Coaching For Success
Posts tagged PPC
How Does Internet Marketing Work?
Aug 31st
Internet marketing is a relatively new concept, which leaves many people scratching their heads as to just what exactly it is. And even those familiar with the term may not be aware of what’s involved and how it works. So, let’s see if we can shed some light onto something that’s become indispensible if you’re a business owner and want to get your business noticed on the internet.
The Basics
Boiled down to its bare essence, internet marketing is basically all about getting visitors (or traffic) to your web site, and, once they’re there, to generate enough interest for them to want to return to your site, or, better still, take some kind of positive action that results in a relationship being established between themselves and the web site, or business.
But, how exactly do you get to the point where you’re getting sufficient visitors who take the action you would like them to take? The devil is in the details as far as internet marketing is concerned, so let’s take a high-level view of the details to see what’s involved.
Internet Marketing Methodology
There are several internet marketing methodologies that can be followed, some of which can be applied simultaneously, but all of which share the common goals of driving traffic to your web site and converting that traffic into customers. These methodologies are:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Web Analytics
- SEO Web Design
- Online Branding
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation, or SEO as it’s commonly referred to, is the art of getting your web site set up so that it ranks well in the organic search results of the major search engines for specific keywords.
The first step of any good SEO campaign is to determine just who your target audience is and what they’re searching for. After all, if you don’t know who’s interested in what you have to offer, how are you ever going to get your web site in front of them? This involves using the right keywords strategically placed throughout your web site, with each page optimized for just one or two keywords.
Having selected your keywords, the next step is to create unique content based around those keywords. Bear in mind that search engines don’t rank web sites based on the site as a whole but based on the quality of unique content presented on individual pages.
The structure of your web site not only determines how easily your visitors can navigate around it, but also how easily search engines can find your site and index it. One thing you should definitely do is submit a sitemap, which represents an outline of your entire site.
Setting up a blog or forum on your site helps keep your content fresh, and, therefore, the search engines happy. It also helps establish your site as an authority in your particular field.
Finally, one of the most important factors in search engine optimisation is creating backlinks, or links from other authoritative sites back to your site. The number and quality of such links play a major part in the algorithms of all major search engines, and will reward your effort and attention.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Whereas the goal of search engine optimisation is to rank highly within organic search results for specific keywords at no cost, pay-per-click (PPC) involves paying for the placement of your site within the sponsored section of search engine results, while competing with other advertisers.
The difference between a visitor clicking on your site in the organic search engine results and clicking on your site in the sponsored results is that the former is free, whereas you pay for the latter, regardless of the outcome.
A combination of both SEO and PPC is recommended, but PPC should be approached initially with care and with a strict budget limit, since you’ll be charged for clicks in real time, so you must stay on top of your campaigns. PPC campaigns never sleep, and neither should you (well, maybe 40 winks here and there!)!
Web Analytics
Web analytics sounds a bit intimidating, but no need to panic – it’s not really that scary at all. It’s all about tracking all the activity connected with your web site, including traffic and user interaction, providing you with the ability to check the sources of traffic coming to your site and allowing you to improve your traffic generating strategies, including search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, etc.
As a result, you can tell which keywords are sending traffic to your site and which aren’t, and make adjustments accordingly. Analytics can also be used to set goals and track the results.
SEO Web Design
In the early days of the internet, you could almost throw together any old site and achieve a reasonable amount of success. Nowadays, not only have search engines become much more sophisticated, but so have users. As a result, much more care and attention needs to go into the design and construction of your web site to please both users and search engines.
- You must know who your target audience is and ensure your site is set up to cater to that audience
- Check the competition and what they’re doing and see if you can improve on it and/or offer something that makes you stand out
- Decide on an appropriate navigation strategy that will allow users to move freely and easily within your site, while ensuring the strategy also makes sense for the search engines (having a link that goes nowhere will bring the search engines to a screeching halt – not good!)
- Which technology will you use to build your site? HTML? Flash? Ajax? PHP?
- Create high quality, informative content that establishes your site as a subject matter expert
- Test the site thoroughly, checking for ease of navigation and that all links work correctly
Online Branding
Building your brand has become one of the most important aspects of building a successful business, both offline and online. As far as online brand building is concerned, internet advertising plays a huge role. Again, this begins with knowing your target audience and determining their needs and desires.
Once you know what your audience is and that they need what you have to offer, your aim then must be to get your company and its name and everything connected with it in front of that audience by every means at your disposal, including your signature, web site, blog, logo, newsletter, etc.
Though it’s a very difficult goal to achieve, branding is regarded as one of the most important marketing strategies since it can be the thing that separates you from your competition and can turn a visitor into a customer. Everything a user sees that’s connected with your company should carry a stamp of quality that the user associates with your name, and thus your brand, ensuring they’ll remember you and your company and will come back to you again and again.
Whichever methodology, or methodologies, you choose to implement, the ultimate goal, when all said and done, is to get visitors to your site and convert them to customers who will hopefully return time and again, since that will be the measure of the success of any internet marketing methodology.
Choose the methodology that’s right for you, and get started on your journey to online success via internet marketing.
6 Adword Campaign Mistakes You Must Avoid
Aug 24th
If you use Google Adwords you know that even the smallest mistakes can end up costing you money. Simple things like not optimising your campaigns properly especially on competitive keywords can reduce or impede your return on investment (ROI).
If used properly Adwords can help you easily achieve maximum return on investment (ROI) for the keywords or phrases that are most relevant to your internet business and can also improve your website stats by providing targeted traffic.
Because internet marketing is becoming more competitive, with more people than ever competing for keywords, it has unfortunately meant that search engine PPC campaigns and keyword prices are more expensive and so it becomes essential for you to avoid mistakes that will undoubtedly result in poor performing PPC campaigns. Below are 6 mistakes to avoid if you want to have successful Adwords campaign.
1. Creating long lists of poorly targeted keywords
When you first set out to create your AdWords campaign, it is import to choose your keywords carefully and resist the temptation to create a long unless list of irrelevant or generic keywords. For example, if you ran a mobile phone shop then, it wouldn’t be sensible to target the keywords “mobile phone” as the cost per click (CPC) for this generic keyword/ phrase would be amazingly high when compared to a more descriptive and relevant keyword/phrase, such as “Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.”
Do not choose keywords that are disassociative with what you offer i.e. if you only sell products do not choose keywords for repairs or spares, these phrases may well bring visitors to your site but produce no conversions as you do not offer these services.
It’s important to identify and understand your specific internet business niche, so that you can market directly to people who want the products or services that your internet business offers. Do not fool yourself into a postion of using broader terms as this will end up negatively impacting you as well as costing you money.
2. Lack of keywords in your ad text
Ad text is probably the most poorly done part of Adwords as most people forget that when they are creating descriptive ad copy, it’s imperative to inject their keywords in to the title and description while maintaining the balance between clarity and relevance. Your internet marketing ad copy should be written in such a way that anyone reading it will understand easily, exactly what to expect when they click on your ad.
3. Utilising single campaigns
Once you sorted out your ads into into easily identified ad groups, you can move on and create your campaigns. At this stage you should have created ads relating to each product specifically, you now need to group these into one container that describes them.
let us use the example of a florist. They have created ad groups for ‘Red Roses’, Red Tulips and Red Chrysanthemums’. The florist now needs to create a container called ‘Red Flower Bunches’ or ‘Flower Bunches Red’ – (remember red flowers maybe to generic) to hold all of the ad groups in the campaign.
This process is then repeated for blue flowers, gifts or anything else the florist may sell.
Having highly organised campaigns is the key to determining which ads are creating the optimal conversions. Don’t simply put all your ads into the one campaign — split them into separate campaigns to make tracking and amending the ad groups easy.
4. Using broad match only
Adwords Funnel
When you start serving your ads, you should make sure you take advantage of the Adwords Ad serving service. You should also take advantage of the phrase matching options that AdWords makes available for your campaigns, if you are not doing this it is likely that you are missing out on potential customers and creating higher CPC for your campaign.
Broad matches are generally less targeted than exact and phrase matches. Broad matching is the default option under which your ads appear for expanded matches such as plurals or relevant keyword variations.
When you use phrase matching, your ad will appear for your chosen search terms in the specified order you put them in, occassionally they will appear for other terms, too. The most targeted option that you can use is Exact matching, this works by only showing your ad for the exact keyword you specified. The negative keyword option is also a great tool as it allows you to specify the keywords you do not want the ads to appear for. Here’s a quick example of how these targeting options work:
· Broad match: Default option: Plumbing Technician London
· Phrase match: Surround the keyword in quotes: “Plumbing Technician London”
· Exact match: Surround the keyword in square brackets: [Plumbing Technician London]
· Negative match: Place a negative character before the keyword: -Plumbing Technician London
Make sure you take time to research and test all of these different matching techniques as not all will be right for your specific campaign.
5. Failing to optimise ad serving for your ads
When you start serving your ads, you should make sure you take advantage of the AdWords ad serving service, this service help to ensure that your most popular ads are displayed more often for any specific keyword or phrase based on its click through rate (CTR). This works by making more use of your popular ads and less use of those ads that people are not clicking on thus giving you more ‘bang for your buck’ as the expression says.
Basically the AdWords platform gives far more weight to ads with higher click through rates, displaying them more often than ads with lower CTRs in the same ad group, but you must use the serving service for this to work best for you.
6. Failing to track results
Performance of your AdWords campaign’s is important and in order to tweak and refine your process or remove poorly performing ads you need to regularly track results, this will help you identify which keywords work and which do not. By using any of Google’s tracking tools or any other provider tools (most are free) you will be able to do this form of monitoring.
Google has built into the AdWords interface Google Analytics web analytics tools which can provide you with in-depth reporting on all aspects of your campaign’s performance. Setting goals for a campaign will allow you to see whether the campaign is over or underperforming.
As you can see these 6 mistakes can cost you dearly not only in time but in monetary terms as well. Try to remember what your goal is for using AdWords and stick to it. Ensure you do not make these mistakes and hopefully you will have a far more successful adword campaign with a high return on investment (ROI) for your internet business.
Pay Per Click and Local Gold
May 30th
Pay Per Click (PPC) is an internet marketing medium which permits you to advertise your product based on a keyword phrase which has a certain monetary value i.e. let us say the word is carpet; its worth 0.5 Cents per click (sorry but everything online seems to be US dollars), if you decide to use this word it will cost you 0.5 cents every time a person clicks on your advert that uses that keyword. A keyword’s cost per click is determinated by the amount of competition there is for the keyword/s and the search engine’s standards.
Current Pay Per Click providers are Bing, Yahoo and Google Adwords. Approximately 70% of all advertising for keywords is done through Google hence many specialists within Search Engine Marketing have used it consistantly since 2004. This does not mean that you should not bother with Bing and Yahoo in fact as a small business these are probably great places to start your online marketing campaign due to less competition, but more on that later.
Marketing using PPC (Pay Per Click) has many benefits like:
1. Speed: it allows quicker ranking on the surface of the Search Engine Result
Where to Look for PPC Ads
2. Predictability: it allows you to be able to predict your Return On Investment (ROI).
But that’s all well and good the question is how do I get started? what do i need to do first? here is a brief outline
First look at what your business offers from your customers point of view, they need your service, it is late in the evening, they are tired from a hard days work and they want an answer to their problem now – Question – what would they type in to find you? Make a list and then put them down for the moment, you will need them later.
Then search your keywords from your list earlier, check to see the amount of searches that where performed by potential customers, the amount of competition for those keyword and the cost of that keyword, if you find that the competition is very high and the price is also quite high you may wish to consider an alternative or use long tail keywords instead. Equally if the search total is too low then this will not benefit you either as the click through rate necessary to make your sales may not come to your site.
Having sorted all of your keywords out next you need to look at the figures i.e. how many visitors would it take before you get a conversion for your product or service, for example let us say that you have 1000 visitors and only ten perple convert, then this means that your conversion rate is 1%, most sites if done decently will convert much higher than this in fact the ratio can be done by using the 80/20 rule however looking at the worse case scenario tends to give you a better picture, simply because if you do not even convert at your worse figure then you truely are doing something wrong and need to go back to the first step or review your website or topic again.
So why is this important – well it helps you to consider how much you can afford to spend on your PPC campaign and what price you need to charge for your product or service in order to recoup the cost of 100 visitors – get it.
Once you have done the figures you can understandably look at how next to precede, how to calculate your expenditure and where best to place your campaign. Now remember in the beginning I mentioned not to count out Bing and Yahoo and this is why – if you can spend less per click for your given keywords and have less competition for those keywords- where do you feel that will place you? Clearly it is advantageous.
Finally go run your campaign, remember to test, test and test again. Now if you really want to take this to the next level you can make your PPC campaign really work for you by using geographical localisation in order to make your product more appealing to a specific, area, region, location than it would have been in the general category that most people vi for.
Now here is the gold, most people never do PPC for their personal geographical location, worst still they do not realise how much money they are leaving behind.
When using PPC geographically something wonderful happens – yes you got it the price per click is substantially lower than for a general category keyword and the competition is also much lower which means, you can buy more clicks, it costs less to convert a prospect and also gives a potentially higher conversion rate, leading to potentially more money for you. This form of internet marketing still has gold in it if you know how to align your thought and research, plan and execute it well to gain your business better profits.
