Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

We’ve seen so many companies that are competent at traditional Pay Per Click (PPC) get destroyed when trying to advertise on Facebook.  Let’s cover the most common mistakes and how to solve them:

• Keywords are not interests: You have keywords on Google versus interests on Facebook. In the former, someone is actively searching for something and is expressing immediate intent. In the latter, you’re targeting WHO someone is, as opposed to WHEN they are going to buy. You’re likely hitting them weeks and months before they search, so your targeting and ad copy must be different. We’ve seen PPC companies attempt to peddle translation tools that convert search keywords into Facebook interests. You might as well make chicken salad out of chicken poop– not possible. In search you know WHEN, but not WHO– in Facebook, you know WHO, but not when.

• Ads take users away from Facebook: Users who are on Facebook don’t appreciate being yanked out of their browsing experience. So don’t send them to your website– send them to your Facebook fan page. But that also requires that you have a custom tab on your Facebook page — a landing page that is just as specific as any PPC landing page, whether sending people to a particular product page, video testimonial, store locator, or whatever. And that does take a bit of engineering effort as they are few app makers that can build FBML apps. WebTrends just bought Transpond for that very reason.

• The ad copy is too forward: Imagine you’re having a nice dinner with a friend. Then some loud salesman interrupts your meal to pitch his wares. You’ve never seen this guy before— he’s not a friend, and you aren’t exactly interested in buying his stuff right NOW, thought it’s something you might consider later. That’s what Facebook advertisers do today– they shout over the din of the other shouting advertisers, just as you see in the content networks. On Facebook, you don’t have to shout because you can microtarget and whisper quietly because…

• There isn’t multi-step engagement: Because advertisers are trying to go from impression all the way through to the sale in the same visit (yes, it works in PPC because you can target bottom of funnel terms), they fail. Instead, have one set of ads designed only to get fans from the right target audience. Then another set of ads messaging just fans. Then another set of ads for friends of fans. You wouldn’t say the same thing to someone off the street versus a friend you’ve known for a while, now would you? In Facebook PPC, you can segment your messaging by their level of engagement. And no, this concept is not available in mainstream PPC tools– those software companies are still trying to jam the round peg in the square hole.

• They aren’t refreshing ads daily: In PPC you can make some ads and they can live a long time. We have ads that are years old that continue to build good Quality Scores. We just leave those campaigns as is–set it and forget it. In Facebook, ads burn out in days. In fact, the narrower the audience, the faster the burnout. Google ads don’t burn out because it’s a different set of users searching on the keyword each day. In Facebook, you’re hitting the same inventory over and over– especially since the average user spends 7 hours a week on Facebook and consumes dozen of pages. With no frequency capping on Facebook, you better keep your ad copy fresh– not just because you want to split test, but because you don’t want to burn out by wasting inventory on the same people over and over.

• Their analytics is sending you the wrong message: If you’re measuring conversions, odds are that it’s the unspoken last click attribution. In other words, the user may have come to your site multiple times via organic, paid search, email, social, or other sources– but only that last click (likely a branded Google click) got 100% of the credit. In paid search, there is the concept of the “assist” and the “view through conversion” to give credit to other touchpoints prior to conversion. In the world of multi-channel marketing, where consumers take in multiple inputs before making a decision, you have to measure how many Facebook visits (or even impressions) resulted in an eventual conversion later. Facebook does have a conversion tracking tool and Ads API– but it’s still too buggy for mainstream users.

• They are going for exposure: True, when you have a new page, you want to get a lot of fans. If you’re a media buyer, you might even be looking for raw CPMs. But a fan is not a fan. You need to measure what those fans are worth. And there is no one size fits all– you can’t just use the ClickZ figure of $3.65 per fan and multiply by the number of fans you have. You have to measure how many of your fans eventually convert and then calculate back to an average fan value. If 5% of your fans eventually buy something and that something is worth $100, then a fan is worth $5 with full attribution. If you find the overlap is 33% between channels on average (3 visits on average between all channels prior to conversion), then your fan is worth $5 divided by 3–or $1.67.

There are no software packages that will save you from these pitfalls–you or someone in your organization must develop the targeting, ad copy, and landing tabs that reflect your unique selling proposition. In the same way that great traditional PPC has tight linkages between the keyword, ads, and landing page– on Facebook, you must have tight interests, ultra personal ad copy, and many interest-related landing tabs.

Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal, a Facebook advertising agency that has been serving brands and local resellers for 3 years. Come hear him speak at PPC Summit.

By Craig Danuloff, President and Alex Cohen, Senior Marketing Manager at ClickEquations

Quality Score is Google’s way of assessing how relevant your paid search keywords are to the searchers you’re targeting.  In our popular blog post about The Economics of Quality Score, we showed how improving your keywords from 7 to 10 could reduce your CPCs by 30%.

But, the way Quality Score works and how you can improve your Quality Score isn’t as easy to understand as it should be.

Just How Important Is Quality Score?
Quality Score plays a critical role in two formulas that Google uses to determine where (and if) your ads appear and how much you pay for clicks.

Quality Score and Ad Rank
The first is the formula for Ad Rank. This is the math that decides which ads appear in the top slot, which ones sit in position #2, and so on all the way down to the point at which ads don’t get shown at all. The formula is:

 
Quality Score is equally as important as your bid in terms of when and where your ads are positioned. It’s the sweat-equity of PPC. You can out-maneuver bigger or slower competitors without spending more.

So if your keyword earns a Quality Score of 10 and your nearest competitor earns only a Quality Score of 5 for that same keyword, your $2 MaxCPC will earn you a higher Ad Rank (and display position) than your competitor’s $3 MaxCPC. Your Ad Rank = 20 (10 x 2) while their Ad Rank = 15 (5 x 3).

If two competitors have similar or equal bids, obviously the higher Quality Score will earn a higher position.
And since there are often more advertisers than available display slots, the Ad Rank impact of Quality Score in many cases is the difference between an ad displaying and not displaying at all.

Quality Score and Your CPC
After Quality Score is used to determine the position of your ad, it is used again to calculate how much you’ll pay for each click.

The formula for your CPC on any keyword is based on the Ad Rank of the advertiser who scored just below you and your Quality Score.

 
Using the previous example, our Ad Rank was 20 while our competitors’ Ad Rank was 15. Our cost-per-click is then calculated as 15/10 + $0.01 or $1.51.

For every point (or fraction of a point) our Quality Score goes up, our cost-per-click goes down. And each rise in our Quality Score literally costs us less money on every click.

Assuming that the average Quality Score is 7 (which is our experience based on ClickEquations clients), earning a Quality Score of 10 is like getting a 30% discount. If your Quality Score is 5, then you’re paying a 40% per-click premium.

These are approximate values, because the numbers Google reports to us as Quality Scores aren’t the actual numbers they use in their calculations. We can assume they have much more precision than they share, and their numbers may or may not be exactly proportional to those they show us.

5 Steps to Improve Your Quality Score
Understanding and optimizing your Quality Score puts you in a powerful position: you can improve performance while reducing costs.

1. Prioritize: Analyze and prioritize your Quality Score optimization
2. Align: Precisely match search queries with ad copy
3. Revise: Extensive ad copy tests to find best performers
4. Remove: Delete or pause ineffective keywords
5. Eliminate: Landing Page problems and penalties

To get started, we’ve put together our 5 favorite tips to boost Quality Score

1. Prioritize Your Optimization - They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and you need to know your Quality Score before you can improve it.  Pay as much attention to Quality Score as you do to CPC, CTR, and Conversion Rate.

A great way to start is by creating a distribution of your Quality Score to get a snapshot of how things look overall. Here’s one example.

Then, sort campaigns by spend, then ad groups by spend, and finally keywords by Quality Score. In those top spending campaigns and ad groups any keyword with a Quality Score below 7 should be the priority for Quality Score improvement.

2. Align Search Queries and Text Ads  – Because Quality Score is driven by click-through-rates, the more you can narrow ad groups so that keywords (and the search queries they attract) are highly relevant to the provided text ad copy the better results you’ll see.

For example, a pet website selling organic pet food wouldn’t want to have the keywords “organic dog food” and “organic cat food” in one ad group. Each of those searchers has a specific pet and a specific pet food need, so they need custom ad copy and landing pages to maximize CTR, Quality Score, and ultimately conversion rates.

3. Revise and Test Ad Creative – Writing compelling, persuasive and distinctive text ads is the most important way you can improve CTR and drive up Quality Score. (The presumes you have organized ad groups narrowly as described above.)

Find the lowest perform text ads (by CTR) in the highest priority ad groups (by spend).  Remove poor performing text ads and work to introduce new ones that are even better. To really figure out what works, run disciplined tests. 

Here are some tips for writing killer text ads.

4. Remove Bad Keywords - Because Quality Score looks at historical CTR beyond the keyword itself, it’s important to remove low CTR keywords and text ads that pull down your overall average and historical rates.

Before deciding to pause or delete a lot of keywords with relatively low CTRs, you should consider the overall distribution of Quality Score within your account. If your account shows these strong signs of solid Quality Score performance, you can be less vigilant about hunting down and removing the low-end performers.

If you’ve got some Quality Score drag, the ?rst step is to remove keywords and text ads that have particularly poor CTRs relative to their closely related peers.

For example, you may have one or more particularly broad keywords within an ad group that gain a massive number of impressions but achieve very low CTR. The decision to pause those is an easy one.

If you have a new or marginally performing account,  you may need to cut more off the bottom and put tighter controls in place, at least until you push the vast majority of your keywords to a Quality Score 7 or higher.

There is a weight of history to the Quality Score calculation so the longer you let poor results linger the harder it may be, and the longer it may take to earn your way out.

5. Eliminate Landing Page Problems  – Of all of the Quality Score components, landing pages are the source of the most confusion and myths. Let’s start by clearing up some of the more egregious ones:

a. Landing pages can only hurt Quality Score, they can’t help it. Generally, only major problems will cause landing  page penalties.

Here are some obvious things to avoid
i. Extensive, unoriginal copy (such as scraped text)
ii. Pop-up advertising
iii. Landing pages that are “bait and switch” offers or that have very little to do with the ad or search query
iv. Very slow loading pages

b. Unlike keyword Quality Score, landing page Quality Score is not updated frequently. If you make changes, be patient. It make take a few weeks to see the impact.

Google landing page guidelines provide the most definitive suggestions.

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Craig Danuloff and Alex Cohen work at ClickEquations, a complete, easy-to-use paid search platform for large advertiser and agencies. For more free tips, check out the ClickEquations Learn section and their paid search blog.

By Kelly Larsen, Director of Marketing at PPC Summit

Is your landing page working FOR or AGAINST you? Landing pages that don’t convert are a common complaint from PPC marketers–we hear this over and over at our PPC Summit training events. PPC advertisers spend so much time and money to get the click through, but somehow they lose the potential customer in a split second after landing on their web page. We conclude that PPC marketers spend so much time perfecting their pay per click ads that the landing page becomes an afterthought. This is a huge pay per click marketing mistake!

Now is the perfect time to fine-tune your landing pages so that you can gain more customers and put more dollars back in your pocket–especially with the busy holiday season coming up! Following are three things you can do to make your landing pages convert better.

Top 3 Tips to Convert Customers with Effective Landing Pages 
1. Use Effective Calls-to-Action: A rule of thumb in pay per click marketing is to direct potential customers to what you promised them in your ad–the landing page should mirror your ad. If the ad says ‘SAVE 50%’, then it should be on the landing page too. To help entice the visitor to buy your product now, always include a
Call-to-Action like: Order Now & Save 50%, Offer Expires in 24 hrs, Buy One, Get One Free. And make sure you give the potential customer clear direction and tell them how to act in one or two simple steps.

Most search engine marketers use the call of action they’re comfortable with, but you have to understand your customer needs and wants. What it boils down to is putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and finding out which Call-to-Action method works best.

There are a couple of ways to do determine which Call-to-Action works best with your customers: 
    a. You can run a PPC split test campaign. This will give you some concrete data to comb through.
    b. The easiest way is to just ask, ie, put a poll on your site. With free polling software, you can have a poll up and going in minutes and gain invaluable feedback directly from your customers!

2. Ask for a Little; Get a Lot: Don’t require visitors to give a lot of information in order to take advantage of any offer you may be running. In fact, you want to ask for as little info – initially – as possible. Consumers are very wary about giving out personal information. Once you gain their trust over time, you can do more progressive information gathering. This is why you’ll see so many pay per click campaign offers that only request an email address to “Get the free, downloadable report instantly”.

3. Create Customized Landing Pages: Many pay per click marketers use one landing page and let it do all of their selling/converting traffic. But, each landing page should have its own set of keyword phrases and be customized for the particular promotion at hand. Again, this goes back to putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.

While it may be more expedient to use one standard landing page, your customers don’t care about that. It’s important to take the time to create custom landing pages to connect with the buyer looking for the specific product/service in your ad. And creating more than one landing page is most effective in reaching ALL customers, those who may be early on in the buying cycle and those who are ready to buy now. 

Giving your customers what they need–when they need it–is a sure-fire way to higher conversions. This is why it’s important to test, test and test some more in pay per click marketing.

We’d love to hear your landing page success stories, email us at marketing@ppcsummit.com. We’ll try to include a few of your stories in our future newsletters.

Book Review by Mary O’Brien, Founder/Director of PPC Summits

Tim does a great job in this book not only covering “What” Landing Page Optimization is but also “Why” you should do it.

His book provides you with excellent guidance for analyzing your current website and determining how to make it easier for the visitor to use and do what you need them to do.

Tim has spoken for us several times at our PPC Summits and his sessions are always very interactive and well received by attendees. In the book he has a section called “Why your site is not perfect.” In person he addresses that head on in a presentation called “Why Your Baby is Ugly.”

Both the chapter and the training session provide excellent information on how to uncover the hidden problems in your site that your users are experiencing even though you may have overlooked them. Users don’t usually navigate your site the way you expect or the way you want them to, so rather than trying to drive them down your path, watch how they navigate and build your site and landing pages to meet their needs.

The book provides an extensive focus on personas, and why users behave the way they do on the web. It also explains basic concepts such as A-B split testing, ROI, and gives some examples with marketing formulas you can apply to your sites.

Tim covers testing landing pages comprehensively from an analytics perspective. No matter how pretty your website is, unless it performs and meets the needs of your audience it is practically worthless.  Tim also tells you honestly the limitations of different testing methods so that you can decide what will work best for you.

There are some good examples of sites with poor landing pages and sites with effective pages so you can get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t.  He also provides important background about the psychology and the math of testing that most people are not even aware of. This may get a little complicated for those who are newer to search marketing, but the concepts are those that every marketer needs to grasp and practice, so it provides a good grounding in some really essential stuff.

As Tim would tell you himself there is no “one size fits all” answer when it comes to landing pages. What works for one site won’t work at all for another, so you have to test and test again until you truly create a page that resonates with your audience. Of course the proof of that is whether the page is generating sales or leads, but the book also does a great job covering the metrics that allow you to discover whether the page is successful or not.

 There are parts of the book that may come across as a little “Salesy” or promotional in nature, but anyone who knows Tim, also knows that this is a just part of his persona. He is a passionate advocate of testing and tuning landing pages to get better results, and he has built a very successful business out of that philosophy and also made lots of money for his clients in the process.

If you are looking for a quick fix, this book is not for you. But if you want a deep understanding of all issues that are critical for landing page testing success, then you should definitely read this, and give it a prominent place on your marketing bookshelf as an ongoing research tool.

By Brian Lewis, Vice President, Engine Ready, Inc

Instead of thinking of your landing page as a “page,” think of it as a group of individual elements that your visitors will see. Your best chance of getting your visitor to convert is to carefully guide them through those elements in a logical way that convinces them to buy or fill out your lead form.

A great way to improve your conversions is to treat your visitors like untrained dogs.

Think about it.  If you want an untrained dog to follow a specific path, you need to put them on a leash and guide them.

They also need very clear and reinforcing guidance to get them to do what you want.

To get the most out of new visitors you need to guide them in the same way through your page to complete the desired action. Just like an author who tells his story in a sequence of ordered chapters, you want to tell the story of your product or service offerings in a pre-determined order of page elements. The more control you have over the visitor’s experience, the more control you have over your conversion rate.

Without this guidance, your visitor will act like an untrained dog running in every direction and ultimately running away.

How many times have you visited a web page, been overwhelmed by multiple headlines, scattered boxes of long copy, and numerous images and not had a clue where to start reading on the page? How long before you lost your patience and decided to move on to a competitor’s site?

Examples of  Winning Landing Pages
Want to see landing pages that convert? You can start by searching the sponsored listings for popular (and therefore very expensive) keyword phrases such as “refinance,” “debt consolidation” and “antivirus.”

Click on the top three ads and look for commonality in page layout and use of web page elements. Due to the high cost of these phrases, top placement is generally a pretty good indication that these pages have been well tested and are converting.

An easy way to remember how to design a high converting landing page to get MORE conversions is with the acronym MORE:

• Marketing Effectiveness:
o Your copy should focus more on selling the benefits versus the features of the product or service and focus on the visitor, not your company
o Be sure that your unique selling proposition (USP) is clearly communicated
o Place a persuasive message above the call to action
o Have a dominant “what’s-in-it-for-me” headline
o Prominently display all available ways the visitor can contact you
o Be sure that your privacy policy, and/or return policy are prominently displayed

• Offer Clarity:
o Have a strong and compelling incentive for the prospect to take action
o Avoid multiple different calls-to-action
o Articulate the details of the offer including answers to when, how and what the prospect is entitled to in a clear manner
o Position the main call-to-action above the fold, and if your copy continues below the fold, repeat the call-to-action also below the fold
o Create a sense of urgency with terms such as “Start now” and “Apply now”

• Readability of Page:
o Your copy/ information should be displayed in a summary format using short paragraphs or bulleted text for quick absorption, with options for the visitor to drill down for more information if desired
o Use a clean uncluttered background, and dark text on a light background with a moderate use of white space to aid in the readability of the page
o Use no more than 3 to 4 fonts
o Be sure the lengths of your lines of copy are less than 60 characters to promote easier reading
o Use bold text, exclamation points & colors sparingly, for emphasis only
o The use of an arrow to your call-to-action has increased conversion rates in many cases
o Usage of attention-attracting features such as animations, video and audio should not distract the visitor from your main selling points
o Keep your copy left justified and use no more than 3 columns of text on the page

• Engagement with Visitor:
o The headline on the page should follow the same theme as the keyword phrase and ad creative
o If you have a form, it should require only the absolute minimum amount of information
o All data entry fields should be clearly labeled with examples if necessary (555-123-4567) and contain format validation with appropriate feedback
o Tell your visitor exactly what you want them to do
o Minimize the number of clicks needed to complete the desired action
o Include credibility/trust/security logos near the submit/order button
o The action button should stand out and call attention to itself
o Your action button should reinforce the benefit, e.g., “Download Whitepaper,” or “Get Quote Now,” instead of saying “Submit.”

Finally, don’t forget about the critical importance of testing and metrics – at a minimum, measure conversion rates, average order values, and bounce rates of your various landing pages.

Don’t assume your visitors are already trained to convert on your landing page. Keep them from running away by taking control of their visit experience. Walk them through your page, and increase conversion by appropriately using web page elements supported by a MORE conversion methodology.

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Brian Lewis is Vice President at Engine Ready, Inc. A speaker at many industry conferences, and noted author, Lewis has over 20 years experience bringing businesses profitable results through digital and direct marketing.

Mr. Lewis earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his M.B.A. in Finance from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, graduating both schools with honors.