Category: adwords

Page Speed Loading Times

As I’ve mentioned many times here at SEO Liverpool I get lots of questions via email. A frequently asked question and something I’d like to talk about today, is the importance of web page loading speeds. Basically, page loading speeds can be important!

Just for clarity, we’re talking about when you click on a website and it takes longer than expected to bring all the elements to the page. This isn’t a broadband problem, you may end up with a page that has no real elements and lot’s of white space.

I’m going to tell you why it’s important from two important perspectives

Human point of view

0.1 load speed – this is instantaneous a 1 second load will also seem very smooth. If you take between 5-10 seconds then you’ll lose potential visitors who’ll click off. There is not a definitive number as some of us are ‘children of the dial up’ and may have more patience. Another person may have less patience or assume the webpage is broken.

Search Engine point of view

About 4 years ago online marketing consultants became aware that page load speed is a part of the Google algorithm. This is important, but I wouldn’t get to hung up on it.

If you use Google Adwords for your PPC then page load speed takes on a more important role. In fact a very important role! It will be part of the landing page (web page) quality score.

This means that you could reach the positions you want and conceivable pay less per keyword.

Factors that may be detrimental to page load speeds

  • Masses of Java, CSS or Flash
  • High resolution images
  • Hosting your own videos
  • Frames – if you’re still using frames then you need a website update

 Next Steps

If you look at the Google webmaster central blog, it has a selection of tools that will help you determine problems and provide help.

Basic Search Advertising Part 2

Here at SEO Liverpool, we offer virtually all web marketing services. Having said that, I always seem to be discussing PPC with clients, and thought I’d go over some points and FAQ’s.

We all agree that it’s very important to understand all the steps if you’re starting you own SEO PPC campaigns. Here’s the second part of our post.

Building the Ads

  • Because CTR  (click through ration) affects your position , do NOT get lazy. Don’t use one ad for everything. You do need to put the effort into writing your ad, you want your quality score to be high.
  • Use keyword in title and/or description. Users follow scent trails.
  • Remember, you must pass an editorial review.
  • Choose appropriate landing page URLs (Usually NOT the home page) you may want to A/B Test.
  • Use dynamic keyword insertion – this is a little complicated to explain here, so check out tutorials on each site. The usage is different between engines.

Note… Searchers prefer uninterrupted logic. Make sure that the ad text and the landing page all talk about what the person is searching for.

Schedule

  • Don’t just set it and forget it.
  • Map out a calendar in terms of;
    • Campaign roll-out.
    • Reporting/analysis.
    • testing periods(s).
    • Other promotions (offline, online, trade shows, etc., like an editorial calendar).
    • Budget changes (e.g. overspend on Google during kickoff).
  • Schedule promotional and seasonal messaging.
  • Day-parting – time of the day – days of the week. If you are only open during the week, you may not want to advertise at the weekends.
  • Schedule quarterly ‘housecleaning’.

Budgeting

  • Daily budgeting technology isn’t perfect, so engines usually under-deliver or over-deliver. Set it for a little more than you want to spend, so the engines don’t under-deliver. So do look at your spend.
  • Put your high-traffic or high-pound words in their own campaign, with their own budget.
  • Start out with a bang, so you can lock in a high CTR which will help your quality score – then pull back
  • Google has different ways to manage budgets;
    • Conversion Optimiser.
    • Budget optimiser (most clicks for a defined budget).
    • Preferred cost bidding (set average CPC preferred).
    • Manual bidding (you control it).

Managing Bids

  • Bid management software can help.
    • Popular tools: search engines’ tools, Atlas, Keyword Bidmax, Omniture, SearchRev, Performics, Clickable, Adapt.
    • Note: “bidding rules” don’t work well on hybrid auctions.
    • Low volume keywords won’t have much data to optimise automatically against ROI or other projected values.
  • People are still required!
  • Paying too much? Improve your CTR and landing page.
  • Delete low performing keywords, or pause/isolate them so they don’t bring down the overall campaign. Don’t have pity, get rid of them if they don’t help you

My Final Thoughts

  • Don’t be afraid to start small and grow your success.
  • Build a risk portfolio for yourself – set aside some budget for experiments and branding. Be creative, try some things, see what you can figure out.
  • Reinvest a portion of  ‘profits’ back into the budget.
  • Leverage the engines for knowledge, but don’t believe everything they tell you.
  • Provide enough resources to support the campaign.
  • Strive for integrated strategy across all media.

Hope this helps

Adwords Quality Score Help Part 4

Cheap search engine optimization is as subjective as the best SEO.

SEO SEM and Web design companies have a habit of boldly claiming they offer both and are all things to all men.

This final part of our look at quality score takes search back to the basics, back to the fundamentals. Providing the user direct access to finding the content they want at the time they want it.

5 basic steps:

Keywords.
Organisation & Structure.
Match Type.
Creatives.
Landing Pages.

Keyword building: Most people bucket them and go off on the long tail. You should have several different groups and categories of brands. It will really improve your quality score. They are not necessarily tail terms, they are product specific. Don’t chase every keyword, chase the right keyword. If you can build out your campaign you can really lower your CPC – if your keyword is profitable, make it more profitable.

Structure: Don’t build thousands of useless keywords. Be organised when you put this together. Some limit you to 10,000 ad groups. If you have not reached that limit you are not working hard enough!

Match types: Every keyword you run should be on every single match type. Every keyword should be running on exact. When you break it out, you will start to see a decline in your phrase match spend. Put in your negatives.

Creatives: Go down to the specifics where you are not even using Dynamic Keyword Insertion any more. Be so specific. We use colour type, size, etc in every creative that we do. Let the user find the exact creative that they are looking for. It will increase your Quality Score and lower your CPC.

Landing pages: In some networks your ad could/will be disapproved if you do not have great landing pages. Everything in your landing pages should be in your ad copy and everything in your ad copy should be in your landing pages.

Simple

Adwords Quality Score Help Part 1

As an Online marketing company with our web SEO and PPC training it’s very common to get questions on Google Adwords quality scores.

More and more, ranking positively in paid search listings is less about how much you pay and more about the “quality” of your ad campaign. But what goes into making up your quality score? We’ll take a closer look at quality factors and give tips on increasing the perceived relevancy of your campaigns.

What is a Quality Score? The old model is kind of a bid to position situation. Quality score essentially is a dynamic value assigned to each keyword, and is the basis for defining quality and relevancy of your ad. So the higher your quality score, the lower your minimum bid and the higher your ad placement.

Google rolled out Quality Score in 2005, and they revised the algorithm in 2007 to incorporate landing page relevance, and then later on allowed their users to see it

The key thing is that Google believe that delivering more relevant ads would create more value for users. If search engines can deliver more relevance that makes them look good and then you look good.

So Quality Score is a way to make searches more relevant.

Where to find the Quality Score? You need to drill down to the ad groups and specifically shows each of the keywords, you need to click on “customise columns” and then quality score. So it gives you a feeling of how good or poor your keywords are.

Historical click through rate for each keyword affects your Quality Score, the relevance of the ads and the quality of landing page. Also your account history, history of all click through rates and ads in your account. Of course there are factors as well that won’t be revealed to us.

Relevance and landing page are the key things.

Case study: We had a client who came to us as part of their whole SEO outsourcingrequirement. They were managing their own campaign and they currently had an average minimum bid of 40 pence, and 5 ad groups, and each ad group had 100 keywords. It turned out that 72% of their keywords had poor Quality Scores.

So the first thing we did was come in and create more, smaller, more relevant ad groups. Then we developed more relevant ad copy for each group. Then we optimised the landing page using Google’s web optimiser. And we tested to see what was and was not working. So some results: the average minimum CPC went down to about 8 pence, click through rates went up about 11%, conversions went up from 2.6% to 4.2% within 2 weeks, the quality score for over 50% of the keywords went from poor to great. And then after a month, anything that still had a poor rating, we just deleted them altogether.

So the key thing is you need to test and keep an eye on quality score. Many people miss out on this.

Hot tip: You probably should allocate about 10%-15% of your budget specifically to testing. You will learn what’s working and what’s not working.

B2B Paid Search Success Part 1

A successful online marketing strategy, paid search campaign is contingent upon three fundamentals: Keywords, Ad copy, and Landing pages. Together they equal success. Right?

Wrong.

The fact is, those fundamentals are only part of the equation. There is another key component entirely. Namely, Analytics. Or more specifically, tracking, and understanding the quality of a visitor. In fact, not only are these other elements fundamental, they also take on increased importance for the B2B set. Why? Because of the complexity of buying cycles for this market.

Let me explain.

When it comes to web seo and search, there are many similarities between marketing to consumers and marketing to businesses, such is the need to understand your audience and speak their language. However, when it comes to buying cycles, the similarities end.

In fact, B2B buying cycles are inherently complex. Consequently, marketers need to be mindful that prospects can be in very different phases within the buying cycle. And because it’s your job to put yourself in the prospect’s shoes and think about what they need, tracking and understanding the quality of a visitor can be instrumental in helping you do just that.

Tracking: why digging deep on keyword data matters

To be sure, tracking offers marketers a myriad of benefits, not the least of which is keyword data. It’s a rich source, and analysis of it can yield highly valuable information that is both immediately actionable, and has the potential to significantly impact campaign performance. It can also help marketers avoid shooting themselves in the foot.

For example, many web marketing services providers, hastily ditch keywords that appear to be non-performers. This is a mistake. Instead, they should take a closer look at their tracking data. Here’s why.

A few years ago, comScore conducted a study that quantified the number of searches leading up to a purchase, by category. For example, the research revealed that computer hardware buyers searched an average of 4.9 times before ultimately making a purchase.

The implication of this finding should be obvious. Just because a keyword doesn’t yield immediate conversions, doesn’t mean it’s not contributing. It could very well be highly effective at moving a prospect through a particular phase of the buying cycle.

To capitalise on this behavior, marketers need to leverage tracking to better understand their customers and prospects. The first step in doing so is to make sure you don’t discount the keywords with a sub-par conversion record. In fact, before you remove a keyword that isn’t producing conversions, or reduce a bid, thoroughly review the query reports that are available through the search engines and/or your search vendor.

Regularly reviewing these click chain reports will help you understand the searches your customers actually conducted, and that ultimately led to their executing the call to action. Then use this data – whether manually or with a bidding agent – ensure that certain keywords maintain their positioning regardless of their direct conversion value.

And as you review these reports, pay attention to your inclusion window. This is the time allocated for a click and the subsequent conversion event to happen in order for it to be considered a result of a particular paid click.

It is critical to appropriately set your inclusion window within your tracking solution, otherwise the learnings gleaned from the data will be faulty. For example, if someone types a keyword, and then sees your ad and clicks, but doesn’t immediately convert, and then comes back to the site 10 days later and converts, it would not count as a conversion against the originating paid search click unless your inclusion window was set to 10+ days.

Banners for (SEM Dummies) Part 2

Basics: What is a Third-Party Ad Server?

In the beginning of display advertising over a decade ago, advertisers sent in their banners in the same way traditional marketers traffic ads to magazines or television stations. Publishing sites would “paste” these ads up and then deliver post campaign results. There were some obvious inefficiencies in this method. As the technologies and methodologies evolved, advertisers could send in “tags,” which aren’t actual ads, but rather “placeholders” which would pull these ads from the advertisers’ own tool call the third party ad server. This is a superior adaptation as now advertisers get real time data of their ads, can serve targeted adseach time the tag is pulled by the publisher, and can perform many other vital operations.

Here are some of the basic features that most third party ad servers can bring to a display campaign and now can be used for Content Campaigns in Google (via certified tools):

Rules: When a banner tag is “pulled” by a publisher site to load on a page, the third party ad server is passed limited anonymous user data such as the location of the user’s IP address, what language their browser is set for, whether they’re using a Mac or PC, etc. Rules can be set to send the appropriate creative every time. So, for example, you can serve a Spanish ad to Spanish speakers. You can also send a user in Liverpool a specialised ad vs. a user in Manchester. This higher relevancy generally increases CTRs and conversion rates.

Frequency capping/storyboarding: Not only is anonymous user data passed in milliseconds to the ad server, but also user cookie info. Using this information, the ad server knows if this user has seen your ad before and how many times. Over time, you can develop a strategy to frequency cap and not show anymore to users who don’t click your ads (thereby not wasting CPM purchased impressions). As well, you can storyboard, which means you can start serving different ads to users based on how many times they’ve already been exposed. So, for example, you could have general creative out there (example: “10% off), and then, if the ad server detects a user who hasn’t clicked after seeing your ad five times, you can start serving an ad with a stronger message (example: “25% off if you act now”) and so on.

Reach and frequency reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads. This is important in understanding how users are interacting with your ads and finding the ‘sweet spot’ to just how many ads you need to buy in order to get your message out to a good percentage of your target audience. As well, a Reach report may show you that buying on football Website A may not be needed because a high percentage of the same users are being exposed to your ads on Football Website B, which you are purchasing at a much lower rate.

View-through conversions: As stated above, once a user is served an ad, they are cookied. So, unlike search, if a user converts after seeing your ad (but not clicking an ad), you will have that insight. This is huge because you’re lucky to get more than a .3% or .4% CTR on your ads…that means if you run 1,000,000 impressions, you may only get 3,000 clicks. However, the other 996,000 ads do have an effect in the marketplace and you can measure that when those users come back and convert.

All of these features may not be immediately available to advertisers. However, Google Content is one of the largest (if not the largest) ad network in terms of volume and these tools are going to help you get the most out of them.

Totally Unrelated Free Tool: HTML That Every Online Marketer Should Know

Tired of “viewing source” of an HTML page and thinking it looks more like ancient Greek than a real language? Online marketers are always checking out web pages to see if their tracking tags are there, checking navigation/link structure, reading competitor metatags for keyword ideas, etc. Understanding HTML is a good skill to have.

Check out Dave’s HTML Interactive Tutorial for Beginners (find it using Google Instant). Sure, there’s a ton of spamvertising, but I’ve literally sent dozens of folks there and they’ve all come out the other end of the seventeen mini-chapter tutorial with a good HTML foundation. Check it out!

Successful SEO with B2B part 2

This is the next part in my collective sessions on SEO and Site Architecture. I’ve be discussing creating a successful SEO campaign with a B2B site and this post is going to elaborate on keyword research.

2. Determine relative popularity

Once you’ve created a full list of potential keywords, you need to determine the relative popularity of those search terms. Often paid search keyword research tools (such as Google’s Traffic Estimator) won’t have data because traffic for these terms is low. In some cases, there will be data, but it will show very low activity. That’s okay. Don’t pay too much attention to that. Rather, use tools like Keyword Discovery to determine relative historical popularity of your keywords. This will give you some idea of which search terms are used more often than others on your list. The actual raw number of searches for a given search term really doesn’t matter much.
When you’re doing this work, remember to enter the starter keyword(s) or starter keyphrase, letting your research tool return permutations and long-tail options. Not only will this give you a larger list to consider, but the results will often lead you down a path you hadn’t previously considered.

At SEO Liverpool we use Worktracker as our Keyword discovery tool. It’s an excellent resource with the ability to dig around keywords, save campaigns and most importantly you can revisit and add to your projects. This is paramount in keeping your campaign viable and responsive to change.

When I’m looking for some quick data you can’t beat the Adwords keyword tool. It’s great for checking the value of core keywords. We use this data when meeting with clients to make them aware of potential clients numbers looking for there products or services.

Stick around for the next instalment.

PPC Basics Part 2

SEO Liverpool understand that Using Pay Per Click without knowing the fundamentals of advertising and writing copy is absolutely pointless. You’ll be taken to the cleaners and beaten at every turn by people who have learnt the game and understand the equilibriums

There are excellent resources available for quickly and painlessly learning the fundamentals. Obviously experience, is key but practising the fundamentals will improve your results the minute you start. You can run small campaigns at relatively little cost that will help you gain the understanding needed.

Book-wise if you’re a novice their is no shame in the Adwords for Dummies by Howie Jacobson. Excellent read and still a good resource for anybody involved in running a campaign. The only drawback is Google adds features periodically to it’s Adwords dashboard and you need to keep update with the latest tools.

Also check out this PPC video… it will help you understand how the process of the bid auction works

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Pay Per Click (PPC) The Fundamentals

Here at SEO Liverpool we are always trying to implement successful PPC advertising campaigns. How successful can we be you ask? We regularly hit Click Through Ratio’s of 5 and 11 percent obviously dependant on keyword competition. Double-digit rates are common, even for most competitive of PPC campaigns. Return on investment of is our major selling point and primary aim. Depending on client average customer values it can easily hit 100% more often than not.

Always check out Google advice and Youtube videos for the free help and advice…. never refuse Google help when it’s offered and just keep A/B testing.

Most of the techniques I’m going to share are based on the science of PPC. Simplistic best practices for constructing campaigns, Understanding the data, and interpretations to improve results. The rest is creative! Writing and designing you adverts and landing pages. Best practices and guidelines have already been studied and reported for years, and various resource as mentioned above are available for free.

The basics are based around exceptional keyword research, account/campaign structure, ad writing and design, bidding strategy, landing page design, and conversion optimisation. Always try and pick up a few new tips from blogs and guidelines that are constantly evolving. I guarantee you will always discover activities you can improve on and ways of taking your campaign over the top.
To succeed with PPC advertising depends on the ability to make potential clients take action, based completly on a few well researched and timed keywords or phrases. You don’t have to understanding how a search algorithm works or use all the features of Google AdWords. (although all if not most are useful and they add more periodically).

The ability to write persuasive ad copy using just 130 characters is a big challenge. Especially if you’re up against significant competition. Your words must not only persuade; they must stand out from a page full of words all shouting for your customer’s attention. And after your words have convinced the searcher to click through to your site, it’s persuasive words (augmented by graphics) that convince the visitor to become a customer. The best of the best online marketers have been testing, and refining ad writing techniques for a years now so there are some excellent resources out there. Learn the science then work on your creativity.
If you need any help please contact Summit Online Marketing 07968 848 228 for more help and advice or wait for the next exciting instalment!