Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

In the pay-per-click world, preparedness is everything. While reviewing data and making related changes to your campaign certainly takes up its own valuable time, it is making preparations in advance which really keeps a company’s ads running smoothly.

The holiday season is just the sort of big event which can seemingly arrive out of nowhere and take a business by surprise. And while making some basic assumptions seems simple enough — increasing your advertising budget to cash in on increased search traffic, for example — a business should always sit down and think about its goals, long before Christmas music starts lighting up the airwaves, or reminders of Valentine’s Day loom.

So when is a good time to start thinking about holiday marketing plans? As with everything, it depends on your business. Internet marketing has seen holiday ads debut earlier with every passing year, and so it’s equally important to balance normal plans with what your competitors may be rolling out.

Think about the goals which should be reached in order to determine acceptability, and then about what it would take to consider your campaign a rousing success. Look at normal day-to-day measures: maybe your PPC campaign is a best practices dream, and you’ve segmented out your ads across both Google AdWords’ Search and Content Networks. Maybe you have a campaign specifically for mobile search traffic, and another for desktop traffic. But have you looked into Remarketing? Sitelinks? Dynamic Search? Themed landing pages? Have you introduced holiday shopping thoughts into your ads early on, then built up incentive to shop with offers and deadlines?

These are all things which should be addressed well in advance, so as to make sure that you don’t suffer from headless chicken syndrome — running around and making hurried, harried changes, things which could potentially lead to misspend or lost opportunities. Online consumer spending is only increasing annually, and the opportunities are unquestionably out there. But it’s not enough to just react, or increase a PPC campaign’s budget by a tiny percentage — a successful campaign which draws traffic, leads or sales for your business requires forethought. So have you made your preparations with time to spare?

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Saint Nicholas knows how to reach every person he needs to but does your organization? By using LinkedIn Advertising your company could be getting in touch with just the right people at just the right time!

LinkedIn is obviously a great new resource for businesses to use. It’s a great networking site for business professionals and companies. In many cases, because of its business professional nature, it can be especially useful for companies that operate in the business to business environment. Recently I began to research the possibilities of using LinkedIn Advertising for B2B efforts. At first glance, it certainly seems to be an option worth testing for many B2B’s.

Here is a quick introduction to LinkedIn Advertising:

• Setup

  LinkedIn Advertising is done directly through LinkedIn, and your LinkedIn account. It is made to be very simple to use. To create your ads they have an easy to use template. For each ad created, payment fees are charged by pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-thousand impression (CPM), you set a maximum bid for each click or thousand impressions, and a daily budget can be specified.

  

• Ad Content/Placement:

  In your ad you are given a space for a small image (branded or not), a headline (up to 25 characters), and a 75 word description to catch the attention of the audience. Once launched, the ads can be seen at the right of each LinkedIn page and in a banner at the bottom of each page.

  

• Ad Targeting:

  The number one reason that makes this form of PPC advertising unique is its exceptional ability to target in the B2B environment. Because LinkedIn users list specific professional information tied to their employer and their job duties/titles, LinkedIn allows you to target your ads down to very specific parameters related to professionals. The following is the list of options you have for targeting:

  • Geography – by continent, country, state, even major cities
  • Company – industries, company size, or even by a specific company or list
  • Job Titles – categories, functions, seniority, specific job titles
  • Group – specific LinkedIn groups and networks
  • Gender
  • Age

  These targeting options open up amazing possibilities. For example, if you provide HR services to retailers, you can target your ads towards only certain job titles or departments related to HR. Then, you can narrow targeting to only the retail industry and even to specific retailers you want to reach. If you wanted to only target employees at JC Penny, you could do that. If you specialize your services for only small retailers in Maine or only large retailers in the US and Canada, that can be done as well. The options are abundant and at first glance seem to be extremely useful.

Read more posts from the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar!

After starting your paid search campaign you’re going to start collecting data. Here’s a simple breakdown of the data you’ll be looking at each day as you monitor and optimize your PPC campaign.

Clicks – This is the number of times someone has seen your ad show up in a search result and have clicked on the ad.

Impressions – How many times the ad has actually shown up for a search; even if a user doesn’t click on it.

CTR – Also known as “click-through rate” this number is the number of clicks divided by impressions. It’s a percentage of the overall clicks that actually get through to the website based on impressions. If your ad is getting a lot of impressions and not that many clicks then you might want to review your ad copy or think about using a different keyword.

Average CPC – CPC stands for “cost-per-click” and this number is basically telling you about how much you are paying each time someone clicks on your ads. Remember that some keywords are more expensive than others, however, there are ways to help reduce how much you pay for clicks by optimizing your ads.

Cost – The total cost you are paying for the campaign (all the clicks’ cost added together).

Average Position – The paid ads show up in Google on the right sidebar, this piece of information tells you what position (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.) it shows up on the page.

Conversion – When you set up your paid search campaigns you can also set up a way to track conversions. This is how many times the users clicks on the ads, gets to your page, and converts.

Cost per Conversion – This is the total cost of the ads divided by the number of conversions. You can think of this number as the amount of money you are paying for whatever the conversion means to your business – most likely a lead.

Conversion Rate – Another mathematical equation – the conversion rate is just the number of conversions divided by the number of clicks.

There, now you know what kind of data you’re dealing with – what should your goals be?

1. First things first, work on getting a good quality score. This will help improve all aspects of your campaign.
2. Improve your conversion rate. There’s no magic number for the “ideal” conversion rate, the key here is to improve on what you currently have.
3. Reduce your CPC. Are you paying too much for keywords? Investigate the costs for each. Can you group them differently to make the campaign more effective?

Want more information about running your paid search campaigns?

• Read more blog posts about PPC
• Check out a webinar about generating sales with PPC
• Optimize your campaign – dayparting and day of the week
• PPC performance tips
• The basics – the anatomy of a PPC campaign

After you’ve set up your Google Adwords PPC account and started running your campaign (long enough to have some data and trends to analyze), you have to start optimizing your campaign. A great place to start is to determine the best (and worst) times of the day and days of the week to run your campaign.

Why is this important? Learning what times of day and days of the week your campaign performs best helps you spend your money more wisely. You also learn more about the kinds of people your campaigns are targeting and are able to target them more closely. Or you can weed out the unwanted folks from your audience who you find aren’t necessarily your target.

Here’s how to easily get to these reports so you can start digging in the data:

1. Once logged into Google Adwords,  click on the “Dimensions” tab. Now you can change the view to Time.
2. The Time option allows you to view your campaign’s performance by dividing it into Day of the Week, Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year, and Hour of Day.
3. You’ll want to view the data over a longer period of time to pick up on trends. Select Day of the Week and the campaigns break out to performance by day of the week.
4. Select Hour of Day and you can see how the campaign has performed by each hour of the day (0 being midnight and 23 being 11pm).

By viewing dimensions this way, you will start to see certain times of day or days of the week that get more clicks, or days that seem to convert better than others. Then you can start optimizing your campaign to only run during the best performing hours and put your budget into what’s working well.

Don’t look at just one piece of data, like the clicks, look at all the pieces of information you are given. For example, if one day gets the most clicks but has the worst conversion rate then you might not want to a majority of your budget into that day.

Look at what is getting the most traction (clicks/impressions) and what is happening when people see the ads. Are they clicking through? How much are you paying for their click? Is it too much? Is it cheaper at another time that will still get qualified clicks? Check on the positioning of the ads during different times of days or days of the weeks – are some times better than others? Once you’ve decided to alter the days/times the campaign runs, you can change the schedule within the settings tab of the campaign. Under settings are “Advanced settings” where you can edit the schedule to only show ads on selected days and time periods.

Though there is not one “ideal” metric with PPC; the idea is to continue improving on what you currently having running. The only way to do that is to analyze the data, do some testing, and keep moving forward. Good luck optimizing!