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Key Components That Guarantee a Return on Investment for PPC Management The Four E’s of a Successful Pay-per-Click Advertising Program
July 19, 2006 By Webposition SEO Team
By Kent Lewis (Anvil Media, Inc.)
The good news: you can setup and manage a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program on Google, Yahoo! or MSN within minutes. The bad news: you can setup and manage a PPC advertising program within minutes. That means anyone can set up a PPC program, which has led to higher overall cost, lower click-through rates and conversions. There is hope, however.
The Process
Developing and refining a PPC advertising management process is essential. It enables a company or individual to train, automate and scale a PPC program, compounding the ROI. There are four key components of a winning PPC advertising program: explore, evaluate, expand and enhance. By following the 4E process, you can virtually guarantee an ROI on your PPC advertising program.
Explore
The exploration phase requires information gathering and assessment, which includes historical PPC account data, internal Web analytics data and peripheral research on customers and competitors. Determining the amount of additional keyword and competitive market research depends on the quality and quantity of information collected in the initial research phase. The desired goal is to formulate a PPC advertising program test campaign that runs anywhere from two to four weeks in duration.
Evaluate
The evaluation phase consists of implementing the PPC program test strategy (keywords, text ads and associated landing pages) and monitoring performance. In this phase, the goal is to determine which keyword phrases, ad copy, landing pages and bid strategies have the greatest potential, and will serve as the foundation for the ongoing PPC advertising program.
Expand
The expansion phase focuses on leveraging insights from the evaluation phase to increase the number of keyword phrases in the overall PPC advertising program to generate the desired quantity of leads or sales without sacrificing conversion performance. For example, a test campaign may incorporate 50 keyword phrases, while the expanded campaign may include 500.
Enhance
The enhancement phase involves constant tuning and tweaking of keyword phrases, text ad copy, landing page elements and bid strategies. Typically, this phase incorporates A/B or multivariate testing to ensure optimal PPC program performance. Developing a highly successful PPC advertising program is an iterative process that is never fully-optimized due to changes in the technology, industry and competitive landscape. As such, it is often necessary to cycle back to the exploration phase and test peripheral keywords, ad copy and landing page creative.
Campaign Elements
Once you’ve mastered the “4E process” concept for PPC advertising, the next step is to apply it to the core PPC advertising campaign elements: keywords, structure, copy, landing page, bid strategies and testing. Each of the following campaign elements are incorporated into each phase of the 4E process.
Keywords
There are an abundance of tools and techniques for identifying possible keyword phrases. While compiling your list of keywords for testing in the evaluation phase, don’t forget to explore “tail” terms, which are typically 4 to 6 keywords in length and are highly focused. Although they generate less traffic, they are often more qualified, less expensive and have a higher conversion rate. Always look at your competitor’s sites and PPC advertising campaigns to enlighten your overall PPC strategy.
Account Structure
One of the most overlooked aspects of a PPC advertising campaign is the PPC account structure. An improperly configured PPC account can nullify brilliant keyword selection, ad copy and landing page creative. Key considerations in PPC account setup include the use of campaigns and ad groups that focus on business or keyword seasonality, geographic targeting, branded terms and the buying cycle.
Ad Copy
When it comes to creating PPC text ad copy that generates clicks and conversions, pay close attention to the following elements: messaging, offer and display URL. Utilizing dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) in Google AdWords can be very powerful, but can backfire if not properly implemented. For example, try a search for “scum” on Google and look at the PPC text ads.
Landing Page
The single most important element of an effective landing page is the “scent.” Does the scent, or theme, of the PPC text ad carry through to the landing page? If not, you can all but guarantee low performance. For example, there are very few good reasons to direct PPC text ads to a home page. Beyond targeting each PPC text ad to a specific landing page, ensure that messaging is consistent across campaigns. Also offer limited options to maximize conversion. If you haven’t implemented conversion tracking by this point, you’ll never be able to truly optimize your PPC advertising campaign.
Bid Strategies
With keywords, text ads and landing pages set up and ready to go; the next step is to determine the overall bid strategy. Are you going to manually manage the PPC advertising program, or utilize automated bid software? There are benefits and drawbacks to both, but our experience is that PPC bid software is overrated, even for larger campaigns. Consider PPC platform capabilities such as geographic targeting and day-parting in your overall PPC strategy. Also consider what time of day, days of week or months of the year you will advertise heaviest.
Testing
Virtually every component of a PPC program can be tested, but that doesn’t mean it should be done all at once. An effective approach to optimizing a PPC advertising program includes a structured and methodical assessment of each component, one at a time. Once you’ve mastered A/B testing of text ad copy and landing page creative over time, move on to simultaneous multivariate testing. This requires additional infrastructure and support, but can boost overall conversion in a time-compressed manner.
Conclusion
Utilizing the 4E process (explore, evaluate, expand and enhance) ensures maximum ROI on your PPC advertising program. This process requires assessing key elements of your PPC advertising campaign: keywords, account structure, ad copy, landing page, bid strategies and testing. In the end, you’ll be pleased with the results.
The Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization
July 12, 2006 By Webposition SEO Team
by Richard Drawhorn
The fundamental concepts behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are understood by most search engine marketers, but those new to the subject should find this article to be very useful. Informative articles on various aspects of SEO have been published here on MarketPosition.com over the years, and in this post I will summarize these concepts and provide links to relevant articles.
Keyword Research
The first step in SEO is to identify the search terms for which you would like your web site to rank well on search engines. We might believe that we know these terms already, but our intuition is often incorrect about how popular or competitive search keywords actually are in reality. People use all kinds of variations of phrases as they are searching for information on the internet. It’s important to identify these terms and use them in your site content exactly as people type them into search engines. To discover what these search terms are, a keyword research tool should be used. There are several free tools available, such as the Keyword Selector provided by Overture, but most of the robust keyword research tools are subscription based. For more information on how to start compiling a good keyword list, read How to Research and Utilize Valuable Search Keywords.
Web Site Optimization
You now have your well researched keyword list in hand, and are ready to use the keywords in your web site content. How should these search terms be integrated into your web pages? How often should the phrases be used, and in what sections of the pages? Those are excellent questions and the answers are not known exactly because they depend on the algorithms used by search engines. However, it is generally agreed upon that search engines look at several different sections of a page when evaluating its content:
- Title tag
- Heading tag
- Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags
- Text within the Body area
- Link text and Link URL
- ALT attribute for Image tags (the ALT tag may be less significant than other areas of the page)
Search engines look at the various sections of the document for repeating patterns of keywords or phrases. For this reason, it’s important to have a keyword density within a specific range. What should that keyword density be? Software tools like WebPosition’s Page Critic can help to answer that question. The Page Critic works by looking at the keyword density (and other statistics) of pages that are already ranking well on search engines. Since the search engines keep the details of how their algorithms work a secret, a reasonable strategy is to emulate pages that are well positioned.
Web Site Design
Aesthetics and user friendliness are important elements of web site design, but there are a number of other things to consider to ensure a web site will be as friendly to search engines as possible.
- HTML Validation
It’s important to ensure that the HTML code that makes up a web page is correctly formatted. If there are errors in the code, then search engine spiders may have difficulty indexing the page’s content. Use a HTML Validator to check the formatting of HTML code, and read this article for more information on why this is important. - Site Map
It’s always a good idea to create a site map to make it easy for search engine spiders to index the site’s content. Link to every page on the web site that has relevant content, and place a link to the site map on the site’s home page. It may also help to sign up for the Google Sitemaps program to help ensure your content is indexed by Google. - Develop a Site Theme
One aspect of web site design that is often overlooked is theme development. If possible, organize your content so that particular themes are reinforced. Read Reinforcing Ideas and Improving Relevance to Gain Better Rankings for ideas to consider when organizing your site content. - Avoid Duplicate Content
It’s important to avoid duplicating content on the web site. Read Duplicate Content: How Does it Affect Your Rankings? for more information on how to avoid penalties associated with duplicate content.
Comply with Search Engines’ Terms of Service
There are several practices to avoid to stay on good terms with search engines. Techniques like cloaking, hidden text, or spamming, for example, violate search engines’ terms of service. If a site is found to be using these types of blackhat techniques, it will typically be removed from the search engine’s index. Read this article for more information about practices to avoid.
Build Link Popularity
The Link Popularity of a page is a term that refers to the number of other web sites that link to that page. Search engines typically consider how many other sites link to a page as a factor in determining that page’s ranking. The idea behind this is that if others link to a page, then they must consider that page’s content to be valuable in some way. However, all links are not weighted equally and it’s therefore important to try to encourage high quality web sites within your own theme area to link to your site. For a good overview of these concepts, read Link Popularity Considerations, and for some ideas about how to start building links read A Review of Link Building Strategies.
Monitor Performance
Once your optimized web site is online, you’ll want to monitor its performance on the search engines. If the site is brand new, it should of course be submitted to the search engines, or perhaps resubmitted if necessary. Monitor the site’s positions on search engines for keywords of interest to identify areas where the site is performing well and areas that can be improved. An excellent tool designed for this is WebPosition’s Reporter feature. It creates formatted reports featuring graphs of positions over time, as well as useful parameters like the Keyword Visibility Index.
A web site that is positioned well in search engines should start receiving a significant number of visitors. To monitor traffic and other useful web site statistics, a web analytics solution such as WebTrends is recommended. Read Measuring Web Site Statistics as Part of Your SEO Strategy for more information about the benefits of web analytics.
Conclusion
The art of SEO is a set of skills that can be learned and implemented by anybody who manages a web site. However, proper optimization and maintenance of the site requires time and effort, and the fundamental elements of SEO discussed above must be put into practice. Those who find they do not have the time or desire to implement their own SEO program, read Outsourcing a SEO Program for some advice on how to best seek out professionals that can help.
Creating a More Search Engine Friendly Flash Web Site
July 11, 2006 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
Most SEOs and many web designers know that Flash based web sites are a challenge not only to get indexed but to even get the site or pages to rank well in the search engines. This article will explore a few of the challenges and provide a few tips that may come in handy if you are asked to work on a site or pages that include Flash based content.
First, consider how Flash is being used. Some web sites are nearly 100% Flash driven. These sites often have non-SEO traditional factors that help create popularity for them and in turn drive inbound links to the site through sources such as a national television/press campaign, a movie or DVD tie in, tremendous industry buzz including reviews, high profile news paper or magazine articles, or other factors that are not easily reproducible.
If your client has a site like this, consider the use of an HTML based landing page under the main URL and/or HTML container for the Flash content at a bare minimum. The object in this case is to at least have a title tag and meta content that can be indexed by a search engine. An example of an HTML container concept would be Warner video’s Gone with The Wind Flash page. Because it does use the term “official” in the title, meta tags, as well as in a brief description of the Flash page in a “no script” tag, this site actual ranks better for a search on official gone with the wind rather than simply gone with the wind.
As noted above, this site uses the ‘no script‘ tag to describe the Flash based content. Others have pointed out that you can also use the ‘no embed’ tag as well as a ‘div id‘ tag to add content about your Flash content. The goal behind these methods is to provide a bit of content for users who do not have Flash installed, have it blocked/turned off, as well as for search engines to index. This content should serve to represent exactly what is in the Flash file, not as a method to add extra content, keyword stuff, etc. Think of it much like a an alt tag on a normal web site. If I am displaying a gray car that has feature x, y, z in my Flash file, I should describe that… not go into a semi-unrelated dialog. A tool called ‘SWF2HTML’ is available through Adobe as part of a ‘Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK‘. This tool can be used to extract the text and links from a Flash file and output this into very basic HTML which can then be used to describe the Flash file. As this is much the same content that some search engines can extract from your Flash file it can help you to tweak the content within the Flash file too, just in case it is being extracted.
If you have a specific font/formatting style that you wish to use with certain portions of your site, consider using sIFR. Normally web designers will use a graphic to replace headline text or cascading style sheets (CSS) to set the font/style that should be used on a given web page or site. The problem with a graphic is that it can not be seen by a search engine, so you loose out on text that might otherwise help describe the page’s content. A problem with both graphics and CSS is that across different monitor/operating systems/browser combinations, the pages will not look the same at all. With sIFR, the same exact content is presented to both engines and site visitors with an improvement for site visitors as the sIFR content scales to the font that the Flash designer wishes to use and scales with the available space specified on the web page instead of relying on the browser/installed fonts to be interpreted through CSS. See this sIFR page for an example of the code in action.
In the most ideal of SEO circumstances, the entire site should not consist of Flash in and of itself. As has been discussed many times in previous articles, search engines rely on the text based content of a web site including on page content, title tags, image alt information, text based links, as well meta information to a much lesser degree, among other factors in order to index and sort sites for relevance. The ideal web site uses Flash to add to a visitor’s experience. There are certainly all Flash web sites that do quite well, but this is an exception and not a rule for the average web site. If you have a Flash web site, try turning cookies and JavaScript off as well using a program like Flash Block to view your site. Make sure that your site can work with out Flash from a visitor point of view. And that any information that would have been in the Flash content is available on the page.
Google Updates Landing Page Quality Score for Adwords
July 10, 2006 By Webposition SEO Team
by Richard Drawhorn
As we noted in a previous post, Google started measuring the relevance or “quality” of Adwords landing pages as one of the variables in determining the minimum bid for search keywords. Google recently announced that a few changes were made to the way the Quality Score for landing pages is determined. In this article I’ll review what the Quality Score is and what you can do to increase the Quality Score for your web site.
According to Google’s definition of Quality Score, the following variables influence its value:
- the keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google
- the keyword’s historical performance on Google
- the relevance of your ad text
- the quality of your ad’s landing page
The value of the Quality Score is important because it determines the minimun bid (per click) for a keyword to display an ad on Google. You don’t have much control over the a keyword’s clickthrough rate or historical performance on Google, but you do have direct control over the quality and relevance of your own landing page. It’s therefore in any advertiser’s interest to spend some time evaluating and improving the quality of landing pages for their Google adwords.
Google does not elaborate on the details of the recent changes to the Quality Score, but some quality guidelines are provided in the Google Adwords Help Center. As you might expect, the most important thing to consider when evaluating your ad’s landing page is its content. Google is concerned with landing page content because they wish to ensure that their users have good experiences when they click on Google ads. A good user experience simply means that the user quickly finds what they expected when they clicked on the ad. Here are a few points to consider when creating the landing page for a Google ad:
- Link directly to the page on your web site that is most relevant to the keywords used to trigger the ad. Do not link directly to your home page or any other page that would require the user to navigate further to find what they were looking for. For example, if you sell home electronics online and purchase a Google ad that appears for the search term “digital cameras”, then have the ad link directly to the digital cameras section of your web site instead of your home page. This allows the user to immediately begin browsing through your digital camera offerings instead of navigating your site’s menu system or site map to find the products they are interested in.
- Provide unique content on your web page. Having duplicate content on your web site will not only be problematic for your Google Adwords Quality Score, but will potentially wreak havoc on your web site’s organic ranking as well. For tips on how to avoid duplicate content issues, read this MarketPosition.com article.
- Do not create web pages that violate the search engines’ terms of service. Hiding textual content, spamming keywords, redirects, and other such activities will certainly earn your page a low Quality Score.
To help ensure that your landing page contains relevant content, it’s a good idea to optimize the page for the keyword that triggers the ad. Optimization of pages on your site will not only improve the Quality Score for Google Adwords, but improve the overall visibility of your web site on all search engines.