In the previous 3 parts of this guide we have had an introduction to using search engine pay per click advertising, looked at how to research and choose your keywords in more detail, and how to write your PPC adverts. Now they are up and running, the next step is to analyse their performance.

Once you have set your objectives (i.e. what you want to acieve with your PPC adverts) you can decide how best to measure the success of your Pay Per Click campaign.

Generating sales or leads
If your main aim is to generate sales or leads, you should use Conversion Rate, Cost Per Action and Return On Advertising Spend to determine success. Conversion is calculated by taking the number of clicks which turn into sales and representing them as a percentage. For example, three sales after ten clicks would equate to a 30% conversion rate.

Cost Per Action (CPA) is a monetary value, and shows how much you have spent to acquire that sale, lead or download. For example if you have spent £100 and 10 people have downloaded your service, you have a CPA of £10. This will show you how cost-effective your marketing is. For example, if you have a CPA of £10 and your service is only worth £9, you have made a loss of £1 per sale!

Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) is the amount of money you have generated for every pound spent. For example, a spend of £1000 generating £1500 revenue is a return of £1.50. A spend of £1000 generating £500 revenue is a return of £0.50 i.e. a loss of 50p for every £1 spent

Brand awareness
If your target is brand awareness, then you should focus on impressions (the number of times your ad is shown on a screen) and ad clicks. You can look at these two data sets independently or combine them to create your Click Through Rate (CTR). For example, an advert with 100 impressions and 30 clicks has a CTR of 30%.

Using the data
Data for data’s sake is a waste of your time. It may present you with some attractive graphs, but if you are not using that data to make decisions on the adverts and your website, your time is better spent elsewhere. Use your data to answer these questions:
- How do customers get to your site?
- How do they interact with your site?
- What was the result of their visit? I.e. did they buy anything?

A basic account will provide you with a lot of information about your campaigns including the following metrics as standard:
- Average ad positions
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Click through rate % (impressions/ clicks)

However, it will not tell you how many sales were generated or information about return on advertising spend (ROAS). To do this you will need to install post- click tracking on your website.

Post-click data
There a variety of different tracking solutions to choose from, some free and others paid. One of the best free products on the market is Google’s Analytics service. You will get a free Google Analytics tracking account when you open your Adwords account. To access your account, just click on the ‘Analytics’ tab at the top of your account page.

In order to install Google Analytics on your website, just follow the instructions within your account. For the basic information, all you need is to copy and paste the Google Analytics JavaScript code into your site’s HTML.

Applying the code to use sales tracking will require some basic knowledge of HTML. You can also tie in your AdWords account simply with a couple of clicks. If you have the ability to enable e-commerce tracking, you can also tie in your sales and revenue providing you with a detailed break down of where they came from and what they bought/ spent.

Basic measurement terms
Visits
The number of times your site was visited. Someone visiting your site more than once, will have each visit recorded here.

Unique Visitor
The metric which measures a visit to the site only once during a specified time period.

Page views
The number of times a web page was requested.

Pages per visit
This shows, on average, how many pages your site’s visitors looked.

Bounce rate
The percentage of visitors who leave after entering the site on a certain page with out navigating to any other part of the site.

CPA - Cost Per Action
This is the amount of money it has cost you to take the desired action on your site e.g. Buy a product, sign up to a newsletter…

CPC - Cost Per Click
The amount of money you have paid for someone to click on an ad

CPM – Cost per thousand impressions
The advertising model which charges advertisers by the number of times an ad is shown. This is typically broken down to the chargeable amount per thousand impressions. For example, 100,000 impressions at £1000 is a CPM of £100.

CTR - Click-Through Rate
The percentage of people who see an advert and then click on it

Return On Advertising Spend - ROAS
This is the amount of money you have generated for every pound spent.

Go to www.marketingterms.com for a comprehensive collection of marketing terminology and definitions

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I’ve stumbled across a handy little website analyser called The Reaction Engine, which is worth checking out if you look after a website and are tasked with getting better search engine results.

It’s pretty cool, allowing you to enter the URL and find out how your website performs against key indicators such as download time, Page Rank, meta data etc., providing an overall rating. There’s loads of these sort of things around, but The Reaction Engine packages it all up nice and simply.

Whether your site gets a good or bad rating, there are a bunch of helpful suggestions to give ideas for improvement.

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We have recently launched a domain name search gadget for your iGoogle home page. To add it to your Google homepage simply click on the link above and scroll down to the 123-reg domain name search widget and click on ‘Add it now’. Now you can search for domain names directly from your personal Google home page. Fantastic!

If you haven’t set up a Google home page yet, it is really easy. Go to www.google.co.uk and click on the iGoogle link in the top right hand corner of your screen. You will be shown a generic example home page along with a link to get started. Once you have created your Google account you can start adding tools and widgets to your Google home page.

All feedback is welcome, so if you use it and have some great ideas on what we can add to it to make it even better leave a comment here or drop me an email at hosting-marketing@pipex.net

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So far we have gone through an introduction to using search engine pay per click advertising and looked at researching and choosing your keywords in more detail. Now we can start to look at writing your PPC adverts.

Writing an advert that attracts people’s attention and sells the idea of them clicking on it whilst competing with 19 other entries (paid and organic results) is quite a task, especially as your adverts have strict character limitations (including spaces).

For Google adwords you have:

• 25 characters for the title (Birthday cards £1.99)
• 35 characters for line 1 (Choose from 1000s of cards)
• 35 characters for line 2 (with free delivery to anywhere!)
• 35 characters for the display URL (www.websitename.com)
• 1024 characters for the destination URL (This is where the searcher is actually sent when clicking on the advert, so you can insert tracking or link the advert directly to a page within the site. This is not shown on the advert)

For Microsoft adCenter you have:

• 25 characters for the title
• 70 characters for the body of the advert. (Line breaks and ad size will vary depending upon the ad’s position on the webpage and the viewer’s browser settings.)
• 35 characters for the display URL
• 1022 characters for the destination URL

Read the rest of this entry »

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When it comes to links and SEO, a common misconception is that it is the volume of links to a site that is most important, unfortunately this is not the case. Instead of quantity, search engines are more concerned with the quality of the links.

It is better to have a small collection of high page ranked sites (e.g. PR6+) linking to your site than lots of PR0 sites. If you find you have a lot of PR0 sites linking to you, don’t worry, you won’t be penalised for this. The search engines know you can’t control someone else linking to you.

Other areas to be aware of include:

Link farms
Avoid using link farms. Once they are discovered by the search engine they are often black listed from the results pages, and those who took part may also be affected.

Link exchange
One way links also count for more than reciprocal linking, as these are counted as genuine ‘votes’ for a site.

Buying domains to set up links to a site
If you own multiple sites each with their own regularly updated independent content then by all means link them together as ‘sister sites’. However if the domains only exist to link to your main site and carry the same copy on each site (if any at all) the search engines will filter these links out and you have wasted money buying the domain names.

Unrelated websites
If you run a site dedicated to the latest news about dogs and cats, a link from another site related to the world of dogs and cats is going to carry more weight than a link from a site that reviews pots and pans.

One of the best pieces I have had about SEO if from a colleague who used to work at Google who said the best way to think about Google’s spiders (the software that trawls the web looking at links, design, content…) is the same way as if a person is actually looking at your site.

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I’m sure a lot of you have signed up for Google Analytics. It is a powerful and easy to use tool, with the added bonus of being free, which is always nice!

The question that always persists is why are they giving it away for free in the first place? One answer is the goodwill that comes with these free services, another is that the more you use Google services the more likely you are to use their search engine. A third reason is all that fantastic data they gather from hundreds of thousands of websites which they can then use to their benefit. A very interesting article concerning a study in to what Google is doing with the ‘bounce rate’ data can be found at http://www.1stsearchenginerankings.com/2007/06/08/google-bounce-factor-research-data-is-in/

In summary, they found:

1) Too many searches resulting in a click to your site which then result in a bounce could negatively effect your site.

2) Somehow lowering this bounce rate, by providing what the users want most likely can indeed have a very positive effect on your site.

3) Google Analytics data is INFACT used by Google to manipulate results in their search engine. By using Google Analytics your data could have either a negative or positive effect on your site.

4) The overall bounce rate for the site and each individual bounce rates for each of your keywords plays a role.

This is just one of many variables Google takes in to account so do not get too worried about how your rankings are being affected if you have pages with high bounce rates. However, from the perspective of your site’s design and content, it is worth your time to try and find out why they have them and taking action to try and lower the bounce.

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One of the interesting (for strange people like me anyway) things about search marketing is how seasonality has such a large impact on certain keywords, and how sites can plan and act on them.

A good example is the keyword ‘Wimbledon’. If we use Google Trends we can see how search volume using the term ‘Wimbledon’ spike during the tennis tournament http://www.google.com/trends?q=wimbledon. We can also see the same for the keyword ‘christmas’ http://www.google.com/trends?q=christmas and ‘mothers day’ http://www.google.com/trends?q=mothers+day&ctab=0&geo=GB&geor=all&date=all&sort=0 

By identifying those events related to your site that come around every year you can plan both your site lay out and search marketing activity in advance. If we take the example of an online store that sells flowers, straight away we can pick out two key events to plan for; Mothers day and Valentines day (http://www.google.com/trends?q=valentine).

With this knowledge we can activate keywords on the search engines in the build up to the spikes and then pause them once they end. This allows you to benefit from a period of high traffic that will have a high propencity to convert in to customers with out having them running through out the year, putting a strain on your budget. You can also amend your home page to focus on these events so that they are the lead messages and offers to draw your visitors further in to your site.

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Hopefully part one of this guide helped you to set up your account and gain an idea of the basics of PPC marketing through search engines. This section will look in more detail at researching your keywords and setting your budget.

Part 1 of the guide can be found here http://inside.123-reg.co.uk/archives/pay-per-click-guide-1/

What are keywords?
Keywords are the terms people have typed in to a search engine to look for some information. For example, if you are looking for a birthday card you may type in “Birthday cards”. When the search engine brings back the results, it also displays adverts related to that subject. Advertisers have told the search engine that they want their advert to be shown when ever their chosen keywords are searched for, in this case for Birthday cards.

Depending on what you want to advertise, your list of keywords may be anything from a dozen up to literally thousands (as is the case with the major retailers such as Amazon).

Keyword research
There are numerous keyword research tools to help you decide which terms to bid on. Some of these are free and others ask for payment. Google provide a free keyword estimator tool as part of their AdWords account, which will show predicted spend and traffic for a keyword. However, it will not create a list of keywords for you.

One of the most popular tools is Yahoo!’s free keyword selector tool, This will tell you how many times a certain term has been searched for in the past month, along with associated searches using that term. This can be found here http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

In order to build a keyword list, start by using these tools to type in the keywords you think people will use when searching for your product or service. The keyword tools will then show you know all the combinations of alternative keywords that people use to look for your product and service. Choose the keywords that you think are most relevant to you. The more keywords that you choose, the greater the potential traffic and sales that your PPC campaign will generate.

Generally, common keywords are popular amongst many advertisers, so the cost per click you pay for these keywords are likely to be higher than longer, less frequently used keywords. It’s a good idea to include as many as possible within your account.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Below is a selection of the blogs I regularly read to keep up to date with the latest on search marketing along with some ideas and tips for our own sites:

www.seobook.com
Written by one of the industry’s leading figure heads Aaron Wall, this blog is primarily focused on SEO. It has been running for some time, so the post topics are quite advanced now, but a search of earlier posts can prove fruitful for beginners.

www.seomoz.com/blog
A really good read, with regular updates along with some original ideas and interesting commentary on industry developments.

adwords.blogspot.com
The official Google AdWords blog. Keep up to date with new product launches, scheduled down time, ideas to maximise your adverts and a like.

adcenterblog.spaces.live.com
The official Microsoft adCenter blog

www.mattcutts.com/blog
Matt Cutts is head of Google’s Webspam team and writes abourt search marketing from an insider’s perspective.

blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog
If you are serious about search marketing you should regularly check both this blog and the main site www.searchenginewatch.com with news, ideas and how to guides, it is a mine of information. If you are just starting to dabble in all of this, here’s a good search marketing guide.

If you have any more you would like to share feel free to add them in the comments box

Matt

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One of the curses of working in online marketing is that you can’t enjoy a website for it’s own sake, or just look at a pay per click advert or banner with out critiquing it, and this includes the domain name.

Some domain names are so long no one stands a chance of remembering it, others are acronyms that leave no idea of what the site is about and a few are even misspelled. One of the key variables a search engine will look at when ranking your site is your domain name, and those containing a search keyword will get a nice ranking boost, so it is important you choose wisely.

Magic dreamers
If we use the example of a fictional greeting card company called ‘magic dreamers’ it may seem obvious to go with (this is an example, not a genuine domain name) www.magicdreamers.co.uk, and whilst this would rank highly for people searching for the keywords ‘magic’ and ‘dreamers’ most customers looking for a greeting card would search for something like:

• ‘Greeting cards’
• ‘Birthday cards’
• ‘Mothers day card’
• Etc…

The domain name ‘magicdreamers.co.uk’, doesn’t let the search engine know what the site is about is in any way. Any domain name with those keywords (e.g. www.greetingcard.com) will score highly, because it describes the site’s purpose perfectly and is therefore more relevant in the search engine’s eyes.

To help you research which domain name to register, one of the most useful free online tools for keyword analysis is Yahoo’s Overture keyword selector site: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Just type in a word or phrase related to your website, e.g. ‘greeting card’, and the program will show you how many searches were conducted containing that word or phrase during the previous month.

It is worth noting that having an excellent domain name alone won’t do the trick, but if it is coupled with keyword loaded content, in bound links and strong page titles, it could be the edge you need to make it to the top 10.

A quick check list for choosing your domain name:

• Keep it short
• Keep it descriptive
• Keep it memorable

Simple!

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