The PPC Whitepaper: Use PPC to Get More Traffic, Leads, Sales

The PPC Whitepaper Use PPC to Get More Traffic, Leads, & Sales Part 1: Setting Up PPC Campaigns, Selecting the Keywords, and Writing Ads By Andreas Ramos Stephanie Cota More Traffic. More Sales. The PPC Whitepaper: Part 1 This white paper is an excerpt from our book Insider SEO & PPC, by Andreas Ramos & Stephanie Cota. Version: September 23, 2006 For the latest version, visit Position2.com/ppc-whitepaper.html Get the Book: Insider SEO & PPC Insider SEO & PPC, by Andreas Ramos & Stephanie Cota. 256 pages on SEO, PPC, analytics, plus 26 case studies and dozens of inside tips and tricks. Jain Publishing, 2006. ISBN 0-87573-088-4. Available at Amazon.com, Borders.com, and other online bookstores. Visit Insider-SEO.com, the book’s website, where you’ll find more whitepapers, book reviews, and information. Visit Us at Position2: Our Company Andreas and Stephanie are co-founders and directors of Position2, where we build and manage SEO and PPC. Our clients get more traffic, clicks, leads, and sales. Our company has certified agency status with Google AdWords, Yahoo Overture, and Microsoft adCenter. Visit us at www.Position2.com or email us at bizdev@position2.com About the Authors • • Andreas Ramos was one of the first Certified Google AdWords Experts. He manages PPC campaigns in Asia, Europe, and South America. Andreas lives in Palo Alto, California. Stephanie Cota develops lead and sales generation strategies. Her background is in ecommerce, business, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and web analytics. Stephanie lives in Menlo Park, California. Feedback and Comments We welcome your feedback and comments. If you have a question, just ask. Andreas@Position2.com Copyright Notice Insider SEO & PPC © 2006 by Andreas Ramos and Stephanie Cota. All rights reserved. This white paper may be freely distributed so long as no changes are made. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 2 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. About Our Company: Position2 Our services bring you more traffic. You will get more sales. We offer three search marketing packages: • • SEO Compliance: We fix your website’s code so the search engines can index your site so you can be found when people search for you. Link Building and Blog Outreach: The more links from other websites to your site, the higher you will rank in the search engines and the more traffic you will get from other sites. We find relevant websites and blogs and get them to link to your site. Advertise on the Search Engines. We place ads in the Big Three: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, so when people search for your product or service, your ad will be at the top. We manage your online advertising to reach your business goals: more leads, more sales, and higher ROI. • Position2 is a leading search engine marketing agency serving clients around the globe. The VC-backed company improves lead generation, customer acquisition, and brand visibility through pay per click advertising management (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), and web analytics. • • • Position2 offers a full service, performance-driven approach to agencies and a diverse array of growing companies. We manage your PPC worldwide. We have clients in Asia, Europe, and South America. We manage your project in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, and more. Our Clients Include The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 3 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Our Search Marketing Services For companies that invest $2000-10,000 per month in search marketing or online marketing, we have SEO and PPC service packages starting at $995 per month. For larger companies, we offer complete management of your SEO and PPC strategy and campaigns. SEO for Small Business • We have built SEO solutions for dozens of clients. Our tested methods bring you more traffic. A personal account manager works with you to build a tailored SEO strategy for you. We manage SEO for big companies and we give you the same proven strategies and results. Our affordable Small Business Package lets you start small and grow big. You get insider access to our SEO experts. Your SEO account manager works with you to improve your web site’s ranking. Our SEO Compliance strategy makes sure that search engines will be able to properly index and rank your website. • PPC for Small Business • We bring more traffic to your website. By targeting the audience to find the kind of people who buy your product or service, you get qualified traffic. By adding forms to your site, you get more sales leads at your website. With shopping cart and ecommerce at your site, you get more sales. A personal account manager works with you to build a tailored business strategy that is profitable for you. We work with your budget to maximize your profits. We manage online advertising for big companies and we give you the same proven strategies and results. Your Google-certified account manager manages your online campaign to meet your business goals. When you email your account representative, you get a personal response. Twice a month, schedule a call to go over your account, make adjustments, and set new business goals. Start small and grow. When you need more campaigns or leads, we add that for you. • • • SEO & PPC for Larger Companies and Enterprises Are you spending $50,000 per month at Google and you can’t get them to return a call? With us, you get a dedicated account manager who works on your account. When you have questions, we answer. We are available by email and telephone. We stay on top of changes at the Big Three and manage your account to get the best results. To Start Contact us to get started: • • • Stephanie Cota, Stephanie@Position2.com Andreas Ramos, Andreas@Position2.com Rajesh Sule, Rajesh@Position2.com The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 4 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Position2’s Key Ideas Understanding the Buying Cycle Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft studied online shopping. They found people go through a Buying Cycle: the “awareness of need” phase, the “research phase”, and the “purchase phase”. In awareness of need, a person realizes she needs something. She moves to the research phase, where she researches how to solve her problem. She searches the web, checks out blogs, and asks friends. After a few weeks, she reaches the purchase phase: she knows what she wants. Now she looks for a reliable vendor. What does this mean for you? Your online marketing has to address the research and purchase phase. In the research phase, search terms are general. You offer reviews and comparisons. Your site shows up in search engines, industry websites, and blogs. In the purchase phase, people are ready to buy. The search becomes specific. You offer web pages with prices, shipping costs, payment options, and offers. Knowing your unique value proposition (UVP) and understanding the Buying Cycle, we use SEO, PPC, and link building to place your offer in front of your prospective buyers. SEO Compliance Our SEO makes your website SEO-compliant. This means search engines can find, index, and rank your website. Your Web Site as a Business The point of ecommerce is sales and profits. We help you to maximize your website’s leads, sales, profits, and ROI. We work with you to set an appropriate budget to enable profitable cost-of-acquisition (CPA). We look at standard business metrics, including average order size and frequency of orders, lifetime value (LTV) of a customer, gross margins, cost-per-lead, ROI, and KPI (key performance indicators), and characteristics for a campaign of this type. We would work with you to assign an estimated value to a visitor in order to create other metrics. Web Marketing Is Trackable The great thing about online marketing: it’s fully trackable. You can use analytics software to know every action that your shoppers take. You can see what doesn’t work, and delete it. You can see what works, and optimize it. To do this, we selected and installed an agencylevel analytics tool. This lets us manage your account towards business goals. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 5 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Position2’s Experience Our clients span a wide variety of industries: Group text messaging Lifestyle magazines Debt consolidation Mortgages Car dealerships Medical second-opinion services Embedded industrial software Group SMS Internet Site Consumer products Real estate Social Networking Consumer Software Hotels and B&B Restaurants Seminars Consumer electronic devices Distributors of music instruments Silicon Valley startups Computer chip distributors Motivational speakers Electronic medical records Marketing companies Consulting companies Book publishing Professionals: Doctors, dentists, and attorneys Office furniture Car parts distributor Video-on-Demand (VOD) services Dating services Cell phone services Enterprise Software Travel Agency Newspapers Universities Office rental Building construction And more With solid experience, we developed proven procedures and tools to apply to your account. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 6 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. What Our Clients Say about Position2 “Position2 helped us take our business to the next level. By introducing innovative ideas, from SEO opportunities to new paid search strategies, the team at Position2 helped drive us tremendous growth while beating our internal ROI measures. The team dedicated to our account works tirelessly to help us succeed… and always seem to have our best interests in mind when driving traffic and growth in our company. Their passion to help us win makes success guaranteed.” Bradford G. Stroh Managing Partner Freedom Financial Network, LLC. “With Position2, we were able to build our worldwide membership base very quickly and effectively. Not only did our cost-per-new-user drop dramatically, we reached our goal months ahead of time. With Search Engine Marketing, we were able to attract high quality members who were really interested in our offering. On top of that, we were offered high quality service at a cost that fit our budget.” Anurag Nigam CEO & Founder PartySync.com "Position2 has been an essential partner to db4objects success to become the world’s most popular object database. In only 6 months, they have increased our SEO/PPC software downloads by over 100% while keeping customer acquisition cost within the narrow constraints of our low-cost business model. With their help, we have expanded our reach across the globe, especially with campaigns in Asia. Position2 is an integral part of our marketing organization." Christof Wittig CEO, db4objects The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 7 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Table of Contents Get the Book: Insider SEO & PPC 2 Visit Us at Position2: Our Company 2 About the Authors 2 Feedback and Comments 2 Copyright Notice 2 About Our Company: Position2 3 Our Clients Include 3 Our Search Marketing Services 4 SEO for Small Business 4 PPC for Small Business 4 SEO & PPC for Larger Companies and Enterprises 4 To Start 4 Position2’s Key Ideas 5 Understanding the Buying Cycle 5 SEO Compliance 5 Your Web Site as a Business 5 Web Marketing Is Trackable 5 Position2’s Experience 6 What Our Clients Say about Position2 7 Table of Contents 8 Case Studies and Interviews 10 The Case Studies 10 List of Case Studies 10 The Interviews 11 Chapter 3: Using Pay-Per-Click 12 In this Chapter 12 The Goal of PPC: The Purchase Phase 12 Paid Placement vs. Unpaid Links 12 The Elements of a PPC Campaign 13 How PPC Works 14 Where Will Your Ads Appear? 15 AdWords Acronyms 15 Case Study: Law Office 16 How to Set Your AdWords Budget 16 How to Calculate ROI 17 Case Study: Entertainment 18 Who Are Your Competitors? 18 Ads in the Blue Box 18 Naming the Ad Groups 19 Writing the Ads 19 A/B Split Testing 20 Case Study: Handbags 21 Selecting the Keywords 21 Case Study: Medical Devices 22 Trademarks and Keywords 22 Negative Keywords 23 AdWords Bidding: Minimum Bids 23 The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 8 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Types of Matching 24 The Bids: What You Actually Pay 25 So What Does the Click Really Cost? 25 Case Study: Violins 26 Automated Bid Management (ABM) 27 What Position for the Ads? 27 Why Isn’t My Ad on Google? 28 Ad Groups 28 Case Study: Business Consulting 29 Go to Part 2 of the PPC White Paper 30 Position2’s Certifications 31 Where Your Ads Will Appear 32 Our Search Marketing Services 33 SEO for Small Business 33 PPC for Small Business 33 SEO & PPC for Larger Companies and Enterprises 33 To Start 33 The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 9 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Case Studies and Interviews The Case Studies Although SEO and PPC are billion-dollar industries, there are very few available case studies of successful applications. To improve this situation, we present 26 case studies. These are real companies. Either we or trusted partners implemented these SEO/PPC solutions. In most cases, we include results, costs, and ROI. List of Case Studies A list of the case studies and interviews that appear in the book. Type SEO SEO SEO SEO SEO SEO SEO SEO SEO PPC PPC PPC PPC PPC Company Chemotherapy site Global toy maker Directory submission to DMOZ Specialty search engine Telecommunications company Health information portal Global hotel franchise Beverage company International bank Business consulting Entertainment & video Winery Dentist Setting up AdSense Issue Link building Title tags Working with DMOZ SEO and Google Sandbox Site map Theme pages SEO SEO Changing the URLs PPC to sell services Improve a PPC campaign Example of a poor campaign Landing pages Google AdSense The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 10 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. PPC PPC PPC PPC PPC PPC PPC PPC PPC PPC PPC Analytics Bed & breakfast inn Web-based enterprise software AdWords User Group Lawyer Bookkeeper Medical devices New Age services Realtor Specialty Handbags Specialty music instruments Semiconductors Building materials Regional Targeting Website, landing pages, and PPC Use PPC to find members Website, landing pages, and PPC Local targeting Improve a PPC campaign Local targeting for courses Local targeting Website and PPC Website, landing pages, and PPC Website, landing pages, PPC, and CRM Web analytics The Interviews We also interviewed a range of people involved in the SEO/PPC industry. This gives you a balanced and complete view of the industry from the various participants: a VP of marketing, a VP of SEO, the CEO of a web analytics company, our assigned account support representative at Google AdWords, and the general manager of Microsoft’s adCenter PPC. Name Adam Gordon Erik Dafforn John Marshall J. at Google. David Jakubowski Title VP Marketing, The Oya Group VP of SEO Services, Intrapromote.com CEO, ClickTracks AdWords Support Rep., Google General Manager, MSN Search Strategy Topic How a VP of Marketing sees SEM Managing SEO projects at companies Using web analytics and ClickTracks Using Google AdWords Using MSN adCenter The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 11 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Chapter 3: Using Pay-Per-Click “Search advertising is at once starkly simple, bafflingly complex, and highly effective.” -- Rick Bruner, Director of Research, DoubleClick In this Chapter This chapter covers the Pay Per Click (PPC) services that allow you to pay to be listed in a search engine. There are two major PPC services: Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). We discuss Google AdWords in detail, along with strategies and tips for managing your Google AdWords account. Two interviews are included: one with a Google Adword assigned rep and a second interview with the general manager of search at Microsoft. The Goal of PPC: The Purchase Phase After consumers have finished the research phase of the buying cycle (see page Error! Bookmark not defined.), they then begin to search for a vendor. They have decided what they want and now they are looking for a company that can deliver. PPC lets you place your ad with the product’s name and price in front of the consumer. Best of all, you can place your ad at the top of Google. The people who click on these ads are highly qualified customers; they want to buy. The purpose of PPC is to fit into the purchase phase. In PPC, you adjust the bids to place your ad at the top. You write ads to catch the buyer’s eye. When the customer clicks the ad, she comes to a landing page (LP) where she is assured that she has found the product she is seeking and she can buy it now. You use web analytics tools to study the results and adjust the campaigns to improve the ROI and profits. Paid Placement vs. Unpaid Links As we wrote earlier, there are two kinds of links in Google. The links are either unpaid (the ones on the left side that Google’s computer finds and ranks) and the paid links on the right side. The paid links are the PPC ads. You pay to place these ads in Google. This chapter covers these paid listings. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 12 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Figure 1: At Google, the links on the right are paid listings. These are ranked according to bids from the advertisers. These are Google’s AdWords. Paid listings are separate from unpaid listings. You pay to be in the paid listings. However, this won’t get you into the unpaid listings nor have any effect on your unpaid listing’s ranking. • The paid listings, which are ad placement, are called Sponsored Links in Google. The Elements of a PPC Campaign Your PPC campaign has several elements: • The pool of keywords phrases. These are the search terms that people type into search engines to find you. Start with a wide collection of keywords and narrow this down to find the best keywords for your product. These keywords are customer-centric: this is how the customer defines your product, not how you define your product. The ad text (also called the advertising creative). The ad should match your customer’s search. She is searching for koromo koi; the ad should show the words koromo koi. The landing page (LP). When the customer clicks on your ad, she comes to a page that answers her question. The landing page shows a picture of the koi she wants and describes the koi she wants. The conversion. The purpose of your LP is to convert the visitor, such as subscribing to a newsletter or buying a product. The thank-you page and the follow-up email confirms the purchase. She is added to a database which contacts the customer again after a few weeks for follow-up sales. This is customer relationship management (CRM). The web analytics tools. These let you monitor and adjust campaigns to improve the process. • • • • These elements fit together in a flow, leading the customer from one step to the next. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 13 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. How PPC Works Here’s a quick overview of AdWords. 1 2 3 4 You sign up for an AdWords account at Google. You create a small AdWords ad with a title, two lines of text, and the URL. You add a list of keywords that are relevant to your page. You set the daily maximum for your budget. If you set this at $20 per day, then Google will display your ads until you reach $20 in clicks and then it stops for the day. Google spreads the ads across the day, so it won’t use up your entire budget in the morning. You place a bid for your keyword, for example, 12¢. If your competitor is #2 and you are #3, you increase your bid until your ad appears above him. This is an auction system: the more you bid, the higher your ad appears. If you want to be #1, just increase your bid. You pay for the click, which is why this is called Pay-per-Click. When someone types a search that matches your keyword, Google displays your ad in the results. 5 6 Figure 2: The AdWords ads are displayed in the right column under Sponsored Links. 7 Google displays eight ads per page. If you go to the second page, you’ll see eight more ads. 8 When a visitor clicks your ad, your website comes up. 9 Google charges your account for the click. If you bid 12¢, Google charges you 12¢ for the click. (We will explain the details later.) 10 The account is linked to your credit card. Google deducts the total from your credit card at the end of the month. 11 AdWords reporting tools shows you the number of clicks, the percentage of views vs. clicks, the cost per click, your ad’s average position, whether the visitor was converted to buying, and other information. The rest of this chapter covers the details of this process. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 14 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Where Will Your Ads Appear? When you advertise in Google AdWords, your ads appear in the following search engines and content sites that are affiliated with Google: • • Search engines include: Google, AOL, Ask.com, About.com, Lycos, InfoSpace, Netscape, CompuServe, Earthlink, AT&T, Shopping.com, and others. Content sites include: New York Times, USNews.com, Forbes, ABC, Economist.com, Fox, TheStreet.com, Thomson, National Geographic, Linux World, All Recipes, LowestFares.com, MacWorld, Business.com, The Weather Channel, Reed Business, Food Network, HGTV, HowStuffWorks.com, iVillage.com, and several million web pages in the AdSense network. These reach 64% of all web users. Other Google services: Your ads will also be displayed in Google services such as GMail (Google’s free email), Google Groups, and so on. • AdWords Acronyms Google adds yet more acronyms and concepts. Acronym Clicks Impr Explanation When someone clicks on your ad, that’s one click. Impression. When the AdWord is displayed to someone, that’s an impression. It doesn’t mean they saw it. They had the opportunity to see it. When you’re browsing through a magazine and there is an advertisement for Honda, that’s an impression. Click Through Rate. This is the number of people who clicked the ad in comparison to the number of impressions. If the ad was displayed 100 times and 25 people clicked it, then that’s a 25% CTR. Cost Per Click. What you bid to pay for a click. However, the actual amount is lower. See Avg CPC. The average Cost Per Click. Based on the average of CPCs for the day. This is what you pay for a click. The total that you’re paying for that keyword. This is the number of clicks multiplied by the actual CPC. If you set up Conversion Tracking (strongly recommended) then this column reports on the percentage of visitors who bought a product. This shows the total costs of your campaign against each click. If the overall cost was $12 for 50 clicks and you made two sales, those sales cost you $6 each in advertising. This is the most significant number on the page: your Cost/Conv should be within the range that you’re willing to pay for advertising the product. If this number is greater than your profits, then you’re losing money on the sale. CTR CPC Avg CPC Cost Conv. Rate Cost/Conv The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 15 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Case Study: Law Office This is a single-practitioner law firm with 17 years of practice in New York City. The attorney practices federal law, therefore, his clients can be anywhere in the USA. Situation The attorney had walk-in clients who tended to pay low fees. He wanted to reposition his law firm to get wealthier clients both in the USA and around the world. He also wanted to improve service and cut costs by moving to an all digital office with online processing and filing of legal documents. The existing website was based on web standards of the 90s. The website was essentially a web-based brochure. We threw it all out and started from scratch. Recommendation and Results Would you like to see our recommendations and the results? Buy the book. Visit Insider-SEO.com We’re giving you the whitepaper, but we’re not giving you the tips ☺ There’s a tip here on telephone numbers. To read the tip, buy the book. Visit Insider-SEO.com How to Set Your AdWords Budget Google will suggest a bid and a daily budget, but these are just guesses from Google. They have no idea of your sales volume or advertising margins. Ignore those numbers. Remarkably, many people set their advertising budget on a guess. “Oh, $20,000/month sounds about right.” To set the initial advertising budget, you’ll need to make a few calculations. 1 2 3 4 5 Find the advertising cost per item that you’re willing to spend. In other words, how much you’re willing to spend to sell one koi, for example, $10. Estimate the number of sales you expect to make per month, for example, 50 koi. Multiply the advertising cost per item by the number of expected sales. $10 x 50 koi = $500. Divide that by 30 days to get the daily budget. $500 / 30 days = $16.66 dollars per day Finally, adjust the bids to get the keywords to the top of the list. After four weeks, look at the results and adjust the budget. For those keywords with good ROI or profits, increase the bids. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 16 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. There’s a tip here on daily budgets. To read the tip, buy the book. With AdWords, you can see the effectiveness of a campaign, which lets you justify the advertising budget. If the advertising produces revenues and profit, you can increase the budget. Again, always run these calculations with your ROI in mind. By knowing your advertising margin and setting your sales target, you can run a PPC campaign to find how much it costs to make a sale. If you find that it costs $7.50 to sell one koi, then in effect you know how much it costs to buy a sale. There’s a tip here on how to determine the cost of ads. To read the tip, buy the book. How to Calculate ROI For us, the goal of PPC is ROI and profits. You invest money into PPC to produce a profit. To measure the profitability of an investment, you use ROI, Return on Investment. ROI is calculated as profits divided by costs, multiplied by 100. Expressed as a formula: To find the profits, you subtract costs from the gross revenues (in other words, profit is net revenues): For example, you spend $10,000 in PPC and get $50,000 in sales. $50,000 in sales minus $10,000 in costs = $40,000 in profits. Divide $40,000 by $10,000 to get 4. Multiply by 100 to get 400% ROI. You’ll also need to consider how long it takes for your customers to buy your product. If they buy within three weeks, then use the revenues and costs for a three-week period. If they take twelve weeks to buy, then use the numbers for a twelve -week period. You can find the time cycle by using web analytics. By the way, a number of websites and books use an incorrect formula for ROI. They use gross revenues divided by costs. Be sure to use the correct formula. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 17 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Case Study: Entertainment This company is a niche competitor in the video rental business, competing with Netflix and similar companies. They have 15,000 movies, a database of 28,000 actors, and offer video by mail and video-ondemand (VOD). Situation They have been using AdWords for several years. The staff, however, was busy with managing the ecommerce and other online marketing campaigns (email newsletter and similar). They didn’t have the resources to manage AdWords. They felt the campaigns could be run better. There were ten campaigns for various movie genres. Within each campaign, there were five to twenty Ad Groups. Within the campaign for actors, there were 900+ names in thirty Ad Groups. The vast majority of actors had zero impressions or clicks. This meant the Ad Groups had nearly zero CTR. Many of the obscure movies had high impressions but only a few clicks, which dragged down the CTR for the group. There was only one ad for every Ad Group. The ads were poorly written. A number of the account settings were incorrect. The CPS (Cost-per-Sale) was $85. Since the average sale was only $35, this was a loss. Recommendation and Results Would you like to see our recommendations and the results? Buy the book. Visit Insider-SEO.com Who Are Your Competitors? For any product, there may be thousands of competitors, but in a practical sense, it doesn't matter. Because of the logarithmic nature of the web, the first five or six advertisers get most of the market. The remainder get so few clicks that they don’t matter. It’s like that old hiker’s joke about the bear; you don’t have to deal with the bear, you just have to stay ahead of it. Just keep your ads in the top positions. • Your bids should be as high as necessary to keep you in the top positions. Ads in the Blue Box Sometimes, Google places ads in a blue box at the top of the page above the search results. If your ad gets into the blue box, it’s double bonus day. You’ll get more clicks. • • For an ad to get into the blue box, it needs to have a strong bid, a high keyword CTR, and a high ad CTR. A high bid is not sufficient. Not every page gets a blue box. It’s up to Google when to display these. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 18 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Figure 3: AdWords for Coast to Coast Koi Co. and Buy Koi appear in the blue box at the top of the page, not the right side. Naming the Ad Groups The campaigns and Ad Groups should have relevant names. This helps Google to identify the theme of the Ad Group so it can place the ads in the right market. • • Don’t use names such as Campaign-27 or Ad-Group-Test. Use descriptive names, such as Koi for the campaign and Koromo Koi for the Ad Group. Writing the Ads Review the UVP and sales pitch you wrote for SEO (see page Error! Bookmark not defined.). You’ll use these to write your ads. • Put your top keywords in the header. In the first body line, use a customer-centric phrase. Answer your customer’s question. Provide the solution. In the second body line, state the benefits. Don’t use www. Use capitalization in the display URL. Instead of writing www.koi-planet.com, use KoiPlanet.com. This is easier to read. State the product’s exact name in the header and first line: Koromo Koi in Stock. Remember: your buyer is looking for her choice and she will click your ad if you have what she wants. If appropriate, include your price in the ad. This reduces unqualified buyers. If your koi are $500, buyers who are looking for $20 koi will go elsewhere. You save money if they don’t click on your ad. • • The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 19 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. • • • • • Add extra features, such as In Stock. Free Shipping. No Sales Tax. Worldwide Delivery. $200 Coupon. Use phrases with a call-to-action. Examples: Buy today, save 50%. Download free trial now. Sale ends Friday. Sale-priced, special offer, limited offer. Use words that invoke positive emotions. Examples: Free, cheap, sale, tricks, you, tips, fact, learn, discover, fast, easy, convenient, quick, fun, instantly, save time, powerful, save money, popular. Negative ads that evoke fear or worry have lower CTR than positive ads. Negative phrases include: avoid, worried about, bankruptcy, don’t get caught. Use the Display URL. The fourth line is the URL that is shown to users. This may be different from the target URL. You can add keywords into this URL. Skip the www part, which saves you four characters (including the period). Type Koi-Planet.com/Koromo-Koi Don’t mislead. Users strongly dislike deceptive or misleading links that get them to click on a link. They will instantly back out and return to the search engine. You’ll still be charged for the click. Run your ads until you get about 700 clicks. Sort the list by clicks and write down the top 3-5 keywords. Now sort the list by CTR and write down the top 3-5 keywords. Finally, sort by conversions and write down the keywords that brought conversions. These are your best keywords. Create ads that use these keywords in the heading and the body text. Those ads will get higher CTRs. Work with these until you find the ones that produce ROI and profits. Delete keywords with negative ROI, even if they have high clicks. • • There’s a tip here on how many ads to use. To read the tip, buy the book. A/B Split Testing With AdWords, every action can be tracked. Actions include: buying a product, filling out a web form, signing up for a newsletter, and so on. • • In each Ad Group, create three or four ads. Run the ads until you get 700 clicks and then look at the results. The ads will be sorted by clickthrough-rate (CTR). This shows you how well the ad works. This is a marketing method called A/B Split Testing. You create two ads (A and B) and you test the response. Delete the weak ad, create a new ad that’s based on A, and test again. Repeat this over and over. This is Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest in action. By deleting the weak ads and improving the strong ads, you’ll gradually get ads with 10-15% CTR or higher. It’s always surprising to see which ad is the winner. You can’t predict this in advance. It’s also surprising that there can be a large difference in response rate to ads with nearly the same words. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 20 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. There’s a tip here with titles of books that have lists of great phrases for ads. To read the tip, buy the book. Case Study: Handbags After ten years of working in the Hollywood movie industry, this client moved in the late 1990s to Santa Barbara, a Southern California resort town, and opened a shop for European handbags. Situation He opened his shop just off the main shopping street. He advertised in local newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, and the Yellow Pages. He also started a website in 1999. In 2001, Google released AdWords and we opened a PPC account for the store. Recommendation and Results Would you like to see our recommendations and the results? Buy the book. Visit Insider-SEO.com Selecting the Keywords You select your keywords the same way as you do in SEO (see page Error! Bookmark not defined.). Use various keyword tools, look at magazines and books, and talk with customers. For PPC, build the widest possible set of keywords. Start with at least 500 keywords. Group them into clusters of similar keywords and put each cluster in its own Ad Group. Test to find the best ones. Run the keywords until you get 700 clicks and delete the ones with zero impressions or zero clicks. There’s a tip here on the keyword tool. To read the tip, buy the book. A common question is How many keywords should I use? This depends on your product or services. For some products in extremely narrow markets, there just aren’t too many keywords. We test several thousand keywords. After several months, we end up with 20-30 keywords with high ROI and profits. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 21 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Case Study: Medical Devices This company was a second-tier player in the medical devices industry. For two years, the company paid a PPC company to manage their AdWords and Overture. The got 500 clicks per month. They felt they could do better. Recommendations The existing campaign had 47 keywords. Yet the company sold 40,000 different items. We suggested the number of keywords should be expanded to cover all of these items. 80% of the company’s clients were in Asia. We recommended campaigns in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Recommendation and Results Would you like to see our recommendations and the results? Buy the book. Visit Insider-SEO.com There’s a tip here on how to create mailing lists with PPC. To read the tip, buy the book. Trademarks and Keywords Here’s another common question: Can I use my competitor’s trademarked name as a keyword? Can I put their name in an ad? For example, can you use Porsche Boxster in your keywords and your ads? There was a lawsuit against Google (Geico vs. Google) and federal courts have ruled on this issue. • If the company registered their trademark and if they filled out a form at Google, then Google will block the use of their trademark term in your ad within the USA and Canada. You can use trademarked terms as keywords. If you’re the holder of trademark terms, contact Google and submit the forms. Google will block the use of your trademarks by others in their ads. However, you can’t block the use of your trademark as keywords. • If you’re using a term and someone tells you to stop, tell them to contact Google. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 22 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Negative Keywords Use negative keywords to prevent ad displays to irrelevant searches. If you’re selling a $100 koi, you don’t want the ad to appear when someone searches for free koi. To block that search, add a minus before the keyword ( -free, -cheap,) and add that to your keyword list. You can also add global negative keywords for all Ad Groups within a campaign. There’s a tip here on how to use negative keywords. To read the tip, buy the book. AdWords Bidding: Minimum Bids In August 2005, AdWords underwent the largest change in several years. The previous bidding system that included On Hold status was replaced by a new Minimum Bids system (which we usually call minbid). • • • • • Google calculates the minimum bid that is required for a keyword to show. The AdWords panel shows you the required min-bid. If Google considers your bid to be too low, they will make the keyword Inactive and ask you to increase the bid. If the keyword is Inactive, it won’t trigger an ad when someone searches for that keyword. If you raise the bid to the min-bid amount (or higher), the keyword becomes active. It can happen that you raise a bid to match the min-bid and a few days later, it’s inactive again. Raise your bid again. You can also improve the keyword to lower the required min-bid. If your keyword uses broad match, change it to phrase match or exact match. Change it to phrase match by adding quotes around the word. Change it to exact match by adding square brackets around the word (this is explained in the next section). • • If a keyword is inactive, the ads won’t display for that keyword. Remove the inactive status as soon as possible. Min-bid lets you use any keyword. Just bid above the minimum amount and you can use the keyword. However, to prevent you from using irrelevant keywords (such as Britney Spears), AdWords will ask for min-bids that are punitive. If the keyword is not relevant to your Ad Group, the min-bid can be $5 or more. If Google is demanding very high min-bids, it’s because their software doesn’t think the word is relevant to your Ad Group. There is not a standard min-bid for a keyword. The keyword’s min-bid will be different for each advertiser. A keyword’s min-bid may be $3 for me and 20¢ for you. It depends on the Ad Group’s Quality Score. The quality score is a combination of CTR, ad CTR, past performance of your account, the content of your landing page, and other factors. For example, if you have a high CTR, your minbids will be lower than someone who has low CTR. • The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 23 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. • • You can often get a lower min-bid by putting the keyword in its own Ad Group and writing an ad that uses the keyword in the header. You can also use the min-bid tool to put keywords on pause. Lower the keyword’s bid to 1¢. This makes it inactive. To activate it again, raise the bid. Min-bid caused a substantial increase in costs for many advertisers. Before min-bid, your competitors were unable to use many keywords because they got .4% (or lower) CTR and the system would put their keywords on Hold. With the new min-bid system, they could suddenly start bidding on keywords, even if these got absurdly low CTR, such as .01% (which means they are losing money). Many of these advertisers don’t realize they should delete these keywords altogether. Low CTRs aren’t good for them, but that’s their problem. However, it means more competition for you, so bids and CPCs have gone up. Types of Matching Google uses four types of matching. • • In general, the more specific the type of match, the higher the CTR and the lower your bids and CPC will usually be. Be sure to use negative keywords. Add words such as free and cheap to prevent worthless clicks. People who are looking for free products aren’t likely to pay. If you see that a keyword is getting lots of useless clicks, add it as a negative keyword. Name Broad Match How to Use Type your keywords. Example tennis shoes Explanation Your ad will show when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order, even if the query includes other terms, such as tennis rackets or running shoes. Google also shows your query for related keywords (such as tennis sneakers). Your ad shows when users search for tennis shoes in that order and with other search terms. Your ad will show for red tennis shoes for sale but not shoes for tennis. Your ad shows when users search only for tennis shoes in that order without other terms. Your ad won’t show for red tennis shoes, shoes for tennis, or tennis bags and shoes. Your ad will not show if a user searches for red tennis shoes. Phrase Match Place quotes around your keywords. Place brackets around your keywords. Put a dash before your keywords. “tennis shoes” Exact Match [tennis shoes] Negative Keyword -red The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 24 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. The Bids: What You Actually Pay You set your bids for a keyword. The actual amount you’ll pay depends in part on the bids from other advertisers. • The actual cost is 1¢ plus the next-lowest bid. This is based on the Vickrey sealed-bid auction system, named after William Vickrey, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Economic Science. It allows you to bid high, but not overbid, since you won’t overpay. The best way to explain this bidding system is with an example. Let’s say there are only three companies with AdWords in the koi market. Apple bids $15, Berry bids $10 and Cherry bids 5¢. Laura clicks on all three ads. What does each company pay for these clicks? Start at the bottom of the table and work up. Company Apple Berry Cherry They Bid $15.00 $10.00 $00.05 They Pay $10.01 $00.06 $00.05 Why They Pay That Amount Apple pays the next lowest bid (Berry’s $10 bid) plus 1¢. Apple pays $10.01. Berry pays the next lowest bid (Cherry’s 5¢ bid) plus 1¢. Berry pays 6¢. Cherry bid 5¢, so he pays 5¢. Ms. Berry and Mr. Cherry are paying pennies for their ads, but Mr. Apple is paying $10.01 for his ad. There’s a tip here on how to avoid being ripped off in the bidding system. To read the tip, buy the book. So What Does the Click Really Cost? You set the bids for keywords. But in most cases, this isn’t what you really pay. The actual cost for a click is usually much less. Are you baffled yet? ☺ The click fee depends on several factors. These include: • • • • The keyword’s CTR. The higher the keyword’s CTR, the lower the CPC. If you have a keyword that is getting 23% CTR, the CPC will be a fraction of your bid. The ad’s CTR. The higher the ad’s CTR, the lower the CPC. If you have an ad with 7% CTR, the CPC will be a fraction of your bid. The Ad Group’s overall CTR. The higher the cumulative CTR, the lower the CPC. Your competitors’ bids. You pay 1¢ above your next competitor’s bid. This means if you develop very good ads (they have high CTRs) and you have an Ad Group with keywords that have high CTR, Google will lower the CPC. Your keywords will get a higher position. You’ll get more clicks for the same budget. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 25 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. In 2002, Google added the CTR to the formula that determines the ad’s position. This introduced a mechanism to encourage advertisers to improve their campaigns. This is good for Google; they get more money if 10 people click on a well-written $1 ad instead of two people who click on a poorly-written $3 ad. This is very good for the advertiser. By improving your ads, you get higher ranking with lower bids. Well-managed accounts can substantially outperform their competitors. This complex bidding system causes problems if advertisers don’t understand it. Many advertisers look at the bid price, not the actual cost, and they tend to underbid. They find that it takes $7 to raise a keyword to #1 and they refuse to pay that, but they don’t notice that the click cost (CPC) is only 42¢. There’s a tip here on bidding strategies. To read the tip, buy the book. Case Study: Violins This company sells violins for classical musicians and serious hobbyists. The company is owned by a classically-trained musician with expert knowledge of the violin and her field. The instruments range in price from several thousand dollars to more than $95,000. Until 2004, the company had no online presence. Because the reach was local and the market was so narrow, she had few sales. In late 2004, she hired a marketing company to develop her sales. To reach a nationwide audience, they built a website. The marketing company asked us to build the PPC campaign. Recommendation and Results Would you like to see our recommendations and the results? Buy the book. Visit Insider-SEO.com The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 26 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Automated Bid Management (ABM) Adjusting the bids every day for your account can become a chore, especially if you have several thousand keywords. Hundreds of bids have to be adjusted up or down. Is there a way to automate the calculation of bids? There are Automated Bid Management (ABM) tools. Generally, you define the rules for the bids and it manages the bidding for you. If a keyword is producing good results, the bids are increased. If a keyword has low results, the bids are decreased or the keyword is deleted altogether. ABM tools tend to be expensive. They often charge a substantial percentage of your ad spend or an amount per keyword. If you have 20,000 keywords, it can be too expensive. There are only a handful of these tools, but more companies are releasing ABM tools, so the price may come down. To find these tools, search for Automated Bid Management. What Position for the Ads? The ads are ranked on the page according to the amount of the bid and the Quality Score (a combination of the keyword’s CTR, the ad’s CTR, the cumulative CTR of the Ad Group, the content of the landing page, the history of the account, and other factors). There are eight positions on the first page. If there are more ads, they’ll be on subsequent pages. So where should your ads be? Position 1? Position 4? Position 7? The Enquiro Eyetracking Study and many other studies show that most people click on the top ads. The first ad got 51% of clicks. Number 2 got 24%. Number 3 got 10%, number 4 got 5%, and number 5 got 0.6% of the clicks (for more on these numbers, see page Error! Bookmark not defined.). This is supported by the fact that only the ads in the top positions are also distributed in Google’s Content network. This means you’ll have to increase your bids sufficiently to put the ads in the top positions. But in which position should you be? Do your ads have to be in #1? Or can they be in #4? Although theory and studies say that #1 gets most of the clicks, we’ve found that some clients get more clicks in position #2. Other clients get more clicks in position #3. You’ll have to test your account to see where you get best results. Run the keywords in position #1 for a week. Then move the keywords to #2 for a week. Finally, try position #3 for a week. Look at the results and decide which is best for your account. • If your budget is too low, you’ll notice that your campaign will max out its budget early in the morning and your ads won’t show for the rest of the day. We recommend that you improve the CTR, which lowers your click costs and gives you more clicks for the same budget. Pay attention to ROI, and if the account is profitable, you’ll be able to increase the budget with confidence. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 27 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Why Isn’t My Ad on Google? You set up a campaign and you want to see your ad appear in Google, so you search for it. And it doesn’t show up. This is one of the most common questions from our clients. They search in Google for their top keywords and they don’t see their ad. Is the account broken? There are several answers to this. • • • • Click the Tools tab and select Ads Diagnostic Tool. This lets you see if an ad is being displayed. If the ad isn’t being displayed, it gives the reason. Look at the number of impressions per day. If a keyword is getting 30,000 impressions per day, then the ad is showing, even if you search and don’t see it. If you want the ad to appear all the time, increase the daily budget. If the budget is too low, AdWords will display the ad intermittently. The goal however is the number of results. Your ad needs to appear only enough to produce the number of leads you can manage. If your sales team can only handle ten leads per day, then you only need to budget as much as it takes to get ten leads. There’s no point in getting more leads. This goes into the general issue of the closing rate. Many companies don’t track how many leads they close. They guess it’s usually 50%. But when you look at the number of leads and sales, it’s often 2%. It’s human nature to make one good sale in the afternoon and forget the morning’s 49 lost leads. Beyond improving the PPC, you should also improve your lead close rate. Track the number of leads and compare this against the number of leads. Aim for a 30-50% closing rate. If you can close more leads, you don’t need to spend much on advertising. Ad Groups One of the challenges in using Google AdWords is the multiple levels of Campaigns, Ad Groups, and AdWords. Many advertisers get confused about these. • • • Set up a campaign for each general category of product. Within the campaign, create various Ad Groups for each product. Within each Ad Group, you add hundreds of keywords and several ads, all of which are specific to the product. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 28 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Category Campaign Description Use a campaign for the general class of product. In the campaign settings, you set the overall daily budget. For example, you can set the maximum at $10 per day for a campaign. You can also set the geographical targeting, target language, and content distribution. Within the campaign, you create an Ad Group for each sub-product. Within each Ad Group, you add AdWords. This is a group of keywords that will trigger the ads. You also create the ads within the Ad Group. How to Use This If you’re selling different types of products, then create a campaign for each type of product. If you’re selling koi, turtles, and ducks, then use the Koi Campaign for koi, the Turtle Campaign for turtles, and a Ducks Campaign for ducks. Within the Koi Campaign, create three Ad Groups for Red Koi, Blue Koi, and Green Koi. Within the Red Koi Ad Group, use keywords such as red koi and crimson koi. Ad Group AdWord It takes some time to become familiar with this. Some people mistakenly create dozens of campaigns, with a single AdWord in each campaign. Others put all the AdWords within the same Ad Group. Those mistakes will hurt your campaigns. Case Study: Business Consulting This company offers business strategy consulting services to mid size corporations. Situation The PPC had been running for a year, but it had low traffic and low results. They had several Ad Groups which weren’t well focused. Each Ad Group had only a few keywords and these had very low CTR. The cumulative CTR was extremely low. There was only one ad for each Ad Group and the ads had never been tested against other ads. Recommendation and Results Would you like to see our recommendations and the results? Buy the book. Visit Insider-SEO.com The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 29 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Go to Part 2 of the PPC White Paper • If you don’t have Part 2, visit Position2.com or Insider-SEO.com to get Part 2 of this white paper. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 30 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Position2’s Certifications We are one of only a dozen Google Certified Agencies. This means special services for us that we can apply to your account. Andreas Ramos, our Director of PPC, was one of the first Google Certified Experts. We also have Agency Status at Microsoft AdCenter. We were one of the few agencies that were beta-testers of Microsoft adCenter. We also have Agency Gold Status at Yahoo! We wrote the book. Stephanie Cota and Andreas Ramos, cofounders and directors at Position2, wrote Insider SEO & PPC (2006). It is #1 at Amazon for SEO or PPC. Available at Amazon, Borders, and so on. We founded and manage the Google AdWords User Group at AdWords-User-Group.com. We are a ClickTracks Analytics Certified Agency. We work closely with ClickTracks and we are beta testers of new versions and upcoming tools. Our team includes CRM experts with SalesForce Agency Certification. We can implement SalesForce CRM as part of a complete SEM process. Member of SEMPO, the trade association for SEO/PPC companies The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 31 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Where Your Ads Will Appear We get you into Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, plus AOL, Earthlink, and Amazon.com. Your ads will also appear in various Google properties, incl. Gmail, used by tens of millions. We also get you in Google’s distribution network of several hundred thousand websites. The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 32 of 33 More Traffic. More Sales. Our Search Marketing Services For companies that invest $2000-10,000 per month in search marketing or online marketing, we have SEO and PPC service packages starting at $995 per month. For larger companies, we offer complete management of your SEO and PPC strategy and campaigns. SEO for Small Business • We have built SEO solutions for dozens of clients. Our tested methods bring you more traffic. A personal account manager works with you to build a tailored SEO strategy for you. We manage SEO for big companies and we give you the same proven strategies and results. Our affordable Small Business Package lets you start small and grow big. You get insider access to our SEO experts. Your SEO account manager works with you to improve your web site’s ranking. Our SEO Compliance strategy makes sure that search engines will be able to properly index and rank your website. • PPC for Small Business • We bring more traffic to your website. By targeting the audience to find the kind of people who buy your product or service, you get qualified traffic. By adding forms to your site, you get more sales leads at your website. With shopping cart and ecommerce at your site, you get more sales. A personal account manager works with you to build a tailored business strategy that is profitable for you. We work with your budget to maximize your profits. We manage online advertising for big companies and we give you the same proven strategies and results. Your Google-certified account manager manages your online campaign to meet your business goals. When you email your account representative, you get a personal response. Twice a month, schedule a call to go over your account, make adjustments, and set new business goals. Start small and grow. When you need more campaigns or leads, we add that for you. • • • SEO & PPC for Larger Companies and Enterprises Are you spending $50,000 per month at Google and you can’t get them to return a call? With us, you get a dedicated account manager who works on your account. When you have questions, we answer. We are available by email and telephone. We stay on top of changes at the Big Three and manage your account to get the best results. To Start Contact us to get started: • • • Stephanie Cota, Stephanie@Position2.com Andreas Ramos, Andreas@Position2.com Rajesh Sule, Rajesh@Position2.com The PPC White Paper | Insider-SEO.com | Page 33 of 33