Nearly a third of all consumers carry out research about the product they’re interested in on their mobile while they are in store. Imagine the impact of this on paid search.
This data was compiled by Google after studying user mobile behaviour across the globe. The research also reported that 79% of all users who watched a video ad looked up more information.
How this affects paid search on different devices
Considering user behaviour, it is recommended to create separate campaigns for mobile, tablet and desktop, and customise your campaigns to provide most appropriate content.
Notice the role of various channels in the purchase funnel. Paid search and display play a major role in decision making. The following recommendations are based on the discussed report.
- Target desktop, tablet and mobile customers separately by creating uniquely targeted campaigns
- Use mobile campaigns to promote action and desktop campaigns to form opinion
- Use videos in your landing pages to increase conversion
- Focus on people below 35 for better ROI
- Focus on non-branded keywords. Users typing branded keywords are more likely to have chosen the brand, whereas the ones using non-branded queries are more likely to be better prospects
Rick Tobin | Managing Director | Circus PPC Agency
HOW TO REDUCE PPC WASTE
If your landing page has a bounce rate of 50% and you spend £10,000 on AdWords every month, it means £5,000 of your budget is wasted.
Creating an effective landing page is an art. With an endless number of variations and combinations available, the million dollar question is how do you know which one to use without trying all the possibilities.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of traffic that leaves your website without visiting any other pages or without ‘engaging’ with it. A high bounce rate means one of the two things:
- Your landing page is attracting the wrong traffic
- Your landing page is attracting just the right traffic so they don’t need to go elsewhere on the website.
More often than not it’s the former, which means either your landing page is attracting the wrong traffic or your website content is not engaging enough for the visitors. Most landing page optimisation therefore includes:
- Analysing your bounce rate
- Analysing your content
Bounce rate
- Google Analytics. The most important statistic to look at is the bounce rate. Generally speaking, bounce under 30% is considered good and anything under 50% is acceptable. If your bounce rate exceeds 50% then you should be worried about it. In paid search what that effectively means is that 50% of your advertising costs is being wasted and you should be worried about it.
- Drill deeper and see if there exists a difference in the bounce rate between your organic traffic and paid search traffic. If the paid search bounce rate exceeds the organic traffic bounce rate then you should be looking into your targeting options including keyword selection, match type, geo targeting, etc. If it’s the other way round then your paid search campaign is doing really well.
- Go through the search term report for a particular period and identify keywords that are driving junk traffic to your website. It’s important that these keywords are dealt with appropriately.
- Integrate Google Analytics with AdWords and download keyword reports with bounce rate. Set a threshold and divide the data in groups of two or three and see if a difference exists in those sets of keywords. Qualitative analysis is hard work but pays off.
Content
- For content you should first be looking at the engagement matrices on your website. These matrices include pages visited and visit duration. A good ratio of these matrices together with high bounce rate suggests that relevant visitors do engage with the website pushing the stats and that the website is getting a lot of junk traffic.
- If all of these matrices appear poor, then chances are you need to work on your content.
- Look at the ‘in page analytics’ under ‘behaviour’ to understand and analyse your content. It will help you understand popular and lesser popular content. You should try moving popular content on to your homepage/landing page to reduce bounce rate.
If your SEO is driving a lot of junk traffic to your website it’s time you had a word with your SEO specialist. Here are two quick tips to help you identify the real problem.
- Explore search query report from Webmaster tools to see if you really want to rank for these search queries.
- Visit ‘content keywords’ in Google Index to see a report of what keywords Google associates with your website.
Reducing bounce rate, improving landing pages and increasing website engagement are all closely knit together. It is often difficult to manipulate one metric without affecting another, but I hope these tips will help you improve your ROI and reduce waste.
Rick Tobin | Managing Director | Circus PPC Agency
The Big Question – Outsourcing PPC to an Agency
How important is it for someone to know PPC? Let’s say how important is it for your driver to know driving?
Most business owners I have met are skilled and/or talented enthusiasts who have converted their passion or idea into successful businesses. If your company sells leather bags, the one who set it up is likely to have known how to build leather bags rather than how to sell it. This is where you need people who are experts in marketing/psychology. Let’s say you hire somebody in marketing. You can tell how well or not he is doing by looking at the sales figures. But let’s say you hire somebody to build your website. How do you know if he has done a good job or not? How do you react when your techie friend says to you, ‘how on earth can you have a webpage without meta tags? And why aren’t you collecting people’s first and last names separately?’ (Coz it helps in sending personalised emails to your customers). How do you know how to react? You are dead confused right? When you start getting conflicting information from experts on a subject you don’t have clue you sometimes find it better to withdraw because you aren’t sure of what you are doing.
Let’s look at some of the challenges of getting somebody in house. First you need resources to interview candidates. Second you don’t know how much a person actually knows about PPC. In agency, there hardly goes a day when we don’t seek any external help on our accounts. A person working alone on a PPC account is likely to have nobody to consult if required. But let’s say you have sorted everything out. Here is your big question.
An outside agency is going to charge you £300-£1000 minimum management fee where as a good PPC expert will claim a salary of at least £2000 per month + taxes. Unless your budget exceeds £30000 / month hiring somebody in house is likely to be more expensive.
In addition to this, if the hire turns out to be a bad hire, then it will become difficult for you to lay him off. In some cases, because you don’t understand PPC yourself you might even find out how well or not he is doing.
You might be surprised at this question and thinking, ‘well it’s simple. Higher the ROI, better his performance. Umm… unfortunately it doesn’t always work like that in PPC. While ROI is the most important matric we consider after any marketing channel there are several other things you can do with PPC. You can use PPC to build awareness, to conduct market research, to test your offline marketing tagline, test website domains and several others. An in house PPC manager is likely to find him overburdened with the variety of jobs he has to deal with.
Not as easy ..ummmm. What do you do?
Even if you outsource it how do you know if the agency is doing a great job? Well the difference is that agencies are better placed in PPC management because of the work environment and contacts. You are not sure about your agency? You can change your mind in 24 hours and terminate the relationship. Try somebody else. Can you do the same if your hire goes bad?
Another concern with PPC is that what works today might not work 6 months down the line. What if this dynamically changing industry is overpopulated by your competitors who are all in the race to beat competition? What if no matter what you do getting a positive ROI proves impossible?
Ask yourself ‘how heavily does your business rely on PPC?’ Say you have been running PPC for the last 5 years and have a very promising account history. You have been spending loads of money with agency or have had problems communicating with the agency?
Let’s keep it simple.
• Do you pay an agency more than what you’ll have to pay to a new hire?
• Do you have resources in house to monitor PPC expert’s performance?
• Are you well prepared to redeploy if the project fails?
If the answer to these three questions is yes then it’s safer for you to consider taking PPC in house.
If not,
Research the company well before you outsource it. Although an in house resource will be much better placed to understand your business, companies that specialise in your industry sector are better at understanding your business. In some cases, in fact, they might be better as they also have access to industry level ROI data which perhaps you don’t. Do you know what your competitors are spending or what their ROI is? Although any agency is unlikely to share this information with you, they can however use this knowledge to advise you on how well or not your business is doing.
Here is what most successful companies do. Get a resource in-house who understands PPC and can translate your business objectives into PPC targets and work with agencies to shape up your goals. While an in house PPC expert will know your business he would not be burdened with bulky, complex accounts. Working with an agency will get you best access to updates latest resources and the in house PPC manager can be deployed for other jobs as well. If the account performance dips you can always use your PPC manager’s knowledge to know what went wrong. You have the freedom to switch agencies whenever you want and you have somebody who understands what’s going on with your account!
Good Luck!
The Big Facebook Fraud
If you haven’t had much luck buying likes from Facebook (either through a third party or through Facebook itself),
have a look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
weve been running likes campaigns for some of our clients on facebook and getting very low interaction, we believe that facebook are faking clicks and likes to generate revenue. watch the video for more information..
The guys at veritasium and the BBC have done some research into buying likes from facebook and the outcome – don’t.. facebook seem to be spending your money via click farms, fake profiles etc.. and we can corroborate many of the points made.
6 acquisition channels in online retail
Acquisition is the interface that brings people to your website. There are five commonly known acquisition channels in online retail: direct search, organic search, paid search, email, affiliate and social. Below is a brief overview of these channels.
Direct:
When a user types the name of your company on the web browser or a search engine and lands on your website it is known as direct acquisition. A high percentage of direct acquisition denotes good brand awareness and loyalty. Statistics maintain that this channel usually has the best conversion rate as people following this channel are likely to be towards the bottom of the purchase funnel. It indicates trust, awareness and intent to buy. This performance appears to be somewhat consistent across most online businesses.
Considering the competitiveness of the retail sector most companies find themselves struggling with volume. Direct channel is more common with existing customers and is usually associated with low cost and high ROI. This channel witnesses the best customer base and a low acquisition rate may indicate need for branding.
Organic
When a user clicks on your website appearing in the search results section of the search engine it is known as organic acquisition. While direct searches indicate a high brand awareness, ranking up in search engines instils reliability and trust.
The biggest advantage of a good organic search listing is that you don’t have to pay for clicks. This usually results in a good ROI (return on investment). However considering the competition and resources you have raking high up in search engines may not be easy. SEO may include things like generating backlinks, directory listing, fixing tag errors on the website, buying links and most challenging of all, producing good quality original content.
One of the main drawbacks of SEO is the time lag in ROI. If you started SEO today it might take up to 6 months before you see any positive returns. Also most companies find it challenging to measure the ROI from SEO. This is because you might end up spending £2000 every month on it and wouldn’t know how much of it has actually brought what amount of traffic on your website.
Pay per Click
It may not be possible for all companies to get to the top of the organic search listings. Companies who are looking for a quicker option and want some degree of control over ROI might find paid search interesting. You bid for positions on certain variations of search phrases and pay each time somebody clicks on it. However simple it may sound paid search can be very tricky to get ROI from. Working with a good paid search agency or hiring an expert can help you exercise better control over your ROI.
Email
Some companies like Groupon have built their entire marketing strategy around email marketing. Email marketing earns you free traffic however does come with certain challenges of its own. The biggest challenge in email marketing is creating an effecting emailing list. This can be tricky depending on how your website is structured and how your customers perceive you. Building a comprehensive email marketing list can take months and conversion rate is usually lower than other marketing channels. There are email marketing applications such as http://mailchimp.com/ that can help you collect and send emails. However it is also important to understand how your purchase funnel works and how your email marketing can contribute to it.
Affiliate: This is also known as referrals and refers to paying other websites to bring traffic or conversion to your website. Again, building a comprehensive affiliate network takes time. There are websites like http://www.paidonresults.com/ that can help you grow your affiliate network.
Social
Many companies now days seem concerned with their social media marketing. To get best out of this channel it is important to understand how it works and how it should be used. It is important to remember that social media is a place to ‘tell’ and not ‘sell’. Therefore if your social media campaign does not drive direct sales you need not panic as this is not what it is usually expected to do. Social media is a place to tell your story to your prospects. Social media marketing is a highly creative field and can very tricky for businesses.
Of the above channels discussed SEO and PPC form the majority of most acquisitions. Direct acquisition is usually a consequence of good brand presence. Generally speaking, email, affiliate and social marketing only resort to a small percent of online sales. Creating a sustainable acquisition strategy depends on building a strong understanding of how various marketing channels work together to push a customer down the purchase funnel. It is perfectly possible for companies to build their entire marketing on some of the lesser known channels however such occurrences are rare.
Paid Search mistakes – Education Industry, UK
‘If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree you will spend your entire life believing that it is stupid’ – Albert Einstein
When planning a campaign it is important to be clear on what you’d expect from it. Several paid search campaigns fail to meet managers’ expectations and are considered inefficient. Most managers consider this a campaign failure and reduce funds or terminate the campaign altogether. But is this always a systemic failure or a case of wrong expectation setting?
The end goal of most education campaigns is to generate as many leads as possible. Most paid search campaigns resonate this goal, by using keywords and ad copy to target people who are most likely to convert. What most businesses fail to acknowledge is the process people follow in getting to the conversion stage, and the role paid search plays in that process.
It is widely acknowledged that a customer goes through four major stages; awareness, consideration, intent and then to conversion. It’s then realistic for a customer, in some cases to go through all four stages in just a few seconds or over the course of several weeks, depending on the product type and user behaviour. Many paid search campaigns usually aim at generating leads. While that may be the end goal of every campaign the contributions of every channel can be different. Take a look at the purchase funnel from Google below:
The above funnel reflects the role of paid search in the education sector particularly in the context of the UK. This study shows that paid search is mostly effective in either driving intent or causing people to see your products/services as a potential solution to their problem(s). This data is significantly different from the education market in France where paid search is most effective in building awareness. In Canada paid search plays an important role in building opinion as opposed to Brazil where it is known to influence the buying decisions of customers.
So how does this fit in with your paid search strategy?
If operating in UK, you are likely to get better results by using paid search to drive intent and measure the impact through other channels.
Based on the facts here are some recommendations which might help improve your ROI.
Use paid search to drive intent.
Remarketing with display network can be set to generate leads as the study shows that display network performs really well in shaping decisions.
Measuring the ROI of paid search just by looking at raw stats may not be sufficient. Run a paid search campaign and see if it shows a difference in ROI through multiple channels. This is a long process and may take weeks if not months to gather results.
You can prepare this report for your website as well. Speak to your paid search specialist to see how a customised report can help you build a sustainable competitive strategy over time.
How PPC Agencies Bid?
Setting the right bid is one of the most crucial aspects of your PPC strategy. Let’s look at some of the dynamics involved in bidding style used by PPC agencies.
Bidding can be set at ad group and keyword (optional) level. The bids you set depend on what you expect from that ad group. Let’s look at some of the desired outcomes and corresponding bidding strategies.
Branding: If the campaign/ad group is bidding on your own brand terms then it is generally considered important for your advert to appear at the top. Usually bidding for the top position is expensive. However when you bid on your own brand terms it is likely to be much lower than your other bids. For example, if you need to bid £2.00 for your products campaign to be on top, you’ll only be paying £0.50 for the top position for your own brand.
When setting bids for your brand terms it is important that your bids are enough to place it on the top of the page.
Products campaign: This is the campaign that drives sales / leads to your website. Attaining and maintaining a good ROI is the key here. Here are some key bidding tips for these campaigns.
Work out your CPA. Work out the maximum amount you can pay for an acquisition without incurring loss. Be extremely careful if pushing the bids beyond your max CPA as this may have adverse affects on your ROI.
Ignore first page bid estimate: I know so many people who are obsessed with the first page bid estimates. However as a PPC agency we hardly pay any heed to Google’s suggestions. It’s ok to go through this estimate to see how expensive your bids are, however it is not advisable to take this too seriously while setting your bids.
Bid setting:
Theoretically speaking there are two different bidding methods:
The first one starts with setting low bids with periodic increments until volume and profitability is achieved. You then build volume by adding more keywords. This works by setting a low bid and waiting 24 hours to see if it has incurred any impressions or clicks and raising or decreasing the bids further based on results. The bids are usually set well below first page estimates. Although this appears to be a safe strategy for PPC agencies however the turnaround time can be slow while waiting for volume.
The other popular strategy used by PPC agencies is to start off with a decently acceptable bid. It is difficult to quote a figure here because of the range of websites and competition. Usually this is somewhere between the first page bid estimate and the top page bid estimate. In some cases, if the CPA allows this may even be more than top page bid estimate (which is not risky as you don’t always pay all that you bid). This helps quickly get some volume and data on the account. If you use this strategy it is recommended to set a daily budget cap to averse risk.
Check back your account in 24 hours and make note of the campaigns and ad group’s performance. See how the bids performed. When you have some data try altering the bids (raising or decreasing) to suit your requirements. If the bids are too high (getting a lot of junk traffic and less conversion), reduce it. If it’s too little, you might want to wait or increase it.
What bidding strategy you use is based on the budget and the project requirements. Most PPC agencies use a combination of both depending on client’s requirements. Usually with old and familiar accounts or in familiar industry sectors we know from experience what bidding strategy to use. Getting to understand how your account responds to specific bids takes time and continuous analysis.
Quick Tip: Don’t change your bids too frequently. It is advisable to wait for 24 hours to see how your bids have performed before making any further changes.
When leads matter – B2B, UK
B2B marketing can be rather tricky for marketers depending on the nature and size of their customers. Their real customers (decision makers) are usually hidden below a few layers of coating and reaching them can be rather daunting at times. What can be even more frustrating when the person you are dealing with is not the decision maker and your deal is stuck in the middle of nowhere.
Below is a proposed strategy on how to get your word out to those who matter.
Start off with creating good quality content that adds some value to the readers. Avoid writing too much about your own company and abilities. People are more interested in things they find relevant and useful.
Market the content using Paid Search. Try exploring LinkedIn advertising to target the industry sector, business groups that will connect to your business.
Use lead generation software such as a1webstats to capture details of companies that visit your website.
Prepare a list of companies that have shown interest in your product and approach them with display advertising (through remarketing).
Speak to your paid search consultant to try this out or feel free to speak to us with any questions you may have.
Facebook acquires Whatsapp – How does it affect you
So why would Facebook chose to pay $19B for a company that was valued between $2B – $4B only a few days ago. The answers are not too difficult to gaze. Whatsapp falls directly within the purview of Facebook’s mission statement, i.e. to make content sharing easier for people. Furthermore acquiring Whatsapp also abates the possibility of a potential competitor buying Whatsapp and using its unique user data to challenge Facebook in future.
How does it impact you as a user?
Facebook has denied all possibilities of introducing adverts on Whatsapp to make more money. According to Facebook, Whatsapp is already profitable with over 450 million users and with subscription plans in place there seems to be no need for adverts. So if every user paid $1.00 per year, Whatsapp would end up making $450 million every year with its current user base. If this grows to a billion over the next year, Whatsapp would be a churning a $1B every year. So does this mean it won’t have any effect on adverts? Not very long ago Facebook was accused of scanning people’ private chat messages and sharing the data with advertisers to customise their ad content (BBC 2014). Imagine if Facebook now has access to all your street messages and late night chat. So if you discussed your holiday plans to Spain with your mate on Whatsapp, be prepared to see some adverts promising you best deals in Costa Brava. Sounds bizarre? Try making a mistake on MS Word and see how you are corrected. With new technology in place it might be perfectly viable for these tech giants to scan people’s messages, make sense of the conversation and customise their ad content.
How does it affect you as an advertiser?
Really well. More the information, better your ad targeting works. With the advent of real time bidding (where advertisers can bid when a user is interested (not necessarily looking) for something as opposed to advertising on probable content or keyword) this could help Facebook enhance its RTB experience for advertisers. This can help you target your adverts more effectively, minimise waste and maximise ROI.
Lastly, how does it affect Facebook?
Facebook will gain from getting insights on how and why Whatsapp users have a higher engagement than Facebook on mobiles. This data can be used to improve Facebook’s mobile experience for its users. As better ad targeting enriches advertisers ROI they would be enticed to spend more and more on Facebook until their ROI falls. This in turn is likely to increase Facebook’ revenue and grow the company further.
Should you care?
It depends on how fussed you are about your personal information being used for commercial gains and customise your content. Just like it helps your local hairdresser to customise its services for you without knowing your name, customised advertisements can be conducive to an enriching search experience without sharing your personal details.
Ref:
BBC 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25584286
Using PPC to influence your buyers
Travel – Global
Those who work in the travel industry know how unique it is. Travel is considered one of the highly sensitive markets owing to its susceptibility to economic turmoil. No wonder it was one of the worst hit sectors during the recent recession. To understand how to influence your buyers in this sector it is important to understand the different types of travel. Below is a classification of travel based on intention and not medium.
Business – Standard business trips
Leisure – Holidays and personal trips
As per Google reports in 2013, leisure travellers are more likely to look online for travel inspiration and love to stay connected with friends and family while away. They are also 42% more likely to use their smartphone to get travel related information. Business travellers on the other hand like to focus on brand sites and prefer price and convenience.
The above data provides useful insights on how your business offering can influence your paid search strategy. If your business offers leisure travel then you are likely to get better results through advertising on search engines. However if you offer more business than leisure travel then you are likely to get better results on other travel websites using display advertising.
How does this affect keyword selection?
For leisure it’s therefore recommended to use non-branded keywords. At the same time, targeting branded keywords such as names of particular hotels or brands is likely to work better for business travel campaigns.