Gord Hotchkiss has spoken and written on many occasions about internet speed and what this means for organizations trying to adapt to a rapidly changing competitive landscape. The question regarding internet speed is how fast are you willing to move to adapt to the changing online landscape, but the question also has to be asked; how fast are you willing to fail?

To determine the most effective marketing mix online, at some point a failure must be encountered. The question regarding optimization of paid search campaigns may come down to complacency. If everything is working well, ROAS is good, CTR is good, Quality Scores are good, then why mess with a good thing? Well, the quickest way to being overtaken by your competition is to stand still, and yet the problem is that when we optimize, we risk failure.

Not too fast, not too slow
Starting to optimize conservatively can lead to long, drawn out failures which can do longer-term damage, and yet going to the other extreme can lead to some very large disasters. It is more about balancing speed and risk with optimization testing. When starting testing it is important to define the scope of the test and determine what the acceptable rate of failure would be (i.e. negative impact to the bottom line) versus time needed to realize statistically relevant information. For example, when testing new ad copy or a new landing page, it is important to measure the volume of traffic you will direct to the landing page compared to the amount of potential loss of business due to that change. The margin of error associated with the test can also come down to the size of the change. The more significant the change, the faster you will see results (positive or negative).

Test markets
As with traditional marketing, definition of the test market will help to control the scope of the testing as well as the amount of volume exposed to the test. Limiting the scope of the test to selected ad groups or specific campaigns, or leveraging geo-targeting to isolate markets exposed to the test, can assist in balancing quick results and risk. The selection of test markets will also assist in providing a comparative bench mark for the test; although it is less of an issue with A/B testing.

Avoid the knee-jerk reaction. Testing and seeing results quickly is great, but ensure the statistical relevancy of those results is accurate. Before declaring a test a success, determine exactly what degree of data is required to see an effect from the test. Remember Statistics 101: what size of result is required to determine a 90 or 95% confidence interval with the test? The confidence intervals are going to be directly impacted by the amount of data; the more data, the smaller the interval required for statistical relevancy. There are two ways to increase the amount of data: time or scope. Increasing the duration of a test will assist in driving towards statistical relevancy or increasing the scope of impacted ad groups/campaigns will increase the amount of data.

Where do you want to go?
Testing in marketing is 70% science and 30% art. Even the most lackluster creative developer can design a highly successful campaign with enough iterations and testing. Before implementing a test, start with a hypothesis. I know, its high school science all over again, but without an idea of what the expected outcome of your testing could be, it’s going to be like going flying without a destination; you’re going to end up somewhere, just maybe not where you would like.

Knowing what works is only valuable if you know why something didn’t work and therefore failure is the only real way to drive success. Failure is only really a bad thing when nobody learns from it, which is why when implementing a testing framework, recording specifics about how each change affected the campaign’s performance is imperative to a successful testing strategy. Each test should be followed up with a detailed analysis as to how the test impacted the results. What was it about the test that caused the specific result?

The key to a successful optimization and testing program is designing successive tests and constantly challenging the status quo. Just remember you’re going to fail once in a while, but you can learn a lot from failure and take what you learn to help you succeed that much more next time.

Determining the most effective structure comes down to really understanding what the goals of your campaign are and how you will need to market to someone from initial awareness right through to the end purchase. Of course, it all depends on what you are marketing and the duration of the purchase decision cycle.

PPC Campaign Positioning

Each campaign should be positioned at a unique point in the purchase decision process; whether that campaign be:

• Awareness focused campaign aimed at filling the top of the sales funnel
• Influencing campaign to guide the prospective customer through to purchase or
• Closing campaign aimed at generating the conversion

The marketing messaging associated with the campaigns should mirror the stages in the purchase decision process from ad copy through to landing pages and offers. Regardless of the position in the purchase process, the customer should be prompted to take some form of action on a landing page.

PPC Campaign Structure

The structure of the paid search campaign will closely align to the associated metrics with each campaign. It would be unreasonable to expect that a campaign targeted at the early awareness stage of the purchase decision cycle would generate a direct conversion (sale), but starting the education and branding conversations are more reasonable goals. A soft call-to-action such as the download of an educational whitepaper would be appropriate in the early awareness phase. It is also important to remember that the amount of information asked for on the landing page form is in alignment to the value of the offer. The contact information for a prospect is valuable to them and therefore the more information requested, the more valuable the offer must be. Awareness campaigns may consist of broad terminology associated with the products or services, pains-based terminology, and even direct or indirect competitor’s terminology.

Understanding how individual keywords are positioned at each stage of the purchase decision cycle will assist in defining the overall campaign structure. As stated, the goal is to create a seamless communication message guiding the prospect from the awareness phase through to conversion.

Maximizing Visibility

As with many other forms of advertising, visibility and frequency is key to effective marketing messages. Focusing all efforts at only a particular point of the purchase decision process would lead to high acquisition and high attrition or low acquisition and low conversions. We all know that the vast majority of conversions require multiple clicks (especially in high value B2B sales) and ensuring effective frequency of ads is important to remaining top of mind while providing reinforcing messages through the subsequent stages of the purchase decision cycle.

Defining the message and the offers that are most applicable at each stage of the purchase process will ensure that ads maintain a high CTR, while landing pages are effective at providing more conversion-focused offers such as demos or free trials. Should the sale involve an offline sales force, it is important to create a paid search campaign aimed at satisfying the informational requirements (IQ Needs) of the prospective client, while allowing the sales force do the relationship development (EQ Needs).

Controlling PPC Costs

Leveraging your campaign structure to control costs is about understanding how each campaign affects the other and ultimately leads to conversion. A keen understanding of the prospect’s path to conversion becomes necessary to developing the campaign structure. Knowing the value of each conversion or lead at the corresponding stage of the purchase decision cycle will assist in bidding strategies as well as determining the appropriate budgeting requirements for each campaign. Several Bid Management tools are developing cross channel tracking technologies to assist advertisers with the determination of the value of associated campaigns. Multiple campaign attribution models are becoming more and more necessary as marketers attempt to become more intelligent about how to better balance visibility each stage of the purchase decision process.

As previously stated, frequency is important to paid search campaigns and therefore it is important to define the tactics to maximize that frequency. Most advertisers are in a deficit situation with regards to available budget versus available keyword search volume inventory. Leveraging day parting and geo-targeting can be effective tactics to concentrate the limited budgets into a smaller subset of the target to maximize frequency and coverage of the purchase decision cycle.

To learn more about effective PPC campaign management, attend our free webinar on September 30, at 11:00am PST (2:00pm EST). We’ll be talking with Maria Pergolino from Marketo about a successful PPC campaign that increased qualified opportunities by 300%.

While we are thinking about the question of whom do we accredit the quote to, now let’s think more close to home; how to we accredit revenue to individual marketing channels?

The double edged sword of PPC measurability is the ability to measure with a great deal of accuracy how paid search is performing and yet it is still easy measure impact wrong when looking at performance rather myopically. There are many different ways to attribute ROAS, such as first click, last click and a linear attribution model. Making decisions based on an individual attribution window could introduce significant error into your decision process and affect the total ROAS of your paid search campaign.

The problem with most analytics tools is that they attempt to apply linear modeling to explain a problem solved with bounded rationality. Business-to-business purchase behaviour is not a simple linear series of events, but more of an entanglement of communication touch points where a decision can be easily swayed by a chance encounter or incalculable externality. Most revenue attribution models ignore that paid search is only one marketing channel that is interrelated to all other marketing activities; which involve both online and offline company touch points.

With B2B marketing, many purchases involve multiple interactions with the vendor from multiple touch points prior to purchase. A study of a retailers, conducted by Coremetrics, indicates that all buyers had interacted with at least 3.9 campaigns prior to purchase; in a B2B environment it can easily be many more. This does not factor in many of the elements active within the B2B purchasing BuyerSphere. Enquiro’s Brand Lift of Search research also indicates that sponsored listings increase a prospective customer’s propensity to purchase by 8% and occupying the top sponsored position increased aided brand recall by 150%. These are all facts that a simple revenue attribution model can easily de-emphasize.

The majority of companies are still solely relying of the last click attribution model, which attributes the entirety of the revenue to the last point of interaction with the site before purchase. The inherent risk with this type of attribution model is the emphasis on the conversion-oriented campaigns and gives no attribution to the campaigns that originally started the marketing conversation. By making bid management and investment decisions based on only this information, the risk of divesting into the acquisition or branding channels increases substantially; effectively reducing the overall effectiveness of the marketing efforts. This risk increases if the company has a relatively unknown brand in the marketplace. The same can be said for focusing only on the first click attribution where we are looking only at the value of the keywords at the beginning of the purchase decision cycle and can ignore the importance of the conversion keywords at the end of the purchase process.

The only answer to this analytics dilemma is to strike a balanced measure using multiple attribution windows. Coremetrics has recently released a great whitepaper on Appropriate Attribution models which is a great read for any marketer on how to better attribute revenue to your online marketing efforts. For quite some time Enquiro’s Sponsored Search Team has been using a similar model of revenue attribution within the confines of the abilities of existing analytics programs, which vary depending on the provider you are using. However, we have also found great success in determining how paid search integrates into the macro-level marketing equation by using a micro-conversion and correlation analysis.

Often Paid Search campaigns are evaluated based on the number of qualified leads they have brought in or the strict revenue they have generated, but there is a missing element of how this impacts the overall marketing efforts. Post click behavior is an important element to any revenue attribution analysis such as the subscription to an email newsletter, requesting a catalog, downloading a whitepaper or other important marketing collateral, calling the phone number listed on the site. Each of these interactions with the website is part of the marketing conversation and can be assigned a value based on historical conversion rates and average order values. These numbers can then be applied to the paid search campaign as part of the revenue attribution model to assist in determining the value of paid search.

Another important metric is to measure the correlation of paid search traffic with direct and branded site traffic. Paid search may be the gateway to starting the marketing conversation with the prospect, but may only be the initial touch point. Measuring the impact of paid search on the direct and branded traffic can indicate how paid search is acting to acquire customers and brand the company in the marketplace. A simple correlation analysis is effective in revealing whether paid search is having a positive impact on the overall traffic to the site. The user may not necessary complete the desired conversion in the same session, but may use a direct or branded search to navigate back to the site at a later time to continue the relationship building process. 

Unfortunately, analysis of the marketing efforts often collides with internal politics which often complicates issues and can even impact the distribution of budgets. However, knowing how your paid search campaigns interact with other marketing channels, drive revenue, and build relationships can assist in determining the total value of the marketing channel.

The key takeaway from this is to look at the impact of your paid search campaigns as holistically as possible to determine your total ROAS. What is the direct revenue from the campaign? Does the ROAS change when using an appropriate attribution model? How does your paid search campaign initiate the marketing conversation and act as a relationship development tool?

We have been working quite closely with our Yahoo Representatives who have been up until this point been assisting with manually day parting our clients’ campaigns. With Yahoo we have seen, through the implementation of manual day parting, an increase on Return on Investment of over 300% by only running ads within the hours when our target market has proven to be online. With a now automated system for advertisers to implement day parting on campaigns we can all now enjoy even greater control over campaigns and optimization best practices. This technology is of specific assistance to B2B marketers who are primarily targeting persons during work hours.

Here are some screenshots of the Day Parting Interface:

On the Campaign-Level view of the Yahoo UI, day parting can be easily seen through the incorporation of these icons beside your campaign names:

To access the day parting controls, enter into your campaign settings. On the right side of the page, you will see your settings for demographic targeting, geo-targeting, and day parting. Simply click edit and the pop-over appears as the following image depicts to edit the day parting.

Simply, click on the day and the controls for editing the day parting settings will appear.

Click save and you are done.

This is a great new functionality to Yahoo and we are excited to be able to expand day parting for all of our clients to further achieve our campaign goals.

Thanks Yahoo!

Over the past several months, in part due to increased economic pressures, we have seen an increase of importance placed on improving return on investment (ROI) from search-based activity, particularly from PPC campaigns. ROI attribution and measurement becomes especially important when justifying the cost of the online sponsored advertising and improving the return on advertising spend (ROAS). Here are some tips on improving your search performance and getting the best ROI possible.

1.      Know Your Analytics

This statement may seem fairly redundant, but all too often search marketers find themselves flying blind without proper analytics. Much of this article will focus on using analytics to optimize for ROI and knowing the limitations of your own analytics program is extremely important. Additionally, ensure that your ROI metrics are tied back to search-related key performance indicators (KPIs).

 ROI attribution can become more cumbersome in the business-to-business (B2B) market place as sales cycles can be extremely long as well as potential of the sale occurring offline. In cases such as this, ensuring lead sources can be captured into CRM systems can provide vital statistics to the health of your campaign. (Yes, pun intended) Several CRM programs, such as SalesForce and Oracle, offer integration with some of the leading Analytics software providers. Simple Access or Excel spreadsheets can also be used to tieback the sales, lead value, or other KPIs to your search activities.

 2.      Optimize Landing Page Performance

So you’ve paid for the click; what now? Your landing page and ad copy must work together to assist in the sale of your product and convince the user into taking your desired action and converting into a lead/sale. On average, you only have 8 seconds to reassure the prospect that you are what they are looking for and convince them to stick around.

 Landing page testing is incredibly important to the success of a paid search campaign and to improving ROI. With a landing page the simple combination of titles, copy, images, and call-to-action can make sweeping differences in the performance of the page. The difficult question is which combination? Unfortunately; other than best practices there is a limited supply of instructions and guidelines to assist search marketers in developing the perfect landing page, but there are testing tools that can help us along the way. Testing tools can range in abilities and cost, but one of the better landing page testing tools on the market is Google Website Optimizer. It is fairly intuitive, easy to implement, and provides clear results analysis, best part is that it’s FREE.

 Your landing pages are perhaps one of the most important factors influencing the ROAS for Paid Campaigns. Simple landing page testing can be an easy quick win for any paid search campaign.

 3.      Optimize Conversion Paths 

Conversion path optimization is the next important aspect of ROI optimization. We all know that attrition occurs at each stage of the conversion path, the key to optimizing ROI is mitigating the loss at these key stages.

 Many of the analytics tools on the market do offer conversion funnel analysis which will allow you to dive deeper into the ‘fall out’ that occurs at each stage in the process. The key objective in this analysis is to determine at which stage in the funnel you are getting the largest amount of abandonment. Once you know where the users are leaving the funnel, you can then focus in on the potential problems with that page; what barrier exists, hindering final conversion?

 Enquiro’s has used funnel analysis to optimize conversion funnels for its clients and has improved the conversion rates by up to 150%.

 4.      Leverage your SEO & SEM Together

Enquiro’s research has proven a significant branding advantage can be achieved by having a top paid ranking and top organic ranking above the fold. However, budgets can be saved by lowering paid ad exposure for those key phrases also occupying top organic position; allowing for more focus in other key opportunities.

 With your SEM campaign, you are able to quickly test the traffic volumes and conversion rates for many keywords as well as determine what the best messaging is for communicating with your market. This knowledge can then be applied to your SEO efforts to help mitigate the costs of PPC. Although organic rankings take time to take achieve, there is significant benefit the can be attained by gaining organic rankings for your top search phrases.

 Additionally, through landing page testing and ad testing, it’s possible to determine what messaging resonates with your target audience and which calls-to-actions are most effective.

 5.      Trim the Fat

We all have heard of the 80/20 rule, but in paid search campaigns it’s more like the 95/5 rule. Ninety-Five percent of your revenue will come from 5% of your keywords. Using your analytics and appropriately tagging your conversions to indicate, on the keyword-level, the source information can assist you in finding those 5% of the keywords and truly optimizing those ad groups. On the flipside this source can also indicate which keywords are simply driving up costs without producing results.

 This should not be confused with eliminating long-tail keywords because they simply have not collected significant click volumes, but more so, finding those head and torso keywords that are costing a lot of money without driving conversions. Don’t be afraid to lose the dead weight in your campaigns.

 6.      Use Testing Budgets

When looking at paid search campaigns, once you feel you have developed a winning formula, there is a hesitancy to not want to mess with it. I know this feeling all to well, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it; but the truth of the matter is, if you don’t break it once in a while innovation cannot occur. To work around the hesitancy of making changes for fear of losing ground or ROI, assign a certain percentage of your budget that can be used for testing. Depending on how risk adverse you are, will determine how much you will assign.

 Using a testing budget (in a separate campaign or even account) will allow you to perform keyword analysis, landing page testing, A/B ad copy testing, as well as experiment with different bidding strategies without affecting the performance of the main account. Once a winning strategy has been proven it can be migrated over to the main account to improve its performance overall.

 One important caveat about testing to remember: one experiment = one independent variable. That is to say only make one change at a time; otherwise you will have difficulty in attributing positive or negative results to the correct changes.

7.      Leverage Quality Score

Although I  normally encourage focus be placed on optimizing based on conversions, optimizing  on the basis of quality score has its advantages, there is nothing detrimental from using quality score to enhance your ROI. So what do I mean with that seeming contradiction in terms? Simple, look at the quality score suggestions and your campaign goals. Make the changes to your quality score that will not adversely affect your campaign. For example, using your ads to pre-qualify visitors may decrease your CTR; in turn negatively affecting the quality score. However, pre-qualifying visitors prior to their click will achieve a stronger Conversion rate, thereby increasing your ROI. Using keywords in the ad copy and landing page can boost the quality score without losing the pre-qualifying messaging.

 8.      Use Micro Conversions as an ROI Indicator

Sometimes it’s not always easy to attribute ROI to your paid search campaigns, in fact in most cases its down right difficult. There is hope, however, in using micro conversions. Micro conversions are those actions that a user will take on the path to conversion. For example sites using a demo can calculate the conversion rates from demos to leads to sales. It simply takes a bit of reverse engineering to the sales cycle and determining values.

 However, with appropriate analytics, you know the demo to lead ratio, the lead to sale ratio, and average sale amount; therefore using your average sale amount multiplied by your lead to sale ratio, gives you your value per lead, then simply multiply that once again by your demo to lead ratio and you’ve calculated your value per demo. The same can be applied for filling out a contact us form, engaging in an online chat with a sales person, adding to cart, product customization, etc. Micro Conversions can assist in determining the value of a paid visitor by the actions taken leading up to the offline sales process where tracking can be more difficult, impossible even.

This is the final installment of the 4-part series on key PPC best practices (PPC Best Practices Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).

Speak Their Language

There has been constant debate as to what to use for keyword analysis with regards to long-tail versus head phrases and which yields the better results. Head phrases are the very generic and broad search queries where there is enormous search volume, but costs associated with the keywords are quite high. Torso keywords are the more-specific keywords; the 2- to 4-word search queries that still have lower search volume compared to the head phrases, but also tend to be cheaper. Long-tail keywords are the keyword phrases over 4 words where the costs tend to be minimal, but search volume is also sparse.

When doing keyword development, first look at the torso phrases and develop your keyword strategy using 2- to 4-word search queries to develop the keyword basket. Once you have the torso phrases, run the account and closely monitor the performance of the individual keywords down to your most granular KPI (ideally ROI or cost per conversion on the keyword level).

Once you know which keywords are driving highly-qualified traffic in the torso, it is then possible to look at the longer-tail keywords associated with the high converting torso phrases. Accounts with literally millions of keywords are not necessary when only a small percentage are actually working; spend where the ROI is made.

When developing your keyword basket, make sure you step into the mind of the searcher. Which keywords is your target market most likely to be using when searching for your product/service? Ensure you are not simply bidding on the marketing language you use internally, but also the language with which your market is most likely to initiate a search. (Hint: Talk to your sales department. They know the language your customers will be using.)

We recently took over a PPC campaign from a client doing it in-house and our first step was to look at the keywords. By refining the keywords based on user intention we decreased the Cost Per Click (CPC) by 23% and doubled the Click Through Rate (CTR). The conversion rate also increased substantially.

It is also possible to break out keywords by the Purchase Decision Process (PDP). By paying close attention to the keyword refinement process, it is possible to determine which keywords are being used at the beginning of the research phase, in the consideration and comparison phase and in the purchase intent phase of the PDP. By allocating these keywords into appropriate campaigns, you can then control the budgets associated with those keywords and effectively increase ROI, awareness, brand reach or whatever your PPC goals are.

Quality Score Is an Indicator, Not a Destination

There has been lots of debate around quality score and what it means to PPC advertisers. The long and short of a quality score is that it is designed to assist the customer. Google and Yahoo (with MSN just coming on board) have been using quality scoring to increase the quality of ads to improve the user experience. That being said, quality score should not be managed.

If you, as the advertiser, are looking to provide the consumer with the best experience possible (a good idea if you’re looking for conversions), then your quality score should naturally be good. A colleague of mine, Chris Davies, gave the perfect analogy for quality score: "It’s the ‘check engine’ light." If you have a poor quality score it serves as indication that it’s time to look under the hood and see what’s causing the issue. Look to your ad copy, landing pages and keywords, or reassign ad groups to adjust your quality score.

Ultimately, if you have a poor quality score and conversion rate is good and cost per conversion is good, then the few cents difference a better quality score can make is irrelevant.

Stop Measuring Cost Per Click; Start Measuring Cost Per Conversion

Ultimately, every change made to a PPC campaign should be to lower the cost per conversion. Therefore, don’t be afraid to bid aggressively on high-converting, high-quality, traffic-generating keywords and bid lower on the other 90% in your campaign if at the end of the day you are achieving the end goal.

Don’t Guess… Test

With a PPC campaign, testing is the campaign manager’s best friend. Testing is a constant, iterative process that must be followed to refine the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns. Multivariate testing can be as complex as developing a multitude of landing pages and testing multiple aspects (such as images, titles and page copy, to name a few) or as simple as using versions of a landing page or ads in A/B tests and constantly refining the best performing versions.

The key with a testing strategy is to balance the size of the test with the size of the account. The larger the test, the longer the testing process needed to gain statistically-relevant data. No matter what the size of the test, budgeting the necessary time is as important as budgeting the media spend.

Don’t Get Punished for Bad Behavior

Behavioral targeting has become one of the more popular buzzwords in the industry and rightly so; after all, the better we can target our market the more effective our campaigns. Several options are available to better target our online market, including geo-targeting, day-parting and demographic targeting.

For example, geo-targeting can be used to communicate more efficiently with users in a particular region and better allocate your product offering. After all, selling snow shovels in Florida wouldn’t be particularly advantageous, whereas selling air conditioners would be.

Finally, it is possible to target based on demographics. This targeting is most effective when using a content network and using site targeting based on the demographics of the audience for a particular site. However, although the information is available through such tools as MSN’s Ad Intelligence, I would stay away from disqualifying keywords because they are not in line with your target market’s demographics.

For example, according to the US Census data, most HR managers tend to be female, yet in targeting this audience I would not disqualify the keyword "Human Resources Management" because the demographics are skewed towards men. One of the marketing basics that’s literally been engrained into all marketers is to advertise where your market is and one very effective behavioral targeting mechanism is the use of vertical engines in your paid search strategy.

Get Vertical

Vertical search engines are an effective method of lowering CPC and improving the overall quality of traffic. The quality of the searches with a vertical search engine also tends to be better due to the increased propensity for buyers to use vertical search engines later in the purchase decision process. This presents an opportunity for those with more limited budgets (and those with the budget, too) to more effectively spend online and generate higher ROI.

Vertical engines also offer the ability to access a much more targeted audience which will allow you to develop custom ad copy for the particular demographic. Although the traffic on vertical engines is no where near what it is on Google, Yahoo, or MSN, it is important not to discount these engines from any paid search strategy.  The ROAS that can be gained from advertising on vertical engines can far exceed what any mainstream engine can provide. The detriment to working on vertical engines are the differing revenue models ranging from CPC to fixed cost and the management nuances to be learned for each engine.

Of course there is a lot more to these best practices than the little snippets above, but those will be the subjects of future, more in-depth articles to come. For the continuation of this series, please visit PPC Best Practices Part 4.

Plan to Measure; then Measure the Plan

As you move forward with your PPC campaign, ensure you are able to effectively measure your KPIs through your analytics tracking. With several of our clients, we are using keyword-level ROI to ensure we can accurately spend the budget where we are making the highest returns. This measurement includes being able to merge data from several sources in order to accurately measure the effect of each keyword on the business.

B2B sales in the online environment are really no different than in the offline environment: The sales process is much longer than in B2C, and relationship development is a primary concern. Knowing this fact, it is important to ensure your analytics are set to measure the multitude of conversions that may occur and assign ROI values to each conversion.

Tip: Ensure your cookie duration is enabled to match the average sales cycle timeline at a minimum.

K.I.S.S Rule Applied to Conversion Path Optimization

Once you have a set of clearly defined goals and are able to effectively measure the necessary KPIs, it’s time to turn to the conversion path. The traditional thought is that the path to conversion starts on the landing page, when, in fact, it starts with the moment the user interacts with your ad on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

All of the tactics you use (including ad copy, targeting, landing page messaging and the subsequent site conversion path) must be dictated by the end goal. Every interaction or step in the conversion process should take the user in one continuous motion towards the intended conversion. Messaging and offers should maintain a consistent theme to gain the conversion and nurture the lead into a prospect for the sales department. The conversion path should provide all of the information the user needs along the way to make the decision whether to purchase or not.

Enquiro’s own research on B2B purchase decision behavior provides valuable insight as to what content to place on your site and in your conversion path. Ensure that traffic, once on the site, can convert on landing pages quickly and easily. Ask yourself several questions:

1. Is the conversion path simple and intuitive?
2. What is the intention of the users on this page?
3. What information are they looking for (pricing, competitive comparisons, product specs, company information)?
4. What goal do you want users to complete?
5. Are there any distractions or unnecessary information on the pages in the conversion funnel?
6. Are your calls-to-action conspicuously positioned?
7. Is your offer (whitepapers, podcasts, eBooks, demos, complimentary trials, etc.) relevant to users’ needs?

 Please check back next week for PPC Best Practices – Part 3 of this Series.

Stop Thinking PPC, Start Thinking Consumer-Initiated Marketing

Over the past year, several new options (and the list keeps growing) have been made available for online advertisers to create more sophisticated online marketing campaigns. We’ve seen the implementation of display advertising through Pay Per Click (PPC) providers as well as a significant movement towards local and mobile advertising. This movement in the market represents a paradigm shift, from simply a PPC-focused strategy, to thinking about all the channels associated with consumer-initiated marketing conversations.

Several of these options include display advertisements, paid inclusion, local listings and Pay Per Action (PPA). With each of these options there are several different revenue models (and by revenue, I mean for the search engines). Therefore, it is important to ensure you have effectively allocated your budget to maintain your ROI (Return On Investment).

PPC and PPA models are the most effective for the advertiser based on the business objectives of driving users to the site and gaining conversions, whereas a CPM-based model is more effective from a branding perspective.

With each of these models it is extremely important to know what your end goal is and how to reverse-calculate to estimate what each conversion is worth, and through your conversion rate what each visitor is worth to you and consequently how much you should be paying per thousand impressions. Sadly enough, too many advertisers initiate PPC campaigns without knowing what the end goal is. A word of caution: Traffic is not an end goal!

Start with the End in Mind

What is it that your PPC campaign needs to do for the business objectives? What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) do you have in place for the measurement of the plan? There are many metrics to measure the effectiveness of a PPC campaign versus the effectiveness of your optimization. What’s the difference? PPC campaign effectiveness is judged by its impact on the company’s bottom line, and the return on investment. Campaign optimization is measured by an increase in CTR and improved quality score.

The goals of your PPC campaign should be those conversions that speak directly to the business objectives and business model of the company. When you begin to optimize your campaigns, it will become clear how measuring the effect of the PPC campaign on the business objectives, not performance metrics, is critical to improving ROI.

Next up, I’ll dive deeper into the PPC process in PPC Best Practices Part 2 of this 4 part series.

A word of Caution to Adwords Advertisers:

Recently, we have seen a notable increase in the number of what appears to be phishing (A.K.A spoofing) attempts targeting Google Adwords Accounts. These attempts mirror the same strategy that was used to steal account information from bank accounts; where the email appears to be from Google Adwords, yet the URL is a different variation to the Google Adwords link. Google does attempt to contact you through emails; however, should you receive an email alert, please look into your account through the user interface directly. A valid email from Google will include your Customer Identification Number (CID). Do not click on the email link and enter in your account information. For example, a recent email we received appeared as the following:

This email on the surface appears to be legitimate; however, when looking at the email’s hyperlink we see the following destination URL: http://www.adwords.google.com.qwoid.cn/select/Login. When we checked, our Google Adwords accounts were perfectly fine.

Should you receive a similar email, Please do not click on the email. Instead opt to log-in to the user interface directly or call your Google Adwords Representative. Google recommends that you report the attempt to Google Adwords Support.