8 PPC Bidding Hacks: Webinar

A major factor that determines the success or failure of your paid search campaigns is your bidding strategy. Speakers from Acquisio and Hanapin Marketing will help you learn 8 PPC Bidding Hacks to help you reach the right customers and maximize every campaign dollar you have.

Watch this webinar, PPC Bidding Hacks: 8 Ways To Supercharge Your Account to hear the experts discuss:

• The economics of the bidding auction
• Winning at average position
• Layering your audiences to supercharge your PPC account

James Stewart, Sales Engineer from Acquisio, covers half the PPC bidding hacks, while Jacob Fairclough, Senior Account Manager at Hanapin covers the rest. Here’s a quick preview of some of the tips the Acquisio expert shares.

1. Think Economy 101

James covers supply and demand as it related to the PPC auction. The PPC auction is a lot like the stock market and James shows how this can be leveraged to your advantage.

2. Intra-day behavior

Looking at the hours of the day, James shows that not all hours are equal by looking at volume, bids and position over the course of the day.

3. "Winning" is sometimes losing

The top position is not always best. See why the distinction between happy readers and clickers is important while analyzing the results of your PPC campaigns.

And more!

By listening in to this webinar you can learn not only what strategies to use yourself, but what technologies and solutions to use to take your bidding strategy to the next level.

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Five Tips For Creating Killer PPC Copy

Writing brilliant PPC copy might seem low down on your priorities list, but a good overhaul of your campaign copy can be the boost that you need for your PPC performance to improve.

Many people overlook their search ad copy and simply try to write something that fits into the space. However, a good advert takes time and effort and you will reap the benefits if you put in a little more thought to the copy.

Here are our five tips to creating compelling PPC copy.

1. Be Focused On Your Campaign

Really take some time to think about what you want to say and how you can say it in the space you have. Don’t be distracted by other tasks. You can see huge jumps in your conversion rate if you spend a little more time on your copy. It’s not got to take you a week to come up with something, but likewise, spend more than just two minutes on it.

2. Brainstorm Everything

Think about what you want to say in your ad and write everything down. We know there is limited space and we’re sure you have a lot to say about your product and services, right? What’s the proposition? How do you want to phrase your call to action? Which adjectives do you want to use? Get everything down on the ideas board and that way you can start to sort the wheat from the chaff. Speak with everyone, from the sales team to the customers, to see what words and phrases they’re using.

3. Unique Selling Points Are Your Strengths

If you want to make your ads stand out from the others, you need to think about your unique selling points. Do you offer:

• Free shipping?
• 24 hour customer service?
• Biggest range of products?

Try and add these to the call to action to really sell yourself.

If you have multiple USPs, you can run a few different versions to see which ones really work for you.

4. Be Creative

Don’t you have any USPs? Is your copy just the same as your competitors? You need to think more creatively then to create more compelling copy.

There are so many different ways to say the same thing. You can say:

• Same day shipping
• Ships same day
• We’ll ship instantly
• Immediate shipping

Play around with these and see which one works.

Another way to change your copy is by adjusting the tone. Try a variety and see which one is resonating with your customers.

• Honey fresh from the bees
• Pure filtered honey
• Heather honey straight off the moors
• Try our honey today!

5. Concentrate On The Components

Look at the specific components of your ad and work on these.

Headline

• Try using numbers vs. using percentages to see which one gets traction.
• Ask a question.

URL

• Try www. vs. not using it.
• Use your homepage
• Link to a specific page.

Description Lines

Where is your call to action? Try on line one and then line two and compare results.

The thing you must do is test, test, test. Keep honing your ad copy to make sure you’re really using the one that works.

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8 Steps To An Effective Pay Per Click (PPC) Advert

Pay-per-click adverts look simple but the best examples use every trick in the book in order to stand out. Business writer Rachel Miller explains how a simple title, copy and link can become a powerful advertising tool

Pay-per-click ads are also known as sponsored links. They appear next to search results on Google and Yahoo — on the right hand side of the search results page and sometimes also at the top.

Pay-per-click adverts have three main components: a heading, a short piece of copy and a link. Despite their apparent simplicity, each of these elements must work hard to ensure the advert stands out from the rest.

1. Use keywords to show relevance

Make sure your ad uses your keywords in your ad title and text — preferably at the beginning. If you haven’t chosen your keywords, then do this first — it will help you write your ad.

There are two good reasons to include your keywords in your ad — firstly, it makes your ad look relevant. So if someone has searched for oak flooring, they’ll look for the ad that has that phrase in the title rather than a general flooring company. Secondly, if the words used in the search are in your ad copy, then they will appear in bold, making your ad stand out.

2. Write a compelling heading

Most people look at the heading first so it has to be good. Headings are usually descriptive phrases that highlight your product or service, such as "Edinburgh Double Glazing". However, the heading can also convey benefits, such as "30% Off Sofa-Beds" or "Award-Winning Italian Restaurant".

If you’re looking to build your brand or have a well-known company, it could be worth putting your company name in the heading — "Laptops at John Lewis", for example. However, it’s usually best to avoid using your company name in the heading. Firstly, your company name already appears in the URL at the bottom of the ad and secondly, most searches are for products and services, such as “plumbers in Leeds”, rather than specific company names.

3. Have a clear call to action

A call to action encourages people to click on your ad. Compelling words and phrases include: "Buy now", "Sign up today", "Order" or "Get a Quote". This gives people a clear idea of what they can achieve when they click on the link that will take them to the landing page on your website. Your call to action should be compelling and specific — "50% Off All Children’s Shoes"; "Buy Valentine’s Flowers"; "Cheap Cameras & Camcorders".

4. Include key information

It’s worth including some key offer details in your ad. By including prices in your ad text, for example, you know that anyone that clicks through is interested in your product at that price. As a result, more clicks (which you are paying for) become customers.

5. Stand out by being different

It’s vital to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Highlight your unique selling points — the products, prices or services that make your business different and better. Analyse your competitors’ ads to ensure that you stand out from the crowd.

6. Exploit the power of capital letters

Using capitals on the initial letters of every word can make your advert stand out. “On Sale Now”, for example, is more noticeable then “on sale now”. This applies to the link as well as the text. By capitalising the first letter of each word in your link, your web address instantly becomes easier to read. For instance, www.FlowersOnTheHighStreet.com is much clearer than www.flowersonthehighstreet.com.

7. Link to a relevant landing page

Many online advertisers spend a lot of time developing a great pay-per-click campaign, only to neglect their own website. Pay-per-click advertising is about taking potential customers through key steps — the search, browsing the results, clicking on the link, taking action on the company’s website — and each one is equally important.

Your website landing page — the destination for anyone that clicks on your ad — must be relevant to the ad and must encourage visitors to take the next step. That could be making an enquiry, signing up to a service or putting in an order. One click should take prospects to the right place, so don’t link to your home page.

8. Test your ad copy

It’s hard to predict how effective different advertising messages will be. So it’s worth testing different titles or calls to action. If you are advertising on Google AdWords, for instance, you can run three or four different ads in one ad group and AdWords will rotate your ads, analyse your 'click through rate' (CTR) and highlight the best performing ad.

11 Tips To Stretch Your PPC Budget 

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Top 5 PPC Fails 

To view the original article Click Here

11 Tips To Stretch Your Pay-Per-Click Budget

At least once in your professional life you tried using Google Adwords as part of your marketing activities. It might have gone well for a while, it might have failed right away. However, I’m quite sure you have this internal feeling you cannot ignore. Without noticing you became part of the Google Adwords religion.

I was one of those lucky ones to hear a voice showing me the way. OK, I’m slightly exaggerating. A nice account manager from Google called me and though I was skeptical about it, I got some really good advice.

I’m not going to preach you about this religion, but if you are already part of it, I’m going to help you in stretching your PPC budget and show you the way by sharing some very interesting tactics.

#1 Focus 

Using Adwords you can reach your target audience on Google Search (or the Search network as they call it) and on the Display Network (any site using Google Adsense). 

When you get started you won't necessarily know which might drive better results, however it is highly recommended to focus on one in order to avoid spreading your budget, which could lead to poor results. 

You should also focus on one territory at a time and try to conquer that territory first. To do so you can choose the country (or even state and cities) you would like to target. That would help you to increase the efficiency in optimization.

#2 Building campaigns correctly

Google scores your campaign pretty much based on first impression. That means that Google measures key parameters of your newly launched campaign to sentence you to life or to death. Meaning, if you will get low scoring for many parameters your chances to improve your campaign and further optimize it are low. You should create Campaigns wisely. 

For example, if you want to create a campaign that targets people who search your competitors brand – you can expect low click-through-rate (CTR) no matter what you will do (especially with Adwords strict restrictions), thus you should create a separate campaign for keywords related to your competitors. 

The same goes for terms that are close to your core business (like relevant marketplaces). For example, a competitors’ campaign CTR can go lower than 0.20% while your core campaign should be at least 1.30% and even higher, as it should be super relevant for your target audience. Obviously, combining them into one campaign would dramatically affect your campaign’s CTR. 

Also be sure to target people on certain devices. Adwords default mode is to mix desktop, tablets and mobile. I’d recommend you to start only with the most relevant device for you (e.g. which typically leads to higher conversion rate for your business).

#3 Getting great ideas for relevant keywords

After creating your own list of relevant keywords, go ahead and type them in the Keyword Planner tool in Adwords to get some fresh ideas of some additional relevant keywords in the space. You can also use your competitors site URL when using the tool to get ideas for keywords based on their site. You can also use Spyfu.com and Similar Web to see which keywords your competitors are targeting.

#4 Start broad but not too broad (Hint: use +)

In order to really crack it you should leave room for learning what your audience is actually looking for. Targeting Broad Keywords e.g. Personalization means that everyone that search for something including the word Personalization would potentially be exposed to this ad. But here’s the trick, if your keyword is Personalization that means that even people who will search for a close term could be potentially exposed to your ad. 

For example, our ad was triggered for someone searching for “personalized christmas ceramic websites” which is obviously not relevant to our business at all. So how do you solve this? simply ad + before any of your broad keywords in order to tell Google to have the campaign triggered ONLY if it matches the exact term and not any synonym or any conjugation of that word.  E.g. +personalization.

#5 How to easily choose negative keyword

When you were using the Keywords planner earlier in order get some good ideas, I can imagine that some of the ideas weren’t good or relevant at all. It means that Google finds those keywords relevant to your terms and potentially your ads will be triggered to a less relevant audience. 

Another way to define negative keywords is by checking for the actual search terms, then sort it by cost/impression and check those keywords you would like to remove. If it is a broad keyword the repeats itself make sure to add + before defining this keyword as a negative one. The rest of the terms (typically including more than one keyword) should be excluded as exact match by using square parentheses. e.g. [website personalization].

#6 Start with relatively high bids

As mentioned before, Google scores your campaigns based on “first impression”, thus you want to make sure to give a really great first impression. That means get high CTR for your ads, be very relevant for your target audience etc. In order to get high CTR not only your ads should be awesome but you should also try and have your ads displayed at one of the top placements (1-3). In order to increase the chances for that to happen you should increase the bids on your keywords.

#7 Bidding’s rule of thumb

It doesn’t matter if you separated your exact match, phrases or broad keywords to different campaigns or they are all part of one campaign you would like to make sure to differentiate the bid for each type. Broad keywords should receive the highest bids, and then you should reduce 20% for phrases and additional 20% for exacts.

#8 Bids are too high in your space? Try the display network

In some industries there’s high competition and bids could get really high. Instead of fighting your competitors who might be wealthier than you are, try to find good alternatives. For example, try using the Display network. You can either run textual ads or display banners you can easily create using Adwords’ automated tool or your favorite designer. Be sure to be very concrete and have a decent call-to-action button.

You can choose placements based on the popular blogs/magazines/forums relevant to your target audience, and also by targeting specific keywords or interests and also demographics and more.

In case you choose to target only desktop visitors, you will notice that you would still get traffic from mobile apps, and mobile devices.

#9 The special secret for completely avoiding targeting of mobile users

Finding out that although you excluded mobile traffic you still received lots of irrelevant traffic from mobile which also wasted lots of you budget can be very frustrating

The account manager at Google which I discussed that with, was aware of this phenomenon and suggested to exclude the following link in order to reduce that undesired mobile traffic: adsenseformobileapps.com

You should also go ahead and scan the list of placements, and search for keywords like “game” and “mobile” and exclude any domain that includes those keywords.

#10 Be consistent and avoid lousy tricks

Part of the quality score Google gives you is related to the ad relevancy which is measured by comparing keywords on your site, the keyword you are targeting, possibly your competitors keywords etc. You can use Quicksprout.com to analyze the top keywords on your site. In order to improve relevancy, make sure that the most relevant keywords will appear at your H1, H2 and also possibly in the HTLM title and description. You can also add links from your site to your blog containing the most relevant keywords.

Be sure that the Ads you create include the keywords from that ad group. You will be rewarded not only because Google will give you higher scores, but also because search terms that appear in the ad will be highlighted (become bold) and would drive more attention to your ad. Also psychologically people will be more likely to click on ads that are more related to the search terms. Please make sure to avoid (at least at the beginning) any tricks you believe would increase your ad’s visibility. E.g. Do not use any special symbols like Stars, Thumbs up etc. as google won’t tolerate that and will disapprove your ad from being displayed.

#11 Increase your landing page’s conversion rate

After all the hard work, you need to make sure that your website or landing page you are directing the traffic to is actually converting, and drives you positive ROI. In order to achieve that, you can start A/B testing your site’s layout, messaging etc.

As A/B testing requires a decent amount of traffic, patience and time (you can learn more about common A/B test pitfalls here), in order to move fast and increase your site’s efficiency you can start adding real-time targeting to your site and target all of your PPC campaigns traffic with a personalized message. For example, you can offer 10% discount for people that used the word “discount” as part of their search term, or simply provide them with a personalized content. E.g. target a visitor from NYC and mention that you offer “Free Shipping to New York area”. That would increase the chances to draw the attention of the visitor to that message, and also to provide him a better experience than the “Free shipping to continental U.S.” ordinary message.

A quick hack could be adding a “net” to your site and as a last resort try to capture emails from people that are going to leave your site without converting by offering any additional promotion or added value.

To view the original article Click Here 

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Tips

There are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign.

Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.

Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that
most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a “per-click” basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site.

There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.

As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective.

One of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your position in
search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO
campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click
campaign is pay a fee.

Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier – and more effective – the process will be.

The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on search engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain your position – which can obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword.

In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth.

You can compute this value by dividing the profit
you make on your website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same time period.

For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were 25,000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.

The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which
your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click.

Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost
considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way
around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual hit.

The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everything you can about search engine keyword research. The good news is there isn’t a limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid because additional keywords do not add additional cost.

This translates into a lot less hassle for you because there is no need to optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords.

Obviously, some keywords are much more effective than others are, but they will not cost you anything except time to set-up your account in your pay-per-click bid.

Of the popular search engines that offer pay-per-click, one now called Microsoft Ad Center/Yahoo provides an online tool that will give you the data on how often particular keywords are entered into their search engine.

I have effectively used Microsoft Ad Center to get instant results and generating hundreds of leads and sales using this method.

I highly advice in investing in a training course or membership that offers you a step by step training that walks you through the setting up and placing your PPC Ads because if you don’t know what you’re doing you can easily blow your entire budget and not get results!

They also offer suggestions for keywords after you enter a description of your site.

Number one crucial part of your pay per click ad is, ” Your Headline “. If your headline is not enticing enough then they will not bother reading the rest of your Ad.

I have tested this extensively to tell you without a doubt that your headline needs to have to right message to attract people to read more.

In pay-per-click, the written description is also crucial. You must understand that the objective of your description is not to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy your service or product go to your site.

You must use expert marketing copy to guarantee that your description is both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description is your most powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.

Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important that you bear in mind that the results of the top search engines providing pay-per-click advertising, which are Microsoft and Adwords, usually appear on other popular search engines.

Because of this, the competition for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click to yield a profit.

If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on
that particular keyword and try another one.

Remember: when you pay too much per click to make a profit, you are in essence losing the bidding war.

Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in
place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least on a daily basis until you have a winning keyword that is profitable for you and your business.

Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends.

Expert monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a success.

It is also important to know what’s working now in pay per click whether you are using Facebook PPC or Microsoft Ad Center to place your paid advertising.

Share this with someone who deserves more success and you care about, let’s help some more people!

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3 Rules To Write Better Ad Copy

Before the days of smartphones, I would often hear complaints from friends about how text messages weren’t long enough to get their message across. Text messages are 160 characters long.

Many of you may lack confidence in your writing skills. Personally, distanced myself from the entire subject of English during college. My high school AP class got me out of freshman writing and my junior writing class was offered by the business school instead of the English department. I actually boast about getting a college degree without taking a single English class.

Along came Twitter (which was originally designed to be used via text message) and I heard even more complaining about how tweets were too short to say what they wanted to say. Tweets max out at 140 characters.
As a PPC professional, I just laughed to myself. I thought that 160 or 140 characters was voluminous. I could say what I needed to say and have room to spare. Why? Because I’d been writing PPC ads for years. I’d been selling products/services with just 95 characters!

Writing Better Ad Copy

But you don’t need professional training to be a great ad copy writer. I had to grow and develop the skill myself, and here are 3 rules that you can follow to write better ad copy.

Rule #1 – Think Like Your Customer

I wrote a full post about this titled “What Keeps Your Customers Up At Night” and I recommend reading it in its entirety. But I will offer a couple high level points here.

• Don’t Assume – You all know the saying about what assume spells, but I see this happen frequently. Meetings are held, problems are discussed, and plans are made with unwritten assumptions. To get at the heart of the matter you need to question assumptions, validate them, and then explicitly state them. Then you can ensure everyone is on the same page and you’re dealing with what really matters.
• Get Closer To Your Customers – As businesses grow, the decision makers tend to get further and further away from customers. If you don’t have the time to interact with customers directly then you need to talk to the people who do.
• Use Their Vernacular – Say things the way they say them. You may think you’re an “enterprise widget management solution”, but you’re customers might simply call you their “inventory system”. If that’s the case, you’ll get better results from ad copy about how you’re an awesome inventory system because you’re speaking their language.
• Learn What’s Important To Them – I recently went couch buying. My wife had picked out a sofa/loveseat combo that she liked and I was there to give it the run through before we bought. I sat on it every which way. I had my wife sit with me. I laid down on it. That was when I was sold. You see, at 6’2″ I’m used to sleeping on couches where either my head or my feet will be on an arm rest. This couch was long enough that I could lay flat without hitting either arm rest. It was the clincher for me and I don’t think the salesman even realized it. What are those clinchers for your product/service?

Rule #2 – Convey Unique Value

Tell me if you’ve ever done a search and seen several ads that look virtually the same? Perhaps it looked something like this:

Image via Wordstream.com

When all the ads look the same, how will you stand out from the competition? Are you willing to bid enough to get that #1 position so that you get the click? It shouldn’t have to come to that (though Google’s bottom line would appreciate it)
You need to dig down to the core of what your product/service does. Here are some questions you need to answer, and then commit these answers to memory:

• What problem does your product/service solve?
• How is that solution better than your competitors?
• Why should a customer pay $X for your solution?

The answers to these questions will obviously be interrelated, but I want to make sure you have homework when you’re done reading this post. Write each of these questions at the top of a whiteboard and then answer each one as specifically as possible. Don’t worry about the length to the answers at first. Once you have answers you feel good about, start distilling it down to phrases that will fit in ad copy. Break it into some pieces that are 35 characters, some that are 70 characters, some that are 90 characters. These are the phrases you can use on various PPC platforms in your ad copy. This will make your ads stand out from the rest and you can get the click even if you’re not in the #1 position because you’re conveying your unique value right there in your ad.
Now on to the third rule.

Rule #3 – Always Be Testing

After taking the time to think like your customer; to really know their pain, their fears, and their worries. After distilling your companies unique value for each product/service into phrases that are 35 or 70 or 95 characters. After all this, you might get attached to your work. You’ll step back and admire it. Perhaps you’ll even pat yourself on the back as you hit the “Save” button, knowing with absolute certainty that you’ve just created the best ad your account has ever know.

And then it fails to beat that old, crappy ad that’s been there forever. It might even get beaten badly. At first you might get angry. You’ll blame search users for being stupid and not understanding. It might be Google’s fault for not giving you good enough placement on the page.

This is why testing is so important. Testing takes the emotion out of the equation. Instead of making qualitative assessments of which ad you feel is better, your potential customers are making quantitative assessments for you. Their clicks show they preferred your ad to another advertiser. Their conversions show that you delivered the product/service that solved their problem. Then it’s not about which ad is better, but which ad produced the best results.

Even when you start to feel like you’ve run out of ideas you can draw inspiration from competitor ads. While you could search a bunch of keywords, you’ll save time by using a research tool like iSpionage. For example, consider you’re in the big data industry and you want to see what a competitor is using in their ads. iSpionage allows you to see ads at the keyword level like this:

One of the great features here is the AEI (Ads Effectiveness Index) that even tips you off on which ads are performing best for your competitors. Then you’ll know which ads to use as the genesis of your next ad test.

This method can be particularly effective when competing against a large competitor with a full PPC team because as the smaller advertiser you can learn from their experience and larger budget.

Homework Assignment

Thank you for reading this entire post. As a bonus, here is the easy-to-follow homework assignment that will get you writing better ad copy today:

• Identify 3 underlying assumptions you make about your customers and question them. Are they valid or not?
• Speak with 3 average customers face-to-face (or speak to 3 customer-facing employees)
• Answer the 3 questions from Rule #2 IN WRITING
• Using the answers from above, start at least 1 ad test today

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