Travel is a highly volatile and competitive industry. While it enjoys the breeze of holidays it also bears the wrath of recession. To keep customers drawn to your website it is important for your customers to believe that they are getting the best deal. Most websites do this by advertising offers.
Offering offers is not that easy. Advertising the right offer can make a considerable difference to your sales volume. Also how do you decide if offering £10 off £200 spend is better than 10% flat discount? Difficult, eh?
Here is a way to test your offers.
Create different sets of ad copies with different offers.
Use Ad Rotation to rotate ads evenly
Notice the difference in CTR for different ad copies
Check the conversion and other matrices for that ad copy
Now this should make it easier for you to pick and choose the offer you want to advertise to your customers. Notice that a good CTR does not necessarily constitute a good ad. It is important that you continue the measuring other matrices further. In fact the most important matric to consider is ROI (Return on Investment). Once you have the data you will be much better placed to make marketing decisions about your company.
PPC & Content Marketing
“What? I thought Paid search was the exact opposite of content marketing! “
If you agree with the above statement then this post is my belated Valentine’s gift for you.
You are right. Generally speaking paid search and content are considered as two different marketing channels. While paid search campaigns usually contain offers, promotions, call to action phrases, all aimed at attracting the traffic which is most likely to convert, content marketing focuses on attracting prospective customers by delivering useful content.
To better understand the concepts of how and where channels are mostly used, take a look at the purchase funnel at the bottom of the section.
Generally speaking most paid search campaigns focus on the customers at the bottom of the purchase funnel. Including offers and call to action phrases are therefore likely to get better results. However consider this: a person typing ‘insurance quotes’ on search engine could be anywhere within the purchase funnel. If your ad copy and landing page are customised to customers at the bottom of the funnel, you are likely to encounter high bounce rates and low conversions.
What content marketing does is try and capture people at the top of the purchase funnel. Creating useful articles on insurance policies or providing insights on insurance’ benefits help companies raise awareness and good website experience can help push people further down the funnel.
The challenge faced by most businesses here is: how to market to people on the top of the purchase funnel. The most widely used channels here are print media, television, radio, newsletters, press releases, social media etc. What people often miss out on is the use of paid search in content marketing.
Strategy
Based on the above discussion we can now lay down a strategy using paid search to deliver our content. If we were to focus on customers in the ‘consideration’ stage our paid search strategy would look something like this:
Keywords like Buy insurance quote could change to Compare insurance quotes
Ad copies like Get quote now! could change to Compare quotes now
Landing page containing Conversion form could now focus on Product comparison
Benefits
• Lower Costs: The closer a customer gets to the bottom of the funnel the more valuable he gets. This raises the CPA (Cost per Acquisition) and CPC (Cost per Click) at this stage. Focusing on customers further up is usually less expensive for businesses.
• Increased Conversions: A customer who has known your brand from the start of the purchase funnel is more likely to buy from you. Imagine if a customer encounters your brand for the first time when he is at the purchase stage. Here, unfamiliarity might prevent him from buying your products.
• Branding: For companies wanting to invest in branding paid search provides an excellent opportunity to use their content to expose their brand to the right audience and create a long lasting effect.
• Building Trust: Sharing knowledge as opposed to selling also helps build trust for your brand.
Challenges
The biggest challenge in this strategy is choosing the right or most effective content for your customers and tracking your traffic flow. I shall be addressing these issues in my next blog. Until then, I wish you happy online advertising!
B2B ONLINE MARKETING REPORT
Our friends at Optify have recently compiled a report into Online Marketing in the B2B world. The report (attached) looks at which sources drive the most traffic and where the quality sales traffic comes from.
The report shows that organic and social are driving most of the traffic (organic is on-going as social is becoming increasingly important) but PPC is playing a huge role in driving the quality, lead generation traffic.
The report also tells us how many B2B businesses have stopped using PPC as a mechanism to drive traffic. This begs the question as to how many have simply been miss-managed? Businesses using a quality, reputable and honest PPC agency like Circus would be getting the right results.
So, here’s what we took away from the report. Use social media to generate interest based traffic, use Twitter, don’t forget email marketing, and CERTAINLY use PPC. If you’re a B2B business and have unsuccessfully tried PPC before then give us a call today and we can show you exactly how it should be done.
Optify-2012-B2B-Marketing-Benchmark-Report
Rick Tobin | Manging Director | Circus PPC Agency
The 4 Ad Delivery Methods
Google AdWords allows advertisers to choose form 4 different ad delivery methods:
Optimise for Clicks: Optimise for clicks allows Google to take control over which ads are shown when. Generally speaking this lets Google match best ads with specific keywords and shows the ones that are more likely to be clicked.
Optimise for conversions: This option lets Google to show ads which have converted well in the past or are more likely are convert in future. This option is only available if your conversion tracking is working.
Rotate evenly: This option tells Google to show all the ads evenly. This strategy can be effective in testing ad copies against each other to see which ones perform better than others. It lets Google rotate your ads evenly and optimise after 90 days.
Rotate Indefinitely: This option involves showing poor performing ads more evenly than the rest. This is not a very popular option is as it involves showing poor performing ads more evenly than others. If an ad copy is not performing as good as the rest there is a reason behind it. Unless you have a strong reason to push ads that aren’t performing well choosing this option is not recommended.
Using PPC for Branding
Before we dive into using PPC for branding lets understand branding first.
Put simply branding refers to the concept of making your products or services recognised from its competitors (http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/77408). Branding has also been defined as a business’ promise to its customers for delivering unrivalled value.
A branding campaign in digital world needs to focus on certain branding objectives. Some of the objectives are listed below:
1. Communicating a particular brand message
2. Creating brand awareness for a new product/brand.
3. Raising brand awareness of an existing product/brand.
4. Changing a brand’s image.
5. Sustaining a brand’ image.
So far, so good, eh?
Imagine if a strong brand stopped advertising. Although it may not have any immediate affects, it may lead to other brands filling the advertising space and eating into the company’s market share. This forces most companies to keep pushing for their own brand.
When it comes to paid search. Most companies seem to restrict their paid search branding to bidding on self-branded keywords and using site links, social extensions, call extensions, location extensions and other flashy extensions to make their advert stand out, fill the top space on the page and drive competitors away.
However, branding in paid search has the potential to grow beyond just an effort to sustain your brand name. Here is a unique case study
http://www.icrossing.co.uk/, a digital marketing company in 2010 was presented with a challenge from www.annsummers.com, a well-known lingerie and sex-toys retailer in UK. The challenge was to drive awareness of its brand and position it as ‘edgy’ with online audiences.
What Icrossing did was unparalleled in the history of paid search. While most ecommerce businesses were busy bidding on branded keywords and the ones that drove most conversions, Ann Summers started bidding on random keywords. When people searched for election 2010 here is the result they got
“Visit Ann Summers & find out why we believe in a well hung parliament” – Election 2010
The response was overwhelming. They gained national media coverage from the likes of Guardian and The Independent resulting in over 1.5 million impressions for mere £4500.00. In an ideal world even with a CPM of £1.00 they would have paid £15,000 for the entire campaign.
What this means to your brand?
1. Just bidding on your own brand keywords restricts the scope of your branding campaigns.
2. Branding campaigns can also be used to promote a particular brand message or to generate awareness in new markets.
3. Paid search can be used to promote your content marketing. Because lesser people bid on content keywords there costs is likely to be lesser than competitive keywords.
Paid search can be used in more than a few ways to support your branding strategy. Bidding on your own brand keywords is not the only thing you can do. If planned carefully paid search can be used to drive just the right quantity and quality of traffic your business needs.
Negative Keywords Not Working?
So you recently added some negative keywords and when you went back to the search terms report you were amazed (and terrified) to find some of the queries containing the negative words! You have checked the negative keyword match type, ensured it’s in the right campaign and ad group and are assured that you did everything just right. Yet, those negative keywords seem to keep coming back to haunt you in the search terms.
Here is why!
1. Query Length: Is the search term query 10 or more words long? Google policies only trigger a negative keyword (irrespective of match type) if it appears in the first 10 words of the search query. Consider the following example:
Negative Keyword: London
Search Query: Phone numbers and websites of dealers selling pet food online for people living in London
Notice the negative keyword London is the 15th term in the query. As per Google’ policies this will not cause London to block your adverts from appearing.
However,
Negative Keyword: London
Search Query: Phone numbers and websites of London dealers selling pet food online.
Here, because your negative keyword is the 6th word in the query it will block you advert from appearing.
Solution
Before you start stressing over Google’ policies you should ask yourself, ‘Is this really going cost me a lot?’ If you’re spending over £10,000 a month and these clicks cost you no more than £10.00 then it might not be worth stressing over it. Note these figures are only indicative.
Such cases are hard to avoid. But if these queries are costing you a considerable sum of money then you may want to pick specific phrases from the search term and add them to your negative keyword list. This may not be a perfect solution but consider it like another step towards building a more comprehensive negative keyword list.
2. Keyword Length: If your negative keyword contains two or more words then your ad might still show if one of the words are entered in the search query. Consider the following example:
Negative Keyword: Pet Food
Search Query: Dog Food
Notice that irrespective of the match type simple because your negative phrase contains food does not mean your ads won’t show up any queries containing the word food. Note that in order to block you ad from showing for dog food or pet food or any query containing food you need to have food and only food as your negative keyword.
So this is it. If you have any questions, observations, feedback, feel free to email us at info@circusppc.com
Look forward to hearing from you!!!
Is your PPC Agency a PPC Agency?
There are two types of entrepreneurs:
One, who looks at the world, identifies gaps in the market and thinks of business ideas to fill them in. They start off with what they need to do, think about how to do it and might over years realise why they did it. Over time they expect to gather the required skillsets to conquer the market.
The other looks in ward and identifies the things they are good at and love to explore further. Then they move on to figuring out a strategy to get this out there with the desired results
Have you ever thought about why your PPC agency is a PPC agency? Consider these:
There are many PPC agencies that might have started off as SEO companies and realised that there was a lot of business potential in PPC and hired some PPC experts to exploit this potential.
There are some who might have realised there weren’t many PPC agencies in the market in their area and ended up making a successful business out of it
There might have been some who happen to know PPC more than anything else and decided to turn it into a business idea.
There are however a handful of companies in the market who do PPC for only one reason; they love it. These agencies are very passionate about PPC and would do it all day, every day. Being profitable becomes a reward for that passion
Why should you be bothered?
The reason why businesses do what they do tells us about their strategy, which ultimately impacts on their clients and other stakeholders. For some agencies, doing PPC for money and making an account work to continue billing the clients might be their end goal. However, agencies who love PPC will always try new and innovative methods to get the best ROI on your account.
Working with PPC loving agencies will minimise your chances of being miss-sold services you don’t need. Equally as important, your business won’t be miss-represented online.
Working with wholly dedicated PPC agencies who love their work is like working with a good friend; someone who understands you and suggests a good plan to fit around you.
Such agencies can use PPC to your advantage. For example:
Conducting market research for your business
Building your content marketing plan
Improving your SEO
Even defining your central business strategy
If you never been with a dedicated, expert PPC agency, you are truly missing out!!