Category: online advertising

Ad Extensions: What Are They and How Can You Use Them?

When you place a pay per click (PPC) advertisement, there are many ways to enhance your advertisement so that it works harder to produce the results you desire. One of these ways is to use ad extensions. Essentially, an ad extension is special format for advertisements online that help extra information show on a search result.

Not all ad extensions show, even if you’ve enabled them or added them. Many factors, such as how high your advertisement shows up on the search engine, will affect whether the algorithm determines that extra is needed for the consumer to make a good choice. Your ad will be compared to another ad, and as you learn more you can improve the likelihood of extensions showing for your ads.

There are several extensions that you can use, such as:

* Social Extensions – This extension is an automatic extension that you can include just because you have a Google+ account or other social account that you list.

* Location Extension – This is a special extension that you have to set up with Google Business and go through a bit of proving that your business is real.

* Seller or Consumer Ratings – An automatic extension that will appear if you fill out the information and someone has made a rating or written a review about your business.

* Call Extension – A manual extension that you can add if you want people to have the ability to click to call you from the search result.

* Sitelinks – Another manual choice that allows you to add the link to your site. Those who see the search results for your site can click on it.

* Callout Extensions – This extension allows you to put extra information and descriptive text for the searcher to help them make a choice of what to click on.

* Previous Visits – This is an automatic extension that shows the searcher whether or not they’ve clicked through this particular site before.

There are many other extensions and more being created all the time that you can add to your PPC ads. Using ad extensions offers increased visibility for your business as well as helps make it easier for a customer searching for your business to find what they want. By providing as much information as possible, you allow searchers to determine if your link is right for them before they click through.

Most extensions don’t actually cost anything to add, but they do offer more opportunities for a person searching to click through. Plus, it requires a little more thought and time to put them together.

Ads with extensions generally appear higher in search results, which causes them to be a lot more effective in producing the results that you want.

Categories: online advertising Tags: Tags:

Using the Right Keywords for your PPC Campaign

When you run a PPC campaign, choosing the right keywords is an important part of having a successful campaign. There are many places you can waste money, and one is over-bidding on the wrong keywords. Therefore, it’s important to understand what type of keywords you need to bid on and why.

Don’t Use Broad Match Keywords

Since broad match keywords are the default, most people make the mistake of bidding on them. A broad match means that if you want to bid on a keyword like snowflake, if someone types in “snow” then it will assume “flake,” or if someone types in “flake” it will assume “snow.” This isn’t the way you want your searches to work, especially when you are working on a low budget.

Use Exact Match Type Keywords

This is especially important when you are trying to build your email list. The exact match type keywords are the best ones to use because this means you’re sure of your keywords and keyword phrases, as well as your audience and what words they’ll choose.

Choose Fewer Keywords per Campaign

Instead of bidding on many keywords and keyword phrases, choose one to three phrases per campaign. This is the best way to ensure that the right people find your products at the right time. You’ll need to do a lot of research to determine what these keywords are, but it will work best if you do it this way. In an email campaign, consider using only one keyword phrase.

Find the Right Keywords

Use a keyword tool such as Google Keyword Planner or Keyword Tool, which is a good alternative to Google Keyword Planner. Once you’ve chosen your niche, you can start finding the best keywords to market your products. You want to find keywords that are low competition and high demand. This means people are searching for them, and there isn’t a lot of supply. These keywords will be your most lucrative yet less expensive.

Links:
Google Keyword Planner – https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
Keyword Tool – http://keywordtool.io/

Test Your Keywords

Try out the keywords to see if they work. Run a test campaign to see if your targeted audience clicks the ads, joins your email list and buys your product. If all those things don’t happen, then you should choose a different keyword. You want keywords to attract the right people at the right time.

Keywords are an essential element in your marketing efforts, most especially pay-per-click marketing. However, it’s also important, vital really, to remember that you are creating content and products for people. The people who are your target audience have desires, needs, hopes and dreams and problems that you need to solve. Never forget that.

Categories: online advertising Tags: Tags:

Common PPC Campaign Mistakes to Avoid

A pay-per-click (PPC) campaign can take your marketing to the next level. You can run PPC campaigns on social media networks like Facebook or on search engines like Google. Even some popular websites offer the ability for you to place PPC ads on them. But, if you want to be successful then you must try to avoid these mistakes.

* Not Having a Goal – Your first job when you want to run a PPC campaign is to understand your goal. Each marketing campaign that you conduct will have a different goal. Some are to bring traffic, some are to spread brand awareness, some are to build your email list – but whatever your goal, know in advance what it is.

* Not Making a Special Campaign for Each Channel – Don’t recycle an old PPC campaign to another network. Each network is unique and should be treated as such. The mood, the size of the images, the guidelines for the type of ad that will be approved, are very different between networks.

* Not Niching Down Your Offerings – When you run any type of PPC campaign, it’s important to have only one CTA. Know exactly what you’re offering and to whom, and convey that in the imagery and copy of your advertisement.

* Not Having a Clear CTA – Your call to action must be noticeable and clear. You want it to denote an action that gives a clearly defined benefit to the person viewing the advertisement. If it’s not clear, people will not click.

* Not Using an Appropriate Picture – Don’t just use any picture; be sure to use the right image for the right advertisement. You want your PPC campaign to speak to your audience using images that they understand and that mean something to them.

* Not Considering the Headline – Your headlines when creating a PPC campaign are critical to the success of the ad. The reason is you have very little space when it comes to PPC campaigns and you want every word to mean something and add value.

* Not Targeting Narrowly Enough – Many people run ads and think they want to cast a wide net, but this can be far more expensive and lower your conversion rates. You want only people who really need, want and desire your offering to click through.

* Not Setting a Budget – You need to know what you plan to spend before even getting started. Most platforms allow you to set your budget on a daily basis, or even a total allotment for the entire campaign. By setting the budget you’ll end up saving money in the long run.

If you avoid these common PPC campaign mistakes, you’ll be a lot more successful with all your PPC campaigns. Avoiding mistakes in all aspects is not possible, but avoiding common mistakes is. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel when it comes to marketing. People with deep pockets have already done the work for you; all you have to do is set up a campaign for success by learning from others.

Categories: online advertising Tags: Tags:

Eight Ways to Market Online with PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a very popular form of online marketing. It consists of an ad that is delivered to various websites that have the ad code on it. You can run PPC ads via Google AdSense, Bing, Facebook and others. You simply create your ad according to the guidelines of the service you choose to use, pick your keywords, the price you want to pay and your budget, and you’re good to go.

You can use PPC for a lot of marketing needs.

1. Build Your Email List – One of the best ways to use PPC if you have a small budget and a low-cost product is to use it to build your email list. Create a free giveaway that you exchange for an email address. Ensure that the freebie is well crafted and so that it gives them a taste of the paid items you want to promote.

2. Promote a Product – Using PPC to promote a product is a great way to get visitors to your website fast. Ensure that you also have a slide or pop-under that only comes up if someone does not purchase the item so that they can get on your newsletter.

3. Promote a Service – You can also use PPC to promote a service. This works especially well if you offer a high-priced service. It’s imperative that you write very professional copy so that you attract the right visitors to this offer.

4. Sell Affiliate Products – Even if you don’t have your own products, you can still use PPC to promote other people’s products. It’s especially worth it if it’s a high-converting product with a good payout. Be careful to follow the rules about which keywords you can and cannot bid on.

5. Use Social Media PPC – Social media sites like Facebook also offer pay-per-click opportunities that are inexpensive and which you can use to promote all sorts of products and services. It’s important to check the rules and terms of service.

6. Try Bing PPC – Bing offers a pay-per-click program too. You can learn how to start a Bing pay-per-click campaign by checking out their website. It’s the same concept in terms of paying for clicks through to your site.

Link – http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/create-campaign/topic?market=en&project=Bing_Ads&querytype=topic&query=HLP_BA_CONC_ADCENTER_FLOW.htm

7. Use AdWords PPC – AdWords is arguably one of the most popular methods by which marketers use PPC. It’s easy to get started with AdWords as they have very few requirements other than that your website cannot be pornographic, spam or illegal.

Link – https://www.google.com/adwords/

8. Don’t Forget the Landing Pages – One of the most important aspects of your PPC campaign is your landing page / sales page / squeeze page – whatever you choose to call it. You can use software like LeadPages.net to ensure that yours works as hard as it can for you.

Using pay-per-click marketing can be very lucrative, or very expensive. It’s important that you understand how everything works and develop a plan of action before getting started so that you don’t waste any money.

Categories: online advertising Tags: Tags:

Eight PPC Tactics That Get Results

Pay per click (PPC) is often overlooked by small businesses because they don’t realize how effective a well-planned PPC campaign can be for them. But, a PPC campaign that has realistic goals can be very lucrative. Here are eight tactics that work very well to improve your business when PPC is used.

1. Remarketing – It’s not just for big business; small businesses can also remarket too. Basically you sign up with an agency such as Google or something like Remarketing.com. They will provide the technology which puts a cookie on the computer that has visited your website but not converted. Then, when the visitor goes to other pages, they will see mention of your website.

2. Build Your List – Instead of using PPC to sell the actual products you want to sell, use it to build your list. You can offer a freebie of some kind in exchange for an email address. Once they’re on your list, you can now market all your products and services to them instead of just one at a time.

3. Local Targeting – Even if you have a national or international business, local targeting is a good thing to do. Write content that is focused on a particular location that has a high amount of your target audience.

4. Segmentation – When you plan a PPC campaign, you want to segment your market down as small as you can for each type of advertisement that you create. You can use the tools available to target only certain people with the ads that you create.

5. Make Better Landing Pages – When you plan a PPC campaign you should create special landing and sales pages for each advertisement. This will help ensure that you target the people that you want to target – not just with the ad that they click, but on the page they land. You can use software like LeadPages.net to make it simpler.

6. Test Everything – Testing is important in all marketing and advertising, but don’t be tempted to skip it with PPC. Try two different PPC ads targeted to the same audience with just one minor thing changed such as headline, or use the same ad targeted to different audiences to figure out which responds most. The important thing is to only change one aspect at a time.

7. People First – With all the focus on keywords, content, and technology, don’t forget that first and foremost you’re marketing to human beings; humans with thoughts and feelings and the ability to differentiate between a good deal and a bad deal.

8. Study Your Numbers – Nothing is ever complete without studying the numbers. At various points during your PPC campaign, compare the results with your goals. If they’re not lining up then you need to adjust the campaign.

Running a successful PPC campaign is easy for small business owners today with the tools available on Google as well as social media like Facebook. But, before you start, ensure that you have a goal in mind, and that you have prepared for the PPC campaign to be successful. Nothing is worse than having your site crash due to too much traffic, or the newsletter sign-up form not working. Be prepared, get ready, and go.

Categories: online advertising Tags: Tags:

Why Facebook Ads Work

Facebook ads are inexpensive, effective, and something any small business owner should consider getting involved with. The reason you should be running Facebook ads, whether they are sponsored posts or other types of ads, is that they do work. Here is why.

* People Live on Facebook All Day Long – People use Facebook on PCs and on their mobile devices, and keep it with them all day long. They take Facebook with them to dinner and some people never turn it off. This is a real chance to connect with your audience that you cannot pass up.

* They Are Relevant Due to Extreme Targeting – Facebook allows you to target your individual audience down to their interests and gender, and you can even provide email addresses for the exact people you want to target.

* Easy to Include a CTA – The tools that Facebook offers the people who want to run ads help to create compelling CTAs that your audience will be more likely to answer, whether it’s as easy as liking your page or downloading your app.

* It’s Easy to Make Professional-Looking Ads – The tools that Facebook offers let you create professional Facebook ads without having the ability to make ads. They lead you through it with their system to make it simple, so you’re more likely to repeat the process.

* Easy to Include Great Value – You can easily include enough information in each ad that shows the value of your offering. With just a few clicks you’ll have an awesome ad that your audience can see the value in.

* They Offer Disruption with Significance – In many cases people are blind to advertisements, but on Facebook the disruption is noticeable and your audience will want to check it out. This is due to the ability to target the ads so closely to your target audience.

* They Are Simple to Create – The ads are easy to create and it gets easier all the time. As Facebook makes the ads work better for business owners, and easier to do with a click of a button, they become more relevant, more valuable, and more useful to you as a business owner.

* Easy to Run A/B Tests – Due to the ability to duplicate an ad and then easily edit to change one part of the ad such as the title or the image, you can run ads simultaneously. You can even target different audiences to find out which works better.

Facebook ads work for a variety of reasons. However, they will only work if you plan them out and spend the time ensuring that you run relevant ads. They must be of value to your audience, grab the attention of the viewer and include a compelling call to action.

Categories: online advertising Tags: Tags:

Eleven Tips for a Successful PPC Campaign

Running a successful PPC campaign requires thought, research, and a deep understanding of your audience and your products. Plus, you need to have a real handle on what your budget is for running a PPC campaign. The only time you should go over your budget is when you are earning a high return on your investment. With these tips you might just manage that.

1. Know Your Products – To create great ads, knowing the benefits that your product offers the buyer is imperative. You need to be able to explain those benefits easily to your customer and/or your copywriter to ensure a successful campaign.

2. Study Your Audience – All successful marketing starts with understanding who your audience is, what they want, need, desire and how much money they can afford to spend on solving their problems. This research will ensure a successful campaign.

3. Create Audience Personas – Within any one audience for any one product or service, there are sub-audiences. If you can narrow down a targeted audience to a specific persona, it will make it easier to write ad copy.

4. Segment in New Ways – PPC allows you to target your audience by segmenting in new ways, including location, sex, income level, interests and more. Use the segmenting features of the platform you want to choose to ensure a truly targeted campaign.

5. Promote Various Stages of Your Product Funnel – Use PPC for building your list, and for selling other products higher up on your product funnel too.

6. Craft Exceptional Landing Pages – Using software like LeadPages.net, create landing pages that are well written, well targeted and that work for your needs and the audience visiting them.

7. Create Targeted Ads – Using the information you have about your product and your audiences, ensure that your ads are targeted to the right consumer. Use images, copy, and even colors and font to make them right.

8. Use Remarketing/Retargeting Technology – If you have a lot of visitors to your site who don’t convert, a great way to increase conversions (some say by 30 percent) is to engage in remarketing. That means that if someone visits your site, a cookie is downloaded to their computer, which will deliver ads for your website.

9. Use Keyword Match Types Correctly – Avoid “broad” match types because you want to really narrow down your keywords to specific keywords to better qualify those who will click through. For example “broad match” will allow part of a word to trigger other words that aren’t relevant to your PPC campaign.

10. Diversify – Google AdWords, Bing and Facebook are all good places to run a PPC campaign. Instead of using just one, try running on all of them or picking something different from AdWords to see how it goes.

11. People over Keywords – It’s very important to remember that a real person is going to read your advertisement and click it, and then read whatever is on the other side such as a download page, a landing page, or something else.

Finally, it’s important to realize that you must have goals, as well as understand the technology you’re using. And, if you don’t know where to start, remember that there is help for you. There are services, apps, contractors and more that will help make running a PPC campaign more successful.

Categories: online advertising Tags: Tags:

Why You Should Run a PPC Campaign to Market Your Offerings

There are numerous reasons why you should run a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign to promote your business. PPC campaigns are inexpensive and work wonders when you need a jump start. If you’re already working to earn traffic via SEO and other means, adding a PPC campaign to your marketing mix will bring added attention and energy to your offerings.

1. Control Your Brand’s Message – When someone conducts a search of your business, they may find information that isn’t the first thing you want them to find. But, if you run a PPC campaign, that will be listed first and help you control better the message you want out there about your business.

2. Rise in the Search Engine Results – Your SERPS are important, and if they’re slacking you can bring them back up with a well-planned PPC campaign. Not only will searchers see the organic search results, but they’ll see the paid ones as well. This means that they’ll see you a lot more.

3. Your Competition Is Doing It – If you don’t run PPC campaigns, you’re going to be left behind by those who do. Your competition is running PPC ads right now, and due to that they’re likely outselling you many times over.

4. It’s Inexpensive Relatively Speaking – PPC is not expensive. You have a lot of control over the budget. In fact, having a small budget can actually help you be more successful because you’re going to be careful about how much you put into it, only increasing your ad runs when you see a ROI.

5. Fast-Track Buying Choices – Your customers are someplace in the buying cycle and decision-making process. If you run PPC ads you can speed up that cycle exponentially, causing them to buy faster than if you stick to organic means.

6. Paid Traffic Converts – Even though earned traffic is awesome, you have to get a lot more earned traffic before conversions take place than when you pay for it. This is true with one caveat, and that is ensuring that your ads are targeted and well planned out.

7. Promote New Products or Services – When you decide to switch things up and promote something brand new to an entirely new audience, running a PPC campaign is a fast way to get up to speed in the new niche.

8. Build Your Email List Fast – Anytime you want to freshen up your email list by adding new members to it, you can do it easily by running a PPC campaign designed to get more subscribers by marketing a white paper or other type of free offer.

9. Damage Control – Is bad press getting you down? You can use PPC to cover up and push down bad press in the search engine results. Just run multiple PPC campaigns using Google AdWords and Yahoo! Bing Network, using the terms that the bad press is attracting. In this way you can push the bad press out.

10. Building Traffic – Pay per click is an excellent way to build traffic to your website. What’s more, you can choose the targeted traffic you want to be taken to your website, which will build up the traffic with more responsive visitors.

Running a PPC campaign can jump-start or refresh your marketing efforts, no matter what kind of business you have. PPC works wonders if you take the time to learn about your audience, understand your goals, and place the campaign where your audience goes.

Categories: online advertising, Run a Home Business Tags: Tags:

How to Use the “Dimensions” Report in AdWords

AdWords offers many reporting capabilities that are of great use in ensuring that your PPC campaigns have the most return on investment. One of the reports you have available is the “Dimensions” report. This report offers insights into your audience such as demographics, paid versus organic search, which search terms are working, what time of day people are viewing your website, and more.

Using the Dimensions tab in AdWords is rather easy to do, though sometimes overlooked. You just click on the tab and then you can choose from a variety of different reports that provide the information mentioned above.

* Geography – Where are your audience coming from? What state, country and if it’s concentrated in a certain location, why? If you can identify the why of most things, you can repeat it.

* Labels – Using labels might not have seemed important until now. If you use labels, you can get a good idea about how each different ad is working with this portion of the report.

* Paid versus Organic – It’s always nice to know how much of your revenue is generated from paid search versus organic search to better understand your ROI for pay-per-click ads.

* Search Terms – What search terms were used to find your online real estate? Did they find you via paid search terms or other search terms within your content?

* Time – When are your visitors most likely to click through your ad?

* Top Movers – Set up the report to cover a specific time frame. For example, did you just do a concentrated PPC campaign on Facebook and you want to know what the effects were during the dates you were running it?

* URLs – If you set up designation URLs, this is a great way to determine which URLs are getting the most traffic and which URLs are performing at a higher volume with the most ROI. Why are certain URLs performing better than others?

These tabs allow you to understand your reach, how many unique visitors you’re getting to, and how often people come back. You can also figure out how often people are viewing your ads, and adjust the frequency if needed. In addition, you can even view by labels that you’ve assigned different information. Comparing labels will help you know what is working and what is not working.

The Dimensions tab and reports are simple to use and offer great insight into how your PPC campaigns are working. The insights that you can identify will enable you to take your PPC campaigns to the next level and make them work harder. As you study the information you can make changes on the fly to improve your AdWords campaign like never before.

Categories: online advertising Tags: Tags:

Key Performance Indicators You Need to Track

As you seek to improve your conversion rates, you’ll realize that real-time marketing offers an excellent solution to improving lead gathering as well as conversion rates. One of the reasons conversions go up is because your audience starts seeing you as real. The more you engage in answering to events happening today and participating in real-time conversations, the more your audience will grow to trust you.

Like with most marketing there are KPIs (key performance indicators) that you need to track to ensure that your efforts are getting the results that you desire. All real-time marketing does is to add in the “when” to the “where” and “how” of marketing. “When” is now.

For example, if you promote work-at-home opportunities and the new jobs report comes out, what can you do to make yourself part of that conversation? You can use their hashtag on Twitter to market your business proposition based on the job reports. Your response might include an informative infographic, or a link to a page of testimonials of those who have used your program to earn money and end their need for a job.

By inserting yourself into the conversation revolving around current news events, you can get more buzz than you may have thought possible. The KPIs you track aren’t that different from the ones you track all the time, but you will want to track them in real time to ensure that your efforts from that action gets immediate response.

There are several KPIs that you need to track:

* Owned Audience – While no one really owns their audience as they’re free to leave whenever they want to, you’ll want to know how many people you’ve already connected to click through and perform any action based on a new event.

* Website Visitors – When you participate in the real-time event, does it affect your website visitors right now? You can use Google Analytics to view real-time activity on your website right now to see if your efforts make a difference.

* Total Leads – How many leads do you collect in the 24 hours after the event?

* Customers – Do you get new customers within 24 hours of the event?

* Recurring Revenue – How many of these new customers end up as repeat customers?

* On-Page Activity – Check your on-page activity during the event. Does it change? What happens?

* Social Media Activity – Once you start your real-time marketing effort, how many times is your message shared or responded to?

* Checkouts – Do people check out without issue? Are there abandoned carts?

* Conversion Rates – What is your lead to purchase conversion rate at the moment or for the 24 hours after the event?

By paying attention to these KPIs, you can understand whether or not your real-time marketing efforts are working. You’ll want to set up the ability to see these KPIs live during the event, and the 24 hours after the event.

You can use a lot of the information you gather to improve future real-time marketing events as well as to create better follow up. For example if you have a lot of shopping cart abandonment, you can remarket to those people a special way based on the fact that they clicked through your real-time marketing collateral.

Categories: online advertising Tags: Tags: