Mike Fleming specializes in Analytics and Paid Search for Pole Position Marketing, a leading search engine optimization and marketing firm helping businesses grow since 1998. Mike enjoys playing, writing and recording music along with playing basketball to get his workout in. He resides in Canton, Ohio with a girl who threw a snowball at him one day…then married him.
Mike and the team at Pole Position are available to help clients expand their online presence and grow their businesses. Contact them via their site or by phone at 866-685-3374.
People that own companies or those in companies that make decisions on how to use a web marketing budget are shown, whether it's their fault or not, too much website data that doesn't directly relate to an impact on the bottom line. What's wrong with this? Only looking at visits and pageviews gives an incomplete story of how a site is truly performing for its customers and the company. So when it's time to decide how to invest, there's nothing concrete that gives confidence in where to put money. To combat this problem, there needs to be a fundamental mindset...
We've talked about what makes a good metric to look at for your business. But, you have to be careful here. There is soooo much data wrapped up in what seems at times like an endless amount of possible metrics that if you are not careful, you will catch yourself wasting your time lost at sea with no idea as to how to get back home where you belong. By "home," I mean those critical metrics that will measure what needs to change at this specific point in time for your online efforts to improve....
Your business is different than everyone else's, so why would you look at the same measurements of success as everyone else? Everyone looks at visitors to their site, but what does that tell you about how your business is doing?...
...the bottom line for magnificent success is the people...invest multiple times more in her or him, or more of them, if you truly want to take action on your data. Otherwise, you are simply data rich and information poor...a great tool in the hands of your reporting squirrel is useless. A free/inexpensive/underpowered tool in the hands of your analysis ninja will yield massive results that impact your bottom line......
...you need to drastically rethink what it means to use data on the web...there is a lot of data, but there are fundamental barriers to making intelligent decisions...because clickstream data is great at the what, but not at the why...it's important to know what happened, but it is even more critical to know why people do the things they do on your site...and the what else, which is perhaps the most underappreciated data on the web...your web analytics tool can report only what it can record...if you marry the what with the why and the what else, you'll have a...
In a typical business, the highest paid person's opinion usually wins. This does not mean that their opinion is always the most informed though. It's just the most powerful. The problem is that it is also the least accountable. But, in the world of the web, there's a new sheriff in town. Data. This is because data (when used correctly) can provide accountability for decisions made....
Your site search data, the phrases your website users type into your internal site search engine, is data that is swimming with insights into helping to make satisfied customers with your web site. If you are someone that is responsible for the performance of a site, this is most likely information that you've never looked at and may have not even known existed. But, you're going to want to become familiar with it because it's about the best place you can go online to learn what your users want. Read the first post in this series for why....
When people come to your site, it can be really hard to know why they are there. The truth is the average conversion rate on e-commerce sites is only around 2-3%...and that's on sites that are specifically built to sell stuff. So, what happens to the other 97%? Why were they there? Did they find what they were looking for? If not, why not? Is the content they are looking for even on your site? If so, are they able to find it easily?...
What I'm about to tell you will totally revolutionize your PPC campaigns and make you A LOT more money. It's simple, but not well known and not widely practiced. Most of your competition isn't doing it. This is why you should be. Really, I should not be telling you this. I should really keep it to myself. Maybe I'll just write about organizing your campaigns or how you shouldn't run search and content ads in the same campaign. Been there, done that. Shoot. Then again, it should be ok. Most of you will follow the principle anyway, so I should...
Until now, the only information a user had on a search results page to decide where to click was the 135 characters in the ads. This led to many advertisers getting away with bad post-click marketing as long as they wrote great ads. Not any more. Advertisers can no longer hide behind the click. Now, users can hover over an ad and see a preview of the landing page with snippets of real text to see how closely it relates to what they're looking for....
Either reporting or looking at reports of your top X whatever rarely leads to insights. Why? They rarely change. Ok, once in a while they do, but for the most part, your top keywords, landing pages, referrers, etc. are going to be basically the same. This is because (for most, not all) what you're offering doesn't change. The problem is that when you look at a report like this, you are looking at static numbers. The key to getting insights from your website is looking at trends, or what's changed. This opens up the doors to asking why things went...
Marketing on the web is demand-driven. Searchers are looking for answers. The best way to dominate the game is to become the best answer to their questions. This is why it's important to do dynamic keyword research instead of static keyword research. It's also why you don't copy and paste the same ads into all of your ad groups talking about yourself and what makes you great....
In an effort to improve relevance on the web, Google is utilizing searcher's relationships. A new button in search results enables signed-in searchers to get recommendations on search results pages and websites from the people they are connected to through their Google profiles. Google is saying it won't affect how quality score is calculated. But, it does affect quality score because if the recommendations improve CTR, then your quality score improves....
Last time, we talked about a revolutionary tool in keyword research called Google Insights for Search that allows you to gain competitive advantages by doing dynamic keyword research instead of static keyword research. Static keyword research is using a keyword tool to get volume "numbers" at one point in time and then using that data to perform long-term marketing campaigns. The problem? Things change. Therefore, we need to incorporate dynamic keyword research to keep our campaigns aligned with what's actually happening on the web....
Google has this tool called Insights for Search. At first glance, it looks like a pretty simple, fairly unsophisticated tool that just tells you if search volume is going up or down for a particular keyword or group of keywords. Not many insights there, right? I mean, all you really have to do for search engine marketing is keyword research with one of the many tools available to you out there and you can easily line up the keywords that you want to go after by search intent and volume, right?...
The latest news to keep you ahead of the competition in managing your paid search advertising......
Sweet. So, let's everybody meet at Outback for an awesome blossom with some extra awesome, right? Not so fast my friend. Let's add a little context to that little observation we made above....
Chad Summerhill wrote a nice post recently about something you should be doing if you manage your own PPC account and something you should be showing your clients if you manage accounts for others - visual statistically significant ad test results by time period. Check out the "how-to" in that post....
Although in beta and only open to VIP advertisers that are invited, Twitter has finally released their ad platform called Promoted Tweets. The general format is that you can use tweets you've created or that have been retweeted by someone else as "ads" that are promoted in certain environments. The way the ads are served are analogous to both search and contextual advertising in AdWords, where you pick keywords that are searched on to have your tweet shown or it is matched to a stream of tweets given the contextual nature that you choose in your account. You pay on...
Last week, we talked about PPC trick #1 to building your online business for the long-term - using keywords correctly. This week, let's talk about another "trick of the trade" that will also help on the way to this goal.As the number of targeting options for PPC increases, so do the creative ways in which you can organize your campaigns to get the maximum effectiveness out of them. As I mentioned last week, for example, you can create a "fishing" campaign and a "bucket" campaign in order to separately control budgeting, bidding and other targeting options to focus your efforts...
In my last post, I shared using a fishing metaphor to talk about stepping your PPC game up to the point where you know how to use it to build your online business for the long haul. So, let's start looking at some of the "tricks of the trade" to do just that....
Apparently, Google is going to start putting Description Line 1 of a typical PPC ad in the headline of the Top 3 ads positions as long as the line ends with a punctuation mark. If they roll this out, it's likely that competition for top position ads will grow and it will also affect ad copy strategies. It is not recommended that you merge the headline and description line as there will be a dash placed between the two in the first line of the ad....
One of the great things about PPC advertising is its immediacy. You can start running ads right now and see almost instantaneous results; whether good, bad or just ok. But, the trap that we don't want to fall into when running our accounts is limiting our thinking just to what can be gained right now. The fact is, PPC is a great way to help build all areas of your online business long-term. And with the continuous expansion of features and avenues being offered in this channel today, the possibilities continue to grow....
There's a lot more leverage in writing and testing great ads than a lot of the activities that PPC managers can spend their time on. For those using AdWords, testing is the answer to almost everything. But, testing works better if you're able to test things that matter. People get caught testing things like switching lines around or replacing colons with semicolons and they end up creating basically similar ads. In this episode of PPC Rockstars, David and Howie explained the coined "Checkmate Method" to their listeners that focuses in on a more intense way to write and test your...
I've started powering through David Szetela and Joe Kerschbaum's new PPC book called Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day and I really like this PDF they made available online to their readers. Although it's about classified ads, you can pull direct correlations to apply to your PPC text ads when advertising on search engines. Really, search engine results pages (SERPs) are just like classified ads except the page is digital instead of paper....
The keyword phrases to use for your PPC account aren't always obvious. A key to great ROI and customer loyalty is to have customers think that you're the only viable solution to their problem at a given time. Therefore, the challenge in keyword research is not coming up with keywords. That's the easy part. You just scan the website and use the product names and there you go...a keyword list.The challenge is in exploiting markets that become successful that competitors may not have thought of. That's why it's important to always be practicing keyword discovery and exploring phrases that might...
Here is an absolutely delightful new little (but really huge!) feature in Google Analytics that should make anyone interested in improving their web business results smile from ear to ear. It's called Weighted Sort.The problem:You want to find out how your keywords are performing for a particular metric, say bounce rate, because you want to improve the relevance of the visitors to your site. You jump into analytics to take a look at the Keyword Report, click on the bounce rate heading to sort bounce rates from worst to best, and you find this......
If you manage a PPC account, you know that for several years now AdWords has had three match types: exact, phrase, and broad. You also know what they mean and how your keywords are matched to search queries. Up until a couple of years ago, broad match meant that the keywords in your phrase were matched to queries that had all of your words in any order. Then, broad match became "expanded broad match" where Google's algorithm was given free reign to decide if search queries were a close enough match in search intent to show your ad. Many of...
If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn't you?), you're always testing. Always. It's the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels. One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc....
Google's Display Network has two types of targeting options. The first, automatic placements, we've talked about already. This is where you create keyword-themed ad groups and Google makes your ads eligible to appear on web pages whose content theme matches the theme of the keywords in your ad group. Now, we'll talk about the second - managed placements....
Now that you've created your keyword-themed ad groups and masterfully rolled out your display ads for those ad groups, your ads are running and collecting impressions, clicks and conversions. The next step is to allow a fair amount of data to collect so that you can then analyze how different sites are performing for you....
Now that you've chosen your keywords to create ad group themes, you want to have ads that will move targeted users from whatever they're doing online to being aware and interested in your product or service. Remember, since the Display Network operates by completely different rules and the users are in a completely different state of mind, the ads should be different than Search Network ads. ...
Man, getting traffic can be so easy.... and dangerous to your bottom line. The truth is, there is an art and science to getting traffic just like any other vocation. It takes skill and knowledge to be successful. So, when it comes to utilizing the Display Network, you need to gather the knowledge that is going to enable you to use the tool correctly to accomplish your goals....
If you are only using the Search Network of Google AdWords to reach customers for your website, you are limiting your online advertising reach big time. On the Search Network, your ads only show when people are looking for what you offer, which is typically in the later stages of the shopping funnel. But, that's a very small sample compared to the number of targeted online users that could benefit from your products or services. With the Display Network option in your AdWords account, you can reach a much larger group of internet users who could receive the benefits of...
First, we took a look at types of ads that you can test and then we look at how to analyze the results of your tests and set up new ones. But, one more thing we must know is when to consider a test complete and ready to be analyzed. If you consider a test complete before you have statistically significant results that prove with great confidence that what you observe is actually true, you may find yourself making conclusions that simply are not. Therefore, you need to know when you have enough data for this to be the case....
OK, so you get this previous post about ad testing and you set up some tests... now what? How do you measure the results? One of the cool features of AdWords is the ability to make a report to observe almost anything about your account. In the case of measuring ad performance, you can create an (that's right, you guessed it) Ad Performance Report. ...
Once a PPC account is set up and running, a good account manager is always looking for ways to improve results to better reach the account's marketing goals. One such way is to test different types of ad messages to gain insights into what attracts your industry's customers to your products/services so that you can better understand and communicate with them....
The guide for what bidding options to use in your PPC campaigns is the same for any other option - your marketing goals. What are you trying to accomplish with this campaign? Once you figure that out, then knowing the options available and which goals that fit well will help you more intelligently reach those goals....
In my last post, we took a look at a good reason for an account manager to make separate campaigns in an AdWords account. If you have a similar product with different profit margins and total profit, then you want to control how much you're spending on each. In this post, we'll explore more of the reasons to separate campaigns....
Most of the PPC accounts I look at do not take advantage of all of the different options that AdWords offers to organize your account for maximum success. Most of them simply organize their campaigns based upon keywords. They'll separate keywords into separate campaigns just because they're different keywords. Or, they'll keep all different kinds of keywords for all different kinds of products with all different kinds of marketing goals in the same campaign. But, AdWords has given us the flexibility to have much more control over how we are spending our money so that every dollar can be maximized....
Once again, we've eliminated more wasted clicks from the mix. Therefore, we should see our conversion rate and cost per conversion metrics in these ad groups improve as we continue to focus on getting only the most relevant visitors to our website and more intelligently spending our precious PPC budget....
There's a big temptation that PPC managers need to stay away from, especially when first building an account. The temptation is assumption. (And yes, we all know what happens when....) If you assume, you can waste a lot of time building out a campaign that you will just have to spend MORE time fixing later....
If you have a PPC account, as you read this you are paying for wasted clicks. Visitors that aren't really interested in what you offer are coming to your website and you're paying for them. Isn't that frustrating to know? The bad news is that the nature of PPC won't enable you to ever totally eliminate this from happening....
What's my favorite keyword research tool out there? Google's? WordTracker? WordStream? Actually, none of them. The best keyword research tool is a broad match keyword in a PPC account. ...
Mike Fleming specializes in Analytics and Paid Search for Pole Position Marketing, a leading search engine optimization and marketing firm helping businesses grow since 1998. Mike enjoys playing, writing and recording music along with playing basketball to get his workout in. He resides in Canton, Ohio with a girl who threw a snowball at him one day…then married him.
Mike and the team at Pole Position are available to help clients expand their online presence and grow their businesses. Contact them via their site or by phone at 866-685-3374.
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