results.
A term used to refer to a matching option in Google AdWords. The broad match option tells AdWords to only show ads when the keywords used in a search match all of the ads keywords used in any order.
Google may also show ads using broad match for expanded matches such as synonyms and plurals. Because of this broad match is less targeted than the other matching options and should be used sparingly to avoid wasting money on un-targeted and irrelevant terms.
With Christmas just a few short weeks away, those very nice people at Google have just released another (free) keyword research application to help advertisers find additional phrases that they could be advertising on within Google’s pay per click platform, AdWords.
The Search Based Keyword Tool acts differently to most in that it uses your site to identify what it believes your web pages are about and then offers up a list of search queries that it believes are relevant to you and that you are not currently bidding on.
As with any keyword research application, you need to take the data and apply your own knowledge before blindly running off and adding a few more billion to Google’s profits. However, this tool has other potential uses. For example, you could also use the data Google presents to you and extrapolate negative keywords, i.e. if Google believes there is a match for a keyword, there is a danger your adverts could be shown if you use broad match in your campaign. Secondly, if there is a definite disconnect between what Google is indicating it believes a page to be about and your intentions, then you may want to review the page in question to validate your copy, e.g. text, headers, title etc.,
All in all, this looks like a useful keyword research tool and astute online advertisers should be able to find plenty of useful data to use to their advantage.
We recently had reason to suspect that one of our client’s Pay per Click campaigns was being targeted by one of their competitors. We suspected that they were clicking the ads to try and use up the daily budget early in the day. The trouble was how to identify who was clicking the Ads.
There are many expensive Click Fraud solutions available but we found a simple and free way of checking who was clicking the ads by using Statcounter.
By putting the Statcounter code on the website pages we were able to easily see the IP addresses of the clickers. This clearly showed that two Competitors were in fact clicking the ads. We then forwarded our findings to Google and hope this will result in a refund for our AdWords client.
You’ve finally taken the plunge to improve your online marketing efforts and set-up your very first Pay per Click campaign with Google AdWords.
You marvel at how easy it was to create your first Ad Group and appreciated the way Google suggested some keywords you might like to add. You worked through your reservations over some of the keywords as you figured that those clever people at Google knew far more about your business than you. Finally, you couldn’t quite believe how easy Google made it to add your credit card details…
Roll forward two months and whilst you appreciate that the level of web site enquiries have improved, you just wish that some of them were connected to your business! You start to question your own ability to sell online and figure that Pay per Click is just too complicated and best left to others. It doesn’t have to be that way. Google AdWords can work for you.
It has long been known that searchers very often search for a brand for research purposes or even as a preference to typing the URL straight into their browser.
By way of example, Google estimate that there are an average of just over 300,000 searches for ‘coca cola’ every month.
To reinforce this message, Hitwise UK have announced in their recent newsletter that 88% of searches for the top 2000 most popular keywords performed during May 2008 were for brands. Not surprisingly, ‘facebook’ was top of the brand searches accounting for 1 in every 72 searches performed. (Facebook Becomes Third Most Visited Site in UK)
Clearly, it is impossible to know the intent of the individual user when they search for a specific brand but UK online advertisers will need to consider the implications of this, particularly after Google removed restrictions on bidding on trademarked terms within their AdWords Pay per Click platform back in April.
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