Managing Micro Budget PPC Campaigns

This is the first part of Pay Per Click campaign management blog posts. I will be posting more tips and tricks here that will help you manage your PPC campaign effectively.

As new entrants in the market (or an old player with unoptimised website), small and local businesses need immediate clicks and customers. Achieving higher organic listings in search engines can take time, sometimes over six months.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be an effective short term online marketing strategy for managers who are desperate for their websites to be found on search engines quickly. However, small businesses with micro or small budgets often find themselves competing with big rivals, who have more resources and budget to spend online. SMEs have to utilise their resources intelligently and often they do not as they try to cut corners and do things themselves without knowing the tricks of the trade.

Managing a micro PPC budget (typically less than £500 p.m.) is a tough job for marketing managers. However, by following some simple rules given below, they can use their PPC budgets wisely to get the most of the paid clicks.

1. First of all, use your website analytics data to find out some of the keywords people type in to reach your website. If you don’t have analytics code set up on your website, ask your web master to install it - it's a must.

2. Think like a customer. If you were a customer, what phrase would you use to find your services/products. When you've got a list, think again. Check with your colleagues, friends or family members to see you are along the right lines. We've seen that you get the best results if you involve some customers (prospective customers) in this “keywords research”.

3. Create your first keywords list. It is safer to select only those keywords which are relevant to your product or service. Often we see that customers come up with vague words around their business which are not specific to them at all. Don't push yourself to create a "fantastic long list of keywords".

Choosing keywords which have little or no relevancy to your business would only waste your budget. Select only a sensible number of keywords and spend more on phrases which are mostly clicked by users.

4. The next thing to do is to create a list of negative keywords in your campaign. You have a small budget to spend, you can't afford paying for clicks look relevant to your offers but actually they are not. Negative PPC words are those which you DON'T want your adverts to appear for when searching for your services. Often these include the words 'free', 'cheap' or places where you do not want to get clients e.g. Manchester if you are based in Dorset.

For example, while working on a PPC campaign for a client offering “fleet management services”, I found people searching for fleet management software. In that particular case, I added keywords like software, systems, computer etc in negative keywords list of the campaign. This trick saved approximately 35% budget of my client, that otherwise would have gone for wrong clicks.

We will be posting more PPC tips and tricks on here in the coming weeks. If you'd like to share any others, please leave a comment below.

Are Social Networks Low Value Traffic Sources?

Nothing new in Jakob Nielsen's new article, it is pretty much same what SEO and Analytics community has been advocating for years. Unique visitors are not an effective way to measure traffic, you will most likely wish getting most of the traffic from loyal users and search engines.

However, in his latest article, Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click usability guru Jakob Nielsen definitely undermines the value of social networks. He believes traffic from Digg is of "low value” as diggers are notoriously fickle and leave the site immediately, once they've satisfied their idle curiosity.

I think it is not the case, diggers are witty, they don't waste their time. You must have interesting and relevant content on your website to engage your visitors with website.

Do you believe in Jakob Nielsen? Post your comments here.

BEWARE - Google Adwords Phishing Emails

GOOGLE ADWORDS PHISHING SCAM - BE AWARE!

I have just been made aware of some dodgy 'phishing' emails which are sent out which look like they have come from Google Adwords. The email looks exactly the same as the normal Google Adwords emails, but the link goes to a very bad website which will try and take your Google Adwords login details.

Here is the email text;

-------------------------
Dear Google AdWords Customer,

We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.

Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your payment information.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords. We look forward to
providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team
-------------------------

If you receive this email and are taken to this website;

http://www.adwords.google.com.startopl.cn/select/Login/

Which looks the same as a normal Google Adwords login screen but it isn't. Whatever you do...

DO NOT ENTER YOUR ADWORDS ACCOUNT INFORMATION!

The website is set up to take your details and then exploit your account and credit card information. This practise is known as 'phishing' and unfortunately happens all the time with online banking and eBay accounts, but now it looks like they have gone after Google Adwords customers.

If you have any more information/details about this phishing scam or any others which are 'doing the rounds', please let us know.

An example of how a poor website can effect your business - a business leaders point of view

As a fellow business leader, I wanted to share with you how a badly designed website or a poorly updated website can seriously affect the bottom line of your business when it comes to gaining new contracts.

Back in 07, I was with a new client discussing their website, and as part of the brief I asked how the current old site has affected their business. They told me how they lost a large contract with plenty of ongoing work due to the fact they had an old, outdated and poorly designed website, which was not good as they were in the process of growing their business and this contract played a large part of this growth.

Let me share with you how this happened. The website had not been updated in years, they had no control over it and the design was seriously dated and looked very unprofessional. As they tendered for this new contract, all was going well, in fact they were about to sign on the dotted line except they needed the approval from the Board of Directors from the holding company (this should have been only a pen pushing exercise) as my client was the preferred supplier and was going to be appointed the contract. The Board of Directors on this occasion decided to look at the website of my new client to check out who they were, and when the saw the old website they stopped the contract and enforced that a new company was found.

Now this is only one example that they were told about, god knows how many more they could have lost due to a poorly designed outdated website, this when they brought us in to solve this.

Businesses must realise that their website is a critical part of their brand and cannot afford to take shortcuts when designing their website and having control over it.

Bricks & Mortar Vs The Internet

A meeting today with a potential client for some online marketing work (more of which, hopefully in the coming weeks) made me think about the real change that the Internet has made to the way that we do business. After discussing how much a website cost the client, the comparison to the alternatives, is massive.

Many companies, be they hotels or manufacturing companies or whatever the industry, do not balk at paying £10,000 for new machinery, or £50,000 to have a complete shop refit, it's a necessary evil. Yet many companies wouldn't contemplate spending a similar or even bigger amount on their website with a reputable web design company? Obviously this is not always the case, and many companies spend vast somes on money, not only on web design but increasingly on online marketing.

So what stops business owners from spending on their online presence, when they're more than happy to spend big on bricks and mortar? I might seem obvious but it's the tangibility (is that a word) of the bricks and mortar. You can see that you've spent money on something that you can hold. But a website? There are still many misconceptions about what works online and what doesn't and how to build a website which ranks well on search engines. The fact that you can't 'touch' it just adds to the issue.

As time ticks and more people go online, and spend money online, the role the web design company plays in making or breaking all types of business, is only going to increase. It is therefore important that companies understand more about online activities and are better informed when choosing their web designers.


P.S. I mentioned about Etsy recently. Turns out that they're getting one million visitors a month and are looking to improve their service with additional funding from VC's.