Co-Founder of Epiphany Solutions, Shane's interests lie in generating business led search strategies for multi-national clients who include:
Yorkshire Building Society, Littlewoods, SilentNight, Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, CBI, Three Mobile and many more.
Is the display network really PPC?
Two of the main advantages that PPC has over other forms of advertising are transparency and control.
You can see exactly where you are advertising, and control the amount that you pay per conversion with great precision. If you know your conversion rate then you can adjust your cost per click to get any CPA that you want.
When advertisers use Google’s Display Network, it’s inevitable that many apply the same logic to it. They have a target CPA, they know the conversion rate, and so they set the bids accordingly.
But is this the right way to go about it? Many advertisers advertise using banner networks, and it appears that the psychology is very different outside the AdWords environment.
The value of significance in ad testing
Advert testing is critical to the continuous improvement of an Adwords campaign. It’s a reasonable bet that many of your competitors are testing new adverts, and hence improving their click through rates and conversion volumes over time.
Where do you think those clicks and sales are coming from?
Overcomplicating your AdWords account
In many ways, effective Adwords account management is a balancing act. Whether you’re trying to balance sales volumes with the cost per sale or trying to write a compelling advert whilst trying to stand out from your competitors, you’re often pulled in opposite directions.
I am often approached to appraise accounts for advertisers, and one of the most common problems that I see is also perhaps one of the most understandable, it’s the result of failing to find the balance between relevancy and optimisability.
The seven deadly sins of PPC
According to the Catholic Church, there are seven deadly sins. They are, in effect, the root of all of the other sins.
Can the same be said of PPC? There are many, many mistakes that can be made, but can they be tracked back to seven root causes? And are these causes similar to the seven cardinal sins?
It’s not quite as ridiculous as it sounds…
The rise and rise of the display network
Pay-per-click has a lot of things going for it as a marketing medium. Your adverts are only displayed to people that are actively looking for your product or service, and you can determine exactly what you are willing to pay for these clicks at a keyword level.
It’s not surprising then, that a lot of paid search advertisers have in the past viewed the Display Network with a degree of scepticism. After all, your adverts aren’t displayed to people actively looking for your product, and because the clicks generated come from hundreds or even thousands of different websites, it’s difficult to tailor your bids.
For many advertisers, the Display Network is very much a poor relation, and it’s remarkable how many don’t use it all.
Top three conversion rate optimisation tools
Here are some handy tools that we use in our conversion rate optimisation service that could help readers understand this process better.
AdWords - Preferred Bidding and Budget Optimiser or not?
A few months ago, Google released a couple of new alternatives to the 'maximum cost-per-click' bids on Adwords, called Preferred Bidding and Budget Optimiser.
Preferred Bidding allows you to specify how much you'd like to pay for each click on average, and Adwords will adjust your bids accordingly. Budget Optimiser takes your daily budget and tries to generate as many clicks as possible for your money.
But is this really what you want to be doing? Both of these options are set at campaign level, and neither looks at the conversion rate of individual keywords or Adgroups, or indeed the value of a conversion.
AdWords Agency Secrets Revealed!
As the owner of a search marketing agency, I am constantly trying to find ways of increasing the awareness of search within the marketing community.
For too long now search marketing agencies have hidden their knowledge behind a wall of technical jargon in an attempt to keep ownership of these techniques, but this practice is holding back the growth of our industry.
