Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

Inclusion of your keyword phrase in both the title and body text of a PPC advert has been proven to be more effective than generic ad-copy. The fact that Google Adwords highlight search query keywords in PPC ads by making them bold is reassurance of this.

But how do you anticipate every keyword phrase that users might enter and do you create hundreds if not thousands of ad-groups with specific adverts to ensure there is a keyword-rich advert for each variation? You could do this, but fortunately there is a dynamic method of inserting specific keyword phrases into ad-copy saving you a lot of time – dynamic keyword inclusion.

Let’s suppose you sell t-shirts in a variety of styles and colours. You could create a separate ad group for each possible colour variation and group relevant keywords into this group. Alternative you could create a single advert with dynamic fields for specific keyword inclusion. Regardless of which colour a user enters, your advert will highlight the fact that you sell that colour and be more likely to receive their click.

The syntax for dynamic keyword inclusion is: {keyword:Cotton T-Shirts} with ‘Cotton T-Shirts’ being default text. Why include default text? When you have included broad-match keywords which include words other than your keyword phrase, Google will replace this with the default phrase. In our t-shirt example the search query ‘red coloured cotton t-shirts’ would show the ‘Cotton T-Shirt’ default if our target keyword on a phrase/exact match was ‘red t-shirt’. If the keyword was ‘red t-shirt’ then the dynamic advert would show ’red t-shirt’ as the title. Dynamic keyword inclusion isn’t a well known technique and dynamic inclusion within the body copy of a PPC ad is even less known. Our experience of using dynamic keyword insertion has been very successful, although it shouldn’t totally replace manual ad-copy completely but run as an integrated element to your campaign. We typically test a number of static creatives proportionally served alongside a dynamic creative to ascertain effectiveness.

There are also a number of refinements you can make to the dynamic insertion of the keyword into your advert. For example, by changing the first ‘k’ of ‘keyword’ to upper-case, this will make the first letter of the first keyword appear in upper case. By also making the ‘W’ of ‘keyword’ upper-case, this makes ALL first letters of keyword phrases upper case (i.e. modify to write as KeyWord). To make all characters appear in upper-case modify ‘keyword’ to ‘KEYWORD’ or for every character in just the first word modify ‘keyword’ to ‘KEYword’.

Using dynamic keyword insertion doesn’t direct improve your quality score, but through creating a more targeted advert for the user, this should improve your CTR and therefore indirectly the quality score (in turn lowering your bid).

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting, integrating with Google Analytics. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

On March 4th 2009 Google updated how Google Analytics imports AdWords data to improve security and provide greater control and convenience. If you’ve not already ‘linked’ your Adwords and Analytics accounts – you should do so to benefit from the additional information that is combined with the regular Adwords data.

Whilst Adwords will provide you with a range or reports relating to the immediate click activity such as word, advert and placement performance, click-through rates, cost-per-click etc. it doesn’t provide information about the subsequent visit to the target website (what happened next). Adwords takes up the baton and provides this information by adding additional metrics as well as combining the core Adwords metrics along with the on-site data.

Linking the two accounts is relatively easy. To do this go to the ‘my account’ tab in Google Adwords and in the ‘Account Preferences’ section, ensure that ‘Auto-Tagging’ is checked. Now click on the ‘Analytics’ tab in Google Adwords and click on ‘Analytics Settings’. Next to your account name, click on the link ‘edit account settings’ and on the following page check the box to ‘Share my Google Analytics data with other Google Products’ (in this case Google Analytics). Your account will now communicate with Google Analytics and share information to enrich Analytics reports’

To view your Adwords data in Google Analytics, click on the ‘Traffic Sources’ tab then ‘Adwords’ option. This will expand to show two further options ‘Adwords Campaigns’ and ‘Keyword Positions’. The keyword position option is very useful at evaluating the most effective advertising positions on a number of user-defined metrics and we covered this in an earlier blog entry Analysing Adwords Positions in Google Analytics.

The Adwords Campaigns tab initially shows the campaigns you have in your Adwords account. The default metrics shown are visits, pages-per-visit, average time-on-site, percentage of new visitors and bounce rate. Note the three tabs above the table containing the campaign names, the default data you are looking at is ‘site usage’. Clicking on the ‘goal conversion’ tab will show you the results for your Analytics defined conversions (not to be confused with Adwords conversions). You will be able to see which campaign drives the best performance on 1-4 goals defined in Analytics as a percentage as well as a per-goal-value if you defined goal values at set-up. Clicking on the ‘clicks tab’ shows you the familiar Adwords metrics such as impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, revenue-per-click and margins if you have this configured in Adwords. You can also assess the hourly breakdown for Goal Conversions such as sales or lead generation (details in our earlier blog entry: Analysing Hourly Traffic and Google Adwords Conversions)

Clicking on a ‘campaign’ will drill down to the ‘ad groups’ within that campaign, showing the same default metrics and again, the goal and click data is available at an ad-group level. Clicking on an ad-group drills down to the individual keywords, again with the default metrics plus goal conversions and click data from Adwords.

As you can see, combining the data from both Google Adwords and Google Analytics provides a very powerful picture of the effectiveness of your PPC activity allowing you to not only determine the most effective words for driving quality traffic to your site, but also for determining which is the optimal position for advertising and the times too.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting, integrating with Google Analytics. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Determining the most effective times of the day for website traffic is an enormous help to website owners. From determining staffing levels for inbound customer service/sales to advertising schedules for paid search marketing, hourly data provides invaluable insight into the popularity of your site throughout the day that can help you manage your business and promotional budgets.

Today we’ll look at two popular website statistical packages and how they can help you measure hourly performance - Google Analytics and AWStats. A popular gripe with Google Analytics is that it doesn’t (by default) provide hourly figures for metrics such as page visits and bandwidth. For that information you will need a logfile analysis application, hence our interest in AWStats. We’ll look at the logfile analysis tool first then see how Google Analytics can enrich the picture painted by AWStats.

Like Google Analytics, AWStats is a free statistical analysis package, but unlike Google Analytics it analyses logfiles from your web server. AWStats is compatible with the main web servers such as Apache, WebStar, IIS and many others. Whilst it provides many useful top-line metrics such as visits, pages, hits and bandwidth by day of the month, days of the week and location by country, we are interested in the hourly data it provides. AWStats shows an hourly profile chart displaying page visits, hits and bandwidth along with a table detailing the actual numbers. Whilst it doesn’t break this down into traffic sources or keywords, it does give you a useful indication as to what the popular hours are for general traffic.

Whilst traffic by hour is all well and good, how can you determine the most effective hours for your PPC activity? Adwords only shows total conversion volumes and day-average metrics. With a scheduling tool like the one provided by Adwords, if you could determine when the ‘junk’ clicks were occurring you could more effectively deploy your advertising spend to those peak hours to maximise conversion potential.

The answer to this problem lies in your goals in Analytics. The goal conversion metric is very useful on other reports provided by Analytics such as ‘referring sites’ or ‘search engines’ but the charting options here are by ‘day’ at the most granular level. The Goal Conversion sub-menu items all provide a ‘by hour’ option on the ’graph by’ section. This includes total conversions, conversion rate, goal verification etc. By configuring your goals you can then interrogate Analytics to show the hourly performance. If you set a goal for your PPC traffic landing page, this will provide an hourly assessment of click traffic (if you filter out non-ppc traffic sources from your Analytics profile), whilst enquiry forms or purchases tagged as ‘goals’ will isolate their popular hours and you can determine the most effective hours from there.

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics and logfile applications including AWStats as part of our website data analytics service. Contact us to discuss your website data analytics requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.

Many advertisers who use Google Adwords as their PPC tool are unaware that there is more than one bidding strategy that they can take advantage of within the system. Currently there are three types:

• > manual bidding
• > conversion optimised bidding
• > budget optimised bidding

For the purpose of this blog entry, we’ll be concentrating on the conversion optimised option.

With manual bidding it is the responsibility of the advertiser to determine their maximum cost-per-click according to their required marketing ROI (return on investment). For example, if you make £30 profit on a £100 transaction and require £20 after marketing costs, then you cannot afford to spend more than £10 on acquiring a customer through PPC. If your conversion rate is 20% of click-throughs then this means that you cannot afford to bid higher than £2 per click on average as this will take your costs above the £10 limit and eat into your profit margin.

With a portfolio of active keywords into the hundreds or thousands, this can become a very time consuming task to constantly monitor your conversion rates and tune your CPC to ensure you remain profitable. The CPA bidding tool takes away this headache by managing per-keyword bids according to historical data from your campaign, thereby saving you time and ensures you limit your acquisition costs.

When conversion optimiser was launched there was an initial requirement for 300 goal conversions to be registered within 30-days which was a tall-order for many smaller advertisers. Currently the UK account management interface states a requirement of 50 conversions in the last 30-days. Whilst this reduction in the required conversion total means more advertisers will be able to take advantage of this feature, there is also a school-of-thought that says the more data collected – the more accurate the Adwords system will be at meeting your requirements. In your Google Adwords account the system will have already determined if you meet the minimum conversion threshold and will either show the strategy as an active option or greyed out.

If you are eligible, the Adwords system will provide recommendations as to what the CPA should be (based on the historical data it has). The system then calculates a maximum CPA for your keyword phrase by dividing the maximum CPC by the conversion rate. One criticism that has been made against this feature is that it can’t factor in ROAS (return on advertising spend) at a product level. For example, If you have a lower converting product with a high profit margin and a higher converting product with a lower profit margin, the system would most likely select the higher converting product over the lower one, despite your business realising a better return on the lower converting product. If your account determines you are eligible to use conversion optimised bidding you might want try it and see if it can save you time and effort managing your account.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements.

Internet marketing is an excellent and cost-effective way of promoting your business, especially if you offer local services to customers. In terms of digital spend, research has shown that PPC is the biggest recipient of online promotional budgets, so how do small businesses compete with national competitors with only a fraction of the budget, especially as cost-per-click prices increase?

One way of limiting your ad exposure and therefore ad-spend is to target geographically and thereby restrict the audience who will see your advert and have the opportunity to click on it. If you provide local services then geographic targeting is an excellent way of limiting your lead generation to your delivery catchment area. This allows you to bid on broad search phrases without using restricting words such as your geographic location as many searchers will chose to use broader and more generic search queries.

All three of the major PPC networks now offer geographic targeting functionality, allowing you to localise your advertising to a more targeted audience. For example, if you are a florist in Oxford and don’t deliver outside Oxfordshire, then you can bid on the keyword ‘florist’ but restrict this to those searching in the Oxfordshire area only. This keyword will almost certainly have a higher search volume than ‘florist Oxfordshire’ increasing your chance of generating targeted traffic and hopefully sales.

Google Adwords offers several options for geographic targeting including a radius tool to select how many miles from your location you want to advertise (e.g. within 20-miles of Oxford). Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter also offer geographic targeting tools to region, county or city level.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements.

Since my early days using Adwords I was always sceptical about the effectiveness of the content network. On a limited budget at that time it seemed like a scattergun approach to targeting and the comparative CPC and conversion levels were always weaker. Therefore I often avoided the network completely, preferring to direct most resources into the Google search and search partner networks instead. Whilst there always was a valid argument in advertising there for increased brand visibility, the content network seemed like a second-class citizen next to its Adwords peers.

The same cannot be said of the content network we see in Adwords today. Google have listened to their customers and created a multi-tiered platform that allows for a high degree of targeting and refinement of the campaign. I particularly like the placement targeting functionality and especially the ‘describe topic’ tool that allows you to enter descriptive words/phrases that return a selection of topic-relevant sites with a variety of advertising placements (traditional text ads, display ads in a variety of sizes and video ads).

I’ve seen comparable click and conversion rates as well as lower CPCs for targeted placements on a variety of campaigns across sectors. With improved reporting on placements, the only drawback I can see is the inability to create a report showing the keyword that triggered a placement click as well as the placement domain (although if anybody knows a report that shows this I’d be grateful to know what it is).

I’d certainly recommend a rethink when it comes to that campaign-setup snub of the content network, it’s greatly improved and is well worth a try. To find out how paid-search and content network advertising can benefit your business, contact us to discuss your requirements.

Nick