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Archive for the ‘ppc’ Category

Mobile Paid Search

Nicholas Pirlis Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Did you know that search is one of the top mobile activities? In today’s Deep Dive Week article, Integrated Media Supervisor Nick Pirlis gives you an introduction to mobile paid search and how you can use it to leverage this important channel for your brand or business. If you’ve found this useful we invite you to share it with your friends or join the conversation on twitter via the hashtag #DeepDiveWeek. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

We’ve all seen the statistics from rising adoption rates of smart phones to the increases in mobile advertising. Some of this information was covered in one of our last deep dive week articles titled “Mobile Search – Are We There Yet?” By now it might be time to assess your current paid search efforts and make some changes. Find out how to make your PPC campaigns mobile-friendly.

Is mobile paid search for you?

If your campaigns are already enabled for ‘iPhones and other mobile devices’ take a look at the percentage of traffic coming through mobile. If 10-20% of traffic is coming from mobile devices you may want to consider segmenting your paid search campaign.
- To figure this out, go to the campaigns tab in AdWords and select ‘Segment’ then by ‘Device’.
Generally mobile paid search works well with lower price point/low-consideration products. Consumers are typically looking for information quickly. Advertising for immediate actions like downloading apps or music, or finding places to eat/drink works well.
You may want to consider the cost vs. benefits if your products are of a higher consideration or longer conversion process. That’s not to say that businesses with these product sets don’t do mobile paid search, you just need to have the proper goals built in.
- Whether the goal is an actual monetary transaction or folded into your current local search strategy, mobile PPC can be an integral and successful component in your overall paid search program.

Setup and Structure

The first step is to create mobile-only campaigns. Take the desired campaigns (or all of them) and make copies denoting these with ‘-mobile’. Then under campaign settings, change the device targeting to ‘iPhone and other mobile devices.’
Now uncheck this setting in your non-mobile versions of the campaigns.
- This will split out campaigns for non-mobile and mobile giving you more options to customize ads as well as tailor landing page experiences.

Opportunities

Now that your campaigns are setup to address mobile specifically, there are a few options to provide searchers with a better user experience. Some of these opportunities synch up directly with items discussed in an article during our last deep dive week around local search.

Click to Call (left)

Phone extensions allow you to place your business phone number as a clickable link within text ads. This is useful when driving consumers to a particular retail store or place of business.

Local Search and Extensions

Since a high volume of mobile search queries are location focused, use extensions to easily show the location of your place of business.
Link to your Google Places page or a Google Maps listing to give searchers easy access to the most pertinent business information.

Mobile Site

Similar to the rationale for segmenting campaigns for mobile specifically, if you’ve noticed a fair amount of site traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s time to make some adjustments for a mobile friendly experience.
Simplify the site, cut down on copy and image clutter. Focus on the most important information a customer might be interested in.
Avoid heavy imagery for faster load times. This goes for flash as well, especially considering flash and iPhones don’t play well together.
Provide clear navigation to things like lead forms and store locators.
If your site has an elaborate lead form, try shortening or cutting down on form requirements to promote completion on mobile devices.

Considerations

Take a look at Google Analytics data to get a good sense of your mobile browsing audience. Use this information when segmenting/targeting your mobile campaigns in AdWords. Google gives you the option to segment by devices and carriers.
- Don’t forget that a user’s mobile experience may differ if they are using a mobile phone or a tablet.
Spend some time optimizing keyword selections.
- Desktop search queries vs. mobile queries vary. Mobile queries also skew high for local results. Along with your own research and organic keyword traffic check out Google’s mobile selection tool for assistance
If you have multiple locations, consider segmenting campaigns to mobile and leveraging geo-targeting. This will provide a super customized experience for mobile searchers.
Ad positioning. If you’ve just let campaigns run on mobile devices without segmentation or optimizing ad positioning, you might be losing out. Bid up and test performance lift. Smaller screen sizes make search real estate even more valuable. You may find that bidding to the top one or two spots can provide considerable performance improvements.
For local businesses think about how local searchers might be finding your place(s) of business as well as your competition
- Take into account the number of competitor listings a search might come across, and how you can differentiate ad copy and the user’s mobile search experience to maximize conversion.
- For example a local pizza shop could display a special, or a bar could show their happy hour specials. Then direct them to your mobile friendly site, places page, or Google maps listing to get directions!

Conclusion

Regardless if we’re actually in the ‘Year of Mobile’ or not, it’s clear that smartphone adoption is on the rise as well as mobile search usage. With a small amount of effort you can easily segment and tailor your target audience’s mobile experience.

Mobile paid search can certainly prove positive for specific KPIs and objectives, but be sure to test and optimize accordingly. Make it easy for searchers to get the information they desire, and test messaging as well as bidding strategies.

Posted in deep dive week, mobile, ppc, search | No Comments »

Google Product Extensions

Mark Barletta Monday, April 18th, 2011

This week we’re kicking off Deep Dive Week – a new monthly blog series where we choose a topic and post about it the entire week. We’re starting the series with Specialty Search and topics will include Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Local Search, Mobile Search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We’ve created a twitter hashtag as well – #DeepDiveWeek – and will be following up next week with a downloadable PDF of the entire week.

We’re very excited to bring this to you and hope you all agree.

Here’s Mark Barletta, Search Marketing Manager, to kick it off with a discussion on Google Product Extensions.

Bob Dylan once sang about how “The Times They Are A-Changin” in 1964. Of course, he was talking about issues such as poverty and social change, but in our marketing industry the title of that song always applies. Things change around us marketers every day, some for the better some for the worse. The one thing constant I’ve found is that when a big change comes Google is almost always behind it, and with that I would like to introduce to you the Google Merchant Center.

What is Google Merchant Center?

Google Merchant Center is a tool which helps you upload your product listings for Google Product Search, Google Product Ads and Google Commerce Search. The advantages of this type of search are to:

Attract more buyers as they can quickly and easily reach your product listings
Submit listings of your products free of charge
Control your product information. With Google Product Search, you can maintain the accuracy and freshness of your product information so your customers find the relevant, current items they’re looking for.

Now what everyone wants to know is how they can make their products or their client’s products stand out in the search market by using the Google Merchant Center.

One way to do this is by using the Google Product Extensions, which is a new feature of Google AdWords that allows you to leverage your existing Google Merchant Center feed to integrate your products directly in your search ads! Google Product Extensions can:

Increase your return on your investment of your current search ads
Work with your already existing ads

Product Extensions give the searchers more information before they click your ad, making them better informed and more prepared to complete a transaction once they get to your site/landing page. It is very important to have a landing page that is relevant to the visitor. The efficiency or quality of your landing page can be measured by the conversion rate.

Examples of Product Extensions Formats

Remember, to make things easier for yourself you can leverage your existing product feed. Product Extensions allow you to use your existing Google Merchant Center product feed to enhance your search ads

No need to add a new feed or manage product listings in two separate places
Accompany the free listings you get from Product Search
Participating in AdWords Product Extensions will not conflict with the free leads you already get from Google Product Search

How do you implement?

You can start out with Product Extensions with only a few clicks. There is no need to create additional campaign/ad groups within your Google AdWords account. Also, you will not have to update your keywords or refresh your ad copy text.

Go to the Ad Extensions tab in the Campaign you want to activate
- Select View Product Extensions
- Click on the create a new extension button
- Connect your Merchant Center account to the campaign and save

Now AdWords will AUTOMATICALLY display products from your product feeds when they are relevant to the search query of the person searching!

Key Takeaways

This new improvement to your Google experience is available to all advertisers
Expect Google to run tests and change formatting to determine what works best for them and for us advertisers
Recommendation: As Google will do, all advertisers should always test!

Tune in tomorrow when Jody Pirrello, VP Technology, talks about structured data, rich snippets and microformats.

If you enjoyed this article and want to stay on top of future Deep Dive Weeks, sign up for our mailing list for more great articles, PDF downloads and other happenings in digital marketing.

Posted in deep dive week, ppc, search | No Comments »

Thanks Google, but no thanks…

Stephen Donlin Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Last week Google announced that they will be standardizing all AdWords display URLs to display in lowercase characters. By standardizing all of the display URLs on within sponsored ads Google is able to improve user metrics, including clickthrough rates. We may not question that standardizing all of the URLs on a page improves click-through rates; however, the question is whose clickthrough rates are improved?

Is Google standardizing URLs so that paid links receive a greater amount of clicks? The answer to that is unclear at this time. In making this change, Google has failed to provide it’s advertisers with the supporting data. From a purely financial standpoint, this makes perfect sense. The more people click on paid links, the more money Google makes. Given Google’s advocacy for being more open sourced, they are very selective on what they are open with.

I believe it should be up to individual advertisers, not Google, to act in the best interest of their brand. Testing the various aspects of your ad copy to improve overall click through rates and conversions is the advertisers job. Google should reward advertisers who test and optimize, rather than implementing blanket changes without divulging supporting data.

Posted in digital marketing, ppc, search | 1 Comment »

How to get the Facebook ‘LIKE’ to do the heavy lifting

Jim DelPizzo Friday, January 21st, 2011

In an early Web Development News, Tips, and Tricks post I showed how to implement the Facebook ‘LIKE’ button. After I implemented this on a couple sites I started doing some more research to understand how my site could take full advantage of the ‘LIKE’ button.

There are a few steps you need to take to fully integrate the ‘LIKE’ button on your site. Facebook uses the Open Graph protocol, enabling you to expose content on your web pages to the social graph. Page selection is important when you consider adding ‘LIKE’ buttons – you should choose to add them to pages with something a person would actually like, e.g. a product, an event, a personal bio, etc.

Along with the ‘LIKE’ button you’ll need to add some “og” meta tags. These “og” meta tags will help you specify structured information about your web pages. The more information you provide in the “og” meta tags, the better your chances are that your page will show up on Facebook.

So let’s look at the example Facebook gives you – a person goes to http://www.imdb.com and clicks the ‘LIKE’ button on the movie “The Rock” (with one of the greatest actors ever, Nicholas Cage). IMDb has implemented the following “og” tags:

As you can see, the “og” meta tags contain several pieces of descriptive information about the movie. Let’s dissect the tags.

The Open Graph protocol defines four required properties:

og:title – The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., “The Rock”.
og:type – The type of your object, e.g., “movie”. See the complete list of supported types in the Facebook Open Graph documentation.
og:image – An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. Facebook supports PNG, JPEG and GIF formats.
og:url – The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/.
og:site_name – A human-readable name for your site, e.g., “IMDb”.
og:description – A one to two sentence description of your page.

When a user clicks the ‘LIKE’ button, the following will show up for all their friends to see:

Once someone likes your page, the image, name, likes, web page, and the number of people who also like it will show up on that user’s profile under the Info tab.

I’ve just reviewed a few of the basic “og” tags – there are close to 50 tags, and growing. You can see all the meta properties you can include on your site by visiting ogp.me .

When building a site or updating a site I recommend adding as many of these meta tags as applicable. Review the list of og tags on Facebook, identify appropriate content, and add the tags to your site.

Why are you doing this extra work? As I reviewed above, when a user likes something Facebook adds that to the user’s wall for all their friends to see. That’s free advertising to their friends! Facebook also displays a user’s likes on their profile page by adding both a link to the page the user likes and a link to the main web site. That’s two links per like. Now if 5,000 people like you that’s 10,000 inbound links.

Facebook also offers per click advertising advertising. As a part of the segmentation and profiling Facebook offers, you can specify groups such as “friends of users who like the Rock” to target your ads to those who are more likely to be interested in your product.

With all the benefits of a ‘LIKE’ button, what are you waiting for? Get working on your “Like” button now!!

Posted in facebook, ppc, SEO, social media, strategy, web dev | No Comments »

Microformats – Big Things Come in Little Packages

Jody Pirrello Friday, April 30th, 2010

Let’s start with the basics.

Microformats (or Rich Snippets, as named by Google) are a way of formatting data that’s both human- and computer-readable.

Put another way, they’re a way of formatting content on your web site for easy reading by both visitors and search engines. It’s like putting meta tags in the open for all to see. Search engines trust it because it’s data you’re showing your visitors and love it because it helps them create more relevant and robust results pages.

a sample search result with map and review

At current writing, there are 9 stable formats, 17 in draft format and a whole bunch in development (see the full list). Some examples include addresses, calendar entries, recipes, reviews and video.

Sample

Here’s a sample hCard entry to specify contact information (name, address, phone, etc).

If you’re familiar with HTML you’ll see that it’s not much additional work to create the address in the hCard format.

<div id=”" class=”vcard”> <a class=”url fn n” href=”http://www.netplusmarketing.com/” _mce_href=”http://www.netplusmarketing.com/”> <span class=”given-name”></span><br /> <span class=”additional-name”></span><br /> <span class=”family-name”></span><br /> </a></p> <div class=”org”>NetPlus</div> <p> <a class=”email” href=”mailto:info@netplusmarketing.com” _mce_href=”mailto:info@netplusmarketing.com”>info@netplusmarketing.com</a></p> <div class=”adr”> <div class=”street-address”>625 W Ridge Pike</div> <p> <span class=”locality”>Conshohocken</span><br /> <span class=”region”>PA</span><br /> <span class=”postal-code”>19428</span><br /> <span class=”country-name”>USA</span> </div> <div class=”tel”>610.897.2380</div> </div> <p>

and here’s how it looks in a browser:

NetPlus
info@netplusmarketing.com
625 W Ridge Pike
Conshohocken , PA , 19428 USA
610.897.2380

By using the hCard microformat I’m telling search engines “Here’s my address” at the same time I’m telling visitors “Here’s my address.” By using the microformat instead of just inserting the address with any old HTML code, search engines know that’s the official NetPlus address and can do special things such as integrate a map in search results and use the address for local search.

Who uses them?

Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Yelp and many others. There are a lot of big players on that list and there are many specialty sites looking for microformatted content as well.

The point is, if you don’t already offer microformats on your site or blog you better plan to add it soon.

How do they impact SEO?

Microformats impact search in several ways:

SERPs – Better visibility on a result page. Make that hard-earned first page placement earn the highest clickthrough it can.
Better data – Microformats tell search engines “here’s some good data for you.”
More access to data – A user can find your address, reviews, and local events all through data you published via a microformat.

Search engines are continually adding new support for microformats. When food network planned their site redesign they included hRecipe before any search engines started using it. This paid off when Google announced its support of recipe microformats earlier this month.

Tools

If you don’t want to mess around with formatting there are several generators available:

And once you have your microformat on your site you can test it with Google’s microformat validator.

Archive for the ‘ppc’ Category

Mobile Paid Search

Google Product Extensions

Thanks Google, but no thanks…

Microformats – Big Things Come in Little Packages

Sample

Who uses them?

How do they impact SEO?

Tools

Further Reading

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