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!

After many years of being neck-deep in Google Analytics, I finally had the chance to complete the Google Analytics IQ test. While reviewing for the test, I rediscovered features that I do not use nearly enough when looking at site data. Perhaps if I am skimping on them, some of you are too – so let’s take a look!

1. On Site Search and Search Refinement Report
   By reviewing search terms that people searched for within your site, you can not only see keywords not previously identified for AdWords campaigns, but content that visitors are trying to find that is not easily navigated to. Search refinement, on the other hand, occurs after the original internal site search is performed. By seeing how visitors refined their searches is an opportunity to modify the initial result page for the first internal search.
2. Search Navigation Report
   Adding onto #1, you can also see where the visitor started the search, and follow the path where visitors who search on a specific keyword go after viewing the search result page. You can see if that site search leads to a conversion or sale. By looking at Start pages, you can assess the effectiveness of that landing page, and learn about the keywords searched on from that page. This can provide details on how you can make the landing page more useful so the visitor doesn’t need to work as hard to get to what they are looking for.

   Site Search reports are located in the Content area of Google Analytics and need to be activated in the Profile Settings. For more details watch the Google module on this topic.

3. Search and Replace Filters
   You can create a Custom Filter that can replace a Request URI with a more meaningful description. For example, in the Top Content Report, you may have a list of URI’s that are not descriptive, and make it hard to analyze, such as /category.asp?catid=5, /category.asp?catid=41, /category.asp?catid=32 and so on. By using the Search and Replace Filter, you can provide content names to specific query stings, making the report a lot easier to digest.You can read more about search and replace filters on the Analytics module on Filters.

   

4. Reverse Goal Path Report
   Sometimes the path people take on their way to completing a goal you have set up is much different than the path you intended for them to take. Knowing that information can really help you with your site elements and goal conversion strategy. Found in the Goals section, you can see goal data defined without a sales funnel. It lists the navigation path that users took to arrive at a goal page, and provides the number of conversions that resulted from each path. This report demonstrates internal linking opportunities that you haven’t considered before, and offers ideas on how you can most efficiently provide visitors with information that they are looking for.

   If you want to know more about goals and funnels, check out the learning module on those topics.

5. $ Index
   Found in the Content area, the $ Index metric is the sum total of (Revenue + Goal Value) / Unique Views of Page Before the Conversion. It allows you to see the value of pages that have the most potential for site profitability. It’s most useful as a ranking metric and and shouldn’t be used as a standalone number. In order to use the $ Index metric, you need to have assigned goal values or have e-commerce revenue, otherwise the $ Index metric will be zero.

   You can read more about the $ Index on this learning module.

6. Graph Dayparts Against Transactions
   If you manually tag your ads, you can only see campaign and keyword data, and won’t receive many of the dimensions that can offer actionable insight. We already implement AdWords autotagging as a common practice, one feature to take advantage of is to graph dayparts against Transactions. Click on Traffic Sources > AdWords > Dayparts. Click on the top Visits tab, and choose Compare Two Metrics. I chose to compare Vists and Transactions below. Then drill down to Keyword – you can drill down even further by keyword and hour of day, and adjust AdWords bids accordingly. To see the full review, watch this video.

All of the study guides are located here. Because many are in presentation format, they are easy to digest. Definitely recommended if you are regularly in your site’s analytics.

Photo credit: Stéfan

Panda, Panda, Panda… Pandas haunt me again*.

I am sure most of you know about the big Google Panda (or Farmer) update and now it is suspected the next version of that update is rolling out. This update is meant to help websites with unique content rank higher than content scraping sites.

In theory this is perfect but in real life some businesses who were practicing good SEO got hurt in the process. We know some customers, peers and vendors who saw their search rankings go down after this update was launched.

One big example is if you are selling a product and a bunch of different retail outlets are selling your product. In most cases they take the approved copy from you and post it on their own site. To a Google bot that looks just like scraped text – which is a big no-no, especially now.

Picking up the Panda pieces

In his live video chat, Matt Cutts got a lot of questions about the Panda update and he let us know there would be an update at some point (soon). Many people in the chat and on blogs have expressed their frustration with the slap on the wrist from Google after this update and they want to know how to get back in good standing.

I just read a blog from Search Engine Watch about their Top 5 Google Panda Update SEO Survival Tips. The biggest being – don’t rely solely on SEO for your website’s success. That makes a lot of sense! If you can spread your traffic sources around, your site will be building in other areas even if it takes a hit in one. You can read more about types of traffic sources on this blog post here.

PPC can help

In the Search Engine Watch article Garry explains why he feels PPC has several advantages over SEO:

• Product: Guaranteed exposure to only those products and services you want to promote in search results. Match keywords to exact product offerings and watch conversion skyrocket.
• Price: In this case, it’s not the price of the product or services offered, but the price your business pays for the traffic itself. Don’t forget to factor in all the time and effort invested into ranking for keywords in organic results, and how often changes may be required.
• Promotion: While you can change the content surrounding your products, you may not have the same amount of creative license to change that content as quickly for mainstay (SEO targeted) pages versus paid search landing pages, nor will you necessarily have control over which pages Google chooses to display in results pages for any given query.
• Place: Distribution of your product won’t change, but distribution of your product in organic SERPs may be highly elastic versus highly-controllable paid search campaigns.
• People: Perhaps the most important component is your inability to control and target behavioral cues in search queries using SEO. It doesn’t get much better than the complete control that multiple keyword match types, negative match keyword lists, and advanced query performance reporting affords a search marketer.

Pretty smart. There is some security in a well-planned and targeted PPC campaign. Pandas or no Pandas – PPC can help bring some new website users to your site that you couldn’t dream of with SEO alone.

Are you prepared for Panda 2.2? Did you even notice a change with the original Panda update?

* Who is haunted by Pandas right? Want to know the ONLY word that rhymes with ‘Amanda’? You guessed it – PANDA! Know what I got for every holiday and birthday? Pandas! Panda clothes, stuffed pandas, panda radio, panda jewelry box, walking pandas, panda air freshener, panda coloring books, panda EVERYTHING. It was actually a bit scary if you saw my room as a child. I should probably see a therapist that specializes in panda overload.

Photo credit: KB35

In paid search (pay-per-click/PPC), like Google Adwords, there is a number that indicates the quality of the keywords you are using and affects it’s ranking and cost-per-click (CPC). The quality score is influenced by many factors like click-through rate (CTR), account history, quality of your landing page, relevancy of the keyword in the ads, and relevancy to the search query. The number is rated on a scale of 1-10; the higher the Quality Score, the higher your ad placement will be at a lower CPC. Microsoft is slated to start having Quality Score available to marketers very soon according to their Advertising blog.

Why is Quality Score important?

Though Quality Score doesn’t directly affect conversions on your landing page, it can lead to insight about how well your ads rank relating to the amount of media spent. The guts of your paid search campaign are:

• Choosing the right keywords to target your audience,
• Integrating those keywords on your landing page and into the ad text,
• And having the ad text relate directly to the landing page.

Knowing and understanding your Quality Score can give you actionable feedback to understand your competitive space as well as improve your campaign. One of the goals of a paid search marketer is to get their ads to rank higher than other ads at a lower cost-per-click. The score allows you to understand how it’s currently ranking and then make educated tests to improve that number.

Here are some ways you can improve your Quality Score:

• Check out your keywords! Are you using the right ones? How do the keywords you’re using in paid search rank for the website organically?
• Review on-page SEO elements. Are the keywords you’re using in paid search found on the landing pages? If not, consider adding or rewriting the content that implements those keywords.
• Do you need more ad groups? Maybe some of the keywords don’t relate to the others – try segmenting the keywords into different ad groups so the keywords in each group are relevant to each other and to the specific ad text used for each group.
• Google Adwords suggests that optimization is the best way to improve the keywords’ performance without raising the costs and recommends using their keyword diagnosis feature to provide insight as to why your ad might not be showing up.

The primary goal is to get the user to convert and although Quality Score doesn’t directly relate to those conversions, having a high Quality Score gives your ads the best opportunity to rank well for those keywords.  The more targeted the keywords, ads, and landing pages are the more likely the user will click on the ad and convert on the page. Using the right keywords for your campaign, making sure that they are relevant to the ad text as well as the landing page you are using is the best way to obtain a good Quality Score.

Much like a saloon in an abandoned western town, without visitors your site will not make you a penny. Among the best methods to drive potential customers is Pay-per-click advertsing (PPC) through Google’s Adwords or Microsoft Advertising’s adcenter- which delivers ads to both Bing and Yahoo. While Google receives a full 2/3 share of the U.S. search market, adding Adcenter to your mix raises your reach to 94.6%.

Before you begin any advertising campaigns, you must set clear goals for what you are trying to achieve. For example: Are you trying to Increase awareness? Increase leads? Perhaps Close more sales? For each of these, the campaign configuration would be different.

Increase awareness
To increase awareness, you would create a long-tail keyword list of relevant terms. Your keyword list should be very broad, and consider a variety of scenarios where your site would be a relevant result.
To build this campaign, create 4 lists of search phrases:

1. For your brand use phrases that include your name or unique products. You want to be sure that you rank well for people who are actively trying to find your site.
2. For your industry, categories, or market. Use association sites, trade groups, email newsletters, industry journals and consumer magazines for your market, as great sources for seed phrases.
3. For your products or services. All names aside, what is it that you sell? List your wares as you would search for them, as wells as how your customers would search for them. Regardless of your product, it’s possible your customers may describe it differently than you do: consider ‘watches’ vs. ‘timepieces’ or ‘chronographs’, ‘pens’ vs. ‘writing implements’.
4. And for your value proposition. What pain can you alleviate, what problems do your products solve? List the phrases that bring customers calling, and hopefully appear on the search engine results page (SERP) when they need you.

Each of these lists contributes ideas for potential keyword categories; develop each group of search phrases by adding variations of each and collect them into 4 ad groups within your campaign. Then set low maximum bids across the entire group- ensuring the most new visits for your advertising spend.

More leads
Bringing leads in the door means qualifying the above list, and not allocating spend toward reach. These terms should be product, pain, or need specific- and copy would appropriately respond to the search. Key word bids may be higher, but the budget must be carefully considered to provide volume and maintain your margin.

Set your maximum bid based on the value of each new customer to your business, the ratios of site visitors to leads and close rate. Let’s say 1 in 20 visitors becomes a lead, you close 1 in 5 leads, and a sale yields $200 in profit.

Maximum CPC=(lead conversion rate)*(close rate)*NewCustomerValue
Maximum CPC=(0.05)*(0.2)*$200=$2

Since only 1% of your PPC visitors will become new customers, you can not afford to buy visits for more than 1% of your margin (or $2) per visitor. If the resulting number is too low for your critical search phrases, revisit your conversion strategy.

Close sales
To connect people in a buying phase, your campaign’s budget would be focused on searches of an evolved and comparative nature. No longer appropriate to target searches that are exploratory, you should narrow your efforts to bid on searches that are most likely to result in a purchase. Consider the searches of two potential visitors:

These phrases exemplify the critical value of long-tail campaigns: the more specific the phrases that you bid on, the lower their averaged cost-per-click. The latter visitor is farther along in the buying cycle, knows what they want, and is more likely to buy if you have what they are looking for. While that narrow phrase offers only 28 potential visits per month, it carries only 1.5% of the cost.

To close more sales, drop higher-cost broad phrases and develop a litany of lower-cost, lower-volume searches that more narrowly describe the specific problem a site visitor could be facing or products that you offer.

Wrangling Customers to your Door
If your site is ready to turn visitors into leads, and leads into customers, then you are ready to dive into the pay-per-click marketplace. I encourage you to start with Google Adwords first, since it does have two-thirds of the market. As you construct your PPC campaign, round up the keyword lists you created above for each ad group, and develop ad copy that is Relevant, Compelling and Valuable for each search target.

You should set measurable goals for your new campaign, but if you’re new to this- how do you set your targets? To see what possible keywords in your market are going to cost, check out the Google Adwords: Keyword Tool, and use the Traffic Estimator to see how many visits you could anticipate.

As you kick-off your online advertising effort, make sure you can monitor your site in Google Analytics, and setup Goal Conversions to the see the effects of your PPC campaign. Calculating your PPC costs versus your “Goal Completions” will tell you the ongoing profitability of your efforts. Once you’ve found success, you can recreate your winning PPC campaign in Microsoft adcenter to expand your reach by almost 42%!