Hey, that’s terrific. How do your conversions look?

Nearly a year ago, a client of ours was in a huge hurry for us to build an expansive pay per click campaign alongside the new website we were also creating for them, and they wanted that PPC fired up immediately! Since building a PPC campaign is much faster than creating an entirely new website, we were just going to do the best we could with what we had on their soon-to-be old site. I had no custom landing pages, nor could I track simple conversions (don’t ask), sooo yeah, it was not going to be the best conditions for a finely-tuned PPC machine. I recall our owner telling them, “Listen, without the tracking we’re just going to be spraying people at your site. Who knows what happens after that.”

It all ultimately comes down to your conversion – what is the goal of your campaign? Are you trying to increase inbound phone calls? Form submissions? eCommerce sales? You can pour tons of traffic onto your site, but unless you’re tracking conversion rates you’ll never be able to truly know what’s happening with your budget. Imagine your PPC ad is the beginning of one of those awesome automated sidewalks like they have at the airport – is there a section of your sidewalk that’s broken? If there is, who’s going to walk on that? They’d look like a dork. Maybe some dorks will walk on it, then you’ll just be paying to have a bunch of dorks coming to your site. Is that what you want? OK, you’re getting me off track now…

Hyperspeed is also a very real danger on these things.

There are ambiguous keywords out there that might be looking good in the CTR column but break down once they hit your landing page. Maybe its the keyword attracting people with the wrong intent, maybe your ad is setting the wrong expectations, or, well, there are all sorts of things that can cause trouble on a landing page; the point is, CTR is not the be-all end-all of your keywords. If you don’t currently have the conversion columns running on your dashboard, THEN SET IT UP! I don’t want to go all local news scare tactic on you, but who knows how much money you could be wasting on a couple bad apple keywords that pull in browsers instead of buyers… how’s it affecting your ROI, what’s in your food, is it good for the children?!

Google responded to this paradigm shift some years ago with Google Maps included in the search results.  The most recent change was to divide Google Maps into Google Maps and Google Places.  A Google Place is almost a mini website where the owner can modify content to fully represent their business or organization including even pictures and videos and associate it with a geographical place. The ‘Place’ will often come up in a search result when the searcher is naming a particular city or geographical area such as “philly cheese steak in kansas city” or “daycare in kansas city”.

Google Map/Place Example

Most people are familiar with the map and the A, B, C… stickpins that appear in these kinds of results.  These maps are said to get 25% of the clicks that will happen on any page they appear on, and that percentage is growing.

As of last month, July 2010, it looks like Google is responding once again to the growing interest level for local search and is currently testing a new layout for geographically targeted search requests. The new format can be seen on a blog from Frank Reed. If this new layout tests well, the significance that the Google Places listing has will grow tremendously.  If you haven’t taken the time to claim your listing, NOW is the time to do so!

Looking at the new layout, most people won’t even realize that the traditional organic listings space has now become an extended Google Places space.  Organic listings have be where 60% of the clicks come from on pages where maps were also present. Google Places will look a lot like organic listings to a lot of people if this layout becomes standard.  If that’s the case, just having a well organized Google Place will get you first page on Google for all the searches that include a ‘geo target’.  That’s HUGE!

It will be interesting to see where Google comes down on these tests because a huge revenue generator for Google is Sponsored Listings, aka – Adwords.  Currently only 15% of the clicks happen in this space on the page.  Will the evolution of Google Places shrink that percentage even further?  Will Google Places become a source of revenue to Google in the future?  Already you can purchase a nice bright yellow TAG for your Google Place, suggesting that Google just may start charging ‘rent’ for your Place.

For now, Places are FREE at Google, claim’em while you can, for no money down and zero rent!

OK, yes, I obviously realize the extreme limitations of your average PPC ad, I don’t expect to be whisked away on some adventure or, what is it movie reviewers say – something, something, roller-coaster thrill-ride? But how difficult is it to at least make your ad slightly different from the competition? Writing PPC ads doesn’t require an English Doctorate, a do-it-yourselfer can get noticed by following a few very simple rules that even some of the pro’s seemingly forget as they cobble together yet another ad about tennis shoes, car tires or Red Vines, the most delicious licorice ever (Tom here in the office has fueled an entirely new addiction for me – THANKS, TOM).

Let’s get this thing rolling then, here’s part one in my, um, some number, series of how to stop being so darned lazy with your PPC ads. Sooo, no particular order, and no, it’s not because I’m lazy… geez:

Check the Competition
I understand you might have a metric crap-ton of keywords attached to a certain ad group, but you should know which are your big-bangers off the top. Simply sling the heavy-hitters into the search engine you’re writing for, hit “search”, and see what ad copy gets served up. What do these ads look like? Which are drawing your eye, if any? Are all the ads essentially the same? Remember, you aren’t trying to camouflage your ad, you want to draw the eye, be unique! Consider what will set yours apart, either with your message, with the inclusion of numbers, or heck, even the shape of your ad.

A week ago I was looking at bikes online with my son and did a search for “giant anthem”, because sometimes I like to pretend I’m rich and can just buy a new bike whenever I want. I just double-checked as I’m writing this and it’s still the same: every PPC ad has the exact same headline… and if you look closely the text doesn’t read properly, leading me to believe these are all dynamic text ads. Making a dynamic text ad is a pain in the rear – I’m sure the people who built these would be thrilled to see this.

What I’m looking at here is a perfect opportunity for a Giant dealer in Kansas City (where I am), even if it’s just some hole-in-the-wall shop, to get some attention and move some of his or her Anthems. Hell, add a word or two to the title and write some copy that actually makes sense and BAM!, you’ll far and away have the best ad of the lot – and you wouldn’t even have to bid anywhere near the top to stick out from the crowd!

Let’s consider you actually have some legit competition that isn’t poorly using dynamic text ads to all look the same, the question remains: from a purely cosmetic standpoint, what will set you apart? Think about it, a searcher isn’t automatically reading every ad at once, something irregular is pulling their attention. In my experience numbers have been strong, whether it’s a price, a percentage, or the easiest (though it does eat up some characters): adding a phone number. Everyone in the SEO game will tell you that putting your keyword in the title and body of the ad is best, and listen, I’m certainly not advising against it, but do a search for “used cars” and see how much of a difference you think those bolded keywords make. If everyone is using the same trick, it’s no longer a trick, is it?

I realize I may have thrown a few people when I mentioned the shape of your ad, and admittedly this one is fairly gimmicky, but hey, you have to draw the eye before you can draw a click, amirite? You can do the ol’ upside-down pyramid, making your title the longest bit and slowly shrinking the next couple lines, or, if you’d like a proper challenge: going the other way with a crazy-short title – just don’t forget that your PPC ad copy has to say something sensible once your potential customer shows up to read it.

And I’ll try to remind you at the end of each of these articles: don’t forget to test your ads! Make multiple ads to see what works. Are your silly pyramids working? How about the numbers? Does it matter where the numbers are in the copy? Keep what’s working and experiment with the losers, and don’t forget, keep an eye on your competitors – your best ad could accidentally get pirated by more than one company and before you know it you’ll be blended back into the sidebar.

OK, stay tuned next week for the, erm, next part of this series I decide should come next – ’til then, happy PPC-ing!

Chapter One: Landing Page of Doom

Tires are kind of a big deal on a mountain bike, and though the Kansas City area is short on mountains, there are still gnarly trails aplenty that are fully capable of, and happy to, throw you headlong into the dirt, jagged limestone outcroppings, trees, poison ivy, stuff like that there – point is, it’s nice having a tire set you’re familiar with, and all I wanted was a replacement for my rear hoop. These are never in stock at my favorite local shop, and to order one in you will pay a premium, so I took to the interwebz to find a new Schwalbe Rocket Ron… and so it began.

Since I deal with PPC campaigns every day I’m inclined to look through the paid search before natural, I suppose more out of a professional curiosity than anything else, and here is where the number one result, though not giving the tire’s model name, matched the make. I took it as a good sign as Schwalbe, a German manufacturer, isn’t as popular here in the States as they are in Europe, so I clicked through. I was dropped on a landing page that was jam-packed with Schwalbe tires, 16 pages worth in fact, with 28 models per page. So, yeah, I wasn’t taken to the tire I wanted, but hey, I was close now – right? This is where it crosses into site design territory, as there was no search bar to guide me directly to what I wanted, and even when I adjusted one of the few variables: the tire size, mine still hadn’t shown by page two. A non-SEO person would maybe be less of a baby about it, but I couldn’t be bothered and decided to look elsewhere.

The lesson here is to aim your PPC ads at a landing page that fits your customer’s search, or at the very least drops them somewhere close! People don’t want to solving the navigation puzzle of your site, and especially when you offer something that is not unique to you, try to keep that sales funnel as short as possible for them.

Chapter Two: The Land of Not Crazy Low Prices

Here’s a quickie: Don’t say you have crazy low prices unless you actually have crazy low prices – it will anger the person who discovers it… you know, the person who was possibly going to give you their money.

Chapter Three: Bounce

Two clicks in and I’m treated to a picture of my tire with a red-lettered, “This item is currently out of stock.”

Back ‘er up – *click* *click*

In this specific case it’s kind of understandable, you’d have to be on the ball to pause your ad after you run out of a freakin’ tire, one item out of the hundreds you stock, but this is still a hit to your ROI. Sure, you could argue that at least you drew a customer into your site, but how realistic is the scenario that they’ll adventure around looking for something else in this case? I was not a customer looking for “mountain bike tires” that’s much different than someone looking for a specific brand and model, and it’s absolutely important to keep this in mind when building your campaigns. If you’re going to go as far as building an ad group around specific items then it only makes sense to stay on top of inventory and hit the pause button if there’s going to be a delay in restocking.

Chapter Four: The Grail

The fourth ad was the first ad that actually had the model name in the ad, and hey, a sale! I was a bit skeptical when the body announced free shipping on orders over $240.00, because, well, that would be a bulk order of tires, and I worried that this was likely a poorly put together dynamic text ad that was about to add some disappointment to my shopping adventure.

Dynamic text can be a great eye-catcher as it matches exactly what the customer is looking for, but boy, if you don’t put the time in when building it, you can really do more harm than good. Before my finger had time to twitch I’d already considered how unrelated the landing page would be, this “sale” having ran through the stock already, if it even existed at all, and why I didn’t just quit screwing around and go buy from the site I usually do. Then, just like that, there it was…

I was taken directly to the item I wanted! There really was a sale! It really was in stock! Yes, I really was this excited to find the thing I’d set out to purchase. And consider this excitement stemmed from all that crap I’d just sifted through; this site was my hero, not because they did anything amazing, but because they did what they were supposed to do! These other businesses spent money to frustrate and run off a potential customer. Comparatively speaking, they’d have come out ahead by doing no PPC at all!

If you’re managing your business’ PPC campaign ask yourself if you’re making it easy for your customers to give you their money. Are you frustrating them? Are you making them write angry blogs? What’s the ROI on that sort of business model anyway?

Regardless if you’ve been caught flat-footed and are scrambling to cobble together some PPC ads, or are, I dunno’, on the ball and prepping for Valentine’s Day, let me show you a handy tool that can help you position yourself for glorious windfalls no matter the occasion. Let’s check out Google Trends.

And let me quickly tell you that the graph and numbers are only relative to the, “average search traffic in the chosen time period,” which creates a baseline where the, “subsequent terms are then scaled relative to the first term.” Yeah, I stole that from their FAQ, but it usually seems to be the first thing that comes up when I show this to people, so I wanted to keep you from getting too excited.

Anywho, go ahead and type in, “long stem roses,” to see a terrific example of a powerfully obvious trend. You probably could’ve guessed the result beforehand, but let’s say you’re running a small toy shop and are wanting to gauge consumer interest in a couple items. I can tell you that the new Space Police Lego sets have been forced into a lot of conversations by my eight-year-old son lately, along with some kick he’s on with working on cars, so there’s an erector set in the mix as well. Using these as search examples, our imaginary shop owner can compare and contrast the old standby erector set with this new Lego line to see which is garnering the most attention from consumers.

Here we see an alien learning to respect crosswalks.

If you perform this search today you’ll see the Space Police are noticeably cooler at the moment, though both are on an upswing, clearly riding the wave of the holiday season, as shown by the previous years’ data. From this information our imaginary owner could pick a direction for a PPC campaign, use it as an additional way to forecast demand in regards to ordering product, or plan future SEO campaigns. This could allow our owner an opportunity to build some nice organic results for the timeless erector sets, while leaving a PPC budget for whatever the next super-awesome, super-cool, “all my friends have one, so I need one,” toy-thing of the season. So, go play with Google Trends and see how it can help you and your business.

Anyway, my point is, with ever-increasing competition along with the proliferation of these types of specialty tools it’s no wonder why the DIY ranks are slowly folding and coming to companies such as our own for PPC management. For those pockets of resistance out there still determined to hold their own line let me introduce you to a couple spy networks that might help ease your burden:

Keyword Spy
Spy Fu