Latest Posts
A Guide to Common Acronyms
If you’re just getting into PPC — pay per click, that is — you might find yourself a little lost in all the acronyms being thrown about. Here at ClickSweeper, we’ve assembled a friendly guide to common acronyms you’re likely to encounter as you delve into PPC.
CPC: cost per click. The CPC refers to the dollar amount you pay every time someone clicks your ad. How high or low your CPC is will depend on how competitive your industry or keywords are, your click through rate (CTR), and other factors.
CPM: cost per thousand [impressions]. For certain types of content network ads, you can opt to pay per thousand impressions (times your ad is shown) rather than by click. The minimum CPM Google allows is .25.
CPV/CPA: cost per conversion/cost per acquisition. The CPV is calculated by dividing the amount of money spent on advertising by the number of conversions. E.g., if you spent $1,000 in the month of June on clicks and had a total of 100 conversions, the CPV is $10. Continue Reading
New ClickSweeper Feature: Cross-Engine Keyword Addition
We’re excited to launch a new time-saving feature that makes improving and synchronizing your campaigns across multiple vendors faster and easier. Now you can add keywords across Google and MSN through ClickSweeper with minimal navigation.
Simply log in, click the keywords tab, and select the ‘Add keywords’ button. An editor will pop up in which you can choose the vendor, campaign, adgroup, match type, and enter keywords. Let’s try adding the keyword ‘paycheck cashing problems’ to our Google campaign. Continue Reading
PPC Management: Building Trust on Your Landing Page
When it comes to PPC management, your landing page is a critical (if often neglected) component. The click is just the beginning; the landing page is what determines whether your visitors convert or bounce. Although there are many reasons why visitors bounce, one key issue is trust. If you can’t establish your trustworthiness in under ten seconds, your visitor is going to leave. Ouch.
So, what can you do to make your landing page emanate trustworthiness and honesty (besides, of course, being trustworthy and honest)? Take a look at our list of elements of strong landing pages and see if yours is up to par: Continue Reading
PPC: More than Just Advertising
PPC advertising, despite its name, isn’t all about advertising. In fact, a focused and well-managed PPC campaign comes with multiple — and sometimes surprising — benefits for businesses. Here are our top reasons why PPC can be a great tool to grow your business.
1. Highly directed traffic. If you’re a small business, you really want your advertising dollars spent only on qualified, interested prospects. With PPC, your ads show up only when a search query includes your keywords. A well-organized campaign with enough broad match keywords to attract a wide variety of relevant searches and enough negatives to keep out most of the irrelevant ones will translate to a high clickthrough rate and a low bounce rate. Both are good things in terms of your quality score and cost per click!
2. Quick to set up, start, and pause. If you have a limited time offer or sell seasonal items that you want to drive traffic to for short periods of time, PPC campaigns can be started quickly and paused instantly. You can advertise for traffic just when you want it, say, during the weeks before a major holiday or during your sale. Continue Reading
PPC Management Tips: Why Bother with Bing & Yahoo
With 70% or more of the total US search share, Google is the indisputed king of search engines. If you run PPC advertising on Google, you might well wonder why anyone would bother with ads on Yahoo and Bing. After all, Google PPC advertising is probably taking up most of your budget and time already, so why would you waste resources you don’t have on search engines with less traffic and lower visibility?
In fact, there are several good reasons to at least give Bing and Yahoo a try. (As usual, we recommend that you track your campaigns religiously and go by the numbers to see if they’re profitable for you.) Here’s why ClickSweeper recommends advertising on smaller search engines along with Google: Continue Reading
Using PPC for Branding
Earlier this month, we all got a lesson in how not to brand when BP began buying PPC ads for terms related to ‘oil spill.’ As a result, plenty of people who were looking for real news about the oil spill clicked on those ads and were redirected to BP’s official take on the spill. Not exactly objective content there. The consensus in the PPC world is that BP’s money would be better spent cleaning up the gulf, and then cleaning up its reputation. Ahem.
While we don’t suggest using PPC for damage control, we do recommend it as an effective branding tool for businesses. Continue Reading
Geo-Targeting & Your PPC Campaigns
Geo-targeting your PPC campaigns is a great way to screen out unqualified clicks and raise your clickthrough and conversion rates. But like everything, it’s a little more complex than it seems. When you choose to geo-target, you can do it in two ways: choosing specific regions, states, or radii when you set up your campaigns, or putting geo-qualified keywords (i.e. ‘electrician San Francisco’, or ‘movie theater San Jose’) into your campaigns or adgroups.
We here at ClickSweeper have tried both strategies in our PPC management experience, and we have to say that geo-targeted campaigns are considerably faster to set up and easier to maintain. Take, for example, a hair salon in Santa Cruz that only wants to advertise for local (10 mile radius) traffic with the keywords ‘hair salon’ and ‘hair stylist.’ Continue Reading
ClickSweeper at SES San Francisco
Good news if you’re in the Bay Area (or simply want an excuse to visit): SES (Search Engine Strategies) 2010 is being held in San Francisco, August 16-20. Whether you’re a marketer, corporate decision maker, or search engine optimizer, this seminar is a great place to get the latest scoop on all things related to pay per click and search engine optimization, attend sessions on pertinent issues, and network with other professionals and industry leaders.
We’re excited to announce that ClickSweeper will be at SES, booth #422. Stop by and say hello to our man Chris. He’ll be happy to introduce you to our PPC management software and answer any questions you have about ClickSweeper.
If you’d like to attend SES San Francisco, ClickSweeper can get you in for 20% off. Use the code 20VARA when you register to save on any 1 or 2 day conference pass. It’s our way of saying thank you.
Quick PPC Tip: Check Your Ad Ranks
This tip might sound obvious, but we here at ClickSweeper thought we’d offer it anyway: always verify your ad ranks. Not because Google and Yahoo are untrustworthy, but because the ranks they report to you are averages, not exact figures. If you want to know how your ads are really ranking at any given point, you’ll need to spend a few minutes checking on them yourself every so often.
Ads are most competitive before 12pm, so if you want to see how your ads are holding up against the stiffest competition, run these checks in the morning. Start by putting together a list of your most popular and expensive keywords (10 – 15 is usually a good number). Then you can either head directly to Google, or if you don’t want to affect your impression counts or need additional location targeting options, go to Google’s Ad Preview Tool instead. Set locations if you need to, then enter your keywords and see where (and if) they trigger your ad. (Hint: you can also get good ideas for new ad copy from your competitors’ ads.)
Checking your realtime ad rankings is a fast, easy way to make sure your ads are performing as expected and to catch any visibility issues before they become bigger. PPC management doesn’t have to be hard or time consuming to be effective!
Organizing Negative Keywords
Good keywords are essential to the success of your PPC campaign, but you may be surprised to hear that negative keywords also play a significant role. We here at ClickSweeper have talked about negative keywords before and how they form a fantastic combination with broad match keywords. Want to capture long tail keywords yet exclude irrelevant queries and clicks? Negative keywords are definitely your friends.
But how do you get the most out of them? Not too surprisingly, like your regular keywords, negatives work best when they are:
- tightly organized
- focused
- well researched
In other words, it’s going to take a little time and work on your part. But it’s worth it to have fewer irrelevant impressions and clicks, higher clickthrough rates, and more conversions. (Keep in mind that although irrelevant impressions may not have an immediate impact on your budget, they can – and do — commit crimes against your quality scores.) Continue Reading