Moderator: Christine Churchill. Will talk about copywriting secrets.
Better qualified traffic if better ads. Things to remember is competitors have same problem, 25 words or less. Harder to be concise when you have less room. Takes creativity and thought to make good ads. Find a way to differentiate b/w your ad and all the others.
Optimizing you PPC campaign:
- Writing a good ad: think about the purpose, what is the ad supposed to be doing. Grab the visitor attention, make it stand out, if you look at your ads, if everyone is using DKI, don’t do it if you want your ad to look different! Think of the ad title as the ad to the ad to grab attention, get keywords in there to make it an attention grabber. - Differentiate your ad. What differentiates your company from all the other companies? Why should I pick your company? Questions to ask yourself before writing the ads, why are you different. If you can put that down everything else will be easier. Put that on your ad and landing pages. - Provide an incentive to click: capture their attention: special pricing, limited time offer, up to 50% off etc. work into your ad. - Create a sense of urgency: if ppl think they can only get something for a limited time, they will buy right now: today only!
- Use keywords in your title! If showing up in title, tends to get higher conversion rates, higher CTRs, makes ads more visible b/c gets bolding effect, draws the eye. - Talk about benefits of product: look at features. Turn into benefit, i.e save time! Get into users mind, if you can save them time and money will be more inclined to click on your ad. - Call to action: sounds so fundamental, but a lot of ads don’t have them. It will help quite a bit.
- Brand names: instill a sense of confidence in the searcher. Increases CTRs for well-known brands. - Avoid being self-centered in ad. Remember the what’s in it for me principal, why the user should by from me. - Pre-qualify visitors. Putting a price in your ad can pre-qualify, will screen out ppl who wont pay that price, i.e. luxury vs. cheap hotels. Way to discriminate ad. The one down side is reducing CTR because might be scaring away ppl who might otherwise click on your ad. It does scare away the freebie hunters. - Be seasonal: conveys freshness, being up to date, festive messages. - Use psychology: ad humor, works well. Attracts attention. Test it out. If all advertisers are doing, may not want to. - AB Testing. Small subtle differences can make huge performance differences so worth testing out different ad copy, landing page combinations. Play with display URLs, normally shorter are better b/c more memorable, stick in some keywords, great branding opportunity. Tends to work better in our testing. Shorter, concise seems to be the best.
Credibility factors: normally engines don’t like superlatives but if you won an award for BEST or NUMBER 1, can use it in the ad. Exception to the rule. Must substantiate on landing page. They could turn an ad off then you have to call Google etc. and explain we really are number 1, and then they will turn it back on. DKI – all the ads are looking alike. Look at what the landscape is for your ad, if all looking identical do something to make your ad more unique. Avoid Hype – read ads out loud to see how they sound, gives an extra edge on if its good or not. Good copy can improve ad performance. Different techniques work in different niches, work better in some industries than others. Test everything. If you only a little time, spend it on the title.
Mona Elesseily is next speaker:
Page Zero Media, director of marketing strategy.
Written couple books on yahoo, have obsession with yahoo, but also love other search engines. In my opinion key to successful campaigns is understanding the difference b/w the search engines. Hopefully with an understanding of the diff features you will be able to capitalize.
Will be going over ad copy, match typing, effective ad distributions – works when it comes to Yahoo, trademarking, case studies.
Lets start with ad copy. One of the most imp ways to make an impact with PPC and get rankings in the search results is ad copy. Diff b/w engines to uncover opportunities: Yahoo – there are 40 characters as opposed to 25 in Google, so make use of extra 15 characters. Use extra characters in the headline to include a feature or benefit of other product or to include a company name. The company name makes the most sense if you have brand recognition. With Capital One, we included the name in the headline. The second difference is the description in yahoo is not divided into two 35 character lines, its all together so advertisers can avoid some of the choppiness or abruptness. The engines skew slightly different so it’s important to tailor ad copy. As an example, we were advertising on Chicago tourist attractions. It was such a broad ad, write an individual ad for each attraction, museums, tours etc.
I have some very basic information, seems like most of you are already advertisers: match types are very different, I want to review a bit more.
Exact match, phrase match, broad match, negative match. Don’t think I need to go over these, we are all comfortable with that. In yahoo there are 2 match types, standard and advanced. There also excluded terms which are not a match type. Standard match - equivalent of exact match in Google: includes A and THE and OF. Advanced match display ads for broader range of searches. Keyword phrases do not to be in account to trigger advertising. Basically, the match types in yahoo are much broader in scope than in Google. Something called match driver – matches root terms and derivatives: misspellings, plurals, variations of root terms.
Yahoos exact match is broader in scope.
On match driver you want to be aware that yahoo incorporates match driver technology so advertisers cant opt of out match driver. Advanced match is the default match type.
Google has expanded broad match.
Ad distribution tips:
In Yahoo, keywords don’t always trigger ads so you want to ad relevant keywords and synonyms.
Google trademark policy: Google is most lenient with TM, yahoo only in specific cases advertisers can use TMs. May want to concentrate on non-trade mark terms to save time and aggravation. Yahoo seems strict in comparison but not as strict as it may seem.
Once you understand the differences b/w the search engines and incorporate them you will see overall improvements in your results.
Andrew Beckman – President of the Search Ad Network
Denver based SEM firm. Started a decade ago. Different world. Focus today is the tools we use as an SEM firm and how we utilize it to maximize PPC campaigns. Use this presentation as a guide to learn more about tools.
Basic tools: Have a thorough keyword list – Trellian, Wordtracker is a great start. Seed list and expand. Better to have a large list and shrink it down. Look at misspelled keywords. Great way to get low CPC ads. Travel without L gets tons of traffic. Some misspellings are gold mines. Google’s keyword suggestion tool. Can put in URL and they will spider and spit out keywords. The advertiser competition barometer is a good indicator.
How has web analytics and who looks at it consistently? This is the backbone of every online marketing campaign. Track keywords that are causing sales. Need to parse PPC from SEO traffic. Shows demo of analytics software to do this.
With analytics tools, use overlay report. You can tag certain marketing campaigns, give it a name, and when users come to your site you can see where are they clocking when they arrive. This will allow you to start shifting the components of your site and make sure users are seeing more pages, spending more time on your site etc.
Multivariate landing page tool: this is where PPC will allow you to differentiate yourself and tag specific components of the landing page and start shifting around the component of the page and basically give us different conversion percentages. Need to convert web page into a sale. Get IT ppl involved with this, important component in the industry.
MSN Ad Labs Search funnel – put in a keyword phrase to see where ppl have searched before and after to help build out keyword list. Seasonality forecast tool Google Trends tool – different cities have different metrics, etc. You’d be surprised with diff info getting from these tools.
Some free info tools: Compete.com – how we are ranking against our competitors and how many visitors coming to different sites. i.e. Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity. Gives trends. Alexa is another good tool, page views of competitors, see how you are doing against comp, may give you some good ideas. SpyFu – reveals what comp is bidding on, CPC expect from diff keywords. Great website. Can really start forecasting budgets as see what competitors are bidding on to cover all your bases. Can see related terms etc. A lot of the data is free.
Q&A Portion.
Q: How good is the CTC on misspelled terms – I go straight to the “did you mean” spelling before looking at ads! A: We started to write misspelled words in our ad copy and that give us a little boost at the fraction of the cost. I optimized a page with a misspelled world and got some traffic as well from that.
Q; Bidding on generic keywords or single words like ball instead of baseball, what effect would that have on campaign? A: A single keyword will kill your budget and I don’t know anyone who does that. It will have a very low CTR. Need to go much further, i.e. geo targeting, day-part, etc.
Q: How do I shape and track a long tail keyword list in a very competitive industry? Is there a method to tailoring the campaign within an industry? A: I don’t know if there are any shortcuts…look at advanced targeting. Go into the analytics to see all variations of keyword phrases. Even with misspellings. Play with all tools available.
Contributed by Avi Wilensky is a search engine marketing specialist and owner of Promediacorp.
