Even experienced users of Adwords, such as agencies, make mistakes, and can cost their clients money and ultimately cost themselves accounts. It’s very rare that I’ve accessed an account, whether managed by an agency or by an individual, where mistakes aren’t being made.

But fear not! Help is at hand. Perhaps the most easy-to-understand, but powerful guide ever written on how to advertise on Adwords is now being serialised on the Epiphany Solutions Blog for the first time.

This is the first part of that serialisation. It gives an overview of what Adwords is, where it is and isn’t useful, and the advantages and disadvantages of PPC against SEO. Future parts will look at each aspect of an Adwords account, and show what you should do in order to deliver amazing results, and perhaps more importantly, why the account should be set up and managed in this way.

Why Advertise Using Paid Search?

It’s a fair question. The days of PPC being a goldmine, with undiscovered pots of gold (also known as searches with few or no adverts) have gone. It’s one of the competitive – if not the most competitive – forms of advertising that there are, and you are going head to head with your rivals.

It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted. Your advert is likely to be in the middle of a bunch of competing adverts, all vying for the searcher’s attention. Even if you get the searcher to your website, they probably won’t do what you want – many sites see only one in every hundred actually making a purchase. Is it worth paying for the 99 that don’t?

It’s interesting, then, that a properly managed account is virtually guaranteed to make money.

No seriously, I mean it. Do the sums. Assuming that the visitors to your site have a value (i.e. you make money from at least some of them), then as long as you bid less than the visitor is worth, you can’t lose money.

For example, suppose 2.5% of your visitors buy something, the average order value is £100, and 25% of the order value contributes to profit. Each sale is worth £25 to you, and so each click is worth £0.625 to you (since every 40 clicks generate one sale, which is worth £25 to you).

So if you only pay £0.50, you will make money. Of course, if 30 other advertisers are all making £5 from each click, they are all going to outbid you, pushing your advert down into the nether regions, and you’ll get very few clicks – so you won’t make much money.

Optimising Your PPC Account

This simple example highlights two of the themes that will keep repeating throughout this whole guide.

Firstly, you should be basing the amount that you bid for a keyword on the amount that the click is worth to you. This is pretty obvious if you look at the example above. But there are still many advertisers out there that view success as achieving the highest positions that they can for their budget!

Secondly, since the amount that you bid is limited by the value of the click, you should be doing everything you can to maximise this. The simplest way to do this is to maximise your conversion rate. Every click that doesn’t convert is wasted money, every click that does convert is very profitable.

There is one more critical aspect to successful account management. Adwords is an auction – if you bid more, you appear higher. However, it is not a fair auction. Google multiply your bid by your Quality Score in order to determine your advert’s position, and the amount that you actually pay per click for your keyword.

Quality Score is Google’s measure of how relevant your advert is. Google want to make sure that their adverts are as relevant to users as possible for two reasons. Firstly, if their search results aren’t high quality, users will use another search engine. Secondly, if their search results aren’t high quality, nobody clicks on them, and Google don’t make any money. And Google likes making money.

Quality Score is covered in a lot of detail later on, as it is really quite important. But for now, suffice to say that every change that you make to your account should serve one or more of the following purposes:

• Increase the volume of clicks that you are generating
• Increase the profitability of a click, either by
  • Increasing the value of the click, or
  • Reducing the cost of the click

Often these two objectives directly conflict. For example, bidding more increases your clicks, but results in each click being less profitable. A new advert may improve your click through rate, but by driving less qualified traffic. New keywords may cause a similar trade-off.

Each individual section will look at this trade-off, and how to make the right decisions, and every recommendation made will be based on improving one or both of these objectives.

Isn’t It Cheaper And Easier To Stick To SEO?

Well – it can be, and you should probably do this regardless of whether or not you do PPC, but optimising your website to appear high in the natural, ‘free’ results takes a lot of time, work and money. In the long run, SEO generally pays off, but you’ll be spending a lot of money for a long time before you get results on popular search terms. And if your competitors are also doing SEO, then you may never catch up.

Pay Per Click gives you immediate results, and unlike other forms of online (and offline) advertising, you know for certain that you’ll get results. Instead of paying for an advert that people see, who then may not even visit your site/store, with PPC you pay only when somebody walks through the door. As long as there’s a good chance of that person buying something, then there’s a clear link between what you’re paying and how much you sell.

Also, you have total control over how much you pay for your visitors, and who visits your site. If something isn’t working, you can stop it immediately, and if something’s very successful, you can do more of it.

PPC can also support your SEO strategy, showing you which keywords convert, which landing pages you should be trying to drive visitors to, and which messages appeal to the searchers. And many studies have shown that websites with both natural and paid search listings get more traffic than they would expect to achieve from the two individually – the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Hope you enjoyed Part One of Google AdWords Expert — keep your eyes peeled each Friday when I’ll post the next part.

In the meantime, please feel free to comment or leave questions.

-An example of how this would benefit is if someone is searching for “used ford focus 1.6,” and when your ad appeared, it had this search term as the headline. A user is then likely to choose your ad over those ads that just have the headline Ford Focus.

2. DKI

– This is similar to the tip above. Dynamic keyword insertion takes the keyword that has triggered the ad and inserts it into the ad. This is most often used in the headline. You use {} brackets for it to work and insert a default headline in case the keyword is longer than the set 25 characters. Like in the example above, you could use {KeyWord:Ford Focus} but your keywords could include “ford focus RS,” “ford focus 3dr sport,” or “5 door black ford focus.” The keyword would then automatically become the headline. The capitalisation is also important. If you use KeyWord in your DKI, then each word within the keyword will begin with a capital letter. However, if you use Keyword, only the first word would have a capital letter.

3. Call To Actions

– CTAs give the user an idea of what to do once they click on your ad. Some examples are “download a brochure today,” “buy online now,” or “get a quote online today.” This makes it very clear to potential customers what they need to do to use your service.

4. Comparing to Competitors

– Make sure you include USPs that make you stand out from your competitors. Have a good look around at what other companies are using in their ads and try to make yours more original. What does your company have that theirs does not?

5. Vanity URLs

– The final line of your ad is your display URL. Although the rules have slightly changed recently and there is no longer any capitalisation in the actual web address part of the URL, this does not apply to what you can add after the /. For example, if you’re looking for a valentines gift for your boyfriend and you type in “valentines gifts for him,” House of Fraser use the ad below with a Vanity URL www.houseoffraser.co.uk/Valentines4Him shown below. So they not only use the keyword in the headline but they have customised the URL to make their ads even more targeted.

6. Pre-Qualify for Higher Quality Traffic

– Ensure you target the right people with your advert otherwise you will just have a huge number of clicks and very few conversions. For example, if you’re offering car insurance for people over 55, make sure you state that in the advert, otherwise you will get clicks from people of all ages, only for them to leave your website as soon as they realise they can’t use your service. This is about ensuring the conversion rate doesn’t drop and the cost per conversion stays as low as possible.

7. Negative Keywords

– Make sure that if you have keywords on broad or phrase match that you use negative keywords. These will help ensure your ad does not appear for irrelevant search terms. I use the Google Search Query report which shows you the search terms that were used when people clicked on your ads. This is an on-going process which needs to be checked regularly to see if you’re wasting budget on any irrelevant keywords. This will help increase your click-through rate as your ad will be appearing for keywords that are relevant and therefore you are more likely to generate more clicks.

8. Take advantage of the change in the headline

– Recently Google started moving the first line of the ad text to the end of the headline for those ads above the organic listings at the top of the results. The headline is usually the first part of an ad that people notice, so to have this extended gives the opportunity to make your ads stand out even more. This only works on ads that have punctuation at the end of line one otherwise the first line won’t move to the headline.

9. TEST! TEST! TEST!

– Finally you will never know how a certain message performs unless you test it. There will always be phrases you are unsure of – they could be amazing or they could flop – but you will only find out by testing these against other messages. Just make sure you check performance regularly after you’ve put them live so that if they do perform really badly then you can pause them and try something else.

Local Ad Extensions

Local ad extensions can help people notice you over your competitors. If location is important to a company, for instance, if they provide a product that is rather sourced locally, then the company should make their location prominent to their potential customers. It may not just be clicks and conversions that you want to improve through this. Showing the address clearly on the SERP might help increase footfall to the shop/restaurant/business, as the address is so much easier to find than a competitors may be.

The example below shows somebody searching for a hair salon in Manchester. The third ad has a location extension and, when opened, does dominate the results. It’s a great way for businesses that rely on local custom to stand out from their competitors. It is also a great way to avoid wasted clicks from those people who do not want to go to where the advertiser is based.

Site Links

Site links are the additional links that go under the text in your PPC ad. These additional links can just go straight through to the home page or they can be links to specific landing pages. The example below shows an ad shown for the search term “car insurance.” The links are highlighted by the red box. This ad has two links and both go through to the same landing page as the ad itself. In this case the ads are used as if they are an extension of the text. This gives the ability of showing all the USPs an advertiser has to offer that would not normally fit into the 70 characters usually available.

The example below for the search term “business insurance” is using the Site Links to enable users to select the type of business insurance they want a quote for before they are even on the website. The options are “public liability insurance,” “shop & retail insurance,” and “self-employed insurance.” All of these links go through to individual landing pages for users to get quotes on that particular type of insurance.

Phone Extensions

Click-to-call or phone extensions enable people to contact an advertiser by phone by just clicking on the phone number in the ad. Mobile marketing is becoming more prominent in the online advertising sector and therefore, click-to-call ads will be even more effective as more people buy sophisticated smart phones. Making the process of a potential customer getting in contact with the advertiser as easy as possible is imperative to the advertising strategy.

Businesses such as restaurants should have click-to-call ads for their websites to ensure people do not hesitate to get in contact and make a booking. It is very common for people with smart phones to search for local amenities using their mobile device. Setting up a mobile specific PPC campaign, and having click-to-call available on the ads, should ensure people have no excuse not to contact the advertiser.

If a company generates a lot of business through smart phone users, but it is yet to have a mobile optimised website, having the click-to-call ad extension available would give a clear opportunity for people to get in contact with your business.

Below is an example of what the ad would look like on a mobile phone. The number appears just under the URL and once a user clicks on this, the mobile device will call that number.

Product Extensions

Product extensions work by showing products from the website in the ad based on the search term used. To have product extensions, an advertiser must have a Google Merchant Account and set up a product feed for the website. The product extension then shows the most relevant products based on the keyword.

An example of this is shown below. The search term “hoodies” has brought up five different hoodies from the advertiser Republic.

The type of advertisers that should test this ad extension are those with retail e-commerce websites. Displaying your products in your ad gives an opportunity for potential customers to see if the range you provide is what they are after. Not only does this extension standout on the SERP, and therefore make the ad more prominent, but it also shows those people who are looking for something completely different, that they should not click on your ad. Therefore, this could also save money from wasted clicks.

For example, in the screenshot above, if those hoodies are priced a lot higher than someone can afford, they won’t click on the ad. However, this does mean you need to set up the product feed properly and name products accordingly. In theory, this should improve the quality of traffic that goes through to the website and help increase the conversion rate of the PPC account.

So that’s a quick summary of each of the ad extensions Google are currently offering to PPC advertisers.

So you put it live, and it bombs. Your clickthrough rate is horrific, and you’re left wondering why….

The problem is that your advert looks good on paper, but adverts don’t run on paper. Your advert may be great in the middle of a blank sheet of paper, but how does it look, when there are ten other PPC adverts surrounding it? And what about the ten natural search results just to the left? Does your advert still stand out?

Suppose that you’re an injury claim solicitor. Your unique selling points, like those of all your competitors (!) are that you pay out 100% of the compensation, and you have a policy of ‘No Win, No Fee’. Clearly, these points need to go into your advert.

Actually, you’re in a no-win situation here. If you don’t put these points in, nobody will click on your advert. And if you do, your advert will look just like everyone else’s adverts. This was what a search for ‘injury compensation’ returned a couple of years ago:

So, unless your advert was top, nobody was ever going to click on it. The solution is to be more innovative with your adverts. It’s likely in this case that searchers will assume that they’ll get 100%, with no win, no fee. If so, then highlight another selling point – something that does make you stand out. This is what the same search displays now:

Some advertisers, such as injurylawyers4u and accidentsdirect are still running the same adverts they did over 2 years ago. Others are trying new messages such as including a location in their advert (National Accident Helpline), indicating how quick and easy the process is (Injury-UK, Injury-Direct), or asking questions to try to interact with the searcher.

There are many clever ways to make your advert stand out, but before putting your advert live, it’s essential to consider where your advert is going to appear, and what everyone else is saying.

There is one further point that must be made here. It’s very tempting to make your adverts stand out by sensationalising them. This will improve your clickthrough rate, but bear in mind that PPC is a bit like paying people to enter your shop. Every visitor that you pay Google for, that doesn’t buy anything, is a waste of money. Make false or misleading promises, and you’ll just end up wasting money.

The perfect PPC campaign would attract anyone who is seriously considering buying, but nobody else. This would not maximise your clickthrough rate, just your campaign’s profitability.

A short time ago in a city not so far away (from Leeds anyway) i came up with what i felt was the Killer App for AdWords. This was a long time before i’d come across the long tail concept, chris anderson’s blog and my favourite keyword research tool of 2007, Hittail. Basically, the Killer App was a log file analyser that primarily focussed on the search terms that delivered traffic to your website. This tool would look at exactly what query delivered traffic to your website and tell you how unique it was.

Why would i build a tool solely to do that? Simply becuase with the help of other pay-per-click bid management tools you can report on the ROI per keyword. Google, and now Yahoo and MSN, allow you to choose exactly what keywords and search term combinations you are bidding on and the ROI that each one, individually, is delivering.

Looking for answers in the wrong places

What i frequently found, managing some very high spending campaigns, was that it was nigh on impossible to generate more traffic for a keyword without raising the bid price. Yet inevitably when a campaign was delivering a strong ROI, my client would always ask me if I could deliver more converting traffic to them, “Why don’t you just bid a bit higher?” In theory i could by raising the bid price, but in reality that strategy could be potentially disastrous, as not only would i be raising the ad position, to get more clicks, I was paying more for each click, so suddenly I might be in the position of kissing goodbye to that great ROI I’d helped deliver. Clients found my answer, that it was simply impossible to deliver better results simply by messing around with bids (after i’d found the sweet spot), difficult to stomach.

Which left me with something to chew over. How could i squeeze a better ROI, whilst engaged in a bidding war with my competitors, without blowing my spend? I felt like i had to develop the art of zen non-competing.

The Preamble

The idea of non-doing in Zen buddhism centers around a double denial of existence. Essentially it is the logic, “life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless”. Basically the logic posits that the statement itself is neither true nor untrue becuase the statement is a component part of reality that only holds a mirror up to what is actually going on. Put another way, the statement itself is only a reflection of what is going on, a description, not actually what is happening.

Pure PPC strategies are just speculative at best

Believe it or not, Pay-per-click bidding is exactly like that. Pure speculation. Most SEMs will push the idea of never before seen levels of campaign control and targeting, yet they are wilfully overlooking that fact that they are overseeing what is essentially a blind auction. When you choose to bid on the term, say ‘jobs in charities’ you can select that to be a broad, a phrase or an exact match, and your bid management engine will deliver an ROI value for each permutation. It’s great becuase it gives the feeling of confidence (especially when you see your exact match is delivering a great ROI), but it’s not necessarily true that the term jobs in charities is the best converter. This is especially clear when you notice your broad match is consistently delivering strong ROI too. A more savvy PPC manager should find cause for concern regarding the long term health of their campaign, simply becuase they cannot say with the same level of certainty what terms are driving conversion. And therein lies the opportunity.

Finding answers in the right places

Typically, although this does vary from market to market, you’ll find that your exact matched term delivers the best ROI but fairly quickly you’ll start to see that drain away as your competitors start competing aggresively and driving your bid prices up. A typical response by most agencies i’ve worked with is to add more keywords and variations to fill out the bottom end of the market with search terms that have lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs). Frequently this strategy works, but it does not solve the problem of what to do about rapidly diminishing ROI from your super-converting term. Furthermore, in most cases, these ads deploy ineffectively because the click-thru rate on your broad match, out performs your new untested and unserved keywords. So you we’re back to square one, becuase the broad matched ad was served in their place and we have no new data.

So how do you solve this problem?

Firstly, optimise your clickthrough rate (CTR) rather than your bidding strategy by blocking certain terms.
Find all the irrelevant matches that are coming in and delete, delete, delete! Set up negative matches on your campaigns so that your ads don’t serve for any irrelevant phrase or broad matches. This should reduce the number of impressions you get on irrelevant terms, pushing your CTR up and furthermore, becuase you are not getting clicks from terms that are unlikely to convert (hey, you know what useful content is and is not on your site), you are optimising your ROI.

Secondly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by adding new terms.
Discover what relevant variations are still coming in. Log all of the long tail combinations and variations that are coming and see what juicy stuff you can learn about your market and where you are failing to serve them effectively. You will honestly be amazed at the granularity of search terms clicking through to your website in the hope of finding something relevant. For instance, in the broad matched example of ‘jobs in charities’, I was amazed to find how much volume there was to the term ‘jobs working in animal charities’ and variations to that effect. Yet, if you think about it for a second, with a global database and the ability to search it at 0.11 seconds, it stands to reason that the more inquisitive user knows exactly what they want and is going to set about finding it!

Thirdly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by restructuring your campaign.
Re-structure your entire campaign to accomodate new learnings, in such a way that you can learn from the new initiatives you are taking. PPC data should be seen as source of response data about your audience. Aside from having some assurances as to what search terms deliver business, clickthru rate metrics give you some pretty good assurances as to what your audience really reponds to. A lot of AdWords accounts that i’ve taken under my wing to optimise basically fail to deliver more becuase of the way they are structured. High traffic terms are under the same budget control as low traffic terms and in many many cases one generic ad is serving a multitude of different search requests. This is really problematic because you are unable to get a clear overview of what keywords and ads your audience responds to. Restructuring your campaign really allows you to know at a glance how relevant your ads and website your website is in general to the market your targeting. People find themselves in different terms. for instance I principally think of myself as an SEO and PPC expert, rather than an SEM expert. Yeah, i may be quibbling over definitions, but frankly if I am, then your audience probably are too.

Even if you don’t bother with steps 1 and 2, a campaign restructuring will deliver more impressions, have a much less volatile cost-per-click (CPC) and higher CTRs. A solid account structure will give you far more control over your budget on a long term basis to engage in or opt out of particular bidding wars. On a daily basis you can switch on and switch off campaigns and adgroups whilst your competitors bid aggressively, until they burn out and you can slide back in.

Fourthly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by writing more specific ads.
Serve your audience better by serving better ads that meet their specific requirements. Until you re-structure your campaign to accomodate the new keywords, you’re going to be under the impression that your broad matched campaign delivers you a fairly standard number of impressions at a fairly standard 3% CTR at whatever CPC. When you restructure your campaign, and serve a relevant ad (and please don’t forget a relavant destination webpage) to that query, you’ll discover that in fact that particular term, say ‘jobs in animal charities’, drives over 500 impressions a month and delivers a 25% clickthru rate when targeted with relevant ad text and landing page. Sit back and watch your ad sail above your competition without you ever adjusting your bid price.

Fifthly (is that a word?), optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by continuously improving your account.
Repeat the whole process on your new campaigns and adgroups. Each new campaign and adgroup you target will deliver more opportunities to discover how you can compete in the marketplace with your current budget and where to best position your spend.

Search terms ARE NOT markets in their own right, only reflections and sources of insights

So where is this killer APP now? Well the long and the short was i was too young and inexperienced in the SEM business at that time to really win the funding i needed to develop it beyond it’s neo-natal stages. In the end the business died (archived site here) because i still needed to support myself – but hey, it’s totally OK to fail at setting up your first company! (Seriously, the UK needs to realise this and learn from our bigger brothers across the pond). Anyway, the most important thing is, as the dalai lama is alleged to have said, “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson”. And I can safely say that i didn’t. Instead i put a similar tool, Hittail, into action with some splendid results. So when you think you are losing the bidding wars (and the ROI), remember not to lose the lesson – ask yourselves or your agency how far you are going to improve clickthrough rates.

And btw, Hittail have just upgraded their service. Isn’t that nice!

AdWords Optimisation

Following on from their comments I just want to add that optimising AdWords is simply not a case of tweaking adverts and bids to get cheaper traffic. Sure its a major part of the ongoing work but the real magic happens at the business end, your website!

If you have a conversion rate of 0.5%, then regardless of how much your traffic costs, if you can make a few shrewd changes to your site and increase conversions by another 0.5%, then you just doubled your enquiry/sales rate.

Imagine if you could increase it by 3 or 4 percent extra, thats when your campaigns really start to fly. Far too often advertisers forget the importance of a solid landing page with good calls to action and a straightforward enquiry / buying process.

Most of your visitors are lost sales because of 3 things:

1. Your advert took them to a page that does not talk about the product or service you advertised.
2. You forgot to ask for their business! They shouldn’t have to hunt around or scroll down the page to move to the next stage, they should easily be able to see multiple calls to action.
3. Your checkout process or enquiry form is simply confusing.

Spend some time on these 3 areas and see how your campaign is transformed beyond where you thought it could be.

So are marketing managers missing a trick? With an advert on Google and an indented listing in natural listings it is possible to have 3 links to your company on the first page of Google! This power would drive lots of interested traffic to your site, so why do some marketing managers phase out ad words spend when they reach the top of Google? Surely running a search engine optimisation campaign and Google adwords campaign simultaneously would ensure you have double or treble the coverage on a targeted advertising medium. People searching for your products and services have a real interest and maximum exposure to this audience should be your main marketing goal.

Epiphany solutions can help you reach those people. As a business we operate in 2 key areas: search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising, we do this day in day out. To find out about how we can enhance your marketing strategy visit our main site or call us on 0870 199 6382.

The Google adwords blog also addresses this issue, to read about it click here.

Essentially, the control of consumed media is being given back the consumer: Sky+ has got us skipping through adverts, and iPods are drawing listeners away from commercial radio stations. This is also reflected online. Banner ads are losing popularity to pay per click advertising, which takes into account what the customer is interested in. There is also a move towards Web 2.0 endeavours such as MySpace and YouTube, although search engines are still playing an important part in developing the web space. Lucinda asks what the future for advertising is, now that it seems everyone is developing their own content.

Her solution is that advertisers should endeavour to become content, rather than piggyback off content. She cites Mastercard as an example. Their ‘Priceless’ commercials have been hijacked, providing the punchline for everything from World Cup defeat to Michael Jackson’s trial. Whilst they don’t publicly condone these films, it’s hard to deny that they’ve helped the campaign, delivering it straight to people’s inboxes.

So, is this the advertising of the future? And how far away is the future? And is Google concerned?

Interested in getting your business noticed? More importantly, are you wanting to drive people to your company website? Contact
Epiphany Solutions for Search Engine Optimisation and Pay per Click / Google Ad words Services.

Epiphany has seen an increase in the number of B2B businesses looking into making the most of their websites, probably linked with the fact that the Internet is the most consumed medium in the UK within office hours, far outperforming radio, TV and newspapers. Recognising the issue outlined above, Epiphany often recommend implementing a 3 month trial project that closely tracks enquiry rates driven by a B2B campaign, to alleviate any of the concerns from a business unfamiliar with what SEO can do. Within this time, a measure of the number of enquiries that are converting into sales is tracked, after which a more heavy-weight campaign can be designed.

At the conference, David Szetela, CEO of Clix Marketing, Jon Lisbin, Chief Strategist of Point It! Inc. and Rick Brown, President of NetTrac presented a case study which highlighted several ways in which B2B businesses could target their audience, tactics that are employed in any professional SEO campaign. One point of note was the inclusion of keywords that extended beyond simply the product name. His suggestions included:

• misspelling
• bad grammar
• brand terms
• wholesale terms

There was also a discussion regarding the value of paid inclusion in aggregators specific to a certain industry, such as Industrial Quick Search. Whilst they were highlighted as often bringing in relevant traffic, there was a question over the metrics that they employed, and their effect on the bottom line. This again emphasises the importance of a trial period, since every customer ultimately needs to see a difference in profits.

[Via Search Engine Watch]

Negative keywords are words or phrases that trigger your adverts without you wanting them to. Let me give you an example, if you were a shoe retailer and you had an AdWords campaign advertising under the term shoes, your adverts would get triggered by people searching for shoes, mens shoes, womens shoes, kids shoes, etc. and this is all fine, assuming you sell a wide range of shoes.

The problem occurs when people searching for horse shoes and brake shoes also trigger your advert. This has two dramatic effects upon your account. Firstly, it means your adverts are being shown to people who have no intention of buying a pair of shoes and therefore if they click your advert are wasting your budget. Secondly, if these people never click your advert, you won’t have wasted any money but your adverts click through rates will drop dramatically and you will end up having to bid more and more to keep your adverts on page one.

Our advice is to use keyword suggestion tools mentioned in the previous tip to build a negative keyword list and also check your web stats to see which search phrases visitors are using that are irrelevant to your product or service and then add all of these into your negative keyword list.

For help in doing this or to talk about this topic further, call one of our specialists on 0870 199 6382.

2. Competitor Identification.
Once
we know which phrases your customers use to search we can identify who you are going to be competing against. It is commonplace for your online competitors to differ from your traditional competitors. There will be some overlap but you will find there are new rivals eating your market share every day you don’t have an aggressive campaign online.

3. Competitor Analysis and Tracking.
Once identified we will spend a good period of time tracking these competitors and understanding which ones are just dabbling in the market, which are just wasting money and which are running refined campaigns 24/7 and making all the profits. In a short space of time we will be able to see how they are achieving this and where their campaigns can be improved.

4. Cost and Return Projections.
At this point we can start to gain an understanding of just how much it will cost to get maximum market penetration and what kind of traffic/return this could yield. Of course, the beauty of PPC advertising is that you can set a daily budget limit and ease into the
market place at a rate you feel comfortable with.

5. Campaign Creation.
Armed with this research we will begin creating the campaign and structuring different ad groups and categories, isolating the campaign to certain regions if necessary.

6. Ad Writing.
This is one of the most overlooked areas of PPC advertising. The text used in ads can dramatically effect your campaigns success. We have vast experience writing ad text that gets results, as you can see in the case study above.

7. Landing Page Creation.
The pages of your website that these new visitors will land on is one of the most important areas of any campaign. It can be the difference between a sale and waste of your marketing budget. We advise upon changes to your landing pages in order to maximise possible conversions and in some cases build custom pages to increase performance.

8. Recommendation of Opt-in Mechanisms.
Most clients have their eyes fixed on the sale and miss other opportunities available to them from this traffic. Not everybody is ready to enquire or buy when they visit your site but they obviously have an interest. If 2% of your traffic turns into sales then you can probably get a 10% sign up to a newsletter if you offer something to them. This way you can stay in touch with these potential clients and convert them at a later date, minimising wastage from your campaign budget.

9. Conversion Tracking.
Detailed conversion tracking is of vital importance. Without detailed statistics pertaining to your campaign then you are flying in the dark. This important information can help us continually refine your campaign and dramatically increase our understanding of your customers ultimately contributing to the success of the campaign. We will recommend how to proceed in this area and produce detailed reports of the campaigns status in all areas.

10. Optimisation and Split Testing.
Stages 6 to 9 are repeated each month a split testing of certain elements occurs to ensure we are constantly improving the campaigns performance. Split testing refers to the process of testing two ads, or landing pages against each other that are identical apart from one change in detail. The loser is then deleted and a new competitor is created from the winner.

As usual adverts will only be triggered by users accessing sites that contain content directly related to that advert. For example, if you were browsing a site talking about mothers day gift ideas, a video advert for a florists may appear.

Adverts will be charged on a cost per click basis or by per 1000 impressions.

To find out more read this!

Until now it has not been possible within Google AdWords to choose over what time period your ads are shown. This has all changed!

Within the AdWords management system it is now possible to choose which days your ad is shown, which time frames and how your budget is distributed during this time.

For instance, a company may know they sell most of their products during the week and weekend visitors are just browsers that effectively just cost them money. They may have also realised that 90% of their sales are made between 8am and 8pm each weekday. Therefore, within the new system they can now schedule their ads to be shown only during these times.

Google, as always, have taken this technology one step further by adding budget percentage spend into the equation. This comes in useful if a company wanted to be highly visible in the morning and just have a moderate presence in the evenings. With the new Ad scheduling system, they could assign 80% of their budget to mornings and 20% to evenings, ensuring they are most visible when it matters to them!

If you would like to know how this could help your business, get in touch!

The system, much like Googles AdWords, takes three main factors into account when deciding where to place adverts.

1. Bid price
2. Click through rates
3. Relevance of advert text to the search

This marks a significant step forwards in the paid search market place with Yahoo (formerly Overture) set to launch their new ranking system for ads towards the end of the year. Yahoo generates 30 to 50 percent less from its advertising system because advertisers can hog ad positions purely on what they are willing to spend but if nobody clicks on the ad because it is not relevant to their search, Yahoo lose out on valuable revenue.

All these advancements are attempts to close the gap with Google who continue to dominate natural and paid search, with advanced advert ranking systems.

To learn more about MSN adCenter click here.