10 Ways to Increase Your PPC Click-Through Rates

10 Ways to Increase Your PPC Click-Through Rates Today - A webinar presentation from WordStream and Hanapin Marketing.

If you directly manage or supervise Paid Search Campaigns, like Google Adwords or Microsoft BING, this presentation on click through rates (CTR) is highly suggested.

We benefit from higher click through rates with more efficient campaigns, lower cost per acquisition (CPA) and higher conversion rates, if thoughtful targeting, organization & structure, keyword selection, negative search terms, and other campaign settings are used to better weed out non-relevant (wasted) clicks and spending.

Presented by Larry Kim (Founder, CTO of Wordstream), Sean Quadlin (Writer and account manager at PPC Hero & Hanapin Marketing), this presentation on "10 Ways to Increase Your PPC Click-Through Rates Today" is well worth watching and learning. You'll be inspired to improve the PPC CTRs for your own campaigns.

 

10 Ways to Increase Your PPC Click-Through Rates Today [WordStream and Hanapin Marketing Webinar] from Internet Marketing Software - WordStream

Google Adwords Scripts

Fred Vallaeys of Top Tier Marketing is a 10 year Google Adwords veteran, including Google's Adword Evangelist, before starting his own company. Fred's presentation at HEROPPC during the "Winning in a Hypercompetitive Market" session today was very informative, sharing how anyone managing Adwords accounts can use a useful tool provided free by Google Adwords to help make campaign adjustments and analysis easier and more automated.

Learn more about Google Adwords Scripts in this video from Google, "Go Bigger, Faster, with Adwords Scripts":



The Adwords Scripts video is nearly one hour long, and is deep on detail, so make sure you have some quality time to view it. You can also visit the Google Developers website to learn more: https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/.

Access and use complete Adword scripts from Google: https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/docs/examples/complete-scripts

How to Promote Your Website On a Limited Budget

Earlier I focused on how to promote your website using free tactics and tools. Free was fun. Now we're looking at Paid Promotion... paying for great cost-effective results is fun. Paying for poor results is not fun at all, don't let that happen to you!

This follow-up blog will list effective tactics you should try when promoting your website and you have pending money... there are a many things you can do to promote your website, even on a limited budget! Careful planning can vastly increase a website's audience exposure and visitor rates with little additional investment.

1. Stationary, Business Cards, Fliers, Brochures:
Putting your website address on these items adds zero cost to your budget, or small marginal costs if you want the address to pop with a special color. If you are investing in the usual printed materials that go with a business, make sure your website is included on all of them. Anything printed on paper that includes your business name and contact details should have your website listed! Prospective customers will visit your site and generate valuable business leads because your website was printed on something.

2. Promotional Giveaways, Signage, Advertisements:
Again, little or no additional cost is involved in adding your website to these promotional tools. You're already paying for a sign or giveaways, add your website so that people can learn more about your business and convert to leads.

3. Live LARGE with Budgeted Adwords Campaigns:
Think online paid-search advertisements are expensive, hard to measure and for the big boys? Then you would be wrong! Google Adwords is one of the most measureable and cost effective for-pay advertising mediums in the known universe. You can control how much you spend, and where and when you spend it. The biggest challenge is to learn using Adword Text Ads to best advantage for your business, including ad and search term optimization and use of negative search terms. If you want to advertise your local business in your metro area only between 2 PM and 10 PM Monday to Friday.... and spend a maximum of 4 cents a click at 3 dollars a day, you can do it! If you want to cover a state, province or entire country on Saturdays in Spanish only... you can do that too. With Adsense, you can even partially segment your market by gender and age group.

4. Print Ads, Radio Ads, TV ads, Direct Mailers:

If you run ads anywhere for any reason... make sure your website is listed or mentioned. Without the web address, you risk losing many business generation opportunities. This as important as listing a phone number.

5. Your Email Signature:
It is amazing how many people don't take advantage of this simple and free option on your email. List your website at the bottom of your emails, along with your phone number, fax, twitter etc. Costs nothing and again you encourage people to click on the link to your site.

6. Press Releases and Email Campaigns:
Press releases and email campaigns can be expensive or cheap depending upon which service you use and how broad you want the PR or campaign distributed. But what gives the press release and email enduring value is to make sure you have not only a link to the homepage but also a link to an appropriate landing page that focuses on the service or news your press release was targeting. If you also load a modified version of the PR or email newsletter into your website you'll have an excellent webpage that can increase your Search Engine results for years. So while you usually have to pay for a decent press release service and the initial email campaign, you can take steps to extract value many times over the original cost.

You can enjoy first-class lead generation results on an economy budget if you get your website promoted well. Watch the spending and focus on value-for-money... you can produce ROI results that will dwarf any investments you made in your initial campaign, promotional, advertising and stationary investments. Just remember to always include your website!

Negative is Positive with Google Adwords

I am called many things, but being negative is usually not one of them. However, when it comes to managing Google Adwords campaigns, I am proud to wallow in negativity!

Using "Negative Keywords" can greatly filter out and reduce wasted clicks on your Adword campaigns, lessen the chance of confused (irrelevant) visitors and help your overall campaign costs, conversion rates and cost-per-conversion. They also help reduce the load on enquiry centers handling the enquiries. I am a big fan of the aggressive use of intelligently selected negative keywords.

Adding negative keywords and search terms is rather easy... you can add them manually and/or, (strongly advised) research the term first with the Google Keyword Tool. You'll be amazed at the sheer number of similar search terms entered by people which have no relevance or value to your B2B campaigns.

An example of a negative term is one related to a desired search term, for example, 'Chemical Lab'. I want people who need professional B2B chemical analysis services. I don't want people looking for a 'Lab' as in 'Labrador Retreiver', or a 'Lab' puppy. So -dog, -dogs, -puppy, -puppies, etc, all go negative for this campaign. This is a simple task with the Keyword tool. For us, other great related negative terms include '-job', '-jobs', '-drug lab' etc. Filter the worthless search terms as much as you can.

I have quite a few campaigns where my negative terms outnumber my positive search terms... and these campaigns greatly benefit from this strong filtering. Conversion rates jump, costs slump. Very positive results from going negative.

Caution: Negative Search Terms and Names can have a very powerful filtering impact, and if you are not careful, unintended consequences can hurt your campaign. For example, if I had used 'lab puppy' as a broad negative search term, I could be filtering out other desirable 'lab' related searches. Going negative for [lab puppy] is better. Using only 'puppy', a very specific one word negative search term, is the least risky of all. I try to keep my negative search terms to one word each. Keep this possibility in mind when adding negative phrases or word combinations.

I use negative keyword terms in B2B campaigns across global business streams, niches, regions and languages, a 24/7 operation. Going negative helped reduce my spend on poor quality clicks and sparked higher conversion rates. If you're not using negative search terms yet, you're likely wasting money and time, which is never a good situation.

Embrace Your Negative Side When Managing Paid Search Campaigns.

Increase Adword Conversions and Reduce Adword Spend, Take One

I received a good Paid Search question from a SEM marketer in LinkedIn recently:

"We use Google Adwords, about $X000 a month I think and most of our conversions are unqualified leads. We have tried different campaigns, keywords and a competitive approach, but nothing seems to work too well. Any advice?"

I use Google Adwords for driving in B2B enquiries, it is an important part of our web lead generation efforts along with Organic Search (our top priority). I use Adwords across the world for key global markets and languages. I manage these large campaigns on a daily basis, because trends and news across the world can change and drive new business opportunities.

Last year I concluded that we should attempt to raise our Conversion Rates (already considered 'good' by Google) and lower the cost-per-conversion (already low) and reduce overall Adword Spend. The goal was to squeeze even more efficiency out of every Adwords dollar I spend.

I acheived this result by Optimizing Search Terms and Filtering, Filtering and Filtering.

Before diving into Adwords tactics and strategies, the content on your landing page must be optimized first and foremost.... landing page content should be focused, concise and precise. Let the visitor know exactly what you offer, the benefits, and include a call to action. This greatly helps filter out low-quality visitors not relevant to your business.

Since last summer, I reduced Adword spend by over 50% and increased conversion rates by over 100%, and cut cost-per-conversion significantly. This took time and attention, coupled with a good understanding of target markets.

To find good search terms, the Adwords Keyword Tool is a great source. Looking for long-tail niche terms is like looking for gold nuggets... worth the effort. Great search-terms can also be found in your Analytics and from you Customers and Busines Development reps.

Extremely important in helping filter out casual or confused Adword clicks is an aggressive use of Negative Search Terms. Heavy use of negative keywords helps to greatly reduce the number of unwanted clicks from casual or confused visitors.

Use of Phrase "keyword" and Exact [keyword] search terms also helps focus and filter how and when your ad will show.

Using the Adword Geography and Time Scheduling features is very important to help reduce low quality clicks. If you don't want to show ads in a particular Nation or State, make sure your settings are correct. If you don't want to show ads between 11 PM and 5 AM in Texas, make sure this is covered.

Your Price per click settings and Budget settings are also important. This helps determine ad rankings, and Ad rankings help determine the number of people who click the ad.

Ad Ranking is very important. Many ads I run are at the number 2, 3, 4 or lower positions, and I am very happy.

Why? Because I only want the Qualified Visitor... someone who is motivated or interested in doing business with my company. I don't want casual visitors who click the number one ranked ad out of curiosity or confusion... those can be wasted clicks that hurt Conversion results and raise cost.

My efforts resulted in a much higher conversion rates and significant reduction in spending. And yet... one can go too far in this process. At some point focus can be so tight that good potential enquiries from people who use a low-quality search term can be lost. I am considering this challenge... so I may engineer a reduction in conversions to widen the Adwords Campaign focus for certain niche campaigns. Running large and successful Adwords campaigns is not unlike being an active Stock Trader... daily attention is required in a dynamic market for Search Terms.

Erik Holladay

Google Adwords Professional

Global Marketing Director