The idea is to cater to each individual searcher, providing them with not only exactly the information they require, but in the right form, i.e., price comparisons if you’re searching for ecommerce items, maps if you’re searching for local businesses. The Google blog explains it like so…

“Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information. For example, if you want to learn a magic trick, a video showing you how to perform the trick is likely the best result”

The newly available types of ad are listed below.

Multiple Links

One of the simplest and most effective forms is the multiple linking option. This allows you to specify a number of specific hyperlinks which take people to various parts of your site. For instance if someone was searching for golf clubs you could offer separate links for drivers, putters, wedges and irons.

Video

This is an interesting one. If you’re looking for instructions on how to do something, a video is quite often the most useful thing to see. This ad allows advertisers to show individual videos below their text ads. Like many of the other new kinds of ad this takes up quite a lot of space in the SERPS, but I’ll come onto that later.

Maps

This allows you to show your business location, address, phone number etc., on a map within the ad. This already goes on to an extent with Local Search, though here it’s actually in the ad so you can appear above your competitors easily – if you’re willing to pay, that is. Obviously, it’s particularly good for people doing regional searches. There’s even a version for bigger brands and chain stores that allows you to display all the branches in the area you’re searching for.

Product Images

A very recent edition to the stable is product image ads, this allows you to show thumbnail images of the products people are searching for within your ads. Again, this is similar to Product Search, except that, since it’s an ad, you can leap frog your competitors. Also, it’s better for Google as they can monetise it.

Price Comparisons

This is by far the most audacious thing Google are planning. From the early looks I’ve had it seems to be basically a price comparison website, but in the sponsored results. Google will take your price information and rank you and your competitors accordingly, you’ll then pay when people request a quote. I’ll give you more information when I have it as this is potentially huge.

Well, there you go. This should make adwords management a little more interesting. It obviously has some major advantages for advertisers but also some big ones for Google. From my point of view Google get two main things out of this.

One: The sponsored list becomes more relevant, which means they stand a chance of lowering the 70% of people who apparently bypass the sponsored listings entirely, making them more money.

Two: It lowers the overall importance of the natural rankings, making SEO less relevant (Google aren’t generally fans of people manipulating their results). Call me cynical but…

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To that end, we’ve decided to let you in on a few of Top Click Media’s main mobile advertising tips, so sit back and prepare for liftoff.

1. Target devices individually. Don’t forget that one campaign will not work for every type of phone. Research the different demographics of say, smartphones as opposed to traditional devices and make decisions based on that. You’ll also need to think about the capabilities of various mobile operating systems and handsets.

2. Think beyond search. Your message can appear to mobile phone users who are searching via text ads as well as to site visitors via display ads. Have a think about which suits your message best and spend time researching the best and most visited mobile friendly sites for your business.

3. Consider Bidding for Calls not Clicks. A very useful thing that’s started to happen recently is that you can now pay per call, meaning that you’re only charged when someone actually makes a call as a result of your mobile ad, which for some businesses could potentially be very useful indeed. I really cannot overstate how useful this can be if you get it right. It works by showing a link of your number number on the ad, when that option is selected you pay, and not a moment before. Not only is it a great deal, it’s probably the first proper mass market technique for tracking phone calls.

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So why do people so dramatically fail to grasp these reasonably basic tenets of the Internet. Well, in a way it’s fair enough. It can seem strange to people who work in the online sector, but most people only really need to use the internet on a very basic level. It’s a testament to the usefulness and simplicity of sites like Google, Amazon, et al. that people can get the full experience out of them without necessarily knowing anything about computers or the internet.

So that’s how, even in the year 2009, people are able to get away with such a basic knowledge of the online world. Tomorrow, I’ll let you in on what this means for your sites and PPC campaigns, and what you need to do to allow for this level of understaning.

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Yesterday I wrote about why someone should use a combined SEO and PPC strategy. Today I’d like to talk a little about how exactly to go about exactly you should go about making PPC complement SEO and vice versa. The first thing I’d like to discuss is using PPC to plan your SEO.

As anyone who’s ever embarked on one will know, an SEO strategy is a difficult and unpredictable path to tread. One way to hamper yourself right out of the gate is not to plan properly, SEO campaigns are big beasts, and about as easy to turn round as super-tankers, if you don’t plan properly, you’re in trouble.

The only way to plan an SEO campaign so that you’re sure you’re targeting the right areas is by building a PPC campaign first. This way, after about 4 – 6 weeks, you’ll
know for sure which keywords make you money or generate enquiries, and often they’re not the ones you may have thought. Once you know, you can pour resources into enhancing your natural position for those keywords, safe in the knowledge that you’re making a wise investment.

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Many people make the mistake of thinking that once their SEO is good and they are appearing on the first page for their most profitable keywords, that they can relax their spending on PPC. Unfortunately, this is too simplistic. Based on your analytics data for CPC versus natural sales you might make the decision to divert some of your PPC budget into more links etc. for your high performing keywords but this is by no means a hard and fast rule.

The central reason for this is that most people still don’t fully understand how their search engine works. Survey after survey continues to prove the public’s fundamental misunderstandings. For instance, many people actually think that all rankings are paid for. In addition, an astonishing number of people don’t know the difference between sponsored links and search results. The point I’m making is that you cannot always rely on people giving more credit to your carefully hone natural search results.

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1. Brands and serial numbers

Always include any unique information about the product. Instead of just having ‘laptop computer’ have ‘Hewlett Packard laptop’ that’s much more specific. Also, if the product has a serial, make or model number include that as part of a separate keyword. It may seem like overkill but people really do search that specifically.

Value Judgements

Putting values in front of keywords often works well, particularly when they’re price focussed. Think about it. How many times have you entered a search term that had cheap, budget or best price in it.

Modifiers

Finally, all of the above can be amended by modifiers like ‘buy’ ‘buy online’ ‘uk’ etc. to make them even more specific.

Put all that in place and your campaign will grow from an amateur twenty word campaign to a professional level thousand-worder in no time and you’ll reap the savings. Just be careful to organise your adgroups properly, otherwise you’ll drown in a sea of keywords.

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People don’t search in the same way they used to. In the early days of the internet people would search generically, though as people have figured out the internet and how it works, the average search query has increased in length year on year as people recognise the need to separate the wheat from the chaff in order to find appropriate results.

PPC advertisers need to be in step with this trend and be matching those long tail search terms exactly in order to save the maximum amount of money. Of course this is more work than simply putting in broad match generics to act as catch all keywords though the potential savings and profits make it more than worthwhile.

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The next point concerns the attitude of the person searching, are they interested in buying today or are they just researching a purchase for a later date. Obviously you have very little chance of making a profit from someone who is thinking about buying at some point (in the browse phase), whereas somebody who is in the mood to make a purchase in that internet session (in the buy phase) is much easier to convince. If your site is good and your prices are competitive, they’re probably going to spend money.

So obviously you want to target users in the buy phase rather than the browse phase. How do you do this? That’s right, with long-tail keywords.

It works like this. Someone who is researching is at the stage where they know very little about the product so they’re going to search generically. For example, if they’re looking for a laptop they’re going to search keywords like ‘laptops’ or ‘laptop prices’. Put simply advertising on these keywords is a waste of your time and, more importantly, money. The vast majority of the time, these people are going to use your site as a research tool and keep their wallet firmly in their pocket.

You’re much better off advertising on a range of highly product specific keywords. You’ll get fewer clicks, though someone who searches for ‘Compaq CQ60-109’ has quite clearly done their research and knows exactly what they want. In other words, they’re ready to buy.

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Okay, this is a big one, as obviously cost per click can make or break any PPC campaign. Let’s stick with the dog food example for the time being to illustrate this. The cost per click of a keyword is determined by the competition for that keyword. A hugely generic keyword like ‘Dog Food’ will naturally have a lot of people bidding on it and so could easily cost over £1 a click for a top five placing.

With a sack of dog food costing about £15 (probably with a profit margin of £7), your conversion rate is going to have to be incredibly good to break even, especially with the potential for irrelevant searches we discussed in the last post. Realistically you aren’t going to be making a profit.

Add a few modifiers to the keyword however, and the cost per click will come down significantly, ‘buy dog food online’ or ‘buy eukanuba dog food’ will have far fewer people bidding and so will be significantly cheaper, possibly around 30p for a top five. Suddenly you have more than three times the clicks to play with and your chances of making money have improved significantly.

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The fundamental mistake made by people who start PPC campaigns is almost always the same, their keywords are too generic. When people come to us they tend to have between thirty and fifty keywords, that target their business sector, but in a really non specific way, for instance if they’re a pet supplies company they’ll have broad match words like ‘dog food’, ‘cat litter’.

What’s wrong with that? you might ask, they sell dog food so why not advertise on the term? seems logical, right? Well, unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. Whilst ‘dog food’ might lead to sales it’ll also open you up to a whole load of irrelevant search queries, stuff like ‘dog food recipes,’ ‘what’s the best dog food for puppies?’, ‘How much food should you give a dog?’ None of these search terms are likely to lead to sales because they are being entered by people who clearly do not want to buy then and there. However, they may still generate clicks, which is the last thing you want.

You can avoid this situation by including modifiers and extending the single ‘dog food’ keywords into several other long-tail versions like ‘buy dog food online’, ‘buy pedigree dog food online’, ‘dog food online store,’ etc.

These keywords may be searched less often, though you can guarantee that the searchers are actually looking to buy. This ensures that only people who are actually useful to you get onto your site.

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Obviously this is great, it allows you to respond to market changes at the drop of a hat and gives you the ability to adjust according to data in real time. However, in some instances this agility, the very thing that makes adwords so effective can be the major factor standing in the way of success.

When people come to us with campaigns that aren’t working, we often find that one of the major problems is the fact that they haven’t left the thing alone for long enough to know whether an idea is working or not, changing the campaign based on opinion and kneejerk reactions rather than data.

It’s understandable really, if something isn’t working then the impulse is to change it, but how do you know it’s not working, have you really tested it?

I’ll give you an example…

If an adgroup has had 10 clicks at £1.50 each and not converted then there is an impulse to think ‘well that’s cost me £15 and not made me any money, I’ll pause it,’ but just take a second to think about your expectations. For an adgroup to have converted once after 10 clicks would give it a conversion ratio of 10%, when 5% is considered an excellent conversion rate for most keywords this probably a bit premature. You really need to be waiting until the 40 – 50 click mark till you can start to draw conclusions like that.

Unfortunately, the ugly truth is that as much as you can minimise it with good research and planning, the early stages of a campaign are learning process. However, the data gathered at this stage will prove invaluable when optimising for the later stages, and eventually lead to an efficient well optimised account. If you can, it’s best to look at a slightly shaky first few weeks as an investment in future success.

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This confirms what many of us within the industry have suspected for quite some time, that the search marketing industry is weathering, if not benefitting from the recession. At a time when most of the technology industry is cutting jobs (just look at Microsoft and Yahoo), we’ve found that we’re having to take on more staff to deal with an increasing workload.

I’m not saying this to brag, I simply want to make a point about the resilience of this type of marketing. The unprecedented trackability, control and cost effectiveness of Pay Per Click marketing means that whilst the rest of the advertising industry struggles, PPC is flourishing as companies seek to get more out of their marketing budgets rather than abandoning them completely.

Just to illustrate my point, we’re now, by all accounts, about a year into the economic downturn and Google has only just experienced its first quarterly decline in profits (that’s first ever).

In my opinion, the days of traditional advertising are numbered. Why put an ad in a magazine, and put up with only vague ideas predictions regarding how it’s working, when you can put an ad on Google and track iots success minute by minute.

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That’s what conversion tracking is for. As you probably know, conversion tracking code allows you to see how many of the people accessing your site through adwords actually go on to complete the goal you have set, i.e., get to the thank you page that signifies buy something or sign up to your newsletter etc. It lets you actually find out the keywords that are profitable in real terms, the ones you want to push.

So now we know that conversions are the name of the game, how do we increase them? how do we make sure that people get to that page? Well, if you’re trying to get people to buy things there are almost limitless ways in which you can encourage conversions, some of which get very complicated, so that might have to be a subject for another post. What I want to talk to you about today is lead/sign up enquiries.

Luckily, convincing someone to fill out an online sign up form to receive a newsletter or sales call is much, much easier than convincing them to actually part with money. However, there are two main things you can do to make it simpler still.

1.Make it easy to find. Do not hide your sign up form away on one obscure page of your site, put it front and centre on your homepage with a clear call to action that explains the benefit of filling out the form and clicking send. Actually, come to think of it, there’s no reason you can’t have a sign up form on more than one page of your site, maybe even all of them.

2.Don’t ask too much. For most sales enquiries you only need two things, a name and a way to contact them, to sign up to an email newsletter it’s even simpler, all you need is an email address. Even so, almost every sign up form I see has row after row of extraneous information, like addresses and pointless questions like ‘how did you hear about us?’ You can find this sort of information out in the sales call, there’s no reason to jeopardise the lead to find it out.

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The weird thing is that to a certain extent they’re right. If you increase the number of keywords, you do increase the likelihood of a click as you reach more people. However, the trick is to do this in the right way.

Firstly, instead of simply adding keywords with abandon, research them carefully, always have sound, provable, reasoning for adding keywords, otherwise you could find yourself spending a load of money on not particularly relevant terms.

Secondly, there’s nothing wrong with appending your keywords in order to catch slightly more long-tail versions though it can be easy to go overboard. It’s fine to change ‘Ford Ka’, to ‘buy a Ford Ka’ or even ‘buy a Ford Ka online,’ however, unless the market really is that competitive, something like, ‘buy a Ford ka from an online retailer,’ will be a bridge too far, especially as that keyword will get picked up by searchers for your previous shorter versions, if they’re broad match. It’s really just a case of keeping a campaign to a manageable level. There’s no sense in having 60,000 keywords if you can help it.

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