Search Engine Optimisation Advice

Why do online advertising agencies offer pay per click management services? What value is there for the customer and why is it important to seek professional assistance with your google adwords campaign?

Things change
As with everything, things change with time. This is extremely relevant with pay per click campaigns that are setup once and not touched again. When you create a new campaign or ad group you are using keywords that are generating traffic (based on traffic tool estimators) and linking the adverts to pages on your website that are most relevant.

Keywords
Keywords are nearly almost certainly generated through a process of brainstorming and then research to see how much traffic these terms generate. The problem you encounter with an old campaign is that these keywords are not necessarily as important as they once were. Perhaps some of the keywords you originally selected were “buzz” words that at that moment in time were very popular and now they are a distant memory. Perhaps the range of products you have been promoting are now outdated and there is a newer model on the market. Perhaps you quoted prices or figures in your advert text that is no longer valid and out of date.

Website

The majority of websites are living, breathing things that are constantly changing. It is not uncommon to find that major website pages (homepage and main category pages) can have a major overhaul at least once a year. This means that where once your ppc campaign was originally setup with your adverts linking to those highly relevant landing pages on the website it now points to pages which may not be as relevant.

In many cases page layouts and text can been changed to effect the old calls to action that might have once been there. This is a bad place to be; users will lose think that your website does not have what they are looking for and your advertising costs will be higher as a result.

All of these things could be severely impacting the performance your ppc ads, costing you money and losing you business.

Just a quick post to outline that google appear to be having issues with their PPC advertising.

Client have been noticing an extra variable in their url when clicking on paid adverts. This extra variable takes starts with “gclid=” and looks something like “gclid=CIfd2tC1mqACFR88lAodpFKYdw”.

If you are using a .htaccess file to redirect your webpages you may find you will have issues with your redirects when pages are loaded from Google adverts.

As part of my job I talk daily to people who are either just joining the online revolution or are already a member but commonly have something in common… the distrust or dislike of online advertising and promotion.

The main argument that comes back is “I have all the promotion I need for my business, my sales team tell people daily about our website and we have lots of print media out in the marketplace with our website address on it”.

Now this argument could almost seem like a reasonable statement at first glance, but we need to stop and think about what effect traditional advertising and promotion has when used for online purposes.

Established businesses with large sales teams and large print media advertising budgets certainly do tout their online wares quite well through the papers and magazines as well as other forms. Many times I have seen some interesting looking two door vans whizzing around the streets of Dublin with their brand name and website address splashed across the side of the vehicle. But can I honestly say I can name one website I saw off the side of that van, or even what service they provided? No not really. The main reason is that unless I am looking for a person to trim my hedges or power wash my drains at the time those vans advertising those service drove by then I am more than likely going to be a potential customer that slipped through the net.

New technology such as a website cannot be efficiently utilised with old style advertising and promotion techniques. The evolution of the internet has allowed hundreds of millions of people to search for information, products or services in real time from their homes or offices. This introduces the question, why spend money on an advert in a newspaper which may be in only 5% of people’s homes who are looking for that particular product or service when you can advertise online only to people who are actively searching for that product or service right now?

The power to tailor how and when your advert is shown makes a small budget go a long way online than it would through traditional means, usually with a much higher return on investment.

There will always be a place for traditional forms of advertising for online products and services, especially in niche markets but as long as someone can successfully target a product or service to a customer on a shoe string budget and make a profit there will always be a need for online advertising.

Every online and offline business owner is concerned about how to increase profitability. With a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business it is usually very difficult (if not impossible) to judge key statistics beyond how many sales were taken that day. Eg; How many people walked past my shop today? Of those people how many came into my shop? Without this key information it is very hard to determine how well a business stands out in a busy market place.

This is where online business has the advantage. Online advertising such as Google’s pay per click provide key statistics to show any advertiser exactly how many people viewed their advertisement (impressions), how many people clicked to see more information (click through rate) and with conversion tracking you can actually see how many people went on to purchase your product.

With this information it is possible to make changes to your campaign to increase your AdWords conversion rate; however there is a large amount of information that Google AdWords does not provide that is critical to having a fully optimised campaign.

This is where having an analytics (statistics) package can take your business and profit to the next level. By integrating your PPC campaign with Google’s Analytics package you can view data to show you how well your PPC campaign is really performing.

You will now be able to view key information such as how well your landing pages are performing, what times of the day people are most likely to purchase and what region or country does your conversion rate shoot through the ceiling or fall through the floor.

There are many factors beyond the keywords and ad text that go into making a fully optimised pay per click campaign, getting analytics on your side is just the beginning.