This definitely isn’t a new topic - you’ve likely heard it before, been urged to try it, and you’ve also possibly ignored it. The fact of the matter is, if you’re still not doing it, you’re quite possibly missing out on some very qualified traffic.  As you know, qualified traffic means sales, and even repeat customers.
So, in the spirit of trying to “convert” anyone who might not yet have the phone number in their ads. here are seven good reasons why you should consider getting your company’s number in those ads.
1. You don’t have to sacrifice space.

It’s perfectly legitimate that you wouldn’t want to give up ad copy characters to input your phone number. Well, at least with some of your ads.  Fortunately, you don’t have to!

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It really is that easy. Just as long as the root domain of your destination and display URLs match, you can put whatever you want after that slash. Aside from being valuable front page real estate for your phone number, you should also be utilizing this space to test a variety of variable factors for success with your ads.

By putting your phone number in this prime spot, you don’t have to worry about losing characters in your description text.

2. It legitimizes your business.

I’ve seen it time and time again within client campaigns - for some reason, the ad with the phone number always gets the higher click through.

Why? Having a phone number legitimizes your business. No one is going to shell out money and time to maintain an 800 line without having a reason to use one.

Of course, you could also say the same is true of Adwords, but a lot of your customers who are searching don’t necessarily know that. They do know, however, that having an 800 number means that a business is eager to talk to its customers. Remember the days before cellphones and free long distance, when an 800 number was pretty much the only convenient way to contact a business for free? That mentality still works today with consumers. It’s as simple as testing click through. Try it - you’ll see what I mean.

3. It’s easy enough to split test.

If you’re not split testing every variable possible within your ads, why not? You’re never going to know what works the best unless you test your variables. If you find, after a few weeks, that the phone number test isn’t getting results for you, then you can easily move on.

4. People might actually call you.

What happens every time a qualified customer calls you as opposed to clicking your ads? You save money! That’s something that every business needs to do as much of as possible.

5. Branding your number

I lived on the east coast for most of my life, and I think I can say with confidence that plenty of people are familiar with Empire Carpeting.

Their company 800 number is 800.588.2300.

I haven’t been to the east coast in a few years now, and I haven’t seen an Empire Carpet commercial for a very long time. So how is it that I remember that number?

Well, Empire had several TV campaigns going at any one time, and their recognizable jingle was part of every one of those commercials. The same familiar voices would sing the phone number over and over again, and years later I still remember.

Not that I’m saying Google Adwords can quite literally sing your phone number from the page, but my point is that repetition can be incredibly effective marketing. Put the number in your ads. Put it on your website. Put it in any communication with your client, and make sure that your operators repeat it twice if you follow up on leads via phone. It’s better to make sure that your potential customers have this information handy than it is to make them look for it. Who knows - the customer could become so familiar with your number that he or she doesn’t even have to look it up.

6. Your competitors aren’t doing it.

Google them. I am willing to bet that several of your competitors still aren’t doing it, and they should be! Better yet, let them give all that qualified traffic to you!

7. It strengthens your image ads.

Put it in your ads, put it on your webpage - make sure people see that number. Again, it legitimizes you and ensures that you are within dialing distance of your consumers.

If you really want to get your money’s worth from Adwords, you want to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to get quality traffic. Changing up your ads is easy and it’s free. Run a phone number test within your ad copy and see if it works for you. i have seen the phone number addition ultimately up CTR and return, and it could for you as well.

Sometimes you can use every adwords keyword tool and still have a campaign that’s really struggling. This is the part I really love. I find such satisfaction in finding new ways to help struggling accounts. It’s fun to check back in the next day after I do my work and see the account is doing great!!

One adwords tip is to think outside the box when doing your keyword search and needing keyword help. This is the fun part that I really enjoy!! Often I’ll really delve into the client’s website and get to know everything I can about their products and/or services. Read everything you can and come up with your own list of keywords, using the same nouns and adjectives they use. You can also look at competitor’s sites and read their descriptions, writing down all nouns and adjectives that describe products and services that you offer. Remember, Google does not like when you don’t play nice and misrepresent yourself, so only use words that truly represent your site. Then once you have your entire list, go through and make every combination of such words that make sense that you possibly can. For example, I had a client who was selling dog collars. Well, I reviewed all of their products and came up with many different ways to describe those dog collars, such as red dog collar, red dog collars, dog collar with studs, dog collar with stud, dog collars with stud, dog collars with studs, large breed dog collar, large breed dog collars, small breed dog collar, small breed dog collars, black dog collar, black dog collars, black large breed dog collar, black large breed dog collars, red small breed dog collar, and red small breed dog collars. The list could go on and on. Especially once your campaign starts and you see which adwords keywords are successful, go in and apply this technique to your most successful words. Come up with as many combinations of those keywords that you possibly can. I have seen this keyword suggestion help take poorly producing keyword adgroups to highly successful keyword adgroups literally overnight!!! I’m not sure why this form of keyword optimization is not a google adwords keyword tool, but I can promise you it will bring you more clicks and in turn, more traffic on your site! I think one of the reasons this google adwords tip works so well is because it truly brings in some very unique keywords that have little advertising competition. It is time consuming, but it will pay off very quickly.

Of course we all know about the keyword matching where you add quotes and brackets to successful producing keywords. For the few days Google added this to our campaigns, life was sweet. Having to manually add this yourself is such a laboring process, but it’s truly worth it. I’m hoping Google adwords will be kind and give us back this automatic keyword matching one day, but until then we’ll spend the time adding our quotes and brackets to our keywords because it definitely does help with keyword optimization and top keywords.

Furthermore, if you have a really struggling account and/or one that has high profit return, it will be worth your while to check in with that account and come up with new keywords on a daily basis. We have some of these higher maintenance accounts and what I like to do is check in at the beginning of the business day and see if all adgroups met their budgets for the previous day. Then I’ll go into my struggling groups and apply the above strategies. I have seen websites who’ve had as little as 4 conversions in one month go to 14 conversions in one day with the help of our services and truly optimizing keywords on a daily basis. It’s always worth your time and effort, though, because the sooner you can get your accounts to be successful the quicker your company starts optimizing their web based marketing and gives you high yield returns!

Don’t be intimidated by Google adwords. They really are a great way to maximize your earning potential and when you learn the tricks of the trade, they can absolutely be your best friend when it comes to bringing in the bucks! Of course the game is constantly changing as Google likes to keep us on our feet, but that’s what I love about it. I’m always up for a challenge!

First let me introduce myself, I’m Mandy Kyle and am an associate of Shanee Kirk’s. Obviously I wouldn’t be working for her if I didn’t think she knew what she was doing, but I’m telling you this gal is a genius when it comes to keyword advertising, pay per click, ppc keywords, web based marketing, and search engine optimization. I feel inept to even be posting on her blog, but together we have helped to catapult poorly performing keyword campaigns into high yield profits for our clients. So I know there’s a method to my madness that will pay off and get you top keywords and the best in keyword optimization!

Keyword research is one of my fortes. I find it fascinating to find new and different internet keywords that will help maximize your potential with online advertising. Of course Google keywords adwords has three keyword tools available for your use.

The descriptive word or phrases keyword tool is always a great place to start. Use the keyword analyzer to choose words that are highly searched giving them lots of keyword popularity, yet have little advertising competition. With this day and age of online advertising, though, you’ve got to learn to be very creative. It’s funny with this keyword suggestion tool how it’s better to only list four or five words/phrases at a time to come up with similar keywords that will give you the best in keyword optimization. If you enter a large batch of words, the list of suggested keywords is not as thorough and truly only focuses on 3-4 of your given words. I have no idea why, but it’s a way around some of Google’s greater mysteries. So, there’s a great google keyword tip for you: when using the descriptive words or phrases keyword suggestion tool, only do it in batches of 4-5 words/phrases at a time.

The next google adwords tool that you can use is the website content. In addition to using links to your own website, I love finding similar sites that advertise the same kind of products/services and finding out what keywords the keyword generator might suggest based on those sites. Of course you definitely want to be true to your product or site. You never want to make false representations. Google does not like that and it’s just bad business.

Once you’ve created your google ad campaign and keyword group, you can then use the keyword research tool that allows you to use successful existing keywords to help generate new, related keywords. As always, you’ll want to look at the keyword tracking and choose words that are highly searched and hopefully have little competition.

For those that are starting out in Google Adwords, begin with the above techniques that Google provides there for you. I’ll be discussing some of my tricks of the trade during my next post. These will help with those unique and struggling accounts. So dive in, take the plunge. Start your adgroups today and you’ll immediately see how Google Adwords can work for you!

Quick and Easy - These are my 3 tips to make a landing page successful for PPC marketing.

Here is what Google says about quality Adwords landing pages.

We all know that a quality landing page is an important factor in Adwords marketing (and the quality score). Here is my summary of the most important parts!

1. Tell them what to Do. Put a call to action near the top. Make it an H1 tag. Make it clear. Make it LOUD.

2. Tell them all about it. Make the content scannable. Think “Power Point presentation.” PPC visitors make a decision on whether they are going to stay on your page or not fast. Give concise headlines and bullets. Make your offer clear. Use your Adwords keywords.

3. Let them buy now! On-Page Form - Have an on page form on your site, above the fold. Make it prominent and obvious. I have seen this simple step increase conversions 4x’s over on multiple occasions.

Shanee
Meet with an Adwords Professional Today!

I’ve received several new accounts lately. Setting up a new PPC account is not as relative to the company’s individual industry as one might think. My clients range from consumer goods to high-tech b2b engineering companies. All of the “getting started” steps are the same.

Another client wanted to give a bonus for “achieving a set number of clicks” for the month. I eagerly accepted this challenge. I completed it within 15 minutes.

Step into my PPC Classroom…

So, for the first PPC 101 post, I’d like to talk about the initial settings that I look at for Adwords campaign management. I always start out the same (although sometimes it does change). And, this is by NO means all there is to PPC management, this is just the first (and easiest) step to Adwords success!

In Adwords: Click a campaign, then click “edit campaign.” Here’s what to look for…

Budget - Set a realistic budget. How much do you really want to spend? I choose to manage/optimize PPC campaigns based on this set budget (more on that later), and I *will* spend the entire budget, so choose wisely. $20-$50 a day is a good, round amount to begin campaign optimization.

Delivery Method - Always choose “Accelerated.” If you choose “Standard” this forces Google to guess about your search volume. They aren’t always good at guessing. Not to mention that their “guessing” can lead to a higher CPC.

Networks and Bidding: Click everything! (Well, almost).
Search and Content Network - Be sure to start with both the search and content networks — Some are “afraid” of the content network. Never fear! It has gotten better over the years, and you don’t know it won’t work until you test it. Be sure to allow for the content network to have it’s own, separate bids. Most (almost every) time you can get a much cheaper Adwords bid for the content network.

Position Preferences - Be sure to click this feature and USE it! This is my 2nd best way to optimize. The position preferences help your CTR by boxing OUT those far out position placements that will never see a click. This will help your CPC by increasing your overall CTR (leading to a better QS).

Target Audience - Be sure that this is set to the broadest target market that you can allow (for your specific product). This will allow for the largest potential for impressions/clicks. You can always narrow the scope later.

That’s my advice!

Shanee
Don’t DIY, hire a PPC advertising company today!

At long last, I have officially been dubbed a “PPC Expert.” In case you haven’t seen the recent Dun & Bradstreet article, here it is folks!

Gotta love that 15 minutes of fame!

Shanee

If you are looking for a PPC Advertising Company, contact us today!

This one is for the PPC techies!

I was talking to a business colleague (another PPC marketer) the other day, and they mentioned that in a new PPC account (their identity will remain protected - Ha!) that they were managing, they found several instances of duplicate keywords across ad groups.  In search, they were able to validate multiple instances of their ads “double appearing” and outbidding each other!

Please don’t do this!  There are two reasons that quickly come to mind for why this is bad, bad, bad…

First, you are bidding against yourself!  So you are in effect in an auction AGAINST yourself.  The obvious reprocussion here is that you are driving up yor own CPC.  Silly!

Second, you are cutting your CTR in HALF!  Yes, you are.  Think of it this way.  If your ad shows twice for the same search, and one ad gets 100% CTR (which it won’t), that is cut in HALF b/c the impressions are doubled.  Now, you know that historical CTR is tied to Quality Score, which is tied to your Adwords CPC.  You see where this is heading.

So, bottom line:  Don’t duplicate your keywords across ad groups.  It won’t help you.  It is sloppy.

If you are curious if you are a duplicate keyword “offender,” use your Adwords Editor Tools to check and find duplicate keywords across ad groups.  It’s an easy mistake to make, but it’s also fairly painless (and important) to correct.

If you have hired a Pay Per Click advertising agency to manage your campaigns, please talk to them to ensure that they are following this practice.

Happy PPC’ing!

Shanee

Talk to a PPC Consultant and get your Adwords search engine marketing program started now!

Any time that you are spending your own or someone else’s money on a PPC advertisement, you want to be able to *show* what you got for it, right? You try to develop a clever way of demonstrating how the advertising spend brought ‘x’ number of visitors to their site, which resulted in ‘y’ number of leads and ‘z’ dollars in revenue. Without true reporting and ROI measurements, you are honestly just guessing and spending money in a vacuum.

Google tries to help its advertisers with Google Adwords Conversion Tracking. If you are new to PPC management, and you read about conversion tracking, it can seem confusing and overwhelming. But, let me tell you that it is essential to building and maintaining a successful campaign. As a company or a small business owner, if you take a look at that section, and your head starts to spin, just call your web master or your ppc manager and have them remedy this for you!

Why is Conversion Tracking important?
On the big picture level, it allows you to combine with your other PPC statistics, another statistic which shows which of your campaigns are converting to leads or sales. So, right away, you know which campaigns are performing better for you — Which are spending your dollars more efficiently.

Then, you can also drill down into the detail — This is the part that I love. With conversion statistics, I can see which KEYWORDS are converting best, which SITES on the Content Network convert the best, which PLACEMENTS convert the best, etc. Then, you are able to start whittling down the “bad” and trying to replace it with more stuff that looks like the “good.” Over a short time, conversion tracking will increase your click-through rates (CTRs) and send you more conversions (leads and sales) — Since you will be optimizing for what is converting best, not what is generating the most clicks/traffic.

Without Conversion Tracking, I cannot answer these questions:
“What can we do to increase our revenue from PPC?”
“What are our best keywords in AdWords for Product A?”
“What Placements Offer the Best bang for the buck?”
“Does the Content Network work for us?”

Again, in most cases, installing conversion tracking takes less than 5 minutes for your web editor or web master. It is easier than it looks, and is well worth digging into. Find a way to have it added to your program! This is a cheap (read: free) way your AdWords experts can help you get closer to your success goals. Ask your PPC advertising firm today if you are using this properly.

And, let me know if you have questions. We’re here to help.

Shanee

If you think that PPC search marketing is just for advertising and driving traffic to your site, then you are mistaken! At our PPC firm we also believe that this is also a great way to test landing page concepts and ideas in a short period of time, with a relatively small budget. Talk to your Pay Per Click management company about running a series of tests on your site to test your new ideas.

Have you ever wondered:
Will an embedded, fresh video help to increase conversions?
Will an on-page form double the leads from the page vs. adding and extra “click” to reach the form?
Will adding a related and attractive graphic to a page decrease the bounce rate (while increasing conversions)?

All of these questions can easily be answered and PROVEN by setting up an A/B split test with PPC advertising. Take one of your PPC themes (ad groups), and one set of keywords, with identical ad copy, you rotate traffic equally between two test pages (A/B). A reasonable budget would be $20-$50/day for a 1 to 2 week period. At the end of the test period, you will have a concrete answer as to whether there is a difference in the conversion rate for either page.

Do you ever receive push-back from management or other departments regarding landing page Best Practices, or changes that you want to institute? Well, the PPC A/B split test is your answer. We recently were able to show one of our clients that by shortening the copy (making it more focused and relevant) and creating on on-page form, this new “test” page converted 3:1 over their “old” page.

Wow! A 200% improvement, proven and learned for less than $500 can now be applied to all other product pages. Can’t argue with that!

How have you used PPC marketing, other than simply driving traffic?

Shanee K.

Hello, World,

This would be our first, our premiere blog post! We are an SEO consulting firm and PPC management agency (we also handle traditional print marketing, but online stuff seems to be “all the rage” these days). I am Shanee Kirk, and I’ve been a marketer for over 10 years now. I began consulting about 5 years ago, and I love it! The variety of work is fun and exciting. It’s a fun challenge to see different clients with their varying goals and problems, and help each of them to succeed.

Tonight, I’m thinking (read: I am annoyed) about some changes that Google recently made to the AdWords PPC management program. It’s really a challenge for PPC managers and PPC companies to keep up with the rapid fire releases and updates that Google regularly (and unexpectedly) releases. And, the changes aren’t always good!

So, I’m curious if Google Beta tested their new summary pages and screens or if they just decided that this was the new and better way to go? Back in the olden days, you used to be able to dig into a campaign, and edit the bids for all of the ad groups at once. Granted, you can still do this, but the “new and improved” summary page doesn’t split the clicks/cost for search vs content!! You can still individually change the bids, but you can not see the stats or data that would aid you in those decisions. This means that you have to click into each individual ad group, and spend a lot more time to manage those bids.

If Google is out there listening, please give us more, not less, with these new releases!

Has anyone noticed a decline in clicks/impressions from the old, stand-alone placement ad campaigns??

Shanee

And, ps — Could you please put position preferences at the campaign level?

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