How to Optimising your pay-per-click

How to Optimising your pay-per-click

Each PPC keyphrase ideally needs to be managed individually in order to make sure that the bid (amount per click) remains competitive in order to show up in the top of the results.

Experienced PPC marketers broaden the range of keyphrases to include lower volume phrases. Since each advertiser will typically manage thousands of keywords to generate click-throughs, manual bidding soon becomes impractical. Some search engines include their own bid management tools, but if an organisation is using different pay-per-click schemes, it makes sense to use a single tool to manage them all. It also makes comparison of performance easier too. Bid management software such as Acquisio (www.acquisio.com) and WordStream (www.wordstream.com) can be used across a range of PPC services to manage keyphrases on multiple PPC ad networks and optimise the costs of search engine advertising. The current CPC is regularly reviewed and your bid is reduced or increased to maintain the position you want according to different strategies and ROI limits, with amounts capped such that advertisers do not pay more than the maximum they have deposited. 

Although pay-per-click marketing does not initially appear as complex as search engine optimisation, in reality there are many issues to consider

In the next section we explain some of the main techniques and questions for the digital marketer to ask.

1 Targeting

● Search ad network strategy. Which of the search networks mentioned above do you use? Which are used in different countries?

● Content network strategy. How do you treat the content network? Do you disable it? Create separate campaigns? Target specific sites using the Placement tool? Develop different creative? Use placement targeting in Google?

● Campaign structure strategy. Campaign structure is important to ensure that searches using a specific search term trigger the relevant ad creative. 

Are AdGroups small enough to deliver a message relevant for the keyphrase entered? 

To understand the type of targeting that is possible, look at these two examples. we have a campaign structure for an online clothes retailer. They monitor spend and budget by product type, so structure their campaigns accordingly and target them nationally.

Keywords related to each product will trigger ads defined within each AdGroup

Is an example of a campaign for a restaurant chain. They monitor spend and budget by outlet, so structure their campaigns accordingly and target them to local areas.

● Keyword matching strategy. How is creative targeted using the combination of broad match and negative match, phrase match and exact match?

● Search-term targeting strategy. What are the strategies for targeting different types of keyphrases such as brand, generic, product-specific and different qualifiers (cheap, compare, etc.)?

2 Budget and bid management

● Budgeting strategy. Is budget set as maximum cost-per-click (CPC) at the appropriate level to deliver satisfactory return on investment? Is daily budget sufficient that ads are served at full delivery (always present)?

● Listing position strategy. Which positions are targeted for different keywords?

● Bidding strategies. What is the appropriate maximum cost per click for different target keywords and campaigns to maximise effectiveness?

● Dayparting strategy. Are ads delivered continuously through the day and week or are different certain days and times targeted

● Use of enhanced campaigns. Google AdWords Enhanced campaigns is a tool to simplify the complexity of advertising when different types of mobile devices can be targeted in different locations at different times.

● Bid management tool strategy. Is a tool used to automate bidding? Which?

● Importance of fake clicks. Whenever the principle of PPC marketing is described to marketers, very soon a light bulb switches on and they ask, ‘So we can click on competitors and bankrupt them?’ Well, actually, no. The PPC ad networks detect multiple clicks from the same computer (IP address) and filters them out.

3 Creative testing and campaign optimisation

● Ad creative and copy strategy. How are the 95 characters forming ad headlines, description and creative used to encourage click-through (and reduce click-through from unqualified visitors if necessary)? Is alternative copy tested? How are ads tested?

● Destination or landing page strategy. How are landing pages improved?

● Campaign review and optimisation strategy. What is the workflow for reviewing and improving success? Which reports are used? How often are they reviewed? By whom? Which tests are used? What are the follow-ups?

● Specialist and innovative paid search techniques. These include local, international, pay-per-call, mobile search.

4 Communications integration

● SEO integration strategy. How is SEO integrated with paid search to maximise ROI?

● Affiliate integration strategy. How is affiliate marketing integrated with paid search to maximise ROI?

● Marketing campaign integration strategy. How is budget and creative changed during offline campaigns.

Advantages and disadvantages of paid search marketing

The Advantages and disadvantages of paid search marketing PPC

 

Paid search listings, or sponsored links, are very important to achieve visibility in search engines when an organisation is in a competitive market, given the competition to appear on the first page of the natural listing for target keyphrases.

As a result, many companies with an established paid search programme may generate more visits from paid search than SEO, although this wouldn’t be true for companies that are class leaders in SEO.

Advantages of paid search marketing

The main benefit of paid search marketing are:

● The advertiser is not paying for the ad to be displayed. As we explained at the start of wastage is much lower with paid search compared to traditional advertising. Cost is only incurred when an ad is clicked on and a visitor is directed to the advertiser’s website.Hence it’s a cost-per-click (CPC) model! However, there are increasingly options for paid search marketing using other techniques – Google also offers CPM (site targeting) and CPA (pay-per-action) options on the Google Display Network (GDN),where contextual ads are displayed on third-party sites relevant to the content on a page.

● PPC advertising is highly targeted. The relevant ad with a link to a destination web page is only displayed when the user of a search engine types in a specific phrase, so there is limited wastage compared to other media. YouTube users can also be targeted through Google’s ‘promoted video’ PPC option. Users responding to a particular keyphrase or reading related content have high intent or interest and so tend to be good quality leads.

● Good accountability. With the right tracking system, the ROI for individual keywords can be calculated.

● Predictable. Traffic, rankings and results are generally stable and predictable in comparison with SEO.

● Technically simpler than SEO. Position is based on combination of bid amount and quality score. Whereas SEO requires long-term, technically complex work on page optimisation, site re-structuring and link building.

● Remarketing. Google offers retargeting through cookies placed on the searchers computer to display ads on the content network after someone has clicked on a paid search ad or visited a specific page on a site as a reminder to act.These can be effective in boosting the conversion rate to lead or sale.

● Speed. PPC listings get posted quickly, usually in a few days (following editor review). SEO results can take weeks or months to be achieved. More over, when a website is revised for SEO, rankings will initially drop while the site is re-indexed by the search engines.

● Branding. Tests have shown that there is a branding effect with PPC, even if users do not click on the ad. This can be useful for the launch of products or major campaigns.

Disadvantages of paid search marketing

The main disadvantages of paid search marketing are:

● Competitive and expensive. Since pay-per-click has become popular, some companies may get involved in bidding wars that drive bids up to an unacceptable level. Some phrases such as ‘life insurance’ can exceed £10 per click.

● Inappropriate. For companies with a lower budget or a narrower range of products on which to generate lifetime value, it might not be cost-effective to compete.

● Requires specialist knowledge. PPC requires a knowledge of configuration, bidding options and of the reporting facilities of different ad networks. Internal staff can be trained, but they will need to keep up-to-date with changes to the paid search services.

● Time consuming. To manage a PPC account can require daily or even hourly checks on the bidding in order to stay competitive. This can amount to a lot of time. The tools and best practice varies frequently, so keeping up-to-date is difficult.

● Irrelevant. Sponsored listings are only part of the search engine marketing mix. Many search users do not click on these because they don’t trust advertisers, although these are mainly people involved in marketing! Best practice in planning and managing paid search marketing With PPC, as for any other media, media buyers carefully evaluate the advertising costs in relation to the initial purchase value or lifetime value they feel they will achieve from the average customer. As well as considering the cost-per-click (CPC), you need to think about the conversion rate when the visitor arrives at your site. Clearly, an ad could be effective in generating click-throughs or traffic, but not achieve the outcome required on the website such as generating a lead or online sale. This could be because there is a poor incentive call-to-action or the profile of the visitors is simply wrong. One implication of this is that it will often be more cost-effective if targeted microsites or landing pages are created specifically for certain keyphrases to convert users to making an enquiry or sale. These can be part of the site structure, so clicking on a ‘car insurance’ ad will take the visitor through to the car insurance page on a site rather than a home page.

shows how cost-per-click can differ between different generic (e.g. ‘car insurance’) and specific (e.g ‘women’s car insurance’) keywords, as well as the impact of different conversion rates on the overall CPA. The cost of PPC search in competitive categories and why companies will strive to maximise their quality score to help reduce costs. 

The cost per customer acquisition (CPA) can be calculated as follows:

Cost per acquisition = one hundred over cost–per–click conversion rate % times cost per click. Given the range in costs, two types of strategy can be pursued in PPC search engine advertising.

If budget permits, a premium strategy can be followed to compete with the major competitors who are bidding the highest amounts on popular keywords. Such a strategy is based on being able to achieve an acceptable conversion rate once the customers are driven through to the website. A lower-cost strategy involves bidding on lower-cost, less popular phrases. These will generate less traffic, so it will be necessary to devise a lot of these phrases to match the traffic from premium keywords.

How Paid search marketing works

 How Paid search marketing works

Although SEO has proved a popular form of digital marketing, paid search marketing is still of great relevance since it gives much more control on the appearance in the listings subject to the amount bid and the relevance of the ad. 

Each of the main search engines has its own paid advertising programme:

● Google Adwords (www.google.com/adwords);

● Microsoft Bing and Yahoo! adCenter (http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com).

What is paid search marketing? We explained the principles of paid search marketing or sponsored links in the introduction to the section on search engine marketing. 

Although we said that the main model for paying for sponsored listings in the search engines is pay-per-click marketing, we have called this section paid search marketing since there are, increasingly, other options for payment on what is known as the content network.

Paid search content network

Paid listings are also available through the display network of the search engines such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Content Match. These contextual ads are automatically displayed according to the page content. 

They can be paid for on a CPC, CPM or CPM (pay-per-action) basis and include not only text ads but also options for graphical display ads or video ads. Google generates around a third of its revenue from the content network, so there is a significant amount of expenditure on the network.

Trusted feeds

Trusted feeds or paid for inclusion is no longer significant to search advertising. However, we include reference to them since a similar approach is used by retailers to include their prod-ucts in Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLAs), where product information such as pricing and images are uploaded to Google’s servers for display in Google AdWords and within Google Shopping (see documentation for Google Merchant Blog for the latest techniques).

What controls position in paid search?

In early pay-per-click programs, the relative ranking of sponsored listings was simply based on the highest bidded cost-per-click (CPCs) for each keyword phrase. So it was a pure auction arrangement with the cost-per-click dependent on the balance of the extent of competition in the marketplace against the revenue or profit that can be generated dependent on conversion rates to sale and retention.

The inflated CPCs at the time of writing in different product sectors show how competitive Google AdWords is. Since only a small proportion of visitors to a site clicking from the ad will convert, it is difficult to generate a positive return-on-investment for these generic terms.

Contrary to what many web users may believe, today it is not necessarily the company which is prepared to pay the most per click that will get top spot. The search engines also take the relative click-through rates of the ads dependent on their position (lower positions naturally have lower click-through rates) into account when ranking the sponsored links, so ads which do not appear relevant, because fewer people are clicking on them, will drop down or may even disappear off the listing. The analysis of CTR to determine position is part of the quality score, a concept originally developed by Google but now integrated as part of the Microsoft Bing and Yahoo! search networks.

Google quality score

Understanding quality score is the key to successful paid search marketing. You should consider its implications when you structure the account and write copy or review performance with an agency.

Google developed the quality score because it understood that delivering relevance through the sponsored links was essential to its user’s experience, and the company’s profits.

The AdWords system works best for everybody; advertisers, users, publishers and Google too when the ads we display match our users’ needs as closely as possible we call this idea ‘relevance’.

We measure relevance in a simple way: 

Typically, the higher an ad’s quality score, the more relevant it is for the keywords to which it is tied. When your ads are highly relevant, they tend to earn more clicks, move higher in Ad Rank and bring you the most success.

A summary formula for the Google quality score is:

Quality score = (keyword’s click-through rate, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance, speed and other methods of assessing relevance) So, higher click-through rates achieved through better targeted creative copy are rewarded, as is relevance of the landing page (Google now sends out AdBots-Google to check them out). 

More relevant ads are also rewarded through ad text relevance, which is an assessment of the match of headline and description to the search term. 

Finally, the keyword relevance 

is the match of the triggering keyword to the search term entered. If you have ever wondered why the number of paid ads above the natural listings varies from none to three, then it’s down to the quality score you can only get the coveted positions for keywords which have a sufficiently high quality score you can’t ‘buy your way to the top’ as many think.

 

Advantages and disadvantages of SEO

Advantages of SEO 

The main benefits of SEO are:

● Significant traffic driver. showed that search marketing can attract a significant proportion of visitors to the site if companies are successful in implementing it.

● Highly targeted. Visitors are searching for particular products or services so will often have a high intent to purchase they are qualified visitors.

● Potentially low-cost visitors. There are no media costs for ad display or click-through. Costs arise solely from the optimisation process where agencies are paid to improve positions in the search results.

● Dynamic. The search engine robots will crawl the home page of popular sites daily, so new content is included relatively quickly for the most popular pages of a site (less so for deep links).

Disadvantages of SEO

Despite the targeted reach and low cost of SEO, it is not straightforward as these disadvantages indicate:

● Lack of predictability. Compared with other media SEO is very unreliable in terms of the return on investment it is difficult to predict results for a given investment and is highly competitive.

 ● Time for results to be implemented. The results from SEO may take months to be achieved, especially for new sites.

● Complexity and dynamic nature. The search engines take hundreds of factors into account, yet the relative weightings are not published, so there is not a direct correlation between marketing action and results ‘it is more of an art than a science’. Furthermore, the ranking factors change through time.

● Ongoing investment. Investment needed to continue to develop new content and generate new links.

● Poor for developing awareness in comparison with other media channels. 

Searchers already have to be familiar with a brand or service to find it. However, it offers the opportunity for less well-known brands to ‘punch above their weight’ and to develop awareness following click-through. For these reasons, investment in paid search may also be worthwhile.

Best practice in planning and managing SEO

In this section we will review six of the main approaches used to improve the results from SEO covering different search engine ranking factors. We describe these in some detail since is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing techniques, so it’s important to understand that SEO is a technical discipline and that the techniques used change through time.

For this reason SEO is often outsourced to a specialist SEO agency, although some companies believe they can gain an edge through having an internal specialist who understands the company’s customers and markets well. You will see that some of the on-page optimisation techniques recommended in this section are relatively straightforward and it is important to control brand and proposition messages. 

Content editors and reviewers within a company therefore need to be trained to understand these factors and incorporate them into their copywriting

1 Search engine submission

While some unscrupulous search marketing companies offered to register companies in the ‘Top 1000 search engines’, in reality registering in the top 5–10 search engines of each country an organisation operates in will probably account for more than 95 per cent of the potential visitors. Most existing companies and even startups will be automatically included in the search index since the search engine robots will follow links from other sites that link to them and do not require submission services. 

Google allegedly places new sites 

in a review status sometimes referred to as the Google sandbox effect. However, Google search engineers deny the existence of this and explain it is a natural artefact produced by new sites having limited links, history and so reputation. Either way, it is important to remember this constraint when creating startup companies or separate unlined microsites for a campaign since you may have to rely on paid search to gain SERPS visibility.

2 Index inclusion

Although a search engine robot may visit the home page of a site, it will not necessarily crawl all pages or assign them equal weight in terms of page rank or relevance. So when auditing sites as part of an SEO initiative, SEO agencies will check how many pages are included within the search engine index for different search engines. This is known as index inclusion

Among the potential reasons for not gaining complete index inclusion are:

● Technical reasons why the search robots do not crawl all the pages, such as the use of SEO-unfriendly content management system with complex URLs.

● Pages identified as webspam or of less importance or considered to be duplicate content which are then contained in what used to be known as the supplemental index in Google which don’t rank so highly. In these cases it is sometimes best to use a specific ‘canonical’ meta tag which tells the search engine which the primary page is. If you are a multinational company with different content sites for different countries, then it is challenging to deliver the relevant content for local audiences with use of regional domains tending to work best.

Companies can check the index inclusion through:

● Reviewing web analytics data which will show the frequency with which the main search robots crawl a site.

● Using web analytics referrer information to find out which search engines a site’s visitors originate from, and the most popular pages.

● Checking the number of pages that have been successfully indexed on a site. For example, in Google the search https://secretfocustips.blogspot.com/ lists all the pages of Dave’s site indexed by Google and gives the total number in the top-right of the SERPs.

● Using Google Webmaster Tools, a free service that site owners can register with which shows pages indexed and potential webspam problems such as a penalty.