PPC

I love PPC. I enjoy squeezing down CPA’s and increasing conversions. Here’s some pay per click tips, advice and guidance to help you get the most from your PPC campaigns as well as other interesting features and developments in the world of PPC.

Things you can AB test in Adwords – A guide

AB testing in Adwords i’d guess is performed by a very small minority of Adwords users yet it’s a really valuable tool that can help maximise your Adwords results.

What things can you AB test in Adwords?

You can test a wide variety of things within Adwords experiments. Here are the tests that I think can lend most value to your campaigns:

1) Ad copy – the obvious one. Run 2 or more ads together and see which has the better CTR, conversion rate and ROI.

2) Destination url. Find out which destination url produces the best conversion rates and ROI.

3) Dynamic destination urls. I sometimes work with a developer to make elements on the page change, usually the h1 (header tag/title), by using paramaters in the destination url e.g. abc.com/example-page V abc.com/example-page?Sale-Ends-This-Week. The latter changes the standard H1 on the page to ‘Sale Ends This Week’. If you access to a savvy developer you could do the same for images, pricing and whatever else you think could be changed on the page. Example of a H1 that could be tested…

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4) Bids. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing this before and perhaps it’s not well known that you can do this but you can actually AB test your max cpc’s. This can help you find out things such as; how much extra traffic you can get by being in top position, what the impact is on CPA by bidding +50%, how much more impression share you can get by increasing your bids etc etc.

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How to set up conversion tracking in Adwords

What is conversion tracking?

If you want to succeed with Adwords you need conversion tracking set up. Conversion tracking allows you to measure KPIs of your Adwords campaigns i.e. form fill enquiry, brochure download, sales etc. With conversion tracking you can easily identify what is producing conversions and identify what the cost per conversion is, giving you the data required in order to make for example bid changes per keyword. Lets look at a simple example…

conversion tracking example Click image to view large table
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Recommended SEO reading & how to read it!

I’d be willing to bet that few of my friends or associates NEED to read relevant industry news and opinion as much as I do. Working in the industry is challenging and exciting, not least because of how rapidly changing, complicated and advanced it is becoming. If I don’t keep up with whats going on in the industry daily I feel like i’m out of touch. A little OCD maybe, but  whether you are a fellow SEO or site owner or marketer it’s important to keep up with the latest best practises and tactics that can improve your site or your clients sites performance.

In this post you will find:

  • Recommended reading for basic, advanced SEO and latest news
  • Recommended reading specifically for Worpress SEO
  • Recommended reading for PPC
  • Manageable ways to read SEO
Recommended SEO reading
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Adjusting bidding by most specific location retired from Adwords Enhanced Campaigns

Ive written here a few posts about the new Adwords Enhanced Campaigns and proclaimed just how cool it was to now be able to bid by location at the most specific level available, usually, zip or suburb. This is particularly useful where physical or other boundaries might mean someone living in zip code x is twice as likely to convert as someone a couple miles away. I reported earlier that functionality seemed to have dissapeared and can now confirm its gone after just a few weeks in service.

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Adwords enhanced campaigns, tablets & responsive web design

The problem: desktop and tablet biddding is now one and the same Ive been using the new Adwords Enhanced campaigns now for a little while and it has some really great things about it and I promise ill be sharing some of those great things here shortly. I cant help feeling however exceptionally frustrated about Google not allowing me (and you) the ability to bid differently for tablet devices. Ive read alot about others finding tablet traffic converts higher. My experience is usually the exact opposite in that they convert significantly worse.

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Google Adwords Enhanced Campaigns Explained

Changes have been coming and some seem great, some seem like a way to squeeze more revenue out of its advertisers, though I reserve judgement just now. The biggest gripe would appear to be about the inability to target campaigns individually at desktop/pc/tablet level which is an important tactic as cpc’s conversion rates and CPA’s differ across devices. Ill report more soon. Heres an email I had from Google today together with my analysis, which admittedly is based purely on my understanding of the imminent changes and not based on my actual experience of them yet…

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