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.

It was once argued that the content network on Google Adwords was unfocused and would simply burn budget whilst skewing your CTR figures with high impression counts and low click activity. Until relatively recently we rarely used the content network for our client PPC campaigns, preferring to direct our attention to Google search and search partner channels. But things have changed for the better and Google have introduced content network Placements giving the advertiser the ability to hand-pick specific sites that have signed up to the content network for advertising.

To begin using the Placement option, click on the ‘Placements’ tab that is located between the ‘Keywords’ and ‘Ad Variations’ tabs. There you will see a brief explanation of the Placement process. Click on the ‘Find and add Placements’ button. Placements work on your existing campaign keyword and phrase portfolio, although you can vary the CPC for the placements separate from your primary search and content network bids.

There are three ways to locate appropriate placements for your requirements – ‘browse categories’, ‘describe topics’ and ‘list URLs’. The browse categories option allows you to select a broad topic such as ‘animals’ or ‘automotive’ and then it drills down to a number of sub-sets with corresponding placements. There are in total 361 topics listed. With the ‘List URLs’ option you enter a URL to see if it is participating in the Adsense programme. Describe topics is our favourite option, as this allows you to immediately narrow the search to your chosen keyword phrases.

As an example if we were running a campaign for a client that sold model railway products we would enter keyword phrases such as ‘model railway’ and ’model trains’. This returns a number of placement options that sound perfect for our campaign such as ‘newrailwaymodellers.co.uk’, ‘ukmodelshops.co.uk’ and ‘modelr.co.uk’. Next to the URL of the placement you can see the ad formats available. It should be noted here that you aren’t limited to just text adverts, on many sites you can also choose display advertising formats or even video ads. You can also see the impressions per day figure for each site so you can gauge traffic volumes. When you have selected the placements most appropriate to your product or service, click ‘add’ for each site and then click ‘save and continue’. In our case we are just planning to show text adverts and we are asked to set a CPC for the placement portfolio. At this stage you just enter a single figure and can change this site-by-site later. Then return to the campaign and click on the ‘Placements’ tab and you will see your chosen sites displayed in alphabetical order.

To change the bid amount and also the destination URL for your placements click on ‘edit placements and bids’ and then modify your campaigns to the following format shown with our three model train sites. We have assumed a £1 generic bid for placements but we want to modify two Placements above this and change the landing page for the third site:

modelr.co.uk ** 1.20
newrailwaymodellers.co.uk ** 1.35
ukmodelshops.co.uk ** http:// www.youdomain.co.uk/yourpage.htm

The bid is changed by entering a space followed by two asterisks then another space and then bid amount without a currency symbol. The destination URL also follows a space and then the full http prefixed URL.

You can run placements as well as general content network sites determined automatically by the Adwords system. However, if you want to limit your content network exposure to just those sites that you have selected as Placements then go to the Campaigns screen and select Edit campaign settings near the top of the screen and go to the ‘Network and Bidding’ section and ‘Content’ subsection where you can select the radio button for ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target’.

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

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.

All too often, user testing is carried out pre-build on a site development project then forgotten about. Successful Internet marketing relies on the marketer’s ability to continually test, modify and re-test campaigns in order to optimise for best results. But in addition to functionality within the online promotional tools, this requires flexibility in the site structure (including content management system environments).

For example, standard user testing will confirm vital information such as the optimal pixel resolution for development in order to ensure that promotional copy is visible without unnecessary scrolling. However, variations in promotional messages, welcome pages, special offers etc. require the flexibility to create multiple pages for testing and this is sometimes a tall-order with developer time at a premium.

If you’re lucky enough to either have a flexible CMS or friendly developer sitting nearby, there are a great many AB tests that can be carried out through almost every digital marcomms channel and provides essential data in order to optimise campaigns. Some can be divorced from the website itself (such as subject line testing in emails or ad-copy testing in PPC) whilst others rely on custom website pages being created as landing-pages tailored to the user.

• > PPC – Google Adwords provide rotation ad-serving where you can create two similar adverts with different landing pages (denoted in the full-path URL). This allows you to differentiate the conversion rates to an assigned call-to-action
• > Email marketing – most ASP broadcasting solutions provide excellent potential for AB testing. Subject lines, ‘from’ names as well as image/copy positioning and click-through URLs can all be varied then tracked to determine the optimal output on test segments prior to a full list mailing
• > Display advertising – multiple creatives served proportionally on an ad-server can yield vital data on performance from CTR to completion of a call-to-action

AB testing should be a continual process and allows you to get best return on your marketing investment – without trying to second-guess your users preferences.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a range of campaign planning and implementation services including testing and refinement with AB testing. To discuss your requirements contact us  and see how we can help you realise your online business potential.

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