Search Engine Marketing

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Twitter Getting Into E-commerce?

Twitter Finally Getting Into E-Commerce: The “Buy” Button Test

Twitter has recently announced a test run for their new Buy Button feature, which aims to speed up the purchasing process for users by clicking on items from tweets using iOS and Android devices.

They released the article announcing their “Buy” button should be available to a minority of Twitter users in the United States, with the promise of increasing this number as time goes by. The idea behind the concept is for users to have an easier time discovering new and interesting products that will appeal to them directly.

This is good news for online marketers because they’re no longer limited to just posting links on Twitter about their products, and the entire buying process can also be achieved in just a couple of taps. Convenience is truly a money-making concept, and it appears the people running Twitter know perfectly well how true this is.

  By clicking on the “Buy” Button, users will see additional details about the product. They will be then prompted to enter shipping as well as payment information. Afterwards, an order information will be sent to the merchant for delivery as soon as possible.

The payment and shipping information provided are then encrypted and stored by Twitter. This will allow users to save time as they won’t have to re-enter the same information anymore if ever they will make purchases in the future.

This test is currently being conducted on a small percentage of U.S. Twitter users. They will see the Buy Button on tweets from e-commerce partners such as Fancy, Musictoday, Stripe, and Gumroad. Twitter will also make exclusive items available from various artists, brands and nonprofit organizations such as Eminem, Brad Paisley, Burberry, Demi Lovato, the Nature Conservancy, Pharell, Megadeth and Home Depot. There’s something for everyone.

This new feature will make mobile devices shopping more convenient and easy. Without having to visit other online shopping retailers, different users will have the opportunity to get special offers on merchandise they can’t get anywhere else. Sellers will also have the opportunity to build a direct relationship with their customers, being able to connect with them on a more personal level through a social media platform that is teeming with potential buyers.

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Google Adds Sitelink Search Box

Google Starts September With Improved Sitelinks Search Box

Have you used the Google search engine lately? Noticed any smaller search boxes appearing somewhere below the results? If you haven’t, try to search YouTube on Google and check out their latest update for the month of September. With the latest update on sitelinks, Google hopes to make searches a lot faster and more convenient for all users.

What’s this “Sitelink Search Box”?

It’s an additional search box that comes up along with search results for specific websites.

With this, Google hopes to speed up the searching process by placing search boxes within search results, providing users with a better experience without having to waste a lot of time waiting for graphic-heavy content to load. What do we have to say about this update?

Personally, we love it!

It has site-specific autocomplete features that instantly come up with suggestions closest to what you type in the search box, and it reduces the steps usually taken in the search process.

To implement this nifty new feature for your own site, you need to have a working search engine function so webmasters can use Schema.org markup on your home page. According to the guidelines released on Google’s Developers Page, doing the following should help you get started:

Set the Schema.org markup on the homepage of your site. You don’t need to repeat the markup for other pages on the site, just for the homepage.

JSON-LD is recommended for this, but you are free to use Microdata or RDFa as well.

For the target, you can specify only one URL search pattern.

From here, you can wait for Google Search algorithms to successfully identify your site. If there are no problems, then users will be able to see this new sitelinks search box when your site comes up on SERPs.

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Bing's New URL Keyword Stuffing Spam Filter

URL Keyword Stuffing Spam Filter – Bing’s Admirable Effort to Stop Spam

Bing has made great progress in their mission to delight users with superior search results in the last few months. Earlier this week, they released an update on their blog that’s been getting a lot of buzz lately, specifically because it shows that, as Google’s only competitor in search engine services, they’re certainly not just idling around without high goals in mind.

The update talks about changes they made months ago to improve their spam filtering, mainly targeting the Black Hat SEO technique known as URL Keyword Stuffing, or KWS.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is commonly defined as the use of SEO strategies or methods that are disapproved of by search engine developers because of their lack of audience sensitivity. They’re considered aggressive strategies that break or go against search engine guidelines, disregarding human experience and prioritizing site ranking.

URL Keyword Stuffing (KWS)

URL Keyword Stuffing is a Black Hat manipulation technique that gives a page or site a higher rank than it truly deserves. While it’s true that search engines rely on much more signals than just URLs to determine a site’s ranking, there’s no doubt that URL KWS can play a big part on improving ranking.

URL KWS revolves on two key assumptions about ranking algorithms, which is more or less the same on any search engine:

The use of keyword matching, and Matching against the URL is highly valuable.

The knowledge of these two simple SEO weak spots encourages many to start creating keyword-rich domains that they hope search engines can pick up on, sending them closer to the first page of SERPs and driving in more traffic than is deserved.

A few examples of URL KWS, taken from the article itself, are the following:

Multiple hosts, with keyword-rich hostnames: http://account.free.online.savings.samedaypaydayloansusa.com Host/ domain names with repeating keywords: http://loan.payday.paydayloanspaydayloansusa.com URL cluster across same domain, but varied hostnames comprised of keyword permutations

http://contososhoeswomen.shoesonsale.com/

http://bestwomensrunningsneakers.shoesonsale.com/

http://discountrunningapparelforwomen.shoesonsale.com/

URL squatting This is a little different as the spammer is playing on a human tendency to misspell keywords & in effect syphoning traffic off of existing (typically high profile/ traffic) sites E.g. http://nytime.com(misspelling of http://nytimes.com), http://ebey.com (misspelling of http://ebay.com)

So if you’re doing any of the following with your own URLs, the time has come to make changes if you don’t want to be filtered out from Bing’s SERPs. The impact of this change is dramatic, affecting 3% of all search queries made.

Certainly not all URLs that contain multiple keywords would automatically be considered URL keyword stuffing. Bing has taken into account non-spam URLs that serve their purpose well enough (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html.) This allows many sites and pages to continue receiving valuable traffic from Bing.

Specifics They’ll Analyze On Their URL Keyword Stuffing Filter

Bing’s exact formula for detecting this sort of search spam hasn’t been revealed, but they were gracious enough to hint at a few signals they’ll be looking at, such as:

Site size Number of hosts Number of words in host/ domain names and path Host/ domain/ path keyword co-occurrence (inc. unigrams and bigrams) % of the site cluster comprised of top frequency host/ domain name keywords Host/ domain names containing certain lexicons/ pattern combinations (e.g., [“year,” “event | product name”], http://www.turbotaxonline2014.com) Site/page content quality and popularity signals

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Content Marketing | The Do's and Dont's

Content Marketing: A Study from All Sides

The content marketing world isn’t just a content-rich conference of sessions where speakers conduct seminars, complete with empowering quotes that explain the art of engaging customers. Let’s not say it isn’t an art form, because to marketing gurus, albeit a majority of them, it remains one of the most compelling strategies ever to be developed in cyberspace. It’s an art form that requires rigorous research and unmitigated fact-finding to produce remunerative results.

The facts you’ll read here are meant for those who are already well-acquainted with the complexities and ambiguities of content marketing, as well as those who are beginning their research endeavors with a clean slate.

We have done considerable research to guarantee that what you’ll be getting from this article will dramatically change how you view content marketing. We aim not to impress, but to inform you on different levels just how content marketing is understood today and how this information, although not readily found on the web, can make or break the success of your PPC campaigns.

Articles that discuss the essence of content marketing appear as if they only scratch the surface. We have no doubt you’ve done your research. It’s tricky business, with an even trickier method of execution. Many have found their own methods to work, although they’ve required content experts to work harder instead of doing it in such a way that would have made everything a whole lot easier – doing the work smarter.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing technique that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and content that in a consistent manner to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

It may also be the overarching practice of using information and entertainment to promote a certain brand or product. This may involve the use of news, videos, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to-guides, photos, and more.

It was around 1996 when John F. Oppedahl led a group of journalists at the American Society for Newspaper Editors that the term “content marketing” was first used. Later in 1998, a man named Jerrel Jimerson had the privilege to hold the title of “director of online and content marketing” at the company Netscape. The following year, Jeff Canon published a book that mentions how content marketing is about providing customers with the information they seek. – Source: Wikipedia

So in essence, it is all about the different methods business owners and marketers use to attract people in buying their products or sign up for their service. The ideal strategy of content marketing is one that creates interest for a product or service through educating, entertaining, and informing. Many times, it also involves the consistent generation content that is both relevant and valuable with the main goal of enhancing or changing consumer behavior in favor of your business.

How to Work Smart

Since the definition of content marketing has already been considered an umbrella term, covering many different marketing practices, the relevance of understanding how you define it is the first step to smart content marketing, the goal of which is to get you more results for less money and a reduced number of headaches.

The key similarity to all definitions of content marketing is this:

You must put customer experience, preferences, and needs at the top of your list of priorities, making them the center of all your content-creating efforts.

And…

It must not be spammy.

Why is it important to put the needs and preferences of your customers first? What is it about your customers that they should be the center of the majority of your efforts? And is it crucial to know who your customers are?

Why is it important to put the needs and preferences of your customers first?

Customers are the main reason why your company can continue to run and prosper, so their opinion counts. You address their needs, and you show them exactly how your products are just what they are looking for. Their preferences, on the other hand, have more to do with taking action based on popular opinions, feedback, or whatever is trending for consumers at a given moment.

What is it about your customers that they should be the center of the majority of your efforts?

When we talk about marketing, we’re talking about two sides who are constantly interacting with each other in the process called buy and sell. There cannot be a buyer without a seller, and there cannot be a seller without a buyer. This is the delicate balance struck in business, and the people who are running the business are just as important as the people who are responsible for providing the business funds for growth and development.

Who are your customers?

To answer this, you must first think about what type of people would benefit most from your products and services. Clarify this in your mind and write notes if necessary, making sure that you have the image vividly imprinted in your head. Targeting everyone is a bad way to go about choosing your customers. If it’s vague, it’s not going to work.

The many definitions on content marketing talk about having an ideal type of audience – the keyword here is ideal. That means people who are most likely to take action (like buying or subscribing for a newsletter) from the content you put out.

I. Putting Your Customers First

When creating your content, keep in mind the word SELFIE (We’re trying to keep up with the younger generation) – Simple, Engaging, “Like”-able, Fresh, Illustrational, and Ethical.

This is how you put your customer in the limelight, paying great attention to detail when tailoring your content for your ideal client. The first step to doing that is to know what kind of content that is.

Think of it as sitting together with a good friend of yours. He tells you he’s excited to find a solution for his business that is amazingly similar to the kind of solutions you offer in your company. Of course, you want to be an astute and friendly business person. You start off by asking the right questions and getting a comprehensive understanding of the issues your friend has in his business. You then proceed to supplying him with very insightful and informed advice, complete with graphs and charts, that your friend is immediately convinced that you offer a solution and a plan to every issue that can possibly arise. No matter how you look at it, he’s sold.

That is an example of a flawless execution of content marketing. Although in the context of a B2B marketing scenario, the “friend” is now your sales prospects, and they are just eagerly anticipating for someone to give them that “Eureka!” moment. That’s where you and your company come in.

II. Avoid Treating Your Content As Spam

Keyword and keyphrase stuffing may sound like a lucrative technique for many of you who are familiar with the trending SEO methods ten or fifteen years ago. If you’ve garnered a lot of positive results back then and are still using it now, it’s time to take a step back and reassess your approach to meeting your customers’ needs.

You’re not likely to persuade someone to buy your product or sign up for your service if they’re blatantly bombarded with undisguised keywords or keyphrases. The same goes for the content used in social media marketing. Your disregard for providing your customers with a satisfying experience will be apparent if you treat content marketing as spamming.

Similarly, useless and irrelevant content is the number one killer of user experience, according to this article posted last year on WebsiteMagazine.

All definitions should not make content marketing sound like it is purely spamming people who clearly do not intend to waste time with content that is irrelevant and meritless.

Roger Bryan also mentioned, in his article for Huffington Post, “Content is the spark that ignites an effective marketing strategy and what keeps it going strong throughout, but not just any content will do.” And we couldn’t agree more.

There are lots of companies today that are fond of sending irrelevant information all the time. This is the reason why some people view content marketing as intriguing. Thousands of marketing messages bombard every person in a single day, and that number increases exponentially the more a person spends time in online.

Why Spam Can Hurt Your Business

Imagine what goes in the mind of your audience when they first see your content and immediately label you as a spammer with nothing valuable to offer? Do you think the chances of them buying from you increases? Or does it diminish dramatically?

Badly written content, on a regular basis, can damage your online reputation. From a Google ranking perspective, it’s going to literally flush all of your efforts down the drain. The worst thing that could happen is that you could suffer both.

If the content fails to hit the mark for engaging prospects and strengthening your relationship with current customers, then the content has no value at all.

Instead of producing meaningless content to fill channels, think about the story that you want to tell your ideal customers. Also, grab the attention of your existing customers so you can establish a trust-based relationship, guaranteeing their loyalty. The more you show them that they are the center of all of your efforts, the more they’ll reward you for it.

Another Essential Ingredient to Content Marketing: Content Planning

Any content strategy thrives on fresh and brilliant ideas, which is why creativity is an indispensable element in content creation and content planning.

Use this creativity, and then implement a system that accomplishes a degree of organization in the sequence of content that you intend to release. Segment these ideas into a simple table that you allows you to understand and absorb everything at a glance. The simpler, the better.

Jay Baer, marketing expert and bestselling author, says that “Content helps achieve business objectives, not content objectives.”

So first, you must know what your objectives are before you start your content marketing plan. The best way to do this is to create your own content marketing mission statement.

Wikipedia describes a mission statement as a company’s reason for existing. The aim is to give people a clear idea, ideally in three sentences or less, of what the organization stands for and why it exists.

Heidi Cohen, President of Riverside Marketing Strategies, released an article last February 2014 that explains beautifully how you can get a big break with your content marketing strategies through her 13-step plan.

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Most Expensive AdWords 2014 | Keywords And Industries

Over the past few years, technology has taken over the world. It changed the way people communicate and interact with each other. But most importantly, it changed the behavior of consumers toward products, services and business in general. The internet has given businesses an easy way to reach out to consumers around the globe.

Google has achieved total global domination. Being the first few innovators who saw the promise of the technology called internet, they have scaled up from just being the runner up search engine next to then famous Yahoo! to becoming the number one search engine in the world for the past decade. In fact, the term Google is instinctively perceived as a synonymous term for the word “search.”

When an online user wants to search for something they just “Google the word” to find more information about it. Understanding the online behavior of people when they search placed Google in a good light to all business enterprises smart enough to jump on the “bandwagon” of online marketing. Thus, e-commerce was coined.

E-commerce has become a widely successful part of the internet as a whole, sprouting many online-only companies and e-tailers. This new breed of entrepreneurs is making a huge amount of money without much investment, leaving home or establishing a physical business in one or more strategic physical locations. Likewise, this allows consumers to buy multiple goods, services, even online games and software with real money without physically hopping from one store to another.

Today as a business competing for online attention, it is important to be familiar with terms such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Simply put, SEO is your traditional marketing efforts that take a while to gain positive results because it requires a lot of brain juice and online field work. SEM, on the other hand, is like paying Google to send potential buyers your way. The latter is commonly known as Pay Per Click (PPC).

With SEO, strategies such as link building, online community interaction, blogging and social media marketing are tactics that will help a business’ website rank high in the search engine results or the SERP (search engine results page), increasing its organic visibility.

With SEM, businesses will run a PPC campaign, bidding on highly relevant and high converting keywords – guaranteeing a large volume of targeted traffic or website visits.

In its fourth quarter Digital Marketing Report released on January 8, 2014, IgnitionOne, a digital marketing solutions firm, reveals that the paid search market spend rose 12 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2013. Google, of course, dominated in garnering most of the sales.

Key findings:

-       Advertising spend rose 12 percent year-over-year

-       Spending growth for tablets is up 82% while smartphones rose up to 253 percent

-       Google spend rose 77.3 percent compared to Yahoo! and Bing at 22.7 percent both

-       Product listing ad spending increased 618 percent, impression grew by 380 percent and clicks were up at 312 percent year-over-year

  Top 20 most expensive keywords

The most popular paid advertising is through Google Adwords. Below are top 20 most expensive keywords in Google Adwords for 2014.

1. Insurance – $ 54.911

2. Loans – $ 44.28

3. Mortgage – $ 47.12

4. Attorney – $ 47.07

5. Credit – $ 36.06

6. Lawyer – $ 42.51

7. Donate – $ 42.71

8. Degree – $ 42.02

9. Hosting – $ 31.91

10. Claim – $ 45.51

11. Conference Call – $ 42.05

12. Trading – $ 33.19

13. Software – $ 35.29

14. Recovery – $ 42.03

15. Transfer – $ 29.86

16. Gas/Electricity – $ 54.62

17. Classes – $ 35.04

18. Rehab – $ 33.59

19. Treatment – $ 37.18

20. Cord Blood – $ 27.80

Industries using above-cited keywords are most probably paying high cost per click rates. The minimum bid for keywords in Adwords is 5 cents, which makes $54.91 per click for the keyword “insurance” very expensive by comparison.

(Source: Infographic at WordStream)

  Top 20 most expensive adwords industries

As cited above, knowing the top 20 most expensive keywords provide clues as to which industries are big spenders on Google Adwords. However, it does not necessary have to follow.

The following are top 20 most expensive adwords industries. But we will take a closer look at the top 10 and the top advertisers under each of these industries.

1. Finance & Insurance – $4.0 Billion

Highest cost per click keyword is “Self-employed health insurance” at $43.39 followed by “Cheap Car Insurance” at $33.97. Other keywords include Credit Cards for Bad Credit, Affordable Life Insurance and Refinance Mortgage.

Top Adwords Spenders under Finance & Insurance

State Farm – $43.7 Million

Progressive – $43.1 Million

Geico – $23.7 Million

Quicken Loans – $21.1 Million

eHealthInsurance – $20.6 Million

2.  Retailers & General Merchandise – $2.8 Billion

Highest cost per click keyword is “Zumba Dance DVD” at $5.18 followed by “Proform Treadmill” at $3.80. Other keywords include Weber Grill Accessories, Lego Activity Table and Barbie Doll.

Top Adwords Spenders under Retailers & General Merchandise:

Amazon – $55.2 Million

Ebay -  $42.8 Million

Macys – $35.6 Million

Sears -  $34.3 Million

JC Penny –  $30.9 Million

 3.Travel & Tourism – $2.4 Billion

Highest cost per click keyword is “New York Hotels” at $7.68 followed by “Plane Tickets” at $6.95. Next is “Cheap Hotels” priced at $5.94 per click. Other keywords include Rental Car Deals and Last Minute Flight.

Top Adwords Spenders under Travel & Tourism:

Booking.Com- $40.4 Million

Expedia –  $28.9 Million

Kayak – $28.7 Million

Marriot –  $20.9 Million

Priceline.com –  $19.6 Million

 4. Jobs & Education – $2.2 Billion

Highest cost per click keyword is “Accredited Online College Degrees” at $34.87 followed by “Online Nursing Degree” at $18.11. Next is “Online Certificate Programs” priced at $14.02 per click. Other keywords are Unemployed Benefits and Entry Level Jobs.

Top Adwords Spenders under Jobs & Education:

University of Phoenix- $46.9 Million

ITT Technical Institute –  $29.9 Million

DeVry – $19.7 Million

Capella University –  $17 Million

classesUSA –  $16.3 Million

5. Home & Garden – $2.1 Billion

Highest cost per click keyword is “Home Air Conditioners” which runs at $8.67 followed closely by “Replacement Windows Costs” at $8.03 per click. Other keywords are Appliance Repair, Cabinet Refacing and Window Installation.

Top Adwords Spenders under Home & Garden:

Lowe’s – $59.1 Million

The Home Depot –  $50.3 Million

Service Magic – $21.4 Million

Sears Home Services –  $20.7 Million

Lighting Universe –  $15 Million

 6. Vehicles – $2.0 Billion

 Highest cost per click keyword is “Cheap Hybrid Cars” bringing in a price of $15.57,  followed by “Certified Used Cars” at $8.54 per click. Other keywords are Bridgestone Tires, Discount Tires and Emergency Roadside Assistance.

Top Adwords Spenders under Vehicles:

Cars.com – $21.3 Million

Auto Trader –  $20.4 Million

Firestone – $16.9 Million

AAA –  $16.3 Million

Chevrolet –  $15.5 Million

 7. Computers & Consumer Electronics – $2.0 Billion

Highest cost per click keyword is “Online Video Conferencing Software” with a price of $35.53, followed by “Ink Cartridges Discount” charging advertisers at $26.79 per click. Other keywords are Email Marketing Software, PC Memory and Anti-Virus Programs.

Top Adwords Spenders under Vehicles:

Hewlett Packard (HP) – $33.3 Million

Dell –  $26.3 Million

Best Buy – $23.7 Million

Apple –  $17.9 Million

Microsoft –  $16.3 Million

 8. Internet & Telecom – $1.7 Billion

Highest cost per click keyword is “High Speed Internet Deals” at a price of $26.74. Next is “Prepaid Cellphones” charging at $25.38 per click. Other keywords are Domain Registration, Fios Availability and Cable Internet Providers.

Top Adwords Spenders under Internet & Telecom:

AT&T – $40.8 Million

Verizon –  $22.9 Million

GoDaddy.com – $21.7 Million

Comcast –  $19 Million

DirectTV –  $18.4 Million

 9. Business & Industrial – $1.6 Billion

Highest cost per click keyword is “Custom Business Cards” at a price of $13.83, followed closely by “Cheap Office Supplies” charging at $10.28 per click. Other keywords are Label Printing Companies, Foam Packing and Office Furniture.

Top Adwords Spenders under Business & Industrial:

Uline – $35.1 Million

VistaPrint –  $26.9 Million

Office Depot – $17.3 Million

Staples –  $15.2 Million

United –  $14.3 Million

 10. Occasions & Gifts – $1. 2 Billion

Highest cost per click keyword is “Funeral Flower Arrangements” at a price of $20.95, followed by “Flower Delivery” at $3.88 per click, which is a costing a lot less than the first spot. Other keywords are Wedding Gift Registry, Gift Baskets and Bridal Registry.

Top Adwords Spenders under Occasions & Gifts:

1-800-Flowers – $30.8 Million

FTD –  $30.7 Million

Proflowers.com – $27.2 Million

Teleflora –  $24.8 Million

Gifts.com –  $10.1 Million

  Below are the 11th to 20th top industries of big Adwords spenders.

  News, Media & Publications

Apparel & Jewelry

Real Estate

Health (excluding Heath Insurance)

Law & Government

Hobbies & Leisure

Family & Community

Dining & Nightlife

Beauty & Personal Care

Arts & Entertainment

  Google is already earning about $37.9 Billion with 50% from advertising within these ten industries alone. The rest of its revenue lies on its mobile business and other software and hardware ventures as predicted by WordStream. Also included in the revenue sources are its Gmail storage subscriptions, enterprise level of web analytics, Google glass and Google’s Motorola Unit. Any business can achieve success by taking advantage of the opportunities provided by PPC Marketing. As long as you don’t stop learning and keeping yourself updated to the trends in online marketing.

New Post has been published on http://www.adwordacademy.com/ppc-path/

PPC PATH: Bridging The Gap For Small Business With Smaller Advertising Budgets

Google AdWords is the worlds largest and most customizable advertising platform. To date, more than one million businesses around the world take part in the AdWords infrastructure to serve relevant ads to their ideal audience all over the internet. AdWords is a deceptively complex system to master, and AdWords management agencies help advertisers maximize the efficiency and profitability of their campaigns by optimizing AdWords accounts for their clients on a daily basis. Merely advertising on Google has become increasingly competitive and increasingly expensive, and many small businesses simply don’t have the budget to both pay Google for ad clicks and pay a management agency their monthly maintenance fees.

This puts a huge amount of small businesses in a sticky situation. They know that they either don’t have the time or the expertise (or both) to manage their advertising dollars effectively, but as much as they wish they did – they can’t afford to hire an agency. This compromised state makes it difficult for many SMB’s to get the most out of their PPC initiatives.

PPC Path is one of the only companies out there today that is providing a comprehensive solution to this exact conundrum. While there is no dearth of optimization tools and platforms available to agencies and individual advertisers, most of these tools focus primarily on helping account managers optimize accounts more efficiently and don’t offer much in the way of actual management. A small business owner with only a fledgling working knowledge of the AdWords system will find little use in most of the popular tools available today.

After creating your free PPC Path account, you’ll be directed to a dashboard that offers one of the most visually appealing and easy to understand overviews of your account performance.

          Beneath your dashboard you have PPC Paths’ Best Practices Modules. Each module is graded on a score of 1 – 10, reflecting the relationship between that particular area of your account and AdWords’ general best practices. Opening up any module accordion will give you a visual performance graph along with actionable insights as to where your account could use improvement. PPC Path will also give you actual suggestions that will help your account run more efficiently. Here’s an example of the expanded Ads Module and a sampling of the great advice you’ll receive:

    Beneath your Best Practice Modules, PPC Path provides an outstanding glossary of common PPC jargon just in case theres an abbreviation or term you’re unfamiliar with.

With an upgraded account (at very affordable rates), you’ll be able to create to-do lists that will help you keep to a consistent optimization schedule as well as see the trending data that will allow you to determine the results of your efforts.

But here is where PPC Path becomes truly unique – and a truly effective alternative for many SMB’s to traditional agency management. PPC Path allows you to create what they call “Projects”. Projects allows you to select exactly what you need to be done in your account (wether it be adding 10 new ads or completely restructuring your account), and contract a freelance certified AdWords expert right from within the slick PPC Path interface. Once you select your project, you’ll see a detailed summary of the work you can expect your personal AdWords expert to do for you along with projected turnaround time.

In the next step, you’ll be able to specify any particular goals and special consideration you want your “optimizer” to account for. You’ll then be able to choose two freelancers from a list of certified professionals PPC Path has negotiated contracts with. They’re all great choices, and each optimizer has a laundry list of credentials that will actually make this step somewhat difficult. Just go with your gut because they really are all very qualified.

The rates are extraordinarily reasonable (just $75 for a Google certified expert to research your industry and develop 10 new creative ad copies for you to test), and once you confirm the project and checkout your project will begin. Here’s an example of the neat work summary page you get once your project is complete:

As far as I’m aware, PPC Path has developed the first all inclusive solution to a major problem in the industry today. Advertisers can now not only optimize their accounts themselves based on the suggestions in their dashboard and best practice modules, but they can also contract out specific projects to trusted experts at affordable hourly rates. This can also be a great opportunity for seasoned account managers who encounter specific hurdles in their or their clients’ accounts and want a second set of eyes to assess and potentially solve the problem.

Upgrading to the Plus account for $25 per month allows you to connect unlimited campaigns under one account, create to-do lists and access trends so you can track your progress over time. The Pro plan at a mere $60 per month allows you to connect an unlimited number of accounts into the PPC Path dashboard.

It’s a really great tool that offers many a small business AdWords advertiser a system that finally allows them to take advantage of industry leading expertise at transparent and affordable rates. And when they’re not contracting out specific projects, they have access to a simplified, well organized dashboard that also generates some excellent advice to increase campaign performance.

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Interruptive Vs. Inbound Marketing: Which One Is Pay Per Click?

Interruptive vs. Inbound Marketing: A Comparative Review

Word gets around fast in the tech world, especially in the close-knit community of SEO specialists and online marketing gurus. But what had them abuzz is not another attempt by Google to change ranking algorithms named after ridiculous animals and objects (no offense Google!). Nope, what has these brilliant strategists rattled is how some of their ilk are confusing PPC as a form of inbound marketing. What? For all that is Inbound-holy! Wait, before any of you get overly dramatic, why don’t find out what ‘inbound marketing’ and its counterpart ‘interruptive marketing’ really are and whether the assumption of PPC as a form of inbound marketing has any merit.

In this post, we will also discuss about commonly used strategies in inbound and interruptive marketing, as well as their pros and cons.

Definition of Inbound Marketing

There are scores of definitions of the term ‘inbound marketing’, so picking out the few good ones from real experts is a must.

According to TrustMedia, “Inbound Marketing is a marketing strategy where businesses implement tactics to ‘get found’ by customers. Inbound Marketing involves creating and providing valuable content for your customers, promoting your remarkable content, building customer relationships, and overall ‘pulling’ the customer toward you. Inbound Marketing strategies create brand awareness, improve Search Engine Optimization, create thought leadership, develop valuable customer relationships, establish credibility, and build trustworthy reputations.”

HubSpotbasically says the same thing. “Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that ‘pulls’ people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.”

 Notice the word ‘pull’? Inbound marketing in other words is any strategy or marketing activity that is intended to pull the customer toward your business, because at the end of the day the ultimate goal of inbound marketing is to sell to customers – when they are ready to buy.

What do you think Rand Fishkin was thinking placing PPC among inbound marketing strategies like SEO, email marketing, community building etc.? Let’s see…

How PPC is Interruptive Marketing (…or maybe it’s not that big of a deal)

For decades the web marketing community has always viewed PPC as a form of interruptive marketing. Sort of that annoying neighbor who keeps getting in your way just to force attention so you’d buy some bizarre knick-knacks ( something like that).

How about TV and radio ads that interrupt a good show every few minutes? Well that is what you call  traditional interruptive marketing, because everybody sees or hears it and most of the time it gets in the way of good content that people really wanted to see or hear. Thus, all form of paid advertising was then considered interruptive.

And since PPC is a paid medium it basically placed itself in the same basket (by putting itself glaringly in front of users whether they want to see it or not).

However, that’s about how interruptive PPC can be. So it’s not surprising why Rand placed PPC side by side with SEO on his new diagram (see below).

Today, what really constitutes one hundred percent interruptive marketing and how does it differ from inbound marketing? It’s time to get down to the core of these things.

Inbound vs. Interruptive: Comparative Review

Defining these two marketing strategies, only two words set these two apart from each other – ‘subtle’ and ‘aggressive’.

Inbound marketing is subtle in grabbing users’ attention because it primarily aims to offer valuable information first to draw users and then gradually convert them as customers. This is what inbound marketers call the flow. These include blog articles, opt-in email newsletters, online videos, books, case studies and other forms of content creation and marketing. In short, as courtship goes, it sweetly woos the user to fall in love with the content enough to consider marrying the product. With this slow form of courtship, customers would then choose to visit your website because of the benefits that are being offered.

On the other hand, interruptive marketing is aggressive and most of the time intrusive for users. Call this the “unwanted suitor” who prefers the fast lane with a clear and primary intent to automatically get users to buy something and become a customer at first touch, even when the users aren’t truly interested yet in the products or services you’re selling. Recognize these in the form of paid reviews, site pop-ups and pop-unders, TV and radio ads etc. This is not at all that bad as far as selling goes, as it also brings awareness to users who do not know what they need until they see it or get smacked by it in the face. Know what I mean?

Key Takeaways:

-        Inbound marketing – people come to you because they need you

-        Interruptive marketing – you coming to people and getting on their face

Then again, there is not much distinction between the two other than the force exerted in marketing. You see the difference is not really clear cut. Even some methods of inbound marketing such as blogging may become interruptive if it’s overloaded with hard-sell content. However, between these two, Inbound is arguably more effective at growing a customer-base because it focuses on building relationships rather than compelling users to buy when they are not ready.

As for interruptive marketing being paid efforts, inbound marketing can cost just as much. But aren’t inbound marketing activities free? Well, the web marketing space has introduced the terms inbound and interruptive marketing just to create a sort of nuance between free marketing and paid marketing.

But let me ask you this, is all your blog content free, or were they outsourced and paid for? How about we ask HubSpot or Moz for that matter? If you go to them for help, will they give their products for free to help manage your inbound campaigns and efforts? I think not. So you see a true marketer knows that no true marketing is truly free.

      Inbound & Interruptive: Different Tactics, Same Goal

We’ve settled their differences, how about we discuss what these two have in common – selling. Whether it’s content, products or services these two marketing tactics are two peas in a pod with only minor differences in approach.

How about we look at these two from a different perspective? For example, Mary Ann accidentally broke her coffee-maker (she can’t live without coffee). So she goes online and Googles “affordable coffeemaker”. Google serves her a combination of paid and organic search results. Which one do you think she’ll click on? Both types of results fulfill her needs, so I guess either one is good!

Mary Ann could have selected either an organic search result or a search ad result and got what she needed – a new coffeemaker.

PPC is closer to organic search than it is to any traditional “interruptive marketing” because it is context-driven – meaning it shows when someone actually searches for it, thus, competing in equal footing to that of top organic search results. Just like the example above, the search query “affordable coffeemaker” is a commercial search so a PPC ad can answer that need just as well as any organic result.

Let’s say you spent two weeks to bring that hard-earned traffic to your website and you know that 80% of it will not convert on the first visit. Will you simply allow these people to walk away and forget about you? If so, you are probably downplaying all the inbound marketing efforts you did and doing yourself or your team an injustice.

But look at this differently, what if you actually have a back-up plan? Perhaps an integrated plan that includes remarketing (interruptive marketing) so you can continue what connection you’ve initially established at that first earned interaction. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? Yes it would be, because PPC remarketing is a proven way to get your abandoned customers back to your site for less than what it cost you to get them there in the first place.

Can you see how both of these strategies complement each other to achieve that one singular goal? So instead of looking at inbound and interruptive marketing as two opposing forces, we should look at them from a holistic viewpoint, as two valuable options that serve the best interests of the business and its goals.

Complementary Marketing Practices

Research suggests that the most beneficial and effective marketing strategies of successful businesses are composed of a combination of inbound and interruptive marketing – white hat SEO, PPC campaigns and content marketing.

White hat SEO is focused on local listing exposure and ranking on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) to increase traffic on any website at a low cost (or some insist, free).

PPC campaigns then complement SEO because they assist in providing the website more exposure on search engines, even when the PPC ads are rarely clicked on. If you are familiar with Google Analytics’ assisted conversion metrics, then you’ll know the impact of PPC in propelling conversions overtime and building brand awareness.

Content marketing, of course, is king (excuse the cliché). Content keeps customers engaged because it talks to them about something they find relevant and important. What’s more, it also increases the customer-base as well as content engagement because of its shareability across all channels in the web space.

You have to become a good marketer no matter what. Marketing will be far more effective if people are concerned mainly on how to grow their business or their client’s business whether or not the particular method used is inbound or interruptive, rather than bickering over which side of the fence is greener. In order to make a business successful, marketing mustn’t only be either white or black. Let’s Most of the time it’s grey.

Don’t dwell too much on whether it’s inbound or interruptive marketing … both have their own strengths and weaknesses. Your responsibility as a marketer is to determine which one is bringing something in the coffers and bringing positive results to your business efforts.

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testing

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How to Make Every Dollar Count in PPC Advertising

    Let’s face it. PPC Advertising can certainly be risky. If you don’t agree with us, then you must be one of the minority of people that started everything out the right way. If so, then we’d love to meet you and shake your hand. If you’re one of the enthusiastic and confident people who haven’t started PPC advertising yet but who are expecting to generate tons of cash, then we’d still like to meet you. We want to tell you good luck and hope you’ve read a LOT of articles on PPC advertising. Cheap Google Adwords Management

But since we’re stuck in front of our computers, gadgets, and gizmos, providing clients with topnotch service because we care, we thought it may be a better idea if we just ‘meet you halfway’ in the form of a really useful article that will highlight the many ways for you to save on PPC advertising.

Why, you ask? Because we noticed that even the most enthusiastic people can mess up, especially when it comes to learning something that’s more complicated than it looks.

Both beginners and pros make mistakes, and more often than not, those mistakes put a huge hole in your pocket. If you’re not careful, you might wake up one day asking yourself “Where did all my hard-earned money go to?”

PPC advertising is never free, but that doesn’t mean it’s never profitable. We guarantee you that companies are making as much as a tens of millions of dollars because they made the right choice of investing in PPC advertising. They also made the smart choice of either hiring a good company to take care of their accounts for them or they had a PPC account specialist to do the job of taking care of their accounts for them. And lo and behold, all the money came pouring down like rain.

Don’t worry, we’re not telling you this because we want you to drool over their money. No, of course not! We’re not that cruel (insert evil laugh here).

In all seriousness, what we’re trying to do is to share with you some of our secrets to guarantee that your money goes to where it’s supposed to go. Also, we’re aiming to provide you with valuable insight into what the best methods are to increase profits while decrease costs.

So now that you know what we’re trying to do, it’s time to let the dogs out. We hope you have a cup of coffee prepared, because this is going to be a long but worthwhile ride.

Saving Money with PPC Advertising

Money is everywhere for those who know how to find it (or earn it), but money isn’t everything and sometimes we need to lose some to gain some. The growth of your business is actually worth more than a lot of the other things you may have going on, and we know that you have great things in mind for your business. If you don’t already have on, don’t worry. It still exists, even if it’s only in your head for now.

It’s not a good feeling knowing you’re feeding Google hundreds or thousands of dollars without getting significant traffic. We bet it’s kept a lot of marketers up at night, and we understand them.

Advertising on Google doesn’t have to be like rocket science, but there are a few important things to remember. They’re worth remembering because they are some of the simplest ways for you to start eliminating unnecessary charges on your account.

If you’re like most small business owners with PPC campaigns, then you may be getting calls from Google offering you a very generous free consultation. It’s one of Google’s many effective ways to court you into making changes to your account. If you take them up on their offer, this is what they are likely to tell you:

First: To add your campaign to the Display Network

Second: To add keywords to get more exposure.

If you’re running a service company, you’re not going to save on PPC advertising with those methods. What will happen is that your costs are raised while your ROI decreases, which is a big no-no if you want to save on PPC advertising. They also won’t be telling you to add negative keywords. Why? Because they are thinking “money” too and they want ad revenue.

Not Having a Negative Keyword List Means Wasting a Lot of Money

You want your paid search ads to show to people who need your service, and AdWords is structured to be very easy to set up, but difficult to master. It would have been nice of Google to include an “Add Negative Keywords” required step for an ad campaign, but we don’t foresee that happening anytime soon. Google is a business, but it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to save on Google’s AdWords platform.

Most business owners have no idea what negative keywords are, which is a shame. They either have no idea that it exists, or they have no clue where they can find the setting to start building a negative keyword list. This has led to many businesses wasting their money on searches that have no possibility of making a sale.

You can save hundreds of dollars every month by adding negative keywords and then you can spend the money on other aspects of online marketing that have better chances of generating revenue, such as organic search and social media presence.

Improving Your Google AdWords Quality Score Saves You Money

Quality score is the metric on Google that determines how effectively you’re running your Google campaign. They use data gathered from analyzing your keywords, ads, and website copy. The complicated algorithm to determine this isn’t really foolproof, but it still has a very big impact on how much money you spend on your campaign.

You may already know about Quality Score. If so, then you know that you will be scored between 1 and 10, and the lower your quality score is, the more you’ll have to pay for each click on your ads. If your score if somewhere below the benchmark, you’ll even be charged a premium for clicks.

It’s not all bad news though. This is just Google’s way of providing incentives to advertisers so they make sure they come up good ads with great content on their landing pages. If your ads fail to serve visitors well, Google will highlight other advertisers who have better results for the online searching public.

Here are three simple ways that will help you improve your Quality Score:

      Set Up Multiple Ad Groups – Bidding on a lot of keywords in the same Ad Group could have a negative impact on your Quality Score. One of the best practices is to group keywords together in ad groups where you can create ads that are relevant to specific keywords by theme.

      Test Multiple Ads – You may be familiar with Adrelevance already. This shows you what keywords are not relevant to your ads, so you will need to create multiple ads that make good use of the keywords you’d like to bid on. If the ads are not related to each other, then create new ad groups to separate your ads and keywords by theme.

      Use Landing Pages – One of the biggest mistakes most advertisers make is to send all of their paid search traffic to their site’s home page. It’s impossible that your home page will be relevant to every keyword you are bidding on and therefore, your ad copy won’t be highly relevant to the copy that’s on your homepage in most cases.

Additional Tips That Let You Get the Most Value from Your Money with PPC Advertising

Start with lower bids

It’s common practice to start PPC campaigns with a short test. It’s not a good idea to place a tremendous bid at this initial stage. It’s a good idea to choose a bid that is just a little bit more expensive than the minimal. This lets your ad be displayed on a slightly more frequent basis.

Placing an ad that is highly expensive though, is obviously overkill in this situation. If you can get the same results with less money, why should you pay more? The idea is to raise your bid little by little.

It’s also important to remember that placing a very low bid may not generate you with the results you’re looking for. Your ads will rarely appear and you’ll have to wait longer before reaching your advertising goals.

Make good use of the overdraft option if available

There are times when an overdraft option can be extremely useful: if you forget to top up the balance, your campaigns can still continue to run. But if ever you are pressed for cash, it’s a good idea to make sure that the system will pause your campaigns when you are out of funds.

Set a daily spending limit

This is another great tip that can help you secure yourself from painful money losses. You have the option of setting a daily spending cap for your PPC campaigns. In the situation where the PPC system breaks down and it starts allowing overdraft, your daily spending limit will guarantee that you’ll only spend what you’ve intended to spend.

Check campaign performance regularly

Even if things aren’t going as smoothly as you’d hoped, there’s still the possibility of things turning around in the blink of an eye. When that happens, it’s important for you that you catch that moment and make the best use of it. There are instances where advertisers set up a PPC campaign and then forget that it exists. They forget that they’re spending money, and may have no idea that their money is just being eaten by the Google monster without getting any good results.

The truth is that there is a lot that you can do to optimize your PPC campaign. PPC advertising is not something you can master overnight, but making adjustments here and there, and updating your ad copies when necessary, these are just some of the best practices that can help you learn and master how PPC advertising works.

Pay attention to Geo-targeting

If you’re a small business in a small area, there’s a very small chance you’re also looking for customers that are outside of your business zone, right? Use the Geo-targeting options to target your audience well. This will help you lower your ad impressions, raise your CTR, Quality Score, and ROI.

There are many effective methods to use geo-targeting in way that will greatly improve performance in your PPC campaigns. The following are just some that you can start using today on your PPC campaign:

        Exclude locations when necessary

AdWords lets you exclude locations that may never contribute to your campaign. This is useful if you own a local store and would like to exclude certain locations that you know your business does not cater to. It limits activity from areas where poor leads are coming from.

      Geo-targeting with a mobile focus

Geo-targeting mobile audiences is a very good way to target people who are constantly on the go. Ad extensions such as call extensions come in very handy for these people because it lets them contact you without having to spend a lot of time browsing through your page and looking for the “Contact Us” info.

      Geo-targeting using only keywords

You can still put some geo-targeting techniques in motion without having to change anything on the location settings. You have the option to use keywords. What this means is that when people are looking for a certain product or service, they may also include in their search queries the location of where they want those product or service to originate from. This lets you pick up more traffic and have an edge over your competition.

Conclusion

So are you ready to start saving money on your PPC campaigns? Refer to this guide whenever you’re having trouble trying to cut back on your campaign expenses, because we understand that you won’t be able to remember everything and implement all of the techniques in one go.

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What You Need to Know About Monetizing Your Website

  Most people make websites just for the hang of it. Little do they know that making such is not merely for recreation, but for income generation. The amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website, known as web traffic, can actually be a source of earnings. It would be too unfortunate for one not to know about this.

As for you, it’s just a matter of awareness before you could start turning your website into a money-making force. Once you master the art, you might end up being one of the youngest billionaires in the country. Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? I might as well lay down the basic facts to guide you as you start your quest.

Website monetization refers to the process of converting your web traffic into revenue. There are hundreds of ways to do this. Some are simple, yet some are too complicated to learn which means that you need the services of an expert. Either way, it all boils down to one goal, and that is to generate traffic because the more traffic your website has, the more likely you are to make sales or get purchases. For the meantime, let’s get down to the basics.

The following can help you get started:

   Search Engine Optimization

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing show search results that are ranked based on what they consider as most relevant to the search by a user. Imagine your website being shown first in the ranking to users as they search, that would mean a lot of users will click on your website thereby creating considerable web traffic on your site. This is called search engine optimization. This can be achieved by using keywords that are common and relevant such that it can easily be connected to the searches made by users. I suggest that you venture and discover more about SEO in order to get more appearances in these well-known search engines.

2.       Display Advertising

Display advertising means placing a graphical banner advertisement on a webpage. This banner catches the eye of the visitors of the page, enticing them to click your advertisement. Simply put, this is a manner of leading the traffic from another webpage to your own webpage, thus creating traffic absorption.

Take note though that display advertising doesn’t work all the time as some viewers easily get annoyed by ads. It’s best to make your ads less annoying but more appealing to the viewers.

3.       Affiliate Marketing

This strategy involves recommending the products and services of other entrepreneurs to the visitors of your website. When your referrals purchase the products or engage in the services of these third party entrepreneurs, you are compensated according to the stipulations of the contract or agreement you have entered into with them. Oftentimes, you get paid on a commission basis.

4.       Donation Button Placement

If your site has consistent incoming traffic already by reason of the benefits that the visitors get from it, you can ask for cash donations from the viewers of your site. You may do this by adding a “donate” button to your page for the purpose of keeping your site going or upgrading. Set the specifications of the donation as to where it should be sent and all other concerns for that matter.

5.       Pay Per Click Advertisement

When you have already established a good traffic to your website, sufficient to get the interest of advertisers, you may begin inviting companies and offer them pay per click advertisement on your site. In other words, they may post advertisements on your website. The advertiser in turn, pays for every click that viewers make on their advertisement.

Final Words on the Matter

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PPC Management Software Review| July 2014

  A healthy and well-maintained PPC campaign is a great way to bolster your business and generate substantial leads to your company, but the more your campaigns grow, the more time and effort you’ll need to expend to managing them. The amount of time you spend in managing your PPC campaigns might soon end up outweighing the benefits of your increased online presence. There are many benefits of using PPC management software; they provide you with solutions to managing, measuring, and optimizing your search campaigns. Although they can sometimes be an expensive investment, there are those who feel that the time they regain through automation is worth more than the money they pay for the service.

In this post, we’ll give a comprehensive review on PPC management software that have ranked at the top of our list, while exploring the many aspects of automated PPC management. There are many interesting points to the topic and we feel that the information we’ll provide here will help you better decide if the benefits of using PPC management software is well worth your money.

The Man versus Machine Debate

The web is now full of automated PPC software like Google’s DoubleClick and Marin’s Management suite. As search engine marketers, we are now in a time where we have to ask ourselves some very honest questions about we plan our management activities using automation.

Some of these questions are:

How is it going to benefit me and my business?

How much am I going to be charged for it?

How much time will I really be saving?

And last but not the least:

Do I really need it?

Rise of the PPC machines

The core question most advertisers have always been asking is “shouldn’t we just employ someone to just do the tasks instead?” This argument would still go back to the debate of whether it’s better to have people do the work than leave it to the hands of a carefully structured program.

The popularity of PPC management software has increased dramatically in the last few years due to the influence of search engine marketing in its entirety. People are now turning to gadgets such as computers, smartphones, and tablets to conveniently shop, do business, and look for certain services online. It’s no wonder that platforms like paid search have become a vital part to increasing a business’s revenue. The domino effect of this is that organizations are now developing countless campaigns with thousands of keywords and a huge storage of data available on tap.

The key role of automation software is to assist us in managing and making sense of all that takes place in our accounts. So let’s take a look at some of the relevant issues that will help us understand more about the benefits of using PPC management software.

Automated Task Management

We all know how boring and tiring it is to perform monotonous tasks like wading through tests for ad splits, dynamic budget, bid adjustments, or pools of huge amounts of data. It’s not something a lot of us wake up to everyday and look forward to doing.

The feeling of redundancy is even more apparent if you’re working for a large company with heaping amounts of data coming in and you need to perform the above tasks regularly. This is why you need PPC management software to make the load lighter for you, and so you can invest your valuable time on other things that can help the company, or on personal tasks that need addressing. We all know how hard it can be to stay on top of these tasks when there are other things on your mind that you should be worrying about.

The following are the main reasons for why many in the industry are turning to PPC management platforms:

The deed for tools that help in bid management have increased greatly

Competition is getting higher

The cost of hiring advertisers are increasing

More and more advertisers are entering paid search marketing

This means that your accounts are going to become harder to manage manually, and keeping your campaigns’ performance consistent will gradually become more difficult.

We did our research and have come up with a number of advantages that make using PPC management software a very lucrative alternative to managing your campaigns. Take time to think about them, and see if it’s about time for you to get into automated PPC management to boost your online business’s productivity levels.

Better Time Management. It takes a great amount of time and effort to expand your campaigns and optimize them. Automating certain management features means that you’ll be able to free up more time. We know that as a business owner, time is of the essence! In fact, you may see time as shiny gold bullions and if you don’t use time wisely, you’ll miss out on getting any. The more time you have available, the more you can use it to be more creative and come up with better strategies that you can test out within the account. This, in turn, lets you create more opportunities to grow your overall business.

Easier Reporting. One of the great benefits of using PPC management software is how it makes the reporting much easier for you. Most of the software include fully automated reporting features that let you track and report on specific keywords and their performance. You automatically get a relatively easy-to-understand visual representation of how your campaigns are going and how your hard work has paid off.

Faster Optimization. It’s time consuming digging through mountains of data just to find that single piece of information to take action on. What most PPC management software can do is to make it easier for you to find out which keywords and creatives are your top contributors. You also quickly see which ones are dragging your campaign down. Knowledge of these things makes it faster for you to make a couple of tweaks here and there to optimize your PPC campaign performance.

More Consistency In Numbers. The PPC industry can be a very dangerous landscape to do business in. Competitors come and go all the time which leads to bids fluctuating wildly and frequently in a given day. If you’re not using PPC management software such as a bid management platform, it’s highly likely that your CPA will also fluctuate wildly.

It’s through the use of a great bid management platform that you can overcome these inconsistencies and generate stable results, based on up-to-date information. Every business appreciates and values predictability.

Increased Chances for Innovation and High Level Thought. When you’re busy trying to manually manage your PPC campaigns, it becomes increasingly hard for you to reach that level of creativity and innovation that could make a big impact on your business. Because today, people are always attracted to what seems new or unique.

It’s hard to come up with those ideas if you’re time is constantly consumed just from account management. This is one of the great reasons why the benefits of using PPC management software far outweigh what it is you have to pay for it.

      Kenshoo – This is company that boasts a smart and caring team that’s gifted with the ability of effective strategizing for your business. Any time of the day, whenever you have a question or need some help with your PPC account, they are always willing to lend a hand.

What’s so great about Kenshoo?

Kenshoo is loaded with features that make managing your PPC campaign easier. Scheduled actions, Kenshoo Editor, and advanced search make it easy for you to schedule changes across different search engines. You also have the option to use their automated reporting which saves you a lot of time.

Here are more of the advantages that you get from using Kenshoo:

Work with a creative team who are always building new innovative products

Immerse in a unique learning experience about digital advertising

Access to many top advertisers in the business.

Let’s not just stick to the good stuff. Let’s take a look at the cons of using this software:

Not a lot are accustomed to the grid interface that Kenshoo has.

Users have reported occasional issues about pulling campaigns uploaded through a non-Kenshoo platform into Kenshoo.

So far, Kenshoo has delivered what it promises to their clients. We’re happy with what they’re doing, and it’s good to know that everyone else thinks so too. They are constantly innovating and looking for ways to stay ahead of competition.

One of the biggest benefits of using PPC management software like Kenshoo is the increase of team productivity. In addition to tracking and attribution, Kenshoo lets you adjust the attribution model and take action based on the acquired data.

      Marin Software – Overall, Marin is a great tool to use and it comes highly recommended to online marketers looking for a way to manage large accounts spanning multiple search networks. They’re most effective when search campaigns carry a large budget and have more complex conversion goals, which make it a good fit for large clients looking to work within AdWords and Bing for digital marketing.

Pros:

It’s a good choice for large business that needs automation to save time, or need to make regular bulk changes to their PPC accounts. We all want a good ROI from our PPC accounts, but this can be difficult to track when the numbers are coming in from everywhere. Marin can serve as a bridge between the two. You have the ability to set what your target ROI is, how much to boost your bids are revenue calculations are done, and what positions you want to target.

Cons:

Accounts that aren’t large enough don’t need the functionality that Marin offers. And if the account is not set up properly, the calculations can easily get out of hand. It also falls short when it comes to integrating other vendors, and we have found other PPC management software that does a better job in this aspect.

When it comes to using Marin, think carefully about your profit margins and the implications of getting low and unimpressive positions, or else you’ll be losing money instead of making them.

      Acquisio – There are two main benefits to using Acquisio, and they pretty much also highlight the benefits of using PPC management software for business accounts.

                   Less time to generate and pull reports

                 Access to state-of-the-art bidding tools

The best feature of the platform for us would have to be the interface Acquisio has for navigating through the Report Center. From here, you have the option of creating nifty report templates that can be used for your account multiple times.

Typical reports sent out to clients may include campaign data for each of their search engine platforms and Facebook accounts, a comprehensive breakdown of stats for the entire month, and a report on whether or not the company is on course to hitting conversion and spending targets.

Acquisio also has one of the most advanced attribution modeling offered. This enables clients to assign values to impressions, clicks, and conversions across multiple channels and by time.

Cons:

Acquisio doesn’t have a spell checker in its reporting system. This might not be a very big deal for those of you who aren’t sensitive to misspellings, but for some it’s a snag.

The Mass Editor appears more like a carbon copy of AdWords editor in terms of layout and style, minus most of the features.

Monthly fee is based on the percentage of spend, which could mean a lot of money if the company decides to increase their daily spend.

New Post has been published on http://www.adwordacademy.com/benefits-of-using-ppc-management-software-and-review-of-the-top-5-july-2014/

Benefits of Using PPC Management Software and Review of the TOP 5 | July 2014

  A healthy and well-maintained PPC campaign is a great way to bolster your business and generate substantial leads to your company, but the more your campaigns grow, the more time and effort you’ll need to expend to managing them. The amount of time you spend in managing your PPC campaigns might soon end up outweighing the benefits of your increased online presence. There are many benefits of using PPC management software; they provide you with solutions to managing, measuring, and optimizing your search campaigns. Although they can sometimes be an expensive investment, there are those who feel that the time they regain through automation is worth more than the money they pay for the service.

In this post, we’ll give a comprehensive review on PPC management software that have ranked at the top of our list, while exploring the many aspects of automated PPC management. There are many interesting points to the topic and we feel that the information we’ll provide here will help you better decide if the benefits of using PPC management software is well worth your money.

The Man versus Machine Debate

The web is now full of automated PPC software like Google’s DoubleClick and Marin’s Management suite. As search engine marketers, we are now in a time where we have to ask ourselves some very honest questions about we plan our management activities using automation.

Some of these questions are:

How is it going to benefit me and my business?

How much am I going to be charged for it?

How much time will I really be saving?

And last but not the least:

Do I really need it?

Rise of the PPC machines

The core question most advertisers have always been asking is “shouldn’t we just employ someone to just do the tasks instead?” This argument would still go back to the debate of whether it’s better to have people do the work than leave it to the hands of a carefully structured program.

The popularity of PPC management software has increased dramatically in the last few years due to the influence of search engine marketing in its entirety. People are now turning to gadgets such as computers, smartphones, and tablets to conveniently shop, do business, and look for certain services online. It’s no wonder that platforms like paid search have become a vital part to increasing a business’s revenue. The domino effect of this is that organizations are now developing countless campaigns with thousands of keywords and a huge storage of data available on tap.

The key role of automation software is to assist us in managing and making sense of all that takes place in our accounts. So let’s take a look at some of the relevant issues that will help us understand more about the benefits of using PPC management software.

Automated Task Management

We all know how boring and tiring it is to perform monotonous tasks like wading through tests for ad splits, dynamic budget, bid adjustments, or pools of huge amounts of data. It’s not something a lot of us wake up to everyday and look forward to doing.

The feeling of redundancy is even more apparent if you’re working for a large company with heaping amounts of data coming in and you need to perform the above tasks regularly. This is why you need PPC management software to make the load lighter for you, and so you can invest your valuable time on other things that can help the company, or on personal tasks that need addressing. We all know how hard it can be to stay on top of these tasks when there are other things on your mind that you should be worrying about.

The following are the main reasons for why many in the industry are turning to PPC management platforms:

The deed for tools that help in bid management have increased greatly

Competition is getting higher

The cost of hiring advertisers are increasing

More and more advertisers are entering paid search marketing

This means that your accounts are going to become harder to manage manually, and keeping your campaigns’ performance consistent will gradually become more difficult.

We did our research and have come up with a number of advantages that make using PPC management software a very lucrative alternative to managing your campaigns. Take time to think about them, and see if it’s about time for you to get into automated PPC management to boost your online business’s productivity levels.

Better Time Management. It takes a great amount of time and effort to expand your campaigns and optimize them. Automating certain management features means that you’ll be able to free up more time. We know that as a business owner, time is of the essence! In fact, you may see time as shiny gold bullions and if you don’t use time wisely, you’ll miss out on getting any. The more time you have available, the more you can use it to be more creative and come up with better strategies that you can test out within the account. This, in turn, lets you create more opportunities to grow your overall business.

Easier Reporting. One of the great benefits of using PPC management software is how it makes the reporting much easier for you. Most of the software include fully automated reporting features that let you track and report on specific keywords and their performance. You automatically get a relatively easy-to-understand visual representation of how your campaigns are going and how your hard work has paid off.

Faster Optimization. It’s time consuming digging through mountains of data just to find that single piece of information to take action on. What most PPC management software can do is to make it easier for you to find out which keywords and creatives are your top contributors. You also quickly see which ones are dragging your campaign down. Knowledge of these things makes it faster for you to make a couple of tweaks here and there to optimize your PPC campaign performance.

More Consistency In Numbers. The PPC industry can be a very dangerous landscape to do business in. Competitors come and go all the time which leads to bids fluctuating wildly and frequently in a given day. If you’re not using PPC management software such as a bid management platform, it’s highly likely that your CPA will also fluctuate wildly.

It’s through the use of a great bid management platform that you can overcome these inconsistencies and generate stable results, based on up-to-date information. Every business appreciates and values predictability.

Increased Chances for Innovation and High Level Thought. When you’re busy trying to manually manage your PPC campaigns, it becomes increasingly hard for you to reach that level of creativity and innovation that could make a big impact on your business. Because today, people are always attracted to what seems new or unique.

It’s hard to come up with those ideas if you’re time is constantly consumed just from account management. This is one of the great reasons why the benefits of using PPC management software far outweigh what it is you have to pay for it.

      Kenshoo – This is company that boasts a smart and caring team that’s gifted with the ability of effective strategizing for your business. Any time of the day, whenever you have a question or need some help with your PPC account, they are always willing to lend a hand.

What’s so great about Kenshoo?

Kenshoo is loaded with features that make managing your PPC campaign easier. Scheduled actions, Kenshoo Editor, and advanced search make it easy for you to schedule changes across different search engines. You also have the option to use their automated reporting which saves you a lot of time.

Here are more of the advantages that you get from using Kenshoo:

·         Work with a creative team who are always building new innovative products

·         Immerse in a unique learning experience about digital advertising

·         Access to many top advertisers in the business.

Let’s not just stick to the good stuff. Let’s take a look at the cons of using this software:

    ·         Not a lot are accustomed to the grid interface that Kenshoo has.

·      Users have reported occasional issues about pulling campaigns uploaded through a non-Kenshoo platform into Kenshoo.

  So far, Kenshoo has delivered what it promises to their clients. We’re happy with what they’re doing, and it’s good to know that everyone else thinks so too. They are constantly innovating and looking for ways to stay ahead of competition.

One of the biggest benefits of using PPC management software like Kenshoo is the increase of team productivity. In addition to tracking and attribution, Kenshoo lets you adjust the attribution model and take action based on the acquired data.

      Marin Software – Overall, Marin is a great tool to use and it comes highly recommended to online marketers looking for a way to manage large accounts spanning multiple search networks. They’re most effective when search campaigns carry a large budget and have more complex conversion goals, which make it a good fit for large clients looking to work within AdWords and Bing for digital marketing.

Pros:

It’s a good choice for large business that needs automation to save time, or need to make regular bulk changes to their PPC accounts. We all want a good ROI from our PPC accounts, but this can be difficult to track when the numbers are coming in from everywhere. Marin can serve as a bridge between the two. You have the ability to set what your target ROI is, how much to boost your bids are revenue calculations are done, and what positions you want to target.

Cons:

Accounts that aren’t large enough don’t need the functionality that Marin offers. And if the account is not set up properly, the calculations can easily get out of hand. It also falls short when it comes to integrating other vendors, and we have found other PPC management software that does a better job in this aspect.

When it comes to using Marin, think carefully about your profit margins and the implications of getting low and unimpressive positions, or else you’ll be losing money instead of making them.

      Acquisio – There are two main benefits to using Acquisio, and they pretty much also highlight the benefits of using PPC management software for business accounts.

                   Less time to generate and pull reports

                 Access to state-of-the-art bidding tools

The best feature of the platform for us would have to be the interface Acquisio has for navigating through the Report Center. From here, you have the option of creating nifty report templates that can be used for your account multiple times.

Typical reports sent out to clients may include campaign data for each of their search engine platforms and Facebook accounts, a comprehensive breakdown of stats for the entire month, and a report on whether or not the company is on course to hitting conversion and spending targets.

Acquisio also has one of the most advanced attribution modeling offered. This enables clients to assign values to impressions, clicks, and conversions across multiple channels and by time.

Cons:

Acquisio doesn’t have a spell checker in its reporting system. This might not be a very big deal for those of you who aren’t sensitive to misspellings, but for some it’s a snag.

The Mass Editor appears more like a carbon copy of AdWords editor in terms of layout and style, minus most of the features.

Monthly fee is based on the percentage of spend, which could mean a lot of money if the company decides to increase their daily spend.

New Post has been published on http://www.adwordacademy.com/google-adwords-quality-score-tips/

Google AdWords Quality Score Tips

  Are you new to PPC advertising? If you are, you must be interested in knowing how to increase your ad placements while decreasing the amount you have to pay for bids. This is possible by achieving a high Quality Score. This is article will help you understand what Quality score as, how it works, and the steps you can take to optimize it to achieve maximum PPC performance for your campaign.

Marketers who’ve had experience with PPC campaigns know that Quality Score is available for individual keywords on your AdWords account, which is the keyword-level Quality Score. What a lot fail to recognize about it is that there is more at play here than most would expect.

There are moments where you won’t be able to solve your issues with Quality Score with just the keyword level QS made available to you in the AdWords platform. There is indeed more to investigate to better understand it, and it requires persistence and a bit of digging on your part to overcome the overall issue.

Because of that, we’ve included here some detailed information of what Google Quality Score is, why they’re so important, and the existing misconceptions about Quality Score. We hope that it will serve as a checklist for you so you can take action and make adjustments to raise the quality score of your own campaigns.

What is Quality Score?

Before we talk about how to optimize for Quality Score, let’s first take a look at what this metric is.

Quality Score is a dynamic value that’s assigned to each keyword in the PPC campaign. It’s the basis for measuring quality and relevance of the ads and landing pages to your assigned keywords. And a high Quality Score positively influences your ad position and decreases the minimum Cost-per-click (CPC) for your keywords. So if you’re a newcomer to the competitive world of PPC advertising, you still get a chance to bet at the top spot while spending less money.

Search Engines before Quality Score

Before the idea of Quality Score was introduced, the primary means advertisers used to achieve a high ranking was just to have the highest bid for a specific keyword. This wasn’t good news for advertisers who couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money on paid search advertising.

But search engines learned that even those people who had the most money to spend on keyword bids didn’t necessarily provide audience with the best ads or destinations sites. In short, the quality of the pages and the content of the sites were surprisingly low, and search engines wanted to give their viewers more relevant results. So they introduced Quality Score as a new criterion for determining the placement of ads.

By encouraging advertisers to create quality and relevant PPC campaigns, search engines benefit by providing searchers with a better quality experience, thus insuring brand loyalty. It’s win-win.

Why Quality Score Is Important

The positive and negative effects of having a good or bad Quality Score remains true today, but it was significantly different in the last 4 years. Based on the research we’ve done on Quality Scores of websites, the average Quality Score this year is just slightly over 5, out of a possible 10.

Before, 7 was the average Quality Score.

The take-away here is that since the average Quality Score has drifted lower in the past four years, the importance of having an above-average Quality has increased dramatically, which also means an increased value.

Another aspect of Quality Score that makes it the most important metric are the discounts for Quality Score keywords that are above-average. From 66%, the discounts have now soared to 200% since their 2009 values.

It is mainly because of this that we feel that Quality Score is the most important determiner of success in your AdWords campaign. And now in 2014, this is truer than ever.

How does it Work?

For each keyword that’s set in your account, there’s a Quality Score linked to it that will be determined based on the quality of your ads and the landing pages that trigger those specific keywords. Getting a high Quality Score is a good indication that your ad and landing page are providing content that are both relevant and useful to Google’s loyal viewers.

Here’s an example:

Mary is looking to buy her boyfriend a new sweater for his birthday. After giving it some thought, she finally decided to choose a sweater that’s designed in fabulous-looking stripes. She goes to Google and types in “striped sweater” and sees your ad which tells her that you’re selling some great striped sweaters online. She clicks on your ad, finds herself on your webpage, and successfully places an order for a cute striped sweater.

See how easy it is when you put up the right ads? This is an example of great customer experience, because she didn’t need to waste any more time looking at other websites. Imagine how differently it would have went if she saw ads for just sweaters or clothes. Google is very particular about making the experience easier for search engine users, which is another reason why you should invest in raising your Quality Score.

The more relevant your ad appears, the higher the chances of getting more clicks, and ultimately, more conversions.

There are multiple factors that Google considers when determining your Quality Score. According to Google, they are as follows

        CTR – Click-through-rate

        Relevance of each keyword to its ad group

        Quality and relevance of the landing page

        Relevance of the ad text

        History of your AdWords account performance

Suffice it to say, your goal is to make your keywords as closely related to your ads as possible. The landing page should also aim to contain content that correlates closely to the ad and the message your ad is sending out.

What do the numbers mean?

Overall, we would recommend a Quality Score of 7 out of 10. If you’re getting above 7 then that’s great, but that’s not easy to achieve and it may not really be worth all the effort. A Quality Score that’s below 7 is still acceptable, but it’s a sign that something isn’t working as it should be.

Quality Score:

1 – This is clear sign that you are in shark-infested territory. Google isn’t happy with your ad or your landing page and they are probably thinking about banning your website. You’ll hardly get traffic with a Quality Score this low and your costs will be exorbitant.

2-3 – In this category, you’re keywords are still suffering. You’re not getting the traffic you should be and you’ll still be charged high prices because of how bad your scores are.

4-6 – We feel that you’re somewhere in the middle of progress and slipping off with a Quality Score of somewhere between 4 to 6. The keywords are still in need of your attention but there’s now less work involved to boost your score to 7.

7 – You are doing great in terms of quality. Google is aware of what you’re doing and likes it. This also means that you’re not being penalized in terms of traffic or costs. This is a clear indicator that you are already optimizing your PPC campaign to work as it should.

8-10 – You have now reached the Holy Grail of Quality Score. You’ve even surpassed Google’s expectations and your performance is well above average. Your costs are also being discounted and your ads are now programmed to appear in prominent positions on a more frequent basis.

By now, you should have a better idea of what Quality Score is and why you should put some effort in improving your own. Now let’s move on to talking about the best practices of raising Quality Score.

Don’t worry, we know this article is long but it’s loaded with information that will help you understand everything there is to know about Quality Score and the ways to optimize to get the best results possible.

Ways to Achieve a High Quality Score – Best Practices for 2014

    Identify your strategy and goals.

Let’s start from the very beginning.

With any campaign, it’s crucial that you have a clear image of what your strategy and goals are. Try and determine if your campaign is more for increasing brand awareness or for lead generation. After that, move on to keyword research and determine which phrases would help drive traffic to your site.

Through keyword research, you can discover new and highly relevant keywords that include the long-tail variety. They’ll contribute greatly to the bulk of your overall traffic.

Segregate your keywords.

After you’re done with the research, you can now move on to segregating them into tight, organized groups. By doing this, you are increasing the effectiveness of your individual ad campaigns. Some marketers want to skip this part and just stuff a number of different keywords into one ad group, and it just doesn’t work. We understand that this requires time and effort on your part as an advertiser, but we guarantee that it’s worth it if you want to raise your Quality Score and turn your campaign into a success.

 Create a good ad copy.

For each of your ad groups, invest time on developing an ad copy that incorporates your keywords or content that is closely related to your keywords. When a search engine user sees an ad that contains words that are closely related to what they’re looking for, they are more likely to click on it. Your ad copy is key to getting clicks, which boosts your CTR, or click-through-rate. CTR is one of the primary factors that determine your Quality Score.

    Optimize your landing pages.

Thankfully enough, this part of optimizing for Quality Score doesn’t have to be hard. These are questions that can help you understand whether or not your landing page will be considered relevant by Google:

 Is the landing page closely related to the ad being clicked?

 Does the landing page fulfill the promise indicated in the ad?

 Are the people visiting the landing page leaving immediately without converting?

If you aren’t optimizing your landing pages, you are missing out on a lot of potential revenue. By creating specific pages for different ads, you’ll be able to customize your marketing message more effectively, which is great for your Quality Score.

    Identify and exclude irrelevant search terms.

Negative keywords should never be forgotten. They are responsible for keeping you from wasting valuable money on search terms that don’t do anything for your website and online business. Continuously research on search terms that you feel are irrelevant to your marketing needs and goals and watch your Quality Score be raised considerably.

So What Are You Waiting For?

As you can see, Quality Score has a lot to do with relevance. Improving your Quality Score is a matter of structuring your PPC campaigns in such a way that the keywords are divided into small and well-organized groups. Better keyword research and proper organization improves the specificity of the ads displayed and the website content, which leads you to target relevant audience who are likely to be searching for your offerings.

We now know that Quality Score has a direct correlation to the success of your PPC campaigns. It is through Quality Score optimization that you can achieve a higher return on investment. This is due to the fact that getting a higher Quality Score means that you’ll be charged less for your bids, and lower cost per conversion.

New Post has been published on http://www.adwordacademy.com/quality-score-guide-to-effective-optimization/

Quality Score: Guide to Effective Optimization

  Are you new to PPC advertising? If you are, you must be interested in knowing how to increase your ad placements while decreasing the amount you have to pay for bids. This is possible by achieving a high Quality Score. This is article will help you understand what Quality score as, how it works, and the steps you can take to optimize it to achieve maximum PPC performance for your campaign.

Marketers who’ve had experience with PPC campaigns know that Quality Score is available for individual keywords on your AdWords account, which is the keyword-level Quality Score. What a lot fail to recognize about it is that there is more at play here than most would expect.

There are moments where you won’t be able to solve your issues with Quality Score with just the keyword level QS made available to you in the AdWords platform. There is indeed more to investigate to better understand it, and it requires persistence and a bit of digging on your part to overcome the overall issue.

Because of that, we’ve included here some detailed information of what Google Quality Score is, why they’re so important, and the existing misconceptions about Quality Score. We hope that it will serve as a checklist for you so you can take action and make adjustments to raise the quality score of your own campaigns.

What is Quality Score?

Before we talk about how to optimize for Quality Score, let’s first take a look at what this metric is.

Quality Score is a dynamic value that’s assigned to each keyword in the PPC campaign. It’s the basis for measuring quality and relevance of the ads and landing pages to your assigned keywords. And a high Quality Score positively influences your ad position and decreases the minimum Cost-per-click (CPC) for your keywords. So if you’re a newcomer to the competitive world of PPC advertising, you still get a chance to bet at the top spot while spending less money.

Search Engines before Quality Score

Before the idea of Quality Score was introduced, the primary means advertisers used to achieve a high ranking was just to have the highest bid for a specific keyword. This wasn’t good news for advertisers who couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money on paid search advertising.

But search engines learned that even those people who had the most money to spend on keyword bids didn’t necessarily provide audience with the best ads or destinations sites. In short, the quality of the pages and the content of the sites were surprisingly low, and search engines wanted to give their viewers more relevant results. So they introduced Quality Score as a new criterion for determining the placement of ads.

By encouraging advertisers to create quality and relevant PPC campaigns, search engines benefit by providing searchers with a better quality experience, thus insuring brand loyalty. It’s win-win.

Why Quality Score Is Important

The positive and negative effects of having a good or bad Quality Score remains true today, but it was significantly different in the last 4 years. Based on the research we’ve done on Quality Scores of websites, the average Quality Score this year is just slightly over 5, out of a possible 10.

Before, 7 was the average Quality Score.

The take-away here is that since the average Quality Score has drifted lower in the past four years, the importance of having an above-average Quality has increased dramatically, which also means an increased value.

Another aspect of Quality Score that makes it the most important metric are the discounts for Quality Score keywords that are above-average. From 66%, the discounts have now soared to 200% since their 2009 values.

It is mainly because of this that we feel that Quality Score is the most important determiner of success in your AdWords campaign. And now in 2014, this is truer than ever.

How does it Work?

For each keyword that’s set in your account, there’s a Quality Score linked to it that will be determined based on the quality of your ads and the landing pages that trigger those specific keywords. Getting a high Quality Score is a good indication that your ad and landing page are providing content that are both relevant and useful to Google’s loyal viewers.

Here’s an example:

Mary is looking to buy her boyfriend a new sweater for his birthday. After giving it some thought, she finally decided to choose a sweater that’s designed in fabulous-looking stripes. She goes to Google and types in “striped sweater” and sees your ad which tells her that you’re selling some great striped sweaters online. She clicks on your ad, finds herself on your webpage, and successfully places an order for a cute striped sweater.

See how easy it is when you put up the right ads? This is an example of great customer experience, because she didn’t need to waste any more time looking at other websites. Imagine how differently it would have went if she saw ads for just sweaters or clothes. Google is very particular about making the experience easier for search engine users, which is another reason why you should invest in raising your Quality Score.

The more relevant your ad appears, the higher the chances of getting more clicks, and ultimately, more conversions.

There are multiple factors that Google considers when determining your Quality Score. According to Google, they are as follows

        CTR – Click-through-rate

        Relevance of each keyword to its ad group

        Quality and relevance of the landing page

        Relevance of the ad text

        History of your AdWords account performance

Suffice it to say, your goal is to make your keywords as closely related to your ads as possible. The landing page should also aim to contain content that correlates closely to the ad and the message your ad is sending out.

What do the numbers mean?

Overall, we would recommend a Quality Score of 7 out of 10. If you’re getting above 7 then that’s great, but that’s not easy to achieve and it may not really be worth all the effort. A Quality Score that’s below 7 is still acceptable, but it’s a sign that something isn’t working as it should be.

Quality Score:

1 – This is clear sign that you are in shark-infested territory. Google isn’t happy with your ad or your landing page and they are probably thinking about banning your website. You’ll hardly get traffic with a Quality Score this low and your costs will be exorbitant.

2-3 – In this category, you’re keywords are still suffering. You’re not getting the traffic you should be and you’ll still be charged high prices because of how bad your scores are.

4-6 – We feel that you’re somewhere in the middle of progress and slipping off with a Quality Score of somewhere between 4 to 6. The keywords are still in need of your attention but there’s now less work involved to boost your score to 7.

7 – You are doing great in terms of quality. Google is aware of what you’re doing and likes it. This also means that you’re not being penalized in terms of traffic or costs. This is a clear indicator that you are already optimizing your PPC campaign to work as it should.

8-10 – You have now reached the Holy Grail of Quality Score. You’ve even surpassed Google’s expectations and your performance is well above average. Your costs are also being discounted and your ads are now programmed to appear in prominent positions on a more frequent basis.

By now, you should have a better idea of what Quality Score is and why you should put some effort in improving your own. Now let’s move on to talking about the best practices of raising Quality Score.

Don’t worry, we know this article is long but it’s loaded with information that will help you understand everything there is to know about Quality Score and the ways to optimize to get the best results possible.

Ways to Achieve a High Quality Score – Best Practices for 2014

    Identify your strategy and goals.

Let’s start from the very beginning.

With any campaign, it’s crucial that you have a clear image of what your strategy and goals are. Try and determine if your campaign is more for increasing brand awareness or for lead generation. After that, move on to keyword research and determine which phrases would help drive traffic to your site.

Through keyword research, you can discover new and highly relevant keywords that include the long-tail variety. They’ll contribute greatly to the bulk of your overall traffic.

Segregate your keywords.

After you’re done with the research, you can now move on to segregating them into tight, organized groups. By doing this, you are increasing the effectiveness of your individual ad campaigns. Some marketers want to skip this part and just stuff a number of different keywords into one ad group, and it just doesn’t work. We understand that this requires time and effort on your part as an advertiser, but we guarantee that it’s worth it if you want to raise your Quality Score and turn your campaign into a success.

 Create a good ad copy.

For each of your ad groups, invest time on developing an ad copy that incorporates your keywords or content that is closely related to your keywords. When a search engine user sees an ad that contains words that are closely related to what they’re looking for, they are more likely to click on it. Your ad copy is key to getting clicks, which boosts your CTR, or click-through-rate. CTR is one of the primary factors that determine your Quality Score.

    Optimize your landing pages.

Thankfully enough, this part of optimizing for Quality Score doesn’t have to be hard. These are questions that can help you understand whether or not your landing page will be considered relevant by Google:

 Is the landing page closely related to the ad being clicked?

 Does the landing page fulfill the promise indicated in the ad?

 Are the people visiting the landing page leaving immediately without converting?

If you aren’t optimizing your landing pages, you are missing out on a lot of potential revenue. By creating specific pages for different ads, you’ll be able to customize your marketing message more effectively, which is great for your Quality Score.

    Identify and exclude irrelevant search terms.

Negative keywords should never be forgotten. They are responsible for keeping you from wasting valuable money on search terms that don’t do anything for your website and online business. Continuously research on search terms that you feel are irrelevant to your marketing needs and goals and watch your Quality Score be raised considerably.

So What Are You Waiting For?

As you can see, Quality Score has a lot to do with relevance. Improving your Quality Score is a matter of structuring your PPC campaigns in such a way that the keywords are divided into small and well-organized groups. Better keyword research and proper organization improves the specificity of the ads displayed and the website content, which leads you to target relevant audience who are likely to be searching for your offerings.

We now know that Quality Score has a direct correlation to the success of your PPC campaigns. It is through Quality Score optimization that you can achieve a higher return on investment. This is due to the fact that getting a higher Quality Score means that you’ll be charged less for your bids, and lower cost per conversion.

New Post has been published on http://www.adwordacademy.com/keyword-match-types/

AdWords Keyword Match Types

  Search engines are all about keywords, but what is it about a keyword that makes it so important? For those of you who are new to the strange yet promising world of search marketing, keywords are the bread and butter of your online business endeavors, and your marketing goals may well lie in your ability to properly utilize these keywords.

Before we proceed to discussing just how keywords work and what the best practices are in using them, let’s first take a look at what they are and why they’re so important. Knowing why you’re doing something can make all the difference, and that applies to practically everything in life, but most especially to businesses.

What’s in a Keyword?

Keywords are extremely important for every online business as they drive targeted web traffic to your website. When done properly, using the right keywords (and eliminating all the wrong ones) can skyrocket your business to online sales success. And we all want that, don’t we?

Keywords are the words and phrases that Internet users type into the search box of search engines, such as Google, to find out about virtually anything they can possible think of. The main goal of every search engine user is to look for something that closely matches what they’re looking. It’s your job to make it easier for them to find you and your business.

There are some keywords that get hundreds of unique searches in a single day while there are others that only get a couple of hundred searches. Because they represent what a page is all about, keywords should be integrated into the body text and meta information in such a way that it remains natural-looking and subtle. If done properly, readers will take in all of your keyword phrases with ease and that will increase the chances of improving traffic. Avoid making your keywords and keyword phrases appear like tiny, misplaced sales pitches, because that will just drive readers away.

Ethical Use of Keywords

Let’s say that you finally understand what keywords are and realize that they can make or break your online business, but it also occurs to you that it may be possible to cheat your way into driving traffic effectively. Keywords should never be used to trick or mislead both humans and Google ‘spiders.’ That’s not the ethical way to use search marketing for business so let’s try and avoid that.

Google is very serious about returning ‘white hat’ (also known as Ethical SEO) web page results that contain high-quality content, and they don’t respond favorably to black hat SEO tactics, such as repeating keywords over and over in a way that isn’t considered natural or editing keywords in a white font on a white background in order to ‘hide’ them.

Search Engine Marketing and Keyword Phrases

Through keyword research, marketers are able to gather information and understand how their target markets are promoting their products. Using this information, marketers are then able to use words that are coming from the users themselves to describe their page content to other human beings and to Google.

Using keyword research can have two effects on your campaigns:

 Keyword research improves your rank. Using the exact keywords your target market is typing into search queries communicates to Google that you are providing an exact match to their queries, and makes you a relevant source of information. You’re not a “kind of close” match or a “sort of related” match, you’re an exact match.

Doing this ends up with you at the top of the rankings, which means that people are more likely to end up clicking and visiting your page than that of your competitors’.

Taking the time to research on the language your target demographic is using in their search queries tells you a lot about their personality, interests, and needs. This information can be utilized by shaping your inventory and creating content that would match the preference of your customers.

Here’s an example:

In your research of the keyword phrase “old cars” you may find that there aren’t that many search terms for the term “old cars”, but the searches being performed for the term “vintage cars,” “vintage cars price ranges,” and “where to buy vintage cars” are significantly higher. This means that you have a better chance of driving traffic to your website if you opt to use the term “vintage cars” in your site’s content.

Head Terms, Mid Tail Keywords, and Long Tail Keywords

“Use head keywords to generate volume and long tail keywords to generate profit.”

This may well be an adage that almost every experienced search engine marketer knows. Typically, keywords are determined as either a “head” one or a “long tail” one depending on the visit volume they garner. There’s also the less-known mid tail keywords.

Let’s discuss how these three keywords work and how they can drive traffic to your website:

Head terms – It’s normal in SEO to talk about keywords that drive a lot of traffic. These types of keywords are called “head terms”. Head terms are high traffic keywords (according to Keyword Planner) that are typically shorter than other keywords. They’re usually 2-3 words long and they have a chance at being decently rankable, relevant, and able to drive good traffic.

They are also the most popular terms to try and rank for and are thus the most competitive by far. Head terms should be used on your site’s main pages.

Mid Tail Keywords – These are not like head terms that are hard to rank for on Google. There’s some debate whether this category of keywords even does exist, because most of them would really just prefer to judge a keyword as a head term of a long tail one. If it does exist, the main idea would that that these keyword phrases would consist of around 3-5 words.

Long Tail Keywords – Long tail keywords are generally described as phrases that are really specific to what a web searcher is looking for. These can also be in the form of questions, and by answering these questions on your site, you can attract relevant traffic. To get the most value from these keywords, you have to use them on your site in a clear and easy-to-navigate way.

Importance of Keyword Length

Search Engine Marketing conducted a study to uncover if keyword length had a big impact on volume and profit margin. The results of the study showed that keywords with characters ranging from 11 to 15 generated the bulk of impressions, clicks, and conversions. Keywords with around 16 to 20 characters followed closely behind. What’s more, nearly 60% of all impressions and clicks occurred with 11-20 character keywords.

Now that we’re done discussing the types of keywords and their importance, we can now proceed to talking about Keyword Match Types.

Keyword Match Types

Running a PPC campaign is like building a house. You want a good solid foundation, which in this case would be your “keywords.” Impressive ads and optimized landing pages can only do so much if the appropriate searchers aren’t even seeing your ad on SERPs. So the question remains: How do you connect with the correct audience?

Before we proceed to answering that question, let’s first take a look at the difference between “keywords” and “search queries” in search engine marketing.

Keywords vs Queries

Most people use the terms “keyword” and “search query” interchangeably, however, they each have their own definitions and are not one of the same. These two are elements that you should consider when it comes to search engine marketing, and you’ll find that the definitions vary depending on what you’re using them for.

So far, these are the definitions that strike us as the most important for you to remember for the two:

Keywords – these are the words or set of words that advertisers bid on in their PPC campaigns. It may also be the words taken from multiple search queries as the result of research.

Search Queries – are words or the combination of words users actually type into the search box of a search engine. This is the real life version of what a keyword is and can be described as a “keyword in action.”

Close variants

As an advertiser, you’re free to choose to have your ads show up for close variants of certain keywords. The following are considered the types of close variants:

-Singular/Plural forms

-Misspellings

-Stemmings (such as bikes and biking)

-Acronyms

-Accents

-Abbreviations

There are situations where we would recommend that advertisers should turn on the close variants feature for their campaign, because our searchers are still human and chances are they’ll be making spelling mistakes every now and then. In these cases, you might miss out on potentially valuable traffic if you should continue without using close variants.

The situations where we feel that you should turn off close variants are as follows:

 If you’re on a limited budget with your campaign; and

 If you’ve seen close variants in action and they aren’t performing very well.

The 5 Google AdWords Match Types

Match types help control when a search engine will trigger your ad based on the keyword you’re using, and there are different types of these that you can utilize to suit your marketing needs.

The common idea is that broad keyword match types are more likely to trigger your ad for a wide range of search queries, since you’re targeting a broad audience too. Each of these match types make use of symbols that you can input with certain keywords within the AdWords interface.

Here’s a simple explanation of what these five match types are:

Broad Match types are the default match type in Google AdWords. These can trigger ads for searchers that are using a specific word in your keyword along with other long tailed words, synonyms, and variations.

Broad Match Modifier (+) keywords function by triggering ads for search queries that contain the specific words with the “+” sign preceding them.

Phrase Match (“ “) keywords work by triggering ads for queries that contain your exact keywords only, or with your exact keywords along with some additional few words before or after it.

Exact Match ( [] ) keywords only trigger ads when your exact keywords are queried without any other words before and after it.

Negative Match ( – ) keywords are great for preventing your ads from showing up to people for certain search queries, especially if you think it would be irrelevant and attract ‘bad’ traffic.

Using Negative Keywords with Match Types

It’s important to know how to choose the appropriate keyword match types for your paid campaign to achieve success. You may be doing a good job of building the most relevant list of keywords, but if they’re all set for broad match without adding negative keywords, it’s likely that you’ll be getting a large volume of irrelevant searches and traffic. You would literally be throwing away money when you could have been saving them otherwise.

Adding negative keywords is one way for you to regain control (or gain more control) over your PPC campaign. Search networks will know not to show your ad for anyone searching for a word or phrase that contains your negative keyword. This is a great way for you to filter out your traffic by only getting those that are more likely to convert, saving you some hard-earned cash.

Final Thoughts:

Don’t worry if it’s your first time to tackle your first keyword build or optimize your account. Just remember that the best approach you can take to reach your target market might be a combination of all five keyword match types. The advantage of this approach is that you get to cover all the bases and show the most relevant ads for the most queries.

Be sure that you are constantly making changes to your account after you’ve reviewed the performance. That way, you won’t fall behind on the latest searching trends and you’ll still be optimized for keyword efficiency while reducing costs.

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How To Monetize With Affiliate Marketing

  We know that affiliate marketing is one of the best and most well-known monetization strategies utilized by bloggers today. While other monetization strategies are more lucrative than affiliate marketing, it’s still one that’s tough to beat because it’s a common first step for bloggers to take to push their blog forward.

Know Your Visitors like The Back Of Your Hand

This first and most important step if you want to achieve prime success with affiliate marketing is to know what visitors are reading and sharing. One great method for knowing that visitors are looking for is to take advantage of hosting services that provide site metrics. You’ll need this information to know what topics or postings are drawing the most traffic to the site. This is crucial in understanding how to monetize with affiliate marketing, so don’t bet your hopes on anecdotal information that could be incorrect.

Appropriately Place Affiliate Links on the Website

The areas where your affiliate links need to be placed must be relevant in order to monetize your blog pages to the fullest. These affiliate links can be placed in key positions on the landing page for the website. You can also place the links in navigation bars or page footers. Just make sure that it’s located somewhere people can notice it.

The idea is to provide your visitors with as many options as possible to take advantage of the affiliate offers. DO NOT, however, put these links all over your website no matter how tempting it may seem. Visitors are becoming ever more sensitive to over-advertising and they will ignore these links altogether if they feel overwhelmed by them.

Build an Attractive Site

This is a very important component for any and every effective website, and it also works wonders for complementing with your affiliate links if done properly. An attractive site that’s jam-packed with content that adds value to readers is a great way of how to monetize with affiliate marketing and with online businesses in general. Having a site with ugly colors and ugly fonts blended together to produce a mess of a page might have worked a couple of years back, but in today’s virtual world it just won’t do. The standards have skyrocketed and if your site doesn’t have complementing colors and an appealing design or interface, then you’re not doing it right. Doing this requires time and a lot of effort but doing so means you’ll have a far greater chance of finding affiliate marketing success.

Consistently Generate New and Relevant Content

One trade secret on how to monetize with affiliate marketing is by creating new content regularly. A single post is likely to draw traffic for some time, but it’s not going to keep them coming back for more. You should give them a reason to come back. By creating fresh content covering various topics or aspects of your product or service, you are increasing the likelihood of viewers taking a deeper interest in your business. These new posts may even increase the chances of boosting your search engine rankings. Make sure though that your affiliate postings are interspersed with non-affiliate content related to the core theme of your site.

Build a Large Email List

A lot of marketers have heard this strategy repeated several times, but many still don’t integrate it into their own marketing strategy. Building a large email list takes painstaking effort and time, and can be a very testing process. But trust me when I say that it’s worth every bit of it.

The following are just some of the reasons for you to build a large email list:

-          Get stable customers. A visitor who comes to your site and makes a purchase without joining your email list won’t likely come back again. However, an email subscriber could potentially buy two or three more products from you. Provided you already have a great autoresponder sequence and an active list of subscribers, then they will keep buying from you.

-          Lower buying resistance. You’ll find that a lot of customers are very resistance to buying from you in the first instance. To get the most of our affiliate marketing, you must be willing to convince them that you do what they want and need.

-     Generate passive income. Once you’ve got a large list of subscribers and a good autoresponder series, then you can literally sit back and just watch the money roll in. You’ve eventually reach a point where every new lead is worth a couple of dollars. So if you have a list of 8,000 members, then you can generate a passive income of a few thousand dollars per year. This is one of the most invaluable secrets you’ll ever find on how to monetize with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing can be a daunting challenge, especially for beginners who are just starting out with their small online business. There are many options for generation a considerable income online and boosting your online traffic. Using PPC is one of them.

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Best Monetizing Tips Using Google AdSense

Everyone wants to put a little money in their pocket. Google AdSense has been around for some time now, but it’s surprising how few high traffic-generating sites ever think of making money with it. That’s what Google AdSense was made for. There are people who would literally pay you money for the clicks that they could be getting from your site.

Here are the following best monetizing tips using Google AdSense.

1. Create keyword rich content – Not just rich with keywords. The content of your website should be of high-quality, with a good ratio of keywords to attract search engine. The ads that Google will choose for your website will match the content you have, so make sure you have relevant content for you to get relevant ads.

2. Avoid copied content – We understand you’re excited to put up some content get the ads running on your site, but don’t resort to just copying content that already exists somewhere else on the internet. Of course, there’s the matter of ethics, but Google won’t tolerate it either. If your content can’t pass copyscape, you won’t be getting any traffic from search engines too.

3. Use common sense – We can provide you with countless information of what we would consider as the best monetizing tips using Google AdSense, but that wouldn’t be enough. The human component should never be absent in any marketing endeavor, because you’re also dealing with other people. Think like a customer and picture what you would want to see on a web page? What would make you stay longer, or what would make you run for the hills?

4. Use appealing colors and blending – The best click-through-rates have been researched to come from the advertisements with great blending that matches the design of the website. You can tweak your ads, and one great way to do this is by designing your ads to look like they’re not ads at all, but small portions taken from your own website. By doing this, you’re creating the illusion that they are parts of the page and not just mere advertisements.

5. Be a master illusionist – Another one of the best monetizing tips using Google AdSense. Taking into account the visual component of your website can really boost your click-through-rate significantly. Place images alongside your advertisements in order to capture the attention of your visitors. But don’t go overboard with this. Google pays attention to these things. Images that trick visitors to click on ads will get you banned.