Posts Tagged ‘images’

Back in 2002, Stanford published their Top 10 Guidelines To Establishing Web Credibility. Amazingly, these conditions for creating a credible website are just as relevant today as they were back then. Isn’t it funny how, with all of the advancements in site development and marketing, it all still comes back to the basics?

Below are the first five guidelines. I’ve provided some of my own additional thoughts and commentary and would be interested in hearing yours as well.

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Once a PPC account is set up and running, a good account manager is always looking for ways to improve results to better reach the account’s marketing goals.  One such way is to test different types of ad messages to gain insights into what attracts your industry’s customers to your products/services so that you can better understand and communicate with them.

Some of these message types include: Click here to keep learning

In my last post, we took a look at a good reason for an account manager to make separate campaigns in an AdWords account.  If you have a similar product with different profit margins and total profit, then you want to control how much you’re spending on each.  In this post, we’ll explore more of the reasons to separate campaigns.

The marketing goals for your company should guide you into the correct account organization for your PPC campaigns. Click here to keep learning

Google, Yahoo and Bing have made setting up pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns fairly easy and painless. Within hours you can have your ads up and running, and delivering traffic to your website for a small fee per click. Unfortunately, the ease in which a campaign can be set up often convinces business owners that they can throw up some PPC ads and the money will start pouring in. I’ve talked to many businesses that think PPC doesn’t work because they tried it once and never made any money.

It’s not that PPC doesn’t work, it’s that the campaigns were not set up and managed properly. All too often a PPC campaign is created by the business owner but left to run with little or no management, supervision or oversight. Even a properly (or professionally) set up campaign needs constant oversight.

Proper set-up and management of your PPC campaigns is vitally important to ensure you have a profitable and high ROI PPC campaign. Without effective bid management and ongoing testing of ads and landing pages the campaign will soon be nothing more than an expensive traffic delivery method. As time passes, bid clicks will rise, positioning of ads will fall, landing pages won’t be as targeted and your cost per conversion will increase. Your PPC campaign may continue to deliver both traffic and sales, but the cost of those sales may be outside of your zone of profitability.

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Most of the PPC accounts I look at do not take advantage of all of the different options that AdWords offers to organize your account for maximum success.  Most of them simply organize their campaigns based upon keywords.  They’ll separate keywords into separate campaigns just because they’re different keywords.  Or, they’ll keep all different kinds of keywords for all different kinds of products with all different kinds of marketing goals in the same campaign.  But, AdWords has given us the flexibility to have much more control over how we are spending our money so that every dollar can be maximized.

First, your account should be organized based upon your marketing objectives.  Therefore, before you create your campaigns (or if they’ve been running for a while now), lay out specifically what it is you’re are trying to accomplish. Click here to keep learning

We’ve been working our way through Google Webmaster Tools learning how to set up and configure a website and took a detailed look at the site stats Google provides. This post covers the Diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools which lets you assess common issues and problems with your website.

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OK, we got rid of some wasted clicks from our PPC campaigns there.  Now, let’s do some more.

Let’s say we have an ad group that is dedicated to selling something specific like “Gibson Guitars.”  We’ve got keywords and targeted ads directed to a targeted landing page dealing directly with guitars that are made by Gibson.  And let’s say we’ve got a decent amount of money to work with so we decide to use the broad match term “gibson guitars” in our ad group.  Well, with broad match, we will get our keyword matched to all kind of queries, even as simple as “guitars.”

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There’s a big temptation that PPC managers need to stay away from, especially when first building an account.  The temptation is assumption. (And yes, we all know what happens when….)  If you assume, you can waste a lot of time building out a campaign that you will just have to spend MORE time fixing later.

A couple of primary assumptions that would be easy to make…

• Keyword phrase “x” is definitely going to work so I’ll spend the time to build an ad group and write targeted ads for it.
• Keyword phrase “y” isn’t working, so I’ll just delete it.

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If you have a PPC account, as you read this you are paying for wasted clicks.  Visitors that aren’t really interested in what you offer are coming to your website and you’re paying for them.  Isn’t that frustrating to know?  The bad news is that the nature of PPC won’t enable you to ever totally eliminate this from happening.

Why?  One reason is because you can’t control searcher behavior.  You could write the perfect ad for your most targeted keyword on exact match so that it cannot be mistaken what it is you’re offering.  But, searchers that are not at all candidates for purchasing will still click through for many reasons.  Maybe they thought you were in their price range, but aren’t.  Or maybe their query failed to return the kind of results they were looking for but your ad piqued their curiosity so they clicked through in exploration mode just to make sure.

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What’s the best keyword research tool out there?  Google’s?  WordTracker? Keyword Discovery?  Actually, none of them.

The best keyword research tool is a broad match keyword in a PPC account.  Huh?  Doesn’t everyone say that broad match is extremely dangerous and you should only approach them with the utmost respect and gentleness?  Well, yes that’s true, but that doesn’t mean you abandon them!

OK, so why do I say this is the case?  Because broad match keywords are like scouts for you.  They go out and evaluate all of the possible “players” in the game and come back to you and let you know which ones are worthy of playing on your team and which ones aren’t. Click here to keep learning