Recently I was working on a project with a client who runs an ecommerce site. We were running PPC only for this client however our findings in PPC led us to discover a bigger problem, the client had issues converting traffic into sales. Working with our team, we were able to trouble shoot where people were falling in the Conversion Funnel, the process of which a visitor turns into a sale. The way we were able to pin point the trouble area was to break the process into three parts:
- Browser Conversion: turning a visitor into a browser, or someone who views the product pages
- Shopper Conversion: turning a Browser into a shopper, one who adds the product to the cart
- Buyer Conversion: turning a shopper into a buyer or customer, one who makes a purchase
The reason it is important to break your conversion process into smaller groups is that it will allow you to diagnose where your problem areas are and understand what remedies are needed to improve the process. I will break each of these ares down into more detail in the next few days so stayed tuned…..
We have all come across ad groups with poor CTRs and thought….let’s revise the ad copy. Yes, this is usually the remedy for poor performing ad copy however sometimes we tend to overlook our keyword lists as the culprit. I, myself, recently came across such an instance where my CTRs were suffering and after 3 rounds of ad copy testing, nothing was increasing my poor performing ads. After taking a deep breath and sleeping on the problem, it hit me…what if the keywords are causing the problem. What if one of the following issues is occuring in my account:
- I have keywords that weren’t researched properly, thereby my ads are being shown to the wrong audience
- My ads are being triggered by unqualified search queries not being filtered by negative terms
This is a common problem that many of us don’t think of because its drilled into our heads that low CTRs = Bad Ads. So I first tackled the keyword list and reviewed the terms that I was bidding on. I took my terms and ran a search on the engines to see what types of ads were appearing. The term I ran was “convention in tx” which the organic listings showed me nothing but types of conventions in Texas. The type of visitor typing this in term is looking for a convention in Texas, my ad was trying to target a visitor looking to HOST a convention in Texas. Thus the CTR on this term was extremely low, while impressions was high. I went through my entire keyword list and made adjustments based on the same logic. Once I finished this task, I moved onto the next task…Search Query Reports.
Running a Search Query Report is never fun, typically you have a ton of data to review and thousands of keywords to go through. This can be overwhelming to most, that is why I have my own system of running the report and focusing on the data I need which will be in a later post. Once I have this data in the manner that is easy to review, I simply went through my list and found that my Broad and Phrase Match Types were bringing in a ton of unqualified traffic as well. Search Queries for “Nudist Conventions in Texas”, “Conventions in Oklahoma” and others were triggering my ads. I immediately created a negative keyword list and a long-tail keyword list based off the data in my Search Query Report to filter out the unqualified traffic in effort to improve my CTR.
After making these two changes, I am seeing my CTR on this particular Ad Group go from .18% to .84% which is a huge improvement almost overnight. Now that I have the right keywords triggering my ads, it is time to review the message.
The heart of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is the how social the web has become. You can’t succeed as a business without taking the time to appeal to the crowd on the internet. Effective social media marketing can be the key that unlocks the power of the crowd in your favor.
Search Engine Marketing actually includes pretty much all forms of advertising that hinge on a search engine, but since I specialize in PPC, that’s got it’s own category!
Simply put, PPC stands for “pay per click.” It’s a method of search engine advertising where the advertiser agrees to pay for every click on an ad, regardless of the final outcome. Since the search engine is only vested in the click, not the conversion, it’s up to the advertiser to maximize conversions any way they can. Search engines will help you all they can, but at some point the advertiser has to realize that the only way the search engine makes money is per click. The only way the advertiser makes money is per SALE.
Aloha, my name is Kalin Dudley and I have created this blog to discuss my passion….Search Engine Advertising and Landing Page Optimization. I have grown to the love this industry over the past 5 years, starting as an intern at a small firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana while I attended the greatest university on earth, LSU !! This firm specialized in selling Affiliate sites to people and helping them market their sites through Pay Per Click advertising, Banner Ads and other forms of internet marketing. The more I learned about the industry, the more I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life. I could see then that Search Engine Marketing was the future of advertising and I wanted to be apart of this movement, only problem was I needed to graduate first….and there were no majors specializing in SEM. So I took side jobs while in College working at my brother’s Law firm, Locke Meredith, as their webmaster. Here I was able to test out some SEO strategy that I had learned from reading blogs like SEO Chat and SeoMoz. Man I loved this stuff…
After graduating from LSU, I looked for work in Baton Rouge that would allow me to get into the industry. Unfortunately there was not a strong need for SEM at the time and I eventually moved to Austin, Texas. In Austin, I eventually found a job at a start-up company Leverage Marketing where I started as a PPC Analyst and eventually was promoted to Senior Analyst in my first four months. I devote much of this success to my passion for Pay Per Click and learning from great blogs like PPC Hero (Personal Favorite), my mentors Michelle Moore at Metric Voodoo (This woman, by far the best strategist I ever met) and the PPC Guru himself (read the About Me Page, I am that old collegue he is talking about). Because of all the wonderful things that these great minds have taught me, I am going to do my best to give back as well by sharing the many different strategy, tools and information that I collect through my testing. So please enjoy, any feedback or comments are always welcomed!!!
Mahalo nui Loa!!
Kalin Dudley