Just launched this January 2010, location-specific phone numbers related to an advertiser’s business will now be displayed beside destination URL’s in mobile ads that appear on high-end mobile devices.
Users will be able to “Click-to-Call” a business just like they click to visit a website in Google. Read More
Paid search marketing, commonly referred to as pay per click (PPC), or cost per click (CPC) advertising, is one of the most popular and effective methods of online advertising because it allows you to drive qualified traffic to your site at a low cost per lead. Free listings or “organic rankings” can take several months to achieve. In the meantime, advertisers, will set up a paid search campaign and bid on keywords that relate to their product or service. Read More
Previously, best practice when setting up an AdWords campaign (the majority of the time) was to have all three match types (broad, phrase, exact) present for a keyword within an AdGroup. This allowed each keyword to perform at its best, ensuring that the campaign was receiving the best cost-per-click, Quality Score and average position available for each keyword. Read More
Recently, 6S Marketing released a Whitepaper on how to rank in Google local, and a portion of the Whitepaper contained tips on how to set up Local Business Ads, which are served in Google Maps, through AdWords. The top 10 best practices for optimizing Google AdWords Local Business Ads that are included in the Whitepaper are: Read More
In March Google updated the way in which Analytics tracks cost data. An email sent out by Google informed users that it will now only display Clicks/CPC Source/Paid Keyword Traffic if either the cost Data is applied or auto tagging is turned off and you manually tag your CPC ads.
This wasn’t a huge change but if you didn’t understand what it meant it could bring up some interesting changes in your reports. A lot of people use the filter described in this blog post – http://tiny.cc/IyI22 to focus on their CPC traffic and keyword referrals. In order to have this filter work properly you will need to ensure that the cost source data from your AdWords is applied to the profile. Google will no longer automatically tag the referrals from your AdWords account. In most cases you won’t even notice the difference as this option is defaulted on when you set up a new profile. However profiles set up previous to the change will not have this on unless you specified it and you may see some strange data in your reports.
Google released a change to their display URL policy this week regarding multiple display URL’s per AdGroup. Previously, Google AdWords allowed advertisers to use different variations of the top-level domain (in this example the top-level domain being www.example.com) used in each AdGroup, such as www.example.house.com.
However, with the new policy, AdGroups must now have the same top-level domain appear for the display URL such as:
This change is to provide more relevant search results and a high quality user experience. The change has already taken place as of February 24th, so to avoid any disruption of your Ads, ensure you make the necessary changes to your Account.
On March 4th, Google will be implementing some changes to the way Google AdWords cost data is imported into Google Analytics. These changes will aim to improve security and provide greater control.
Currently, when setting up new Analytics profiles, “Apply Cost Data” is selected by default; however after the changes implemented on March 4th, it will be necessary to choose this option when setting up new Analytics profiles.
Be sure to make the necessary changes to your Analytics accounts by the 3rd of March to ensure correct data collection.
If you’re an AdWords Editor user like me, you probably have a list of features that you would like to see added to the AdWords Editor software. Well, you’re in luck! AdWords Editor 7.0 was released today with a whole bunch of new features like first page bid estimates, keyword quality score, campaign targeting and the ability to send feedback to Google (to improve the software). Other updates include absolute numbers in the Keyword Opportunities tool of traffic for the past month, instead of scaled values… Download AdWords Editor here.
Conversion rates, click through %, visitor to lead, lead to sale…all very important stats when looking at an Internet marketing campaign. Conversion rates can sometime be confusing, but are very very important and can make or break campaigns.
In this post we will look at how we can dramatically increase the efficiency of your ad spend with a few steps.
Lets break this down – the stats we need to look at are:
1) Click through rate from your add and CPC (cost per click)
2) Conversion rate of your visitor to a lead
Click through rate from add or link and CPC (cost per click)
This stat is important in that it determines your cost per visitor and contributes to your cost per lead. The efficiency of your cost per click campaign can dramatically affect your return on investment.
Lets say you are spending $1000/month in cost per click funds and receiving 1000 visitors and getting 10 leads.
After tweaking the campaign by lowering the cost per click, and increasing click through of the ads by adjusting your ad copy you are able to achieve 2000 visitors and 20 leads – not bad!
Well lets say now we look at the conversion rate of the ads, remove non-performing keyphrases and ads, and focus only on campaigns and keyphrases that are converting into leads.
If we are able to improve the efficiency of the campaign by 30% – we are spending $1000/month, and we are now getting 2000 visitors, and receiving 30 leads – 20 more leads than the original – again not bad!
So… onto the next conversion rate…
Conversion rate of your visitor to a lead
So we are now getting 2000 visitors to the site and we are getting 30 leads – or a conversion rate of 1.5%. Not a bad conversion rate but as the marketing manager I think I can do better – so I set-up an A/B test via Google Website Optimizer.
After a few experiments I am able to increase my conversion rate from 1.5% to 3.0%. So now I am getting 2000 visitors to the site with a 3.0% conversion rate or 60 leads.
So – by doubling my traffic via adjusting the CPC spend and ads, increasing the efficiency of my ad campaign by 30% via concentrating on converting terms, and by doubling the conversion rate via A/B tests, we ended up with a net increase in leads of 600% from our original – and we are still spending the same amount in ad spend.
Nice work! Your company makes more money, you get a raise, and you get to go on a nice all inclusive vacation!
This example shows the power of conversion rates and the fact that by making relatively small adjustments throughout the campaign you can end up with a much larger net result.
