Post-Click Conversion Optimization For Long Sales Cycles
My latest Search Engine Land article is out titled: Post-Click Conversion Optimization For Long Sales Cycles.
In this article, I describe a low-tech approach to tracking clicks to conversions when your sales cycle is something like:
- Buy click to website
- User downloads whitepaper after giving you name & email address
- Those who download the whitepaper are sent an email invite to attend a product webinar (where you also collect phone number, company name, etc)
- Those who attend the webinar are then called by the sales force
- Sales force tries to sell the product
Few systems have a nice approach for tracking these disparate systems. However, you can use simple spreadsheets to build a conversion funnel so you can not only optimize each step of the conversion process, but you can see what a click is actually worth to your business.
I think it’s an excellent read not only those involved in long sales cycle, but for anyone who wants to think critically about merging data sets and how simple it can easily be. I hope you enjoy Post-Click Conversion Optimization For Long Sales Cycles.
Broad Match + Negative Keywords = A Profitable Long Tail
My newest Search Engine Land column is now out titled: Broad Match + Negative Keywords = A Profitable Long Tail.
Start with these 4 ideas:
- The ‘long tail’ of keywords is useful to add to PPC campaigns
- 20% of all searches on Google have not been seen in the past 90 days (you just can’t have every negative keyword)
- Broad match is often undervalued and often its suggested to not use it
- Negative keywords are incredible for shaping when your ads are triggered
When trying to reach the long tail of keywords – since you just cannot simply have every keyword in your account, a combination of broad match long tail keywords combined with negative keyword to filter out unwanted traffic can be a potent combination.
This week’s column looks at these points in depths and how to use negatives across the 3 major engines.
AdWords Updates Display URL Policy – New Policy Still Falls Short
Google has finally updated their Display URL policy so that if you use a shared domain (such as blogspot), then you need to be more accurate in your portrayal of the destination URL.
For instance, if your URL was: mybusiness.blogspot.com, all you had to do was use blogspot.com in your destination URL and you would meet the policy. In fact, you could have even used YourCompetitor.blogspot.com as the display URL and taken them to your page.
While blogspot is an easy one to pick one, I think that this ruling occurred (and will be modified one more time) because of the sudden influx of Google.com URLs.
Legitimately Use Google.com as Your Display URL
If you use Google Apps or Google Pages, then you can have a site hosted at:
sites.google.com/a/Customize
If site.google.com/a/Customize is the destination URL, you can use Google.com as the display URL.
With Blogspot, every site has a subdomain and therefore this is an easy ruling to apply.
With Google pages and Google sites, the URL is a folder and not a subdomain and therefore makes it difficult to pick a URL that accurately describes where the user is going.
In fact, you may see destination URLs that are: Google.com/AdWords or Google.com/Coupons that actually go to sites.google.com/a/SpammyOffer.
This is a good move from Google, it just needs to go further to clarify how to handle folders within a subdomain or what constitutes ‘additional information’ that is actually relevant to the consumer.
My PPC New Year Resolutions
My newest Search Engine Land columns is out titled: My PPC New Year Resolutions. This article looks at things to change in 2010.
My main 2010 PPC resolutions are:
- Track everything
- Lose the long tail weight
- Try more rich media ads across the content network
- Focus on post conversion communication
- Be more creative
I wrote an article for SEL two years ago about cleaning up your account from last year that you can find here: New Year’s Resolutions For Your PPC Campaigns.
These two articles should help get you a jump-start on PPC in 2010.
The 7 Most Under Used PPC Tools
My latest SEL article it out entitled 7 Incredibly Valuable But Underused Free Tools For PPC Marketers.
It takes a look at some new ways to use these tools:
- Google Sets
- Tilde search operator
- Google Trends
- Ad Preview Tool
- adLabs Demographic Prediction
- adLabs Detecting Online Commercial Intent
- Site spidering with Google’s keyword tool
While many of these tools are not new – I discuss unique ways of using these tools to improve your PPC accounts.
Best New AdWords Features Launched Over the Past Month
Google has launched several small updates over the past month. Together, there has been quite a bit of innovation. Here are my favorite changes that everyone should know about.
AdWords Editor Updated:
The newest version of the AdWords editor launched with some very nice updates. It now supports:
- Ad scheduling
- Advanced location targeting
- Inline editing
- Editing multiple campaign settings at once
- YouTube promotional ads
- New keyword expansion options
- Set default targeting
- Supports Spanish as an interface option
You can see the full release notes for the newest version here.
Product Listing Ads:
Google announced new product listing ads:
Google Ad Planner Updated
Google made some nice additions to Google ad planner. You can now see placement listings, subdomain info, and additional graphing options.
New Alerts Features
You can set up customized AdWords Alerts to help spot issues within your AdWords Account.
Sitelinks now available for AdWords Ads
![[sitelinks.jpg]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_XvO3o7JhYsM/SvByJoce_-I/AAAAAAAAAD8/_EopSSaT7iA/s1600/sitelinks.jpg)
If ads meet certain quality guidelines, they can now show additional links within the ad. Good stuff for branded queries, or when you are currently sending traffic to segmentation pages.
Google Analytics for Mobile Users
Many phones do not support scripts, such as Google Analytics. If you want to track additional items, you can use event tracking to track mobile usage and apps.
New Conversion Tracking Interface
The conversion tracking interface received a facelift. Among the changes is the ability to see which page conversions are occurring on.
What’s new with Microsoft adCenter?
It’s easy to get lost in a world where AdWords seems to dominate the marketplace. However, not only is adCenter a great product (with an amazing community) they also have continued to innovate. Here’s a roundup of adCenter posts that makes it easy to catch up with the new features and improvements that have come out of adCenter over the past couple months.
SEM Beginner Series: Ad Copy Importance, Best Practices and Resources
The Silent Click – Increase Brand Awareness Online – adtech New York 2009. While this post is a recap of an adtech session, there are some charts in here that contain some great info on display that every marketer should read. In addition, there is a link to a full PDF report that shows more details of this information – great stuff.
Microsoft adCenter Fall 2009 Upgrade: Tutorials and What’s New in the Learning Center – adCenter desktop is a great tool for managing your adCenter account on your computer.
Microsoft adCenter Fall 2009 Upgrade: Improvements and New Features. Microsoft has an ad preview tool, the ability to set default time zones (this is great), and some other improvements.
Here’s an older post on this site that contains links, resources, and a comparison chart to help understand adCenter as it relates to AdWords.
Q&A Is it OK if a keyword appears twice in an account?
First, let’s define a keyword as a keyword & match type combination. Therefore, “kitchen remodeling” phrase matched is a different keyword than [kitchen remodeling] exact match.
With the above definition, the short answers are:
- The same keyword should not appear twice in a search campaign
- A keyword can appear twice in an account if the keywords do not compete with each other
- The same keyword can appear twice in content campaigns
The same keyword should not appear twice in the same search campaign
Your keyword’s visibility settings are set at the campaign level (day parting, geographic targeting, etc). Therefore, all keywords within the same campaign have the exact same potential visibility. If you have two of the same keyword in two different ad groups within the same campaign, these keywords will compete with each other. Essentially, Google will show the one with the highest Ad Rank (Max CPC x Quality Score) most often. This leads to a loss of control for the advertiser.
For every keyword, you should have in mind an exact ad copy and landing page you wish a searcher to see. If you are not sure which ad copy or landing page is best for any one keyword, then test these items within the ad group.
A keyword can appear twice in an account if the keywords do not compete with each other
It is OK if a keyword is in two different campaigns if those campaigns have different visibility settings. Some of those most common examples are:
- The campaigns are set to be shown in different geographies
- One campaign is content only, another is search only
- One is for desktop users, the other for mobile users
- The campaigns are shown at different times, or on different days
What you do not want is for a keyword to be in two different campaigns if ads from those campaigns could be shown at the same time (which they won’t as only one ad per account will only be shown on one search result).
The same keyword can appear multiple times in content campaigns
For content campaigns, the search engine examines all of the keywords in an ad group and assigns a theme to that ad group. What is more important for an ad group is that all of the keywords create a cohesive theme. Individual keywords do not matter nearly as much. Therefore, it is OK to have the same keyword in multiple ad groups. For instance, you may have these ad groups:
Ad Group 1: iPhone
- iPhone
- iPod
- MP3 Player
- 3g
- wi-fi
- mobile phone
- AT&T
Ad Group 2: Droid
- Android
- Droid
- wi-fi
- mobile phone
- Verizon
In this example, the word wi-fi and mobile phone are in both ad groups. As the other keywords in each ad group help to shape that ad group’s theme, is is OK for those keywords to appear in both ad groups.
Keep Control of Your Ad Display
The search engines are happy to take control of your ad serving. If you use a keyword multiple times in a campaign, especially if you only use broad match, then you will quickly start to lose control of your ad’s display to the search engine. Much of PPC optimization is ensuring that your ad is only shown under specific conditions.
Every time someone conducts a search that matches a keyword in your account, you should control exactly what ad copy and landing page will be seen by the searcher. Only by asserting control over your own account will you find true PPC success.
Latest SEL Column: How To Bid Profitably On Non-converting Keywords
There are many studies that show that using both organic and paid together creates increases in CTR and conversions, even if the ad is not clicked.
However, many of these types of words are early in the buying cycle. It is very hard to monetize keywords early in the buying cycle as often someone is still conducting research before buying. However, that does not mean these keywords are useless. Often consumers will ‘lock-in’ to a site, or find enough information on your site to finishing going through the buying cycle and create a conversion.
However, how do you set bids for keywords that often do not lead to direct conversions; but for ones that you still wish to find some visibility?
You can use a combination of the new goals in Google Analytics (page views per visit and time on site) and the budget optimizer, which tries to maximize the clicks that any one campaign receives.
The two of these in combination with each other allow you to set ‘branding awareness’ or ‘informational campaigns’ to take advantage of these words.
My latest Search Engine Land column walks through the procedure for setting up these campaigns and how to measure them for effectiveness:
How To Bid Profitably On Non-converting Keywords
Should you use Google’s new translation tool for AdWords?
Google announced that your can use their translator service to automatically translate an .aes (AdWords Editor File) into various languages.
Sounds nice?
I’m not so sure. The same words have different meanings in different languages and this scares me a little bit.
Andy Atkins-Krüger wrote a good piece at Search Engine Watch about translation a while ago that is worth reading again before you use the tool without a language specialist to edit the file before your keywords and ads go live.
I spoke on the same panel as Andy at SES San Jose and he definitely knows his linguists. Here’s a good comment from the piece for just English (and it gets crazier past English):
Why doesn’t translating keywords work? Because keywords are the fruit of a language, hanging on the branches of trees that grew and were nurtured in the local climate and are rooted in the local culture. As markers of someone’s intent when they search — they spring from local habits and behaviors that will vary from country to country — or even region to region.
Compare the U.S. and U.K. use of English — the same language. In the U.K., we’re in the habit of saying "holiday" when folks in the U.S. would say "vacation." For "football boots" Americans would say "soccer cleats" (Can someone please tell me what a "cleat" is? Because, as a sailor, I think that’s somewhere you fix a rope to stop it slipping). And as for baseball, well that’s just not cricket.
Here’s the full article on translation.
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