Marketing on the web is demand-driven. Searchers are looking for answers. The best way to dominate the game is to become the best answer to their questions. This is why it’s important to do dynamic keyword research instead of static keyword research. It’s also why you don’t copy and paste the same ads into all of your ad groups talking about yourself and what makes you great.
In an effort to improve relevance on the web, Google is utilizing searcher’s relationships. A new button in search results enables signed-in searchers to get recommendations on search results pages and websites from the people they are connected to through their Google profiles. Google is saying it won’t affect how quality score is calculated. But, it does affect quality score because if the recommendations improve CTR, then your quality score improves.
Last time, we talked about a revolutionary tool in keyword research called Google Insights for Search that allows you to gain competitive advantages by doing dynamic keyword research instead of static keyword research. Static keyword research is using a keyword tool to get volume “numbers” at one point in time and then using that data to perform long-term marketing campaigns. The problem? Things change. Therefore, we need to incorporate dynamic keyword research to keep our campaigns aligned with what’s actually happening on the web.
Google has this tool called Insights for Search. At first glance, it looks like a pretty simple, fairly unsophisticated tool that just tells you if search volume is going up or down for a particular keyword or group of keywords. Not many insights there, right? I mean, all you really have to do for search engine marketing is keyword research with one of the many tools available to you out there and you can easily line up the keywords that you want to go after by search intent and volume, right?
The latest news to keep you ahead of the competition in managing your paid search advertising…
Possibly the biggest mistake you can make when analyzing your own web data or reporting other people’s data to them is stopping at what happened. Here’s an example….
“Search Engine traffic rose 20% in the last 3 months.”
Sweet. So, let’s everybody meet at Outback for an awesome blossom with some extra awesome, right? Not so fast my friend. Let’s add a little context to that little observation we made above.
Chad Summerhill wrote a nice post recently about something you should be doing if you manage your own PPC account and something you should be showing your clients if you manage accounts for others – visual statistically significant ad test results by time period. Check out the “how-to” in that post.
Wow, mobile is evolving fast. AT&T introduced location-based “ShopAlerts” in NY, SF, Chicago and LA. People can opt-in to receive offers and promotions via SMS or MMS when they physically enter a designated area defined by the advertiser (e.g. a mile from their store). This can help drive in-store traffic and reach mobile users in very specific markets. This is even more targeted than web-based and app-based advertising, but it is opt-in.
Although in beta and only open to VIP advertisers that are invited, Twitter has finally released their ad platform called Promoted Tweets. The general format is that you can use tweets you’ve created or that have been retweeted by someone else as “ads” that are promoted in certain environments. The way the ads are served are analogous to both search and contextual advertising in AdWords, where you pick keywords that are searched on to have your tweet shown or it is matched to a stream of tweets given the contextual nature that you choose in your account. You pay on a cost per engagement which include clicks, favoriting, retweets and replies. There is also Promoted Account where you can essentially buy followers and Promoted Trends where you are shown on hashtags.
Last week, we talked about PPC trick #1 to building your online business for the long-term – using keywords correctly. This week, let’s talk about another “trick of the trade” that will also help on the way to this goal.
As the number of targeting options for PPC increases, so do the creative ways in which you can organize your campaigns to get the maximum effectiveness out of them. As I mentioned last week, for example, you can create a “fishing” campaign and a “bucket” campaign in order to separately control budgeting, bidding and other targeting options to focus your efforts on dominating the locations (search queries) that really put food on the table.
In my last post, I shared using a fishing metaphor to talk about stepping your PPC game up to the point where you know how to use it to build your online business for the long haul. So, let’s start looking at some of the “tricks of the trade” to do just that.
One of the great things about PPC advertising is its immediacy. You can start running ads right now and see almost instantaneous results; whether good, bad or just ok. But, the trap that we don’t want to fall into when running our accounts is limiting our thinking just to what can be gained right now. The fact is, PPC is a great way to help build all areas of your online business long-term. And with the continuous expansion of features and avenues being offered in this channel today, the possibilities continue to grow.
There’s a lot more leverage in writing and testing great ads than a lot of the activities that PPC managers can spend their time on. For those using AdWords, testing is the answer to almost everything. But, testing works better if you’re able to test things that matter. People get caught testing things like switching lines around or replacing colons with semicolons and they end up creating basically similar ads.
In this episode of PPC Rockstars, David and Howie explained the coined “Checkmate Method” to their listeners that focuses in on a more intense way to write and test your ads against your competition. Here are some of the highlights…
I’ve started powering through David Szetela and Joe Kerschbaum’s new PPC book called Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day and I really like this PDF they made available online to their readers. Although it’s about classified ads, you can pull direct correlations to apply to your PPC text ads when advertising on search engines. Really, search engine results pages (SERPs) are just like classified ads except the page is digital instead of paper.
The keyword phrases to use for your PPC account aren’t always obvious. A key to great ROI and customer loyalty is to have customers think that you’re the only viable solution to their problem at a given time. Therefore, the challenge in keyword research is not coming up with keywords. That’s the easy part. You just scan the website and use the product names and there you go…a keyword list.
The challenge is in exploiting markets that become successful that competitors may not have thought of. That’s why it’s important to always be practicing keyword discovery and exploring phrases that might work well by always testing.