Natural Search Blog


Increasing The Scope Of Existing PPC Campaigns Effectively

The complexity of Google Adwords is always on the rise and it takes time, skill and effort to achieve good results with PPC campaigns in terms of finding the sweet medium of increased conversions and reduced costs.

If you have an existing PPC campaign and it is performing decently, you can still increase its scope and hence improve its performance by targeting more keywords in the niche you are running your campaigns in.

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How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign

PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns are a sure fire way of attracting traffic to your website almost instantaneously without the rigors of an SEO campaign that is required to bring your site on top of the SERPs. The most important thing to be aware of when it comes to a PPC campaign is understanding the rules to play the Adwords game.

Google’s policy of serving relevant ads in response to user queries coupled with complex factors like quality score can make Adwords a minefield for a novice or intermediate level practitioner so much so that a lot of money is coughed up to elicit a poor ROI (Return on Investment) or not the best bang for your buck in layman terms.

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Website Optimizer – Great Tool For Tracking CRO

If you have a Google Adwords account, you have access to the Website Optimizer tool that is a very nifty application to get a great idea of the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). PPC campaigns nowadays do not come cheap and the crucial factor is to keep track of the conversion rate of your sales funnel.

The actual conversion process involves testing a landing page leading to a signup or filling in of a form or a thankyou page in the event of a successful sale of a product. With Website Optimizer, you can set up experiments that involve Multivariate testing or A/B testing to track which version of the landing page is pulling in the desired results.

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Taking On An Existing PPC Campaign – Things To Be Aware Of

Working in a search marketing firm throws up lots of interesting challenges. One of them is taking over an existing Pay Per Click campaign from another agency as the client is very unhappy with her paid search efforts. Her main grouse is that she is not getting enough business out of her PPC campaigns and her ROI (Return on Investment) is pretty poor.

There are a variety of factors that are contributing to the client’s poor performance in paid search. If you are taking over the client’s existing campaign, there are positives and negatives which you have to be aware of. This post will discuss these at length in no particular order.

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Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?

It is a known fact that Pay Per Click (PPC) model of advertising has contributed the most revenue to the Google coffers in the past few years. The fact that paid search contributes to only 12% of the total search traffic is fascinating with a bevy of tools flooding the market all promising to deliver the ultimate solution in paid search marketing.

Organic search is still the biggest driver of search traffic at a whopping 88%. Unlike paid search where results are measurable accurately and instantly, the organic SEO process is a long term strategy with measurable results becoming clearer over time. Yet, the big question in every online marketer’s mind is – Which results do users trust more on search engines – the organic or paid results?

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Natural Search Marketing is Just in Time Conversation

I had the extreme pleasure of presenting to some of the biggest brands around at the 2009 Brandworks University. This year represented 19 years that Lindsay, Stone & Briggs has put on this annual branding conference. Brandworks is very unique in many ways as conferences go: attendance is mostly done by invitation, but attendees still pay a fee to attend; rather than elective presentations running simultaneously, there’s one block and presentations flow back-to-back and are formulated to relate to and support each other as well as the underlying theme; rather than a typical podium setup, presentations are done “in-the-round;” and it isn’t hard to find attendees who are able to claim 5, 10 or more years of attendance. Needless to say, if you ever get the opportunity to attend or are invited to speak, I highly recommend it.

This year’s talk was around the core theme of the “conversation economy” and how marketing, branding, and business in general is being shaped by and around conversations. Not surprising, there was a fair amount of talk around social media. Of course, my portion was to focus on natural search as part of this conversation, which thanks to blended search, crosses over and intersects all marketing channels. While my view on natural search hasn’t changed much over the years, preparing my presentation for the conference helped me frame it up with the exact message phrasing that I’ve been looking for – “just in time conversation.”

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NebuAd – New Twist on Behavioral Targeting for Online Ads

News stories this week highlighted Silicon Valley startup NebuAd, which recently unveiled their behavioral targeting network at ad:tech.

NebuAd

Behavioral ad targeting is nothing new on the internet, and I easily recall it being offered in one form or another as far back as about 1999. In fact, 24/7 Real Media currently offers behavioral targeting through their ad network as just one case in point. So what’s new with this incarnation is the way in which NebuAd collects data to base the targeting upon. NebuAd’s innovative twist on behavior targeting is based upon monitoring individuals’ internet browsing habits through their ISP, essentially seeing all the sites and pages that a user visits. (more…)

Voice Search the Next Big Thing in Mobile

Gregg Stewart has a great article today at Search Engine Watch on how Voice Search may be the “next big thing” that’s actually already arrived to large degree.

He posts an interesting graph from the Kelsey Group that estimates some fantastic growth figures for ad-sponsored directory assistance usage over the next few years.

Although I don’t really question any of the points Gregg made (more…)

Should you buy search ads for your brand keywords?

I confess, as a search engine optimizer, I used to think that buying ads for one’s own brand name was a complete waste of money. After all, all companies should rank in top slots for their own brand name(s), if they’re doing their SEO right, and if you’re ranking tops then people will be able to find you if they’re looking for you. As such, I thought that buying ads for your own name was just paying for clicks that should rightly come to you anyway.

But over time, I’ve heard other experts stating that their research shows that having ad presence for brands along with natural search ranking appears to enhance overall click through rates in a synergistic manner. And, with greater experience, I’ve seen a number of cases when companies really should be buying their own brand name keywords for ads!

I see that George Michie over at the Rimm-Kaufman Group criticized a recent Microsoft study claiming that some advertisers are wasting money by buying their own brands in paid search ads — and I think George was right to criticize this. Read on and I’ll elaborate…

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Pay-Per-Action Ads may open up Google to being a victim of fraud

I was just reading Barry Schwartz’s report that Google is opting-in some AdSense publishers into Pay Per Action (CPA) ads. He poses the question of why would Google push these ads on the publishers who haven’t asked for it? The immediate answer I come up with is that this could actually be a test to try to detect fraud, since CPA is thought to be less prone to exploit. After all, the publisher would only get paid for these ads if someone buys – not just clicks on the ads on their sites. Perhaps the publishers that are getting opted-in are ones for which Google has had some question about the quality of click-through in their regular PPC ads.

Google AdSense logo

I’ve been thinking that an unpublished problem with Google’s pay-per-action product is that Google itself is likely to become more a victim of fraud with these types of ads. Read on and I’ll describe…

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