Google Adwords Blog Posts
Google Analytics Account Set-Up Best Practice
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009Google Adwords, Google Analytics
We have recently taken on a client whose previous web development company set-up an analytics account and, upon gaining access, we quickly became aware that it was under the dreaded all sites account. Put simply, this means we cannot gain admin access which has a knock on effect on several key areas:
- The ability to link AdWords and Analytics accounts which, until Google’s update regarding cost data reporting meant all CPC traffic was recorded as direct.
- The inability to create new profiles which are essential for testing and segmentation
- The inability to apply filters essential for filtering out your own IP. Applying filters also has some very powerful data manipulation uses.
Client side or agency?
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009When working in PPC, which side of the fence is best to work on, client or agency?
Having recently made the transition from client to my first agency role, it’s clear that both have their own mutual benefits. Ultimately it comes down to personal preference.
In my previous role, the client’s industry was all things power tools, hand tools and fixings. By the end of my time there, I knew all there was to know about power tools – a saw to you and me is just a saw, but to a builder it can be a hacksaw, a mitre-saw, a cut-off saw, a ripsaw…. (I could go on!). But that’s the key in any client-side role – expertise in your field and knowing every little detail about your customer’s needs. (more…)
PPC Or SEO
Friday, June 5th, 2009There is an old argument, whether a business should focus its marketing spend on PPC, SEO or a combination of the two. There are clear advantages and disadvantages to both.
SEO
A new website, in a competitive industry, is going to find it difficult to get rankings on high-traffic keywords quickly. Even with an established website, it’s unlikely that you are going to rank highly on every term that you would like to.
Consider Next, for example. They have a decent range of garden furniture, but don’t rank on the first two pages naturally for the keyword ‘garden furniture’.
It can take a long time for SEO to show any kind of return on investment, and the nature of the business is that it’s quite opaque – whilst you can see the overall impact of the work that you’ve done, you can’t see exactly what caused your rankings to improve.
And you’ll probably have to do quite a lot of work redesigning your website in order to optimise your search results, which requires additional cost and resource.
But SEO has clear advantages, as well. Once you get a high position for a keyword, you can get a lot of traffic very cheaply, and even if you stop spending completely for a short time, you may well retain your positions.
Typically, SEO results pick up most of the clicks, though the exact percentage varies dramatically, depending on which study you read.
There is also a ‘halo-effect’ with SEO. As well as getting rankings for the keywords that you are targeting, you will also get rankings for searches so long and obscure that no PPC advert would ever appear. A commonly-quoted statistic is that 50% of all searches on Google are unique. Trying to chase these with PPC would be impossible even using Broad Match, but with SEO, you raise the profile of the whole website in the eyes of the search engines.
PPC
There are three clear advantages to PPC. You can get instant results for any keyword that you want to appear for, you can control your message very easily and you can see exactly what you are getting for your money.
On the other hand, with the exceptions of the savings that you’ll get by improving your Quality Score, the cost of PPC is unlikely to improve dramatically over time. You can improve your adverts, and adjusts your bids in order to get as many sales or leads as possible at an acceptable cost, but after a while, improvements will become harder and harder to achieve.
Next appear top for ‘garden furniture’ in the PPC results, a position that they can maintain thanks to having a good range of products, reasonably priced, a recognised brand name and deep pockets.
Perhaps the biggest problem with PPC is that you need to list all of the keywords that you want to appear for. Using Phrase or Broad Matching to expand your keyword list can help here, but you are likely to appear for keywords that aren’t relevant.
This is, of course, true with SEO as well, but with SEO, you aren’t paying per click, so it doesn’t really matter if you appear for things that aren’t that relevant.
The Answer
The answer to the question is that both PPC and SEO offer clear and distinct advantages to advertisers. Perhaps the question, then, is how best to get the most out of the two, and use them to complement each other, rather than cannibalising each other.
By looking at your PPC results, you can see exactly how much traffic is available on keywords, and how well that traffic is likely to convert. Since you can only target a limited number of keywords for SEO, this can give you a clear guide of where your efforts would best be targeted.
Also, PPC allows you to experiment with different advertising messages. If you have a number of different USP’s, for example, you can test them using Adwords (serving each up 50% of the time, and seeing which generate clicks and conversions), and then transfer your results into your natural search results.
There is clearly an advantage to appearing twice on the search results as well. It’s not surprising that somebody is more likely to visit your website if you have two adverts rather than just one, and a lot of searchers probably won’t even realise that they are for the same company, particularly if your messages are different.
Whether or not you should use PPC, SEO, or a combination of both, really is a decision for every business to make for themselves. But the natural synergy between the two is sufficient that for the vast majority of businesses, it is certainly worth doing both, if marketing budgets allow.
Steve Baker & Guy Mains
Will Bing Bang Or Bomb?
Thursday, June 4th, 2009So, Microsoft have released their new search engine, Bing. Apparently, it’s not a search engine, though – it’s a decision engine. According to Microsoft (www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/may09/05-28NewSearchPR.mspx), this means that it is a “new and more powerful kind of search service … designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions”.
They go on to explain that according to a comscore study, “results … across core search engines shows that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result”, and that “approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page”.
So, they want to give you results that tell you what you want to know, or help you make a decision, without having to run further searches.
They’ve just released their first TV advert (adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137044), to back up this message, citing ‘information overload’ as the big problem, not just with the internet, but with the whole world (I think they even blame Google for the recession!).
This sounds great, I thought. I can barely wait to try it out! My excitement increased further when I read this article on ChannelWeb (www.crn.com/software/217700773). It lists five reasons that Bing could rival Google.
1) Visual Presentation. It apparently gives “a richer, more visually agreeable search presentation”
2) Keywords Help. “As search words are being typed into Bing, the Bing search function offers keywords to help users narrow their searches”. They do acknowledge that this is a function already offered by Google, but are hopeful that Microsoft’s version will be better.
3) Shop-Til-You-Droppers and Hypochondriacs. It appears that Bing will break the search results down into four types, shopping, local, travel and health. Though this hasn’t happened yet, as far as I can see…
4) Best Match, Instant Answers And Quick Preview. Best Match, they say, is the Bing equivalent of Google’s ‘I feel lucky’ button. Instant answers gives a single-click version of this, and quick preview gives you a preview of each result’s content without clicking on it.
5) It’s Microsoft. They claim that Microsoft are so big and ‘savvy’ that if they really try, they can probably beat anybody at anything.
Hmm…
Let’s look at the visual presentation first. Here are the search results for ‘toasters’ from Bing and Google…
The results look pretty similar to me, though Bing isn’t using the full width of my screen, and they put their alternative searches on the left, rather than at the bottom of the page.
What about the search suggestions? When I typed toasters into Bing, it came up with two:
Hmm. Wasn’t really looking to buy a toaster for my kids, or join a club for toaster fans… What does Google come up with?
Quite a difference – it suggests looking for the best toasters, reviews, toaster and kettle sets, 4-slice toasters and a few shops that sell toasters. They also give some indication as to how many results I’m likely to get. I think Microsoft have a long way to go before keyword suggestions become one of their selling points…
At the moment, the splitting of the search results into four categories doesn’t appear to be working.
Clicking on the shopping option above the search results takes you to Ciao – hardly a search revolution. And the other options aren’t visible anywhere…
The same appears to be true for Best Match and Instant Answers – if these features are on the website, then they aren’t being promoted very well. I suspect that this is something they’ve still got to add?
The quick preview is shown on the top screenshot, and is quite good, though in the case of toasters, the content of the website is quite predictable. Most of the websites sell toasters, and the quick preview is likely to show you this. Though, as you can see above, toasters.com does not actually sell toasters, so this could potentially save you a fruitless (and indeed toastless) click.
The last point makes no sense to me at all, that it will do well because it’s Microsoft. After all, so was Live Search.
So what’s the conclusion, then? Will Bing suddenly change the search engine world? If they are still in the process of rolling out of their functionality, then they’ll certainly win over some new users. But for me, this is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Bing is better than Live Search in my opinion, with some nice new features, but for me, the most critical challenge is the search results themselves.
If Bing delivers more relevant results than Google then it has a chance of eroding Google’s market share, but I believe that users will need a strong reason to switch. It may be true that Google’s users are one bad experience away from switching search engine, but the user experience on Google is consistent and reliable.
Unless Google drop the ball badly, it’s probably going to take a bigger USP than any I’ve seen so far from Bing to threaten Google’s domination in the search market.
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