But manners remain incredibly important and I think that it is something which is frequently overlooked.

I try to always speak my mind but at the same time remain respectful in all situations. But for some reason, when I am pissed off by someone I have a slightly sharper tongue online (speaking mainly about emails here) but with social media I am more guarded.

With social media I usually give a bit of thought to what I say as I realise that the potential audience is large and that things can be easily misinterpreted. When in person with close friends I find it is fun to say ridiculous, stupid, extreme, controversial things and mess about as they know that I am messing about but online things can easily be taken the wrong way and you do not have the opportunity to read the recipients facial expression for clues on their interpretation of what you just said.

As well as this, related to online manners I noticed that in business social circles there are often clear hierarchies developing where some, more popular and well known individuals seem to feel that they do not need to be as polite in terms of saying thank you to others that help them in small ways, perhaps because they feel that they do not need the help or perhaps it is not bad manners, maybe they simply do not have the time to say a simple “thank you”?

I started wondering how others feel about manners online and put the following question to 6 well known bloggers:

Q. How important are good manners in todays online world? Do you have any personal examples of how good manners (saying thank you, doing a small favour) have benefitted your business?

Roxanne R Roark

“Manners are absolutely important online! In the “age” of social media, people tend to pay more attention to you if you are being engaging and friendly; saying thank you for the Retweet or comment on Facebook.

Being friendly and generous on Twitter has built my business and actually led to potentials becoming clients, as well as building a wonderful network of (now real-life) friends that help me if I ever need it. :) ”

@r3socialmedia and http://www.r3socialmedia.com/blog

Jay Baron

“Manners don’t mean a damn thing online today. Everyone is out for themselves and they don’t care about anyone. Consider Triberr as an example. We have thirty members on our Tribe yet no one can spend the time to answer a question of the day, and here is why. The only thing they care about is getting shares, tweets, and likes on the content they create and not helping others create valuable content or sharing.

People on the internet today are looking out for themselves and only want to do what will benefit their rankings, traffic, or website.

It’s rare today to find people that do stuff just to help others such as guest posting (without asking for a link), leaving a comment on a blog without trying to get something in return later, or following someone on Twitter in hopes that they will follow us back.

Manners are important and we do need them online, but it seems they are all but missing.”

@jaysbaron and http://www.madtowndesigns.com/blog/

Lena West

“Good manners are always appropriate and in order.

That doesn’t mean that people exhibit good manners online these days, but I look at that as a benefit.

What I mean by that is I believe that how you do anything is how you do everything and so when people express poor manners, I just take it as that’s how they do everything and I know that it’s not a fit to work with them.

I always try to be cordial and respectful and people do notice. I can recall one instance where someone said something very complimentary about my work and wanted to book a time to talk about consulting with me.

In my initial reply, I focused only on booking the appointment, but when I realized what I had done, I emailed back immediately and thanked her for saying such nice things about me and I included a line like, “where are my manners!?!”

She wrote back immediately thanking me for sending the extra note and she ended up being a Private Coaching Client because she said she “liked my style”.

How you do anything is how you do everything.”

@lenawest and http://www.influenceexpansion.com/

Carol Lynn Rivera

“Manners are important anywhere you go in life, whether that’s online or offline. People don’t always exhibit the best manners but they always notice when they’re on the receiving end of poor manners.

I think to some extent, poor manners has become the norm to the point that when you meet someone who is kind and polite, it comes as a pleasant surprise. That can be a good thing for those of us who do mind our manners – we get noticed.

Answering a tweet, sharing a blog post (without expectation of reciprocation), answering an email on the same day you receive it – all those things that once may have been common courtesy now make us stand out as people that other people want to know and do business with.

Beyond common decency, it has had a noticeable impact on my business. If I hadn’t chosen to answer someone’s email within ten minutes, but had either ignored it or waited a few days, that person would not have been pleased and impressed and we would not have begun the type of relationship we developed and I would not have closed the contract that I did.

If I hadn’t thanked, shared, retweeted or extended any number of common courtesies, I would not have built the relationships I have, would not have grown a community of people who are also willing to help, thank, share and extend courtesies to me.

I’ve closed jobs, I’ve grown my subscriber list, I’ve improved my traffic and conversion rate – in some cases clearly through a simple act of kindness or courtesy.

People recognize good manners. People also recognize – and remember – bad manners. Being known as rude, unapproachable or unhelpful is not likely to win you any fans or customers.

There is also the simple fact that acting with poor manners is a reflection of you and your business ethics. It’s impossible to choose to be rude or dismissive online but then preach good customer service and attention to detail “in the real world”.

(And I use the word “you” in that global, general sense!)

You represent yourself, your brand and your company in every small interaction and every thank you. They do count!”

@CarolLynnRivera and http://www.websearchsocial.com/

Ryan Baron

“I find that good manners are highly Important Online.

I personally reach out to people on Twitter and actively try to help people with problems that I know can be a quick an easy solution.

Do I ask for anything out of return? Of course not, but 9 times out of 10 those people follow me and are more than willing to share my expertise and links.

Spending the time to help others and just being nice can yield amazing results online.”

@MightyZombieTX and http://www.mightyzombie.com/

Brett Dixon

“Manners online are important, although they don’t come very often. A simply +1 / Like or share of a post is a good way to thank people and we should try and give thanks were its due.

I recently built a great relationship with an up and coming business – we both have a love of all things tech and simply engaging and commenting on each others posts here and there has developed into a close relationship where our businesses help each other out whether its just sharing posts or recommending clients – all because of good social media etiquette and some thanks were it was due!”

@BrettDixon and http://www.dpom.co.uk/blog

I just want to thank all six of you for helping me with this question; your manners are impeccable.

I am in two minds after hearing everyone else’s opinion. I strongly believe that manners are important online and that doors can easily be closed through poor manners or simply a lack of gratitude. At the same time good manners can create incredible opportunities with people that you have never even met in person.

I am now starting to ponder the question of why some people, including me, occasionally forget their manners online? The answer may be that it just comes down to specific circumstances. If I have a shitty day then I am less bouncy and jovial in all of my transactions with other people regardless of whether they take place on or offline. But then again, perhaps online I worry less about keeping up appearances?

About 6 weeks ago I read this brilliant post by Frederick Vallaeys where he gave up a simple Google Adwords script that allows you to track the Quality Score of an Adwords account every day in an automated fashion by keeping a daily log in a Google Document.

This was my introduction to Google scripts as to be honest I am not a coder and apart from basic HTML any kind of code scares me a little. However – Frederick gave the instructions and the code so all I had to do was copy and paste it into my clients Adwords accounts – the screen shot below shows you where this needs to go in your Adwords account. On the left hand menu go to:

Bulk Operations >> Scripts:

I started collecting the data and within 1 day I had a strong desire to track the quality score of campaigns and ad groups. I did a lot of digging around the Google Adwords developer forum for scripts and eventually found another blinding post on quality score tracking by Martin Roettgerding of Bloofusion.

In this post Martin explains how to track the quality score of your most important keywords over time – up to around 100 of them.

This was a step in the right direction BUT I really felt that what we needed for our clients was the ability to track campaigns and ad groups as that way we can prioritise time and effort efficiently. For example if a specific campaign makes up 20% of the total Adwords spend and it’s average quality score is just 5 then it is one that needs attention as there are large cost savings to be made.

Martin kindly gave me some advice after I left this query on his post and directed me to some Adwords scripts. I spent a frustrating morning trying to hack together scripts into a working format and unfortunately got nowhere. Luckily one of our team is far more adept with scripts than me and took the reigns. Within a few hours he had a working script that did what we wanted – it tracks quality score at account, campaign and ad group level.

Today we will be sharing that script with you.

Caution: Adwords scripts time out and break if they do not complete within a few minutes so if you have hundreds of campaigns and thousands of ad groups you will not be able to track everything with this script. The way we have been using it is to track the campaigns with the most spend and to then dig into those that have the lowest quality score on an ad group level so that specific actions can be taken – improving ad copy relevance and developing negative keywords, splitting out keywords into separate ad groups etc.

Step by step guide to tracking Adwords quality score by account, campaign and ad group

Step 1 – prepare a Google Spreadsheet

Here is the spreadsheet template – click on this link and then click on “Make a copy” to copy it.

Make sure that the Account tab contains Account name in 1^st column, Campaign tab must contain Campaign names in 1^st column and Adgroup tab must contain Campaign and Adgroup names in 1^st and 2^nd columns. This way you can decide which Campaign and Adgroups you want to track. This is important as if the account size is too big the script might time out as Google allows script run time to be only 30 minutes. In the sheet, I’ve included names such as Campaign-01 but they need to be changed with actual Account, Campaign and Ad group names.

2. Go to Google Scripts

In your Adwords account you should see on the left hand menu an option called “bulk operations” – click on that. There are 3 options; under scripts, click on “create and manage scripts”

There will be a green button that says +create script – click on that.

You should see a screen like this:

3. Paste in the script

Paste in the following script ensuring that you replace any other script in the box:

Everything after this >>

var spreadsheet_url = “https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuPPDa_qWJYOdDNHUlYwajhRYlc3d0dfUXIwb1BLQXc#gid=3″;
 var email_address = “myemail@mycompany.com”;

function main() {
 var matches = new RegExp(‘key=([^&#]*)’).exec(spreadsheet_url);
 if (!matches || !matches[1]) throw ‘Invalid spreadsheet URL: ‘ + spreadsheetUrl;
 var spreadsheetId = matches[1];
 var spreadsheet = SpreadsheetApp.openById(spreadsheetId);
 var account_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName(‘Account’);
 var campaign_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName(‘Campaigns’);
 var adgroup_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName(‘Adgroups’);
 var account_sheet_values = account_sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
 var campaign_sheet_values = campaign_sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
 var adgroup_sheet_values = adgroup_sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
 var result_range = new Array();
 var adgroup_result_range = new Array();
 var account_alert_text = new Array();
 var campaign_alert_text = new Array();
 var adgroup_alert_text = new Array();
 var campaign_history = new Array();
 var account_history = new Array();
 var adgroup_history = new Array();
 var currentTime = new Date();
 var today = (currentTime.getMonth() + 1) + “/” + currentTime.getDate() + “/” + currentTime.getFullYear();

//Account QS Starts

for(i = 1; i < account_sheet_values.length; i++){
 if(account_sheet_values[i][0] == “”) continue;
 result_range[i] = [today, 0];
 var account_name = account_sheet_values[i][0];
 var latest_check = account_sheet_values[i][1];
 var old_quality_score = account_sheet_values[i][2];
 var totalImpressionsAnalyzed = 0;
 var totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = 0;
 var keywordIterator = AdWordsApp.keywords()
 .withCondition(“Status = ACTIVE”)
 .forDateRange(“LAST_30_DAYS”)
 .withCondition(“Impressions > 0″)
 .orderBy(“Impressions DESC”)
 .withLimit(50000)
 .get();

while (keywordIterator.hasNext()) {
 var keyword = keywordIterator.next();
 var qualityScore = keyword.getQualityScore();
 var keywordStats = keyword.getStatsFor(“LAST_30_DAYS”);
 var impressions = keywordStats.getImpressions();
 var qualityScoreContribution = qualityScore * impressions;
 totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed + qualityScoreContribution;
 totalImpressionsAnalyzed = totalImpressionsAnalyzed + impressions;
 }

var accountQualityScore = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed / totalImpressionsAnalyzed;
 var FinalAccountQualityScore = accountQualityScore.toFixed(2);

// Save account quality score for results
 result_range[i][1] = FinalAccountQualityScore;
 // for the history we note the change
 if(old_quality_score > 0) var change = FinalAccountQualityScore – old_quality_score;
 else var change = “NEW”;
 var row = [today, FinalAccountQualityScore, change];
 account_history.push(row);
 account_alert_text.push(FinalAccountQualityScore + “\t” + old_quality_score + “\t” + change + “\t” + account_name);
 }

// write results to spreadsheet
 result_range.splice(0,1);
 account_sheet.getRange(2, 2, result_range.length, 2).setValues(result_range);
 // write history to spreadsheet
 var history_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName(‘Account QS history’);
 history_sheet.getRange(history_sheet.getLastRow()+1, 1, account_history.length, 3).setValues(account_history);

//Account QS Ends

//Campaign QS Starts

for(i = 1; i < campaign_sheet_values.length; i++){
 // make sure there is actually some data here
 if(campaign_sheet_values[i][0] == “”) continue;
 result_range[i] = [today, 0];
 var campaign_name = campaign_sheet_values[i][0];
 var latest_check = campaign_sheet_values[i][1];
 var old_quality_score = campaign_sheet_values[i][2];
 var totalImpressionsAnalyzed = 0;
 var totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = 0;
 var keywordIterator = AdWordsApp.keywords()
 .withCondition(“CampaignName = ‘” + campaign_name + “‘”)
 .withCondition(“CampaignStatus = ENABLED”)
 .withCondition(“AdGroupStatus = ENABLED”)
 .orderBy(“Impressions”)
 .forDateRange(“LAST_30_DAYS”)
 .withLimit(50000)
 .get();

while(keywordIterator.hasNext()){
 var keyword = keywordIterator.next();
 var current_quality_score = keyword.getQualityScore();
 var keywordStats = keyword.getStatsFor(“LAST_30_DAYS”);
 var impressions = keywordStats.getImpressions();
 var qualityScoreContribution = current_quality_score * impressions;
 totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed + qualityScoreContribution;
 totalImpressionsAnalyzed = totalImpressionsAnalyzed + impressions;
 }

var CampaignQualityScore = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed / totalImpressionsAnalyzed;
 var FinalCampaignQualityScore=CampaignQualityScore.toFixed(2);

// save quality score for results
 result_range[i][1] = FinalCampaignQualityScore;
 // for the history we note the change
 if(old_quality_score > 0) var change = FinalCampaignQualityScore – old_quality_score;
 else var change = “NEW”;
 var row = [today, campaign_name, FinalCampaignQualityScore, change];
 campaign_history.push(row);
 // if we have a previously tracked quality score and it’s different from the current one, we make a note to log it and send it via email later
 if(old_quality_score > 0 && CampaignQualityScore != old_quality_score){
 campaign_alert_text.push(FinalCampaignQualityScore + “\t” + old_quality_score + “\t” + change + “\t” + campaign_name);
 }
 }

// write results to spreadsheet
 result_range.splice(0,1);
 campaign_sheet.getRange(2, 2, result_range.length, 2).setValues(result_range);
 // write history to spreadsheet
 var campaign_history_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName(‘Campaigns QS history’);
 campaign_history_sheet.getRange(campaign_history_sheet.getLastRow()+1, 1, campaign_history.length, 4).setValues(campaign_history);

//Campaign QS Ends

//Adgroup QS Starts

for(i = 1; i < adgroup_sheet_values.length; i++){
 // make sure there is actually some data here
 if(adgroup_sheet_values[i][0] == “”) continue;
 adgroup_result_range[i] = [today, 0];
 var campaign_name = adgroup_sheet_values[i][0];
 var adgroup_name = adgroup_sheet_values[i][1];
 var latest_check = adgroup_sheet_values[i][2];
 var old_quality_score = adgroup_sheet_values[i][3];
 var totalImpressionsAnalyzed = 0;
 var totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = 0;
 var keywordIterator = AdWordsApp.keywords()
 .withCondition(“CampaignName = ‘” + campaign_name + “‘”)
 .withCondition(“AdGroupName = ‘” + adgroup_name + “‘”)
 .withCondition(“CampaignStatus = ENABLED”)
 .withCondition(“AdGroupStatus = ENABLED”)
 .orderBy(“Impressions”)
 .forDateRange(“LAST_30_DAYS”)
 .withLimit(50000)
 .get();

while(keywordIterator.hasNext()){
 var keyword = keywordIterator.next();
 var current_quality_score = keyword.getQualityScore();
 var keywordStats = keyword.getStatsFor(“LAST_30_DAYS”);
 var impressions = keywordStats.getImpressions();
 var qualityScoreContribution = current_quality_score * impressions;
 totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed + qualityScoreContribution;
 totalImpressionsAnalyzed = totalImpressionsAnalyzed + impressions;
 }

var AdgroupQualityScore = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed / totalImpressionsAnalyzed;
 var FinalAdgroupQualityScore=AdgroupQualityScore.toFixed(2);

// save quality score for results
 adgroup_result_range[i][1] = FinalAdgroupQualityScore;
 // Note the change for the history
 if(old_quality_score > 0) var change = FinalAdgroupQualityScore – old_quality_score;
 else var change = “NEW”;
 var row = [today, campaign_name, adgroup_name, FinalAdgroupQualityScore, change];
 adgroup_history.push(row);
 // if we have a previously tracked quality score and it’s different from the current one, we make a note to log it and send it via email later
 if(old_quality_score > 0 && CampaignQualityScore != old_quality_score){
 adgroup_alert_text.push(FinalAdgroupQualityScore + “\t” + old_quality_score + “\t” + change + “\t” + campaign_name + “\t” + adgroup_name);
 }
 }

// write results to spreadsheet
 adgroup_result_range.splice(0,1);
 adgroup_sheet.getRange(2, 3, adgroup_result_range.length, 2).setValues(adgroup_result_range);
 // write history to spreadsheet
 var history_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName(‘Adgroups QS history’);
 history_sheet.getRange(history_sheet.getLastRow()+1, 1, adgroup_history.length, 5).setValues(adgroup_history);
 //Adgroup QS Ends

// Send Quality Score Changes through Email

var message = “The following Account Quality Score changes were discovered:\nNew\tOld\tChange\tAccount\n”;
 for(i = 0; i < account_alert_text.length; i++) message += account_alert_text[i] + “\n”;
 message += “\n” + “The following Campaign Quality Score changes were discovered:\nNew\tOld\tChange\tCampaign\n”;
 for(i = 0; i < campaign_alert_text.length; i++) message += campaign_alert_text[i] + “\n”;
 message += “\n” + “The following Adgroup Quality Score changes were discovered:\nNew\tOld\tChange\tCampaign Name\Adgroup Name\n”;
 for(i = 0; i < adgroup_alert_text.length; i++) message += adgroup_alert_text[i] + “\n”;
 // Include a link to the spreadsheet
 message += “\n” + “Settings and complete history are available at ” + spreadsheet_url;
 MailApp.sendEmail(email_address, “AdWords quality score changes detected”, message);
 }

Chris from Ten Scores has even been kind enough to answer some questions for the Deep Footprints blog about quality score; there is some fantastic insight for all readers here so I hope that you enjoy it. I have also checked out the TenScores tool which is all about helping you to understand and improve quality score and am impressed. I suggest that when you are done with this post that you take a look too.

So; here is the meat:

1. Hi Chris, please could you give us a little background on how you got involved in PPC Marketing?

It started in 2007 when I was still living in Belgium. I had an idea for a website that I wanted to create but I needed to know if there was interest before I went full steam building it. I set up a quick email capture page and when it came to traffic, I played with adwords and facebook ads. I got fascinated about how changing one word in an ad would dramatically improve my CTRs and conversions. I was hooked. A year later, I moved to Canada to attend university. Needed some extra cash to pay for high international student fees and that’s when I discovered affiliate marketing. My world flipped over and it hasn’t been the same ever since.

2. You recently developed a product called Ten Scores that is designed to help PPC Marketers improve their quality score and consequently get a better return on their ad spend: so for anyone who is not a seasoned PPC marketer; why is quality score important?

Quality Score influences how much google charges you on every click and it influence how many of those clicks you can actually buy. So if you have high Quality Score, you’ll be rewarded with cheaper clicks and you’ll get more of them. Those are the two main reasons but there are more. I like to think of Quality Score as the heart of your Adwords account (as opposed to conversions which are the brain that make advertising work). Low Quality Scores is a sign that your heart is sick and if it goes as low as 1/10, Google stops sending you traffic, it’s like a heart attack, you die.

3. In your experience can a keyword with a low quality score (2 or 3) ever be improved to the extent that it has a QS of 9 or 10? If so what are the first steps?

Not every keyword can get to 9 or 10. But almost (I said almost) all keywords can get to 7/10, even from 2 or 3, which is the objective any advertiser should shoot for. To get 9/10 and 10/10, you have to be a really really great advertiser in a really great market. Nines and tens are achieved through exceptionally high click-through-rates. Click-though-rates that are 2x, 3x or more than any other advertiser in your market. That is easy to accomplish with brand terms, for example if someone is searching for deepfootprints and they see an ad from deepfootprints.co.uk, the probability that they will click that ad rather than another is insanely high. With that said, we have a number of customers using Tenscores that have over 100,000 non-brand keywords and are still able to average quality scores of 9 and 10/10. You have to be really really good… or really lucky to be in an easy market.

4. I have a feeling that re-searches are an important indicator of poor relevance but it seems to be a factor that people do not mention much, what would you say are the most important influences of quality score? And to what degree of importance are they?

A lot of times people want to guess what factors are important for high Quality Score and they speculate. The thing is, there is no secret and Google has provided the factors that influences it over and over again.

First you need high quality and relevant landing page. What Google means by ‘high quality’ hasn’t always been straight forward. In my experience, if what you’re selling is evident within one click, you have information about the business (about us page, contact us page) and what you do with users data (privacy policy), you’re good. Then the ‘relevant’ part for landing page means that the ads and keywords you’re using are closely connected to what you’re selling on the landing page.

Second, you got to have high relevancy between your ads and keywords. There are two components to this. Google has algorithms that compare your keywords to your ads and determine if they correlate. However, Google also uses their users to tell them which ads are relevant and which are not through the evaluation of click-through-rates.

Which brings us to the third and most important factor: click-through-rates (CTR). CTR is evaluated everywhere. At the keyword level, at the query level, at the display url level, at the geographical level (where the ad is shown), at the device level (desktop or mobile) … anywhere there’s a CTR, you can be sure Google is using it to reward or punish you high or low QS. Focusing on CTR is 90% of the work of increasing QS and when you do that, significant results start to show.

5. what would you say are the most common mistakes that businesses make with Adwords?

Wow, there are many. Let’s talk about businesses that are starting out with Adwords and then ones that have been using it for a long time.

The businesses that start out make the biggest mistake of not optimizing their sales funnel well enough before advertising. I see this happening all the time. When you focus on optimizing your sales funnel first, it forces you to measure results, track those results and sets the foundation to high ROI advertising.

For businesses that have been around Adwords for a long time, the biggest mistake is that they’re not picky enough with their keywords. Most of them have a few highly profitable keywords and a ton of low performing keywords that they let sit in an account without ever evaluating their performance. That results in a lot of wasted spend. A keyword is like an employee, if it’s not working to make a profit, it has nothing to do in your adwords account. Remove it.

6. Could we now do a bit of maths. If you have an Adwords account spending on average £5000 per month with an account level QS of 5 – how much would the account holder save if they managed to increase the average account level QS to 7 without impacting conversions?

I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. Even if I tried I’d be wrong because there’s simply too much going on when advertising that predictions like those are hard to make. However, we do give very broad estimates in Tenscores using the following formula that was provided by Google a while back:

Avg. CPC = [(AdRank Of Advertiser Below)/QS] + $0.01

You do the math ;-)

[ insert your math here... hehe... ]

JC – OK; I like a challenge – The important assumption here is that all other things remain equal – i.e. just because we manage to improve our quality score through ad, keyword and landing page optimisations I will assume that the competitors quality scores remain unchanged. The reality is of course that by improving our quality scores there will be some impact on the competitors, but for now let’s ignore that.

Using an example of how ad rank varies based on QS we can get a rough figure:

Your Ad Rank (position) is determined by Maximum CPC Bid X Quality Score. If your ad rank is higher than your competitors then your ad will show above theirs.

This table shows how, for a fixed bid of £1.20, quality score affects your ad rank.

as we know, Quality Score ranges from a low score of 1 to a high score of 10.

Max Bid Quality Score Ad Rank (position) £1.20 1 1.20 £1.20 2 2.40 £1.20 3 3.60 £1.20 4 4.80 £1.20 5 6.00 £1.20 6 7.20 £1.20 7 8.40 £1.20 8 9.60 £1.20 9 10.80 £1.20 10 12.00

I will need to assume a starting average CPC, so for that I will assume £1.20 as shown in this table. With a quality score of 5 on average our ad rank averages our at 6. If we can improve QS from 5 to 7, then we can use a simple formula to estimate the average CPC needed to achieve the same ad rank.

6 (ad rank) / 7 (new quality score) = 0.86p

This means that if we improved QS from 5 to 7 AND we also bid down so that our average CPC dropped from £1.20 to 86p then we would still maintain the same average position. It’s a 28% saving

Now; I just want to say that I am not new to public humiliation; so if this is horribly wrong then please feel free to correct me in front of the Deep Footprints readers.

7. Can you give us any (non-sensitive) examples of how Ten Scores has helped businesses to increase their quality score by a factor of 20% or more?

We’re actually going to start featuring customer success stories on our blog. The most recent I have numbers for is Philip Sander from dedukta.dk. Within a few days of using Tenscores, they were able to increase their overall account QS from 3.3/10 to 5.4/10 which resulted in a 31% reduction in CPC. They still have some work to do to get it to at least 7/10 and rip all the benefits, but they’re on the right track.

8. Anything else you would like to add?

Well, thank you for this interview Joel. I like very much the interest and your recent research on Quality Score. For readers who want more information about QS, we recently created an interactive page about Quality Score. And for those who want to optimize, Tenscores.com makes it easy.

Wow – thanks Chris. Really really enlightening responses that are clear and easy for business owners to understand. We really appreciate you taking the time to contribute.

Unfortunately this can sometimes be tricky – sometimes you can bid up a keyword into position 1 but even once there it’s click through rate (CTR) remains pitiful. You check that you are not abusing your customers in your ad copy and see what some of the other competitors are doing with their ads and you find that (as objectively as possible) that you have strong ad copy. So wassup?

Today we are going to look at the process you should go through when you find yourself a bit stumped as to why your click through rate (CTR) is so damn low, and we will of course then give you some pointers on what you can do to improve it.

First up – What is a good click through rate for Adwords?

This does vary greatly with each keyword, and in fact each auction as there are many influencing factors e.g. a domain that is almost synonymous with a specific product (think Amazon on book related searches), or whether or not there are product listing ads within the results, and if so where they are positioned etc etc.

all of that aside there are some general averages that are typically called upon at times like this data gathered by Accuracast:

You will probably have an idea of the specific auction peculiarities for your top keywords so can adjust due to this to work out whether your CTR is poor or not.

Here is a keyword that we were confused by this week for one of our clients:

Although the keyword is running in an average position of 1.5 the CTR is just 3.74%. Using the above table we can see that this is well below average for this position. The cost per conversion (£12.97) for this client is very good so we want more traffic; it looks like we cannot get into a much higher position and the issue is obviously CTR. Here is the process that we went through to figure out why:

Make a list of potential reasons

• Ad copy is poor compared to competitors
• Ad copy is not relevant to the keyword or to the intent of the searcher
• If broad match keyword are we getting irrelevant searches?
• Do we have a low impression share through day parting and compete aggressively at that time?
• Are we also running on the search partner network – how does performance vary?
• What about ad extensions – are we missing any critical ones?

Review ad copy

Here we refer back to best practices – see this infographic on how to write the best PPC ads. In this case the keyword is exact match so we know that all of the searches are relevant to the ad we have written. We looked through all of the competitor ads and could not see any reason why ours were losing – we had a good clear attention grabbing headline, strong call to action and ads that were focused to the searchers intention with this keyword.

Reviewing Adwords Auction Insights to see what competitors are doing

Another report that was released in 2012 is the Auction Insights report, this allows you to compare some of your performance indicators directly with specific competitors – at first glance it can be a little confusing but with a little interpretation a fair amount can be learned from this report. To get the keyword insights you need to select an individual keyword and then click on “keyword details” and then choose the option “Auction insights” as shown in the screenshot below.

Here is the auction insights report for the keyword in question:

The first thing to look at here is the “position above rate” as this shows you who is beating you and how much of the time they are beating you. You can see here that 2 of the competitors have a position above rate of 99% so this means that when our ads are shown together they almost always rank above us.

If you now look at the impression share column you can see that we had our ads served for 100% of the available impressions for this keyword whereas the 2 competitors that are beating us have a much lower impression share – this could be because they are only running ads at specific times of the day. It could theoretically be because their bid is too low to get all of the available impressions but that does not make sense considering that when they do show they always show above our client.

So; in order for us to show above them more of the time we will need to bid up during peak trading hours.

Determining where our impressions are coming from? Google Search or the Search Partner Network

The next thing that we looked into is the network that we are running on and it quickly became apparent that our CTR in Google search was very good when our ad was shown in the top positions above the search results; this perhaps accounts for the good quality score of 10/10.

However; most of the impressions came from the search partner network when we were in lower positions. The take away from this is that we could split out the search partner network targeting into a separate campaign to better understand the performance and also to bid differently for the two – perhaps we need to bid a little higher for the search partner network than we do for Google search.

Checking Ad Extensions

another reason why CTR may suffer is if you do not use relevant ad extensions: For example if you are a restaurant and you do not run call extensions to allow mobile users to click to call or if you do not link up your Places extension to show address details then you could lose clicks and sales. In Adwords you can check on the part of your ad or ad extension that was clicked – in the example below you can see the comparison between the headline, the product extension and the ad sitelinks.

This data does not mean that site links are bad – they probably help the CTR overall as they allow your ad to take up more space on the page and to say more about your offering but the fact that most people click on the headline is probably more down to the nature of how people are used to using a search engine. It does look like the product extensions help the click through rate as when they are shown we get a better click through rate than on the headline as people are interested in specific products.

Looking at this I cannot see any action that needs to be taken.

Other things to examine

A number of the factors we have looked at here in this post can be found under the “Segment” option on the keywords tab (shown in screenshot below).

Play around with the different reports under here to see if and where any data stands out.

Considering what we have found through the auction insights data it would be interesting to know the performance of this keyword by time of day; unfortunately the smallest unit of time available under segments is by day. Under the dimensions tab you can get a performance report by hour of the day but this is at ad group and campaign levels only, so you would need to put a keyword in it’s own ad group to work out at what time of day the CTR is suffering.

Conclusions

From this analysis we have the action points of:

1) Create a separate campaign targeting the search partners and to bid slightly higher in that campaign for this keyword.

2) Test a slightly higher bid in Google search too.

It’s important to remember that ads can always be improved too and to keep testing.

I have given a basic outline of our process in the following, and epically long infographic – in fact 2 infographics.

If you suffer from any sizing issues – i.e. it coming out too small then you can see the SEO linkbuilding 14 step infographic here.

I set up a new clients account last week and was taking them through it when a question that they asked gave me an idea.

Just take a moment to check the QS of the keywords below:

We were looking at this screenshot and they asked me why there was such a variance between the quality scores of these keywords in the same ad group. Bear in mind that the keywords have never run; they have been freshly loaded in so there is no performance history on them, they all share the same landing page and the same ads.

From experience I know that performance in terms of click through rate is a key determinant of quality score. I have no idea how important it is compared to other factors though, just a vague feeling that it is the most important factor based on past experience. I know that the accounts I manage with high click through rates benefit from high quality scores.

One thing that I noticed here was that the keyword with the highest quality score was “wholesale polo shirt” with a QS of 7. It was also the keyword that I used in the headline of the ad – in fact it is a proper phrase match.

I started to wonder if I was on to something and as this is a new account it was a great opportunity to try and reverse engineer Adwords quality score formula. In retrospect that is an undertaking that I am vastly under-qualified for but my analysis gave me some key insights that I will share with you here in the hope that others can take this further.

Let’s start with Google’s explanation of how they calculate quality score:

Now, considering that I am running this analysis on an account that has no history we can discount many of these in trying to understand the variances in quality score that my clients keywords had as shown above. Basically we can put it down to 2 things:

• The quality of your landing page
• Your keyword/ad relevance

There are a number of considerations here:

Quality of the landing page considerations

• how the keyword is used in the page heading
• how the keyword is used in the body text of the page
• image alt tags, video content
• page load speed, layout, HTML markup quality

There are a number of things that come into play; I didn’t go into this much detail as it would require a lot longer than I have available and also I am not convinced that I would get my hands on anything conclusive without doing the exercise on multiple accounts. Therefore I just considered the target keyword usage in the page text, URL and headings.

Keyword/Ad Relevance considerations

• Headline relevance to keyword
• Description Lines 1 and 2 relevance to keyword
• Display URL relevance to keyword
• Destination URL relevance to keyword

In fact for this experiment I discounted the relevance of description line 2 as the ads in this account contain a generic call to action in desc line 2 rather than anything related to the keywords in the ad group, but I looked at all of the other parts of the ad’s relevance to the keyword.

The background on this Adwords account

The client is a wholesaler of T-shirts, sweatshirts, bags etc that are to be used for printing. The account only contains keywords that define the website as a wholesaler and not a B2C retailer – otherwise we would obviously not be getting a great conversion rate. Each ad group focuses on a product type and then the keywords use that product name + a defining keyword e.g. “wholesale” or “blank”. There are 7 defining keywords used in the account:

• wholesale
• blank
• bulk
• for printing
• merchandise
• promo
• promotional

How we conducted the experiment

The account has 337 ad groups and 4653 keywords. All ad groups contain each of the 7 defining keywords. I downloaded all keywords into Excel and then downloaded all ads into Excel and used the vlookup function to match the ads to the keywords based on the ad group.

I then pulled out the key defining term for each of the keywords and the ads and also pulled out what type of product the keyword related to as this would then allow me to determine the landing page relevance to the keyword

I then ran a series of pivot tables to look at the average quality scores across the account based on different factors but largely based on the quality of the landing pages and the ad to keyword relevance.

First up I looked at the average quality score by defining keyword to see if there were any patterns across the account. As you can see there is clearly a variance here with the words “promo” and “wholesale” getting significantly higher quality scores (6.28 and 6.12 respectively) than the term “blank” which had an average quality score across the account of 4.64.

After seeing this the first question I had was on the websites relevance to these 2 terms – as a crude measurement, were they used more heavily in the content on the site than the term “blank”

It is not an ideal analysis of the website relevance but I checked the keyword density and it actually showed a negative correlation – the word “blank” was used more than the terms “promo” and “wholesale”.

Quality score by keyword match type

Google quality score is supposedly set on exact match keywords/terms and as we have both exact and broad variants of many of the same keywords in the account I thought that I would double check this:

Looks close enough to me.

Quality score by looking at relationship between the keyword and the ad headline

First of all I looked at the relevance of the keywords defining term to the ad headlines defining term. Basically; what I wanted to see was whether or not, on average, did the keywords with the term “wholesale” in them for example, have a higher quality score when the corresponding ad also had the keyword “wholesale” in the headline of the ad.

Answer: No

One interesting thing that I found here was that having the term “bulk” in the ad headline consistently gave a higher quality score across the whole account. This was interesting as “bulk” is not a term used at all in the website’s content so I have no ideas on why this may be? However – what I was hoping to prove didn’t come through – there was no link between the keywords text and the ad headlines text effect on quality score.

What about the ads description line 1?

There does seem to be some relationship here although the data is just not really enough to prove statistically that there is a connection or exactly how strong that connection is.

*You are comparing horizontally.

One takeaway is that perhaps having the users searched keyword in the description line 1 is more important than in the headline because the headline should be more about grabbing a users attention, so may not necessarily require the same keyword to signify relevance whereas the description lines 1 and 2 are more about qualifying relevance so require the keyword – see this infographic we created on how to write great ppc ads for more on this.

What about the display URL & Destination URL?

The interesting thing here is that the bags and the vests; the ones with the highest quality scores had the most tightly themed keywords and also the least keywords. This suggests that tight ad groups are important; but that’s nothing new really – PPC marketers have been suggesting that for years.

and the destination URL’s

There is something interesting here shown under the product types – basically for the same keywords we are using 2 landing pages – one for the broad and one for the exact ad group. One is specific to a group of T-Shirts and the other is the homepage which has all T-shirts on it. The landing page that relates in theme to the keywords has a higher quality score. This is something that we could easily test more comprehensively byt creating multiple ad groups and just switching the landing pages for the same keywords (DO NOT TURN THEM ON) to see the effect on QS. It’s only about a 6% improvement in QS but it is something at least. This is not conclusive enough to say that keyword relevance to landing page is 6% of the QS formula but it is at least a hint that it is important.

I plan to take this research further in the future as I think that the concept is good but I just lack the brain and the necessary time to properly reverse engineer the importance of these various factors towards the keyword quality score. I would love to hear about any experiments that others have been doing and your findings?

• Geographic targeting – should we split out campaigns for different regions/countries and target differently/bid differently?
• How do we handle different devices – do users search for this companies products/services differently on different devices? e.g. click to call on mobiles.
• What types of extensions/sitelinks are relevant for this business? Are they are a locally based bricks and mortar business needing location extensions or do they have great reviews so can leverage reviews extensions?
• What types of conversions do they have on their site? leads, sales, phone calls? What is the best way to track these and apply bidding rules to them?

On top of that you have all the basic structure questions: should we base it on website hierarchy (common e-commerce structure) or on the ways people search for the product/services (common service type structure)? How do we conduct keyword research, what business information do we need for the ad building etc etc.

Why does it all have to be so complicated?

We have noticed that our clients are just confused and so really do need professional help with their Adwords accounts.

This is an issue for all parties as many businesses that have a go themselves, fail, and then may determine that Adwords is no good as a marketing tool and give up. This of course affects Google’s bottom line, reduces customers for PPC agencies and most importantly leaves small businesses failing to sell as much as they could. Adwords should really be accessible for small business owners as not all businesses are in a position of being able to afford professional support – most businesses are 1 person micro businesses.

I am guessing that this was the impetus behind Google’s introduction of enhanced campaigns, which they announced last week.

Here is what Google said about Adwords enhanced campaigns in their announcement:

“People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.

This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.”

You can read the announcement here, and here is their dubious video explaining it:

Google’s videos are usually great but I am not convinced that this makes the product any clearer for advertisers. Not to worry – we are going to go through it now.

So what are Adwords Enhanced Campaigns?

Currently many advertisers split up their Adwords accounts into very complex set ups so that they can understand how different factors interact. For example – how does geographic location affect sales of different products? How do sales differ by mobile, desktop device? Should I bid lower/higher on mobile devices?

The current answer to these questions is to split up campaigns by region, device and product type. For example if you have 100 products, selling in 50 countries and on 3 devices (mobile, tablet and desktop) we have 15,000 variations. Sam Owen wrote a good article about this over at PPC Hero.

With enhanced campaigns you can now adjust bids based on location and device so there is no need to split them out into different campaigns.

Roll out of enhanced campaigns will occur over the next 4 months with completion by July 2013.

Here is a screenshot that Search Engine Watch took of the new set up – none of our accounts have the functionality yet!

Screenshot attribution: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2243708/AdWords-Enhanced-Campaigns-Hands-On

Wait; there is more:

Changes to Sitelinks

A major frustration with the Adwords sitelinks extension has been that you cannot get data on the performance of the individual sitelinks – so it has been impossible to optimise the sitelinks other than by using a bit of nowse and a best guess. This will now change and as well as that we will be able to set sitelinks at an ad group level rather than a campaign level.

I am excited about this as it will allow great opportunities e.g. retailers will be able to have sitelinks for their best selling products with much more flexibility.

New Conversion Types

In their announcement Google gave one specific example:

“Example: You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads.”

As well as this the calls that result from a click to call ad have been charged at a fixed fee of £1. According to Search Engine Land this is now free – another great little bonus.

Tracking calls that last 60 seconds plus as a conversion sounds quite sensible on the face of it but you will need to monitor the types of calls you are getting as businesses with complex products or services may require more than 1 minute to identify relevance so this type of conversion may just be confusing for that type of business.

What needs to be done by advertisers to prepare for Adwords enhanced campaigns?

If you currently have campaigns separated by device and by Geographic region then you may want to consolidate them; in fact for device targeted campaigns you will need to combine them as you will be opted into all devices by default. If you are 100% sure that you do not want to run ads on a specific device e.g. mobiles then you can reduce bids for mobiles by -100%.

Combining campaigns will mean that when you are running tests on different ad copies or sitelinks etc you will be able to reach statistical significance much more quickly. This will allow you to develop and improve performance more quickly.

If you are not currently separating campaigns by device or region then nothing really needs doing but you should be aware of the new possibilities open to you – run a geographic report in Adwords using the dimensions tab and a separate one by devices so at least you will know where you are.

If you have never done this before then you will find it quite enlightening as there are normally regional and device variations – specifically mobile targeted campaigns usually require a lower bid so you can save a bit of money through separating them out – but obviously do not bother going to this trouble now as you will be able to achieve it through simple device specific bid adjustments once enhanced campaigns is released for your account.

Concerns about Adwords enhanced campaigns

All in all I believe that this is a positive step forward by Google, especially for the less experienced advertisers as it will make life a lot simpler for them and will allow them to take advantage of the optimisations that more advanced marketers have been using for years.

However – my concern is that the simplification will lead to murkiness. What I mean is that with separated out campaigns we can clearly see where we are but with the combined campaigns we will need to run various reports and to cross reference them to get a clear picture of what is working and why. For example – you find that you are getting better conversions on a campaign and need to understand why – you will need to analyse:

• which keywords
• in which locations
• on what devices

are helping you. Most advertisers just will not bother so will become less aware of what is working and what is not unless they find themselves struggling to get their account to perform.

Also – what if you want to bid keyword 1 up in location A and down in location B but they are in the same campaign?

There are a lot of unanswered questions that i am sure will become clear on roll out and also the update of Adwords editor that will accompany the change. I look forward to seeing this new functionality in action and testing it. What do you think? Good or bad move for advertisers?

After a couple of minutes I had to stop him and ask what he was talking about.

He started laughing as I was perhaps the last person in Japan to hear about the fastest growing social network ever (in Asia).

Line began in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake when all telecoms providers collapsed and communication was lost. At that time I was teaching a lesson in a Japanese primary school and no-ne could contact anyone – land lines and mobiles all down. However, I could call my dad through Skype.

Developers at the Japanese arm of the large Korean search engine Naver (NHN Japan) recognized this as a serious issue/opportunity and quickly put together the bones of Line.

The network launched on 27th June 2011 and within 1 year had 45 million users, 20 million of which were in Japan. Last week Line hit the milestone of 100 million users worldwide with the vast majority shared between Japan and Korea, dwarfing the other big players, Facebook, Mixi, Gree and Twitter. They are claiming around 3 million new registered users each week.

There are 10 million users in both Thailand and Taiwan and it is fast becoming popular in South America and Eastern Europe.

The network is more than just online text now though – you can also make free calls through Wi-Fi or if you are on a flat rate plan to any contacts on your phone who are Line users and there is a timeline that pulls in group communication abilities.

Line requires a unique telephone number for every user, although registered users can now download a desktop version of the app too.

The great thing about it being tied to a unique telephone number is that when you log in to Line it automatically scans all of your contacts numbers to check who is on Line at that time. You can then message them, have group chats and call directly. You are instantly connected to all of your important contacts, this is something that no other social network has achieved.

So what about that aggressive post title?

With the title of the post I am not just trying to get attention, the growth of this network is one signal that it is set for good things, but more than that I have always felt that the social site which will beat Facebook to the number one spot will need to be very different, Google+ has some fantastic features but it is not different enough whereas Line, being 1) Focused for mobile devices and 2) Requiring a unique telephone number, has capabilities that are just out of reach for Facebook, Twitter, Google or most other networks.

If you have not yet used it then you will be laughing at my naivety at this point. Well, we will see.

When you join, Line scans your friends of friends to suggest people to add as contacts on Line. You can add in all your friends from Facebook and instantly marry up with your contacts based on telephone number – quickly everyone is nicely tied up. As the vast majority of the population are now using Line in Japan, text messaging and calling have essentially become free for many people. Although most people are actually on unlimited data plans for texts anyway, the calls cost a fair whack in Japan so there is a financial incentive to use the network too.

What is Line’s business model?

With the user base they have there will be a number of opportunities and it seems that this is still being figured out but one of the key aspects of Line is that there are a wicked range of “stickers” or emoji that you can send. Stickers are elaborate emoticons and there are thousands of them available.

Line allows brands to upload branded stamps that users can purchase for a dollar or two. This may be an aspect that is unique to Asia but they are incredibly popular and consumers are happy to shell out to send Doraemon or Crayon Shinchan stamps to their friends.

There are Line business accounts, which unlike Facebook or Twitter require a joining fee and then a monthly subscription fee.
With a business account you are able to sell stickers, send messages to your contacts, distribute coupons and run competitions.

Lawson, who are a large chain of convenience stores in Japan messaged their 1.5 million contacts through Line in August 2012 with a coupon offer and 1 million of the recipients redeemed in store!

There are also “Official Accounts” which allow users to communicate directly with famous figures that are on Line.

The timeline allows you to share updates with all contacts in a similar approach to the Facebook network.

There is also a Line photo application and many games within the app.

Line can be downloaded in the App store on all popular smart phone platforms and is available in Japanese, English, Chinese and Spanish.

I was having a conversation with another SEO (Tim Grice) the other day about how SEO has evolved and become more difficult for small businesses due to the increasing onus on linkable assets (great content, tools, brand equity, relationships etc).

I am not talking about technical SEO here – technically things have not changed incredibly of late, there have been additional considerations such as open graph protocol, structured data and page speed becoming much more significant but essentially things have been moving on a consistent trajectory.

On the other hand link building and off site SEO has undergone a sea change, and one for the better good of the internet (IMHO).

It’s not really a change of direction for any of the search engines; they have always been trying to achieve what they are now finally achieving – i.e. a situation where the sites that genuinely are the most relevant and appropriate are being surfaced for users searches rather than sites that have been gamed for positions using things like exact match domains and mass linking from low quality sites with exact match anchor text.

For many SEO’s the game has always been about trying to beat the search engines, find loopholes and ways to trick the search engines into thinking that you have the most appropriate content. This does not go for everybody in SEO – there are many link builders such as Eric Ward who have always taken an approach of building connections that could have occurred naturally and that make sense and just encouraging those relationships to actually happen.

But now that the easy life is over SEO’s need to be a lot more creative and experimental in their thinking and planning – again a big positive for the industry.

Not that we were ever short on creative minds in SEO, but now that things have evolved at least those that have taken the longer and steeper road will not have to glance sideways at competitors who have a backlink profile straight out of the landfill site and have second thoughts about the approach we are taking.

It’s tough when you have clients/bosses asking for the logic on your slower, more costly content-based strategy when it is plain obvious you are being beaten by a much easier strategy. Thank god those days are coming to an end.

Anyway; back to the A-Team.

If you are a young whippersnapper and are unfamiliar with arguably the best 80’s show to ever grace the TV screen then get into your Dad’s old cabinet and look for these chunky brick sized items that have tape in them – those are called videos – find one with the A-team written in faint biro on it, grab a penguin bar (small chocolate biscuit) and settle on the sofa for a televisual extravaganza like never before.

Oh and it may be worth switching your imagination on, the special effects in those days were not what they are nowadays.

Here is the intro to the show:

Assuming that we are all up to speed on who the A-team are I want to talk about the last 15 minutes of every single show.

This is the bit when things are looking really dismal, the chips are down and the bad guys have pretty much taken over. Hannibal and his team then lock themselves in a garage and quickly audit the available weaponry – usually just old bits of wood and metal and there is always a welder.

They then assemble the available resources into a mega weapon vehicle – It bursts through the splintering side of a barn wall and picks out the army of bad guys one by one to claim a victory against all the odds.

That is what SEO link building is now all about (if you are a small business).

Sorry – they disabled embedding on this one so you will need to head to YouTube to watch it, but this shows exactly what I mean:

http://youtu.be/H7zc1iySY1I

What does this have to do with SEO link building in 2013?

I think that the process for SEO in 2013 has to look something like this:

1. Analysis of business, it’s place in the market, strategic goals and KPI’s along with a clear understanding of budgets and CPA targets.
2. Technical site audit and changes
3. Content audit

• This is the A-team strategy. Websites can sometimes be a like a box full of lego, or indeed a warehouse full of corrugated iron and pieces of wood and a welder.
• SEO’s need to fully audit the linkable assets of a company; blog, industry reports and research papers, tools, whitepapers, infographics, images, well known staff, people they sponsor, corporate relationships/partnerships, charitable work, video content, buckets full of sharp tacks and sticky oil etc etc.

4. Identify target sites to get links from

• This can be done in many ways but I find that with new clients it helps us to understand the industry well if we look at the backlinks of a number of the key companies and also informational hubs in the space and map out commonalities as well as links that make sense which have been gained through unique and creative strategies.
• Identify the key influencers in the space – best tool I have used for this is Little Bird (still in beta and pretty pricey), Followerwonk is also good and not too pricey (especially if you are an SEOMoz Pro subscriber) and even Twitter can be pretty good when you run searches for specific keywords.
• Identify the sites the influencers are talking about and linking to.
• Find out where your customers hang out on the web – just ask them to list their top 5 websites within the industry.

5. Match the inventory of linkable assets to the target sites – i.e. What is the most appropriate asset you have which can be used to approach target site A to ask for a link? This needs to be done objectively as if you do not have anything that could benefit a target site then you are going to need to create something new.

6. When planning and creating new content it is good if you have a group of target websites in mind for it so that you get the most bang for your buck. Guest posting is often a good investment but it only typically gets you one link so you need to choose the site carefully so that you get a good level of traffic from your time investment.

So that’s it – The A-team approach to SEO link building.

Thinking about it – I could have used MacGyver as well:

This screenshot shows you where you can find the rules in the Google Adwords interface. The screenshot was taken on the Keywords tab but the rules are accessible from all tabs.

As you can see from the image there are lots of rules that can be implemented to automate the management of your PPC account. This post we will be specifically focusing on the management of keyword bidding and pausing rules.

Before you create automated rules I suggest that you are very clear on what your aims are and what rules will enable you to become more successful.

With automation there is a danger that you become reliant on it and become more lazy with the other aspects of your account maintenance so make sure that you keep in mind that these rules are designed to help you optimise bids and that is it; you are going to need to spend as much time as you always have on search query reports and ad optimisation.

Here is a post on creating a bidding strategy for Adwords and another one on running a search query report

For automated rules to work effectively you will need to have conversion tracking installed on your website and to be getting sufficient conversions to allow for the rules to work. If you example you are running a small account and only get about 1 conversion per day then it is probably not worth using automated rules – just do it yourself in Excel as you will then be in a better position to have a close understanding of your account data.

To summarise incredibly quickly; you need to have an idea of the rules that will allow your account to perform better consistently and that will not hobble you if left unchecked.

Here are a few examples of possible rules:

1. You may want to pause keywords that have had 100+ clicks and no conversions
2. You may want to bid up all keywords that have a cost per conversion/acquisition (CPA) below £20 by 10%
3. You can bid down all keywords that have a CPA above £40 and a position lower than 5 (i.e. between 1 and 5).
4. There may be keywords that are not getting a chance in positions lower than 7 or 8 so you could bid up anything that is in a position lower than 7 by 10% or 20%.

Here are some real examples of rules that i have set up on a clients account:

Let me explain the reasoning behind these rules one by one:

1. Stopping Keywords getting in too low positions:

• There are always keywords that fall off the radar – usually the long tail ones that do not get much traffic so therefor often are overlooked in Excel based analysis of Adwords accounts – It is important to give all keywords a fair chance – keep them running until they have had a good number of clicks before making a decision on what to do with them – kill them, bid them up etc.
• This rule says that any keywords that are in position 7 or lower should be bid up 10% to a max bid of £2.99. My thinking is that if position 7 is too low to get a fair chance (see my post on Google pushing advertisers to go for top positions).
• Of course this is not a good rule if it were alone, it needs a counter balancing rule such as one of the two bid down rules I have listed above – if the keyword hits a spend of £50 OR has 120 clicks and no sales then it gets bid down. I could have made the rule to pause the keyword but I am opting to do pauses manually as i want to check a number of factors and reasons for no conversions before I pause.

*BTW – yes I did catch that I was only bidding down 0.1% rather than 10% – lucky I wrote this post and took the screenshot, Even automated rules are not immune to human error!

2. Bid down 10% on poor CPA (cost per acquisition) keywords:

• If a keyword is converting but doing so at an unsustainable cost for the business then it needs to be bidded down so that clicks can be gained at a lower CPC and consequently conversions can be gained at a lower CPA – we assume that conversion rates stay the same regardless of position (they do in my experience).
• The requirements for this rule is that the keyword is in a position higher than 5.5 and has at least one conversion and that the average cost per conversion is greater than £50 (this is a figure based on my customers unique business).

3. Bid up 10% on good KWs:

• Pretty self explanatory – you do not want to miss opportunities – if it is doing well then bid up. The requirements are that the KW has converted, the CPA is less than £30 as otherwise we cannot afford to bid up and also that the keyword is in a position lower than 1.9 – if the keyword is already in position 1 then Google will let you bid up and they will even take more money per click but they will not put you in a higher position as it is not possible for them – of course you can go from 1.2 to 1.1 for example but it is really not worth bidding up for such small movements.

4. Bid down 10% on non converters

• Explained under number 1 above – if a keyword (however cheap CPC) reaches 120 clicks and has not had a sale then there is something up with it and needs to be paused or at least bid down. I have this set to bid down but I also run a monthly manual check over a longer date range to catch keywords that are consistently poor and gradually draining budget.

These rules are really helpful as my previous process was to run an analysis once per month and apply the same rules manually through using formulas in a spreadsheet and then uploading changes to Adwords through the Adwords editor – the process takes about 1 to 2 hours for each account. With the automation I can make the changes much more frequently – daily if I wanted to, so why not daily?

I had a think about frequency and you need to consider the data that is being used to make the analysis and the changes that will be caused. In order to make changes that you can rely on you need to use data from a significant time frame. Therefore if I made changes every day it would be OK but the data that the rules are judged upon would not change significantly enough each day to make it worth it.

There are four options on the frequency that the bidding changes will be made:

• One time
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly

I selected weekly as it means that changes can be made frequently enough so that new opportunities are not missed – i.e. if a keywords starts bringing in sales then I want to maximise the opportunity to get as many sales out of the keyword as possible within a defined cost per sale (will come to that in a little while).

To define the frequency accurately you need to consider the period of time over which the data being used is drawn from and how much traffic your keywords are getting over that period – recency is important but unless you are spending in excess of £10,000 per month then I think that you will need to use 90 days of data for it to be reliable on a keyword level.

The data options are shown below:

As I say; unless you have a large account you should go for 90 days or all time. The problem with this is that the elements of the rules are also being drawn from the same date range.

So for example based on a 90 day set of data:

You have keyword A that you want to bid down 10% as it has gone over a click threshold and is in too high a position. Imagine that you are changing bids on a daily basis. On day 1 your rule bids the keyword down 10% (assume that it moves from position 2 to 3.5) and then on day 2 Google will look at the past 3 months data going back from day 2; it is likely that the average position and the number of clicks have not varied at all so Google will again bid down 10% (pos 3.5 to position 4.5) and then again on day 3 (4.5 to 5.5) etc.

Because of this I decided that I would use only weekly changes so that there can only be a maximum of 4 changes per month allowing the data to build up recent relevancy for all of the requirements that I am using in the rule. For many of the smaller accounts we manage we need to have 3 months data. If you manage a large account then you may need to set up rules at a campaign or even an ad group level – especially if you are a retailer with a broad range of products.

This post is getting rather long so quickly and finally I want to show you the various requirements that you can set up the rules on. There are many options here which allow for a great deal of flexibility and creativity – just make sure that you do not try to be clever and make things too complex as you need to understand the interacting elements of each rule.

Word of warning: do not allow your use of rules to make you lazy – keep active on all accounts otherwise they will suffer and run manual analysis of your rules to ensure things are not unexpectedly backfiring.

We are told repeatedly that humans are visual creatures and that people are four times more likely to engage with an image on Facebook that a text based post. What does that say for video? Well, audiences are 12 times more likely to engage with a video than a text based post.

Video is a powerful tool. It can be used to tell stories, spread messages and encourage action.

The availability of high speed internet both on fixed and wireless networks has made the use of video more widespread for both bloggers and brands.

Bloggers who were not comfortable with their writing skills can now tap into the power of online video to communicate their knowledge and passion.

Brands such as Old Spice have realized that an online video that goes viral can be more powerful than a 30 second TV ad spot.

How to use video to damage a brand

It can create a brand, support/echo a brand and if used unwisely, it can seriously damage a brand (see Microsoft video below which certainly did not aid their brand development).

A video can be the creator or definer of your brand identity. It can become what you are remembered for. This is a huge opportunity and scary responsibility. Sometimes, it isn’t something we have much control over and can happen by accident. However, there are techniques and theories which can help maximise the potential of your videos being shared and even going viral.

Video to support brand identity

If you have an established brand identity, video can support or echo that identity. A recent example of this is the Bodyform viral video. This video is a great example of subtle branding. The blue beverage and the use of the Bodyform jingle for the ringtone are a genius use of recognisable elements of the Bodyform brand.

This video is also an example of best practice in terms of engaging with social media audiences. It was made in response to a comment on their Facebook page. The comment was made by a man who claimed that Bodyform had lied about a woman’s experience of ‘that time of the month’. They could have deleted the comment or been defensive but instead they chose to turn a potentially damaging comment (despite it being rather tongue in cheek) into an opportunity for them to consolidate their brand identity and show their personality to the public. The video went viral and has reached more than 3 million views (at time of writing).

Video is more art than science

Getting your video content right for your audience is more of an art than a science. The companies that get it right are the ones who have a good understanding of their company image and how they are perceived by their audiences.

The FemFresh saga is a perfect example of a company who not only lacked an understanding of social media, they also completely lacked understanding of their target audience – women. A thoughtful use of social media could have limited the damage caused by their original campaign which offended a lot of people. Instead they deleted their page. A video that a) demonstrated an understanding of their own mistake b) demonstrated an understanding of their audience, plus c) had a sense of humour could have turned this negative experience into a positive one. A wasted opportunity by any marketer’s standards.

Understanding your audience using the 7 fascination triggers

One way you can get your audience to connect with your video content is by thinking in terms of the seven fascination triggers. Sally Hogshead has carried out research, the results of which suggest seven triggers which are hardwired into the human brain. She states that once you understand these triggers, you can utilize them to elicit particular responses from an audience.

The seven triggers are:

1. Power
2. Passion
3. Mystique
4. Prestige
5. Alarm
6. Rebellion
7. Trust

We all have different primary triggers. Let’s take the example of alarm. To fascinate with alarm you might offer a discount to customers that has a deadline, or offer a free gift for the first X number of purchases. Groupon are the pros of fascinating with alarm. People with alarm as their primary trigger will feel the urgency in this type of marketing and are more likely to respond to it.

Keeping it simple

Whilst there are theories that draw on psychology and research, video marketing doesn’t need to be over-thought. The success of your video marketing will very much depend on the people creating the videos and their understanding of your target market. Employing the right people and nurturing their creativity should be a priority.

The Emma Blog published a post about a personal experience of a brand. A blogger (CC Chapman) posted a tweet asking for advice because he was considering starting to run. He got a lot of responses, but the most admirable (from a business branding perspective) was the video that can be seen on this link:

As you can see from the above screenshot, and on the page itself if you clicked through to watch the video (you should) it is a personalized video response to his question. It doesn’t have high production values but that doesn’t matter – it is personal, thoughtful and meaningful. Additionally there are commercial opportunities for the blogger to take the advice and go shopping or learn more through one of their seminars.

Video has infinite potential in terms of promoting your brand – everything from a high quality Hollywood style production to a something created with a mobile phone can have an impact. The skill is in the content and the timing. The Bodyform example and the Emma Blog example both demonstrate the power of using video to engage with your audience in the realm of social media; remember, you might be responding to one person but there is potential for millions of people to overhear.

What About You?

How are you using video? Are you using video at all?

Do you see it as too complicated? Is it something you would like to try?

Look forward to hearing your stories and feedback in the comments below.

One of the tools mentioned was Fliptop. This is a tool that can take your email data, or your social follower data and append it with much more information on the individuals – e.g. if you have an email address then Fliptop can find all of the social profiles associated with that email address and append them to the email address. It can also run the same process starting with a Twitter handle.

It seemed like a brilliant idea to me at the time as I was in a position where I had no email database but had over 1000 Twitter followers so was interested to see what the tool could do for me.

I uploaded my Twitter followers into Fliptop and for free the system took 100 of my followers and appended their email address along with Facebook, Linkedin and around 50 other social profiles (if they have them tied to the same email address). This data was then downloadable into a CSV.

I ran it as a test to check the data and it was solid but then did not use again until last week. One of our clients is an established company in their industry and has a database of email addresses that they have built up over the years but they have now decided that they want to start using social media.

I think that the key with social media is to build strong 1 to 1 relationships that then scale to more awareness through social sharing. Most of the relationships remain distant e.g. I have 1700 Twitter followers yet I have only probably conversed with 200 of them. If someone messages me or even mentions me then I respond directly as I believe this is an opportunity to strengthen the relationship – you never know where it may lead. The way I use Facebook is different – I rarely accept a friend request of someone I have not already met and most of my FB friends are good friends or old friends.

So, going back to our client; they have around 10,000 contacts via email but around 30 Twitter followers and a similar number on Facebook. Therefore to get started in social media they should ideally connect with these people and build up followers and friends amongst those who are warmest to them – their existing customers and contacts.

Fliptop has changed a little since I last used it – they are currently just advertising a subscription service for $99 per month OR if you are a Salesforce user then there is a free integration that will append all of the users data for free. Here is a screenshot of the site showing the People Graph service overview – I suggest that you check it out on their site though.

As our client does not have a database size that warrants a subscription service I contacted Fliptop to ask if they could be flexible and run a one off append to the email data. I received a response from a really helpful guy called Al Gerona within a few hours that told me that they would be happy to and that they were also launching a new web UI that allows you to run on pay as you go or subscribe via CSV in early 2013.

A few days later I had a CSV from my client with all of the email addresses. Al recommended that for the highest match rate that you include First Name, Last Name, Email Address and Location. However – our client pulled the data from their email marketing system and did not want to spend the time cross referencing data so we just went with email address only.

Getting social media profile data appended to email addresses:

I stuck the file into Dropbox, where Fliptop picked it up and got to work. 48 hours later I was emailed with 2 things:

1) An over view of the data append with percentages
2) All of the appended data in a CSV file including all social profiles that had matched each of the email addresses.

Here is a screenshot of the overview:

I cannot include a screenshot of the actual data for obvious reasons but you can see here that 23% of the 10,000 contacts have a Twitter account attached to their email address and 5% are on Facebook. I am guessing that Facebook is lower as many people use personal email addresses for Facebook and business email addresses for Twitter, and many of this clients customers perhaps used their business email address when purchasing.

An overall data match of around 40% is average according to Fliptop as of course not everyone has a social profile and also some people have multiple email addresses so the one you have in your database may not always match the one they use for one or more social media sites.

What can we do with this social data?

The first thing that is obvious is that the main opportunity for this client lies with Twitter. If we can get 10% of their current customers, who we know already use Twitter (2300 x 10%), to follow our client then we will have 230 new followers – roughly a 10 x improvement on the current situation. However – we are more ambitious than that and want to achieve around 50% follow back.

To succeed with this the first thing that we did was to create an auto-follow list on TweetAdder. We simply uploaded the CSV of Twitter profiles that came back from Fliptop into TweetAdder and created a follow list of the 2300 approx profiles and set it to follow 50 each day. It will take one month and perhaps 10% of them will follow back.

Yes, some people will frown on using a tool that Twitter do not publicly approve of. However, my argument on this is that we are using Twitter in line with how Twitter intend the tool to be used. We are connecting with people that are already familiar with our client so that we can strengthen the relationship with them. Tweet Adder is a tool that can enable spamming but it doesn’t have to be used as a spamming tool – it can be incredibly effective for building relationships ethically.

The thought of individually finding 2300 people on Twitter and individually following them is simply a waste of time when it can be automated.

There is one major flaw with this. When we have followed 2ooo of the contacts Twitter will stop us connecting with more unless we have a relatively even ratio of users following us.

Simply relying on the probability that a percentage of the people we follow will then follow us back is not enough; we need to ensure that we get as a high percentage as possible following us back so that future scaling is not restricted.

To do this we go back to the Fliptop appended data and pull out all of the email addresses that we have the Twitter accounts for. This allows us to email only the people that we know have a Twitter account associated with their email address.

This has not been actioned yet but we are going to email all of these people to let them know that the client is now on Twitter and that we will be following them at some point within the next few weeks. We will also place a follow us button in the email that we will ask them to hit.

People usually need an incentive to take action so we may need to sweeten things a little for them by offering a discount for them if they follow us back. But, wait a minute this is also the perfect opportunity to scale things.

Rather than offering a discount for simply following us back we could ask them to follow us back AND tweet a tweet that we place in the email that contains a certain hashtag.

This way we will pick up follows from our contacts as well as some of their contacts – anyone who tweets with the hashtag gets DM’d a unique discount code for the site.

I will update the post with the results on how many followers we get through this exercise. So far we are getting about 10% of the people we follow following us back but I am hoping that this will be eclipsed very soon.

He grew up in a small mining community in rural Yorkshire in England. He witnessed massive change in his life – when he was a kid there was no electricity, hardly any cars, no toilets in the house and by the end of his life there was Facebook and Skype. Incidentally he thought Skype was incredible.

He is not a historian but just a regular bloke telling the story of parts of his life and the observations he has made on how life has changed.

In the memoirs he told stories about how intertwined peoples lives were and how the society worked together and supported each other. In those days all selling was face to face and usually from people you knew well.

For the past 60 or 70 years we have become used to an ever-increasing barrage of communications through an expanding range of media.

At the same time we have seen transport and communication links improve immeasurably and these amongst other things have led to the break up of local communities. He revisited the village he grew up in recently and it is now a suburb of Sheffield and he found that he didn’t know anyone and no one seemed to notice him – he said the place was soulless.

This is not true of everywhere in the world but is a pretty common theme in much of the developed world.

This is not an argument that we should go back to living in small insular communities where everyone knows everyone else’s business; but I think that there are some interesting points to be made about how people (and marketers) communicate nowadays and what we can learn from the old days.

Spam is an obvious example of poor communication but the problem extends beyond spam. As we are developing new communication tools at lightening speed there is the problem that people take time to learn to use the tools effectively.

I am going to highlight some examples of communications I have received in the past few days to help make my point:

1. Request for a reciprocal link:

Dear Sir/Ma’am,

As, I have gone through your website and I would like to invite you for link exchange with my website. I am pretty much sure that this would really help us to improve the rankings in major search engines and traffic. As you know that back links help to achieve desired search engine results & generating more relevant traffic towards the websites, so it would be mutually benefit for us.in short we are loking for site who has at least google page rank…… Please let me know if you would be interested in pursuing this conversation further…

we have Quality websites related to seo services, web development, web designing………….etc.

Looking forward to your fast & positive reply…!!

With Regards
Vinit

2. Offer of a guest post – this was sent to a client of ours who is not in the SEO field:

Hello, I am a writer for Expert Market – http://www.expertmarket.co.uk. I am interested in contributing a guest post to your blog. Please let me know what you think of the following article topic – ‘How to Create Valuable Blog Posts’ – ‘Why SEO is Only Part of the Marketing Equation’ I would also be happy to create a custom post for you on a given topic. This would include one link back to my website. I look forward to hearing from you. Kind regards Amy

3. Article exchange request:

4. One of the least compelling and most lazy pieces of outreach I have ever received:

5. Blog comment

Now, all of these examples are perhaps the lower end of the scale – they are spam, sent by clueless opportunists why bank on a very small response rate that allows them to scrape a living. I didn’t include the letter from a Nigerian widow who has inherited $10 million and needs me to help her claim in order to not be robbed by the tax authorities as I am still considering whether I should take her up on the offer or not ;-)

But this article is not just about spamming and what a true waste of your life it really is, but it is about the rest of us; the so called marketers and intelligent communicators. Are we innocent of crap communication?

Confession time – I am not!

This has been by Twitter “Thank you for following me” message for the past few months:

What an arrogant pile of crap; why on earth would anyone respond to that? Most people do have problems with their business but they are not likely to admit them or be open to discussing them with someone they just met on Twitter and have no trust of, especially as he has just insulted them with the first communication.

I have now changed it to something more specific, that, although sales related does actually hold some value for the recipient.

I had a look at some others – apologies if you have been named and shamed here but at least it will hopefully be a wake up call for you:

If my grandad got a message like this he would be confused for a while and would then bin it – which is what 99% of us are doing with each others messages.

Looking at my email inbox and my Twitter feed there is a mountain of crap. Facebook is good as I have not made friends with anyone who I am not actually friends with and in some rare cases where I have accepted a friend request because “I ought to” for whatever reason – e.g. knowing that I went to school with them but cannot for the life of me remember them. I did once start to follow a few people that I respect in the business world on Facebook and my feed quickly filled up with stuff I have no interest in so I revoked that decision.

So, have we lost the ability to communicate?

No, I do not think so but we are struggling with the new tools of communication and how exactly to get the best results out of them.

I also think that for around 70 years our societies have become ever more private; we now have a lower tolerance for sharing the intimate details of our life with others. Going back to my grandad – here is an extract of one of the stories he told:

In some of the terraced houses, with yards rather than gardens, and often in rural areas where semi-detached cottages were the order of things, neighbours had to share a lavatory. In these circumstances, two-seaters were common. The buildings were twice as wide as ours and the seats had two holes. I have it on the most reliable authority that sitting beside your neighbour on the occasions of your visits at the same time led to the exchange of the most intimate information. It also gave unrivalled opportunity to observe all manner of detail from the state of your neighbour’s underwear to the dimensions of the gentleman’s genitals. And this information rapidly became common knowledge.

When people live in those circumstances they get to know each other very well indeed.

Social media has in many ways made the world less private, in a sense, taking us back a little bit:- people are sharing more of their lives, in some cases more than is palatable for others, with wider groups of contacts than they have for a very long time. When I post an update on Facebook I consider who the likely recipients are and tend to refrain from going all out but many friends do not; which has funny yet unanticipated consequences – many unspoken.

Therefore I think that as our societies have “virtually” moved back to the larger communities that existed when my Grandad was a kid there are certain lessons that can be taken from that generation.

What have I learned about marketing from my Grandad?

Marketing is about building relationships and making connections between people and companies. To really sell in the era of social media there does need to be a relationship based on trust and respect.

• If I would be embarrassed to send a communication of any type to my best friend then I should not be sending it at all.
• With social media I should imagine that I am selling in a local butchers shop or bakery in the 1920′s – here is another extract to help make this point:

“The one with the business head was Aunt Annie. Small, almost round, in immaculate dress and her starched pinafore she bounced around the shop like a sorbo ball – always with a smile on her face and a cheerful greeting for her customers. She knew them all and always enquired after members of their families and knew just how to draw attention to items she knew interested every one of them. ‘Now Mrs. Smith, she’ll be looking to see if I have any jars of boiled baby beetroot or my homemade chutney – ah here’s Mrs. Jones, Mamie have we any speckled oranges?’ She spent hours in the evenings making her jars of all manner of preserves from pears, raspberries, red and black currants, beetroot, carrots, beans – all from the orchards, as the smallholding was called.”

They incur the wrath of many marketers due to their constant innovations that tighten the noose a little at a time to just slowly squeeze the life out of us but not enough to kill us off completely.

They have held a monopoly on search for the past 5 years, pretty much worldwide and this grip shows no real signs of change as they continue to innovate and lead with the best and most accurate search engine in the world.

Today I am going to talk specifically about the changes that Google have made in the past few years that have had the effect of increasing the heat on paid search auctions in Google Adwords. These changes are not listed chronologically as my memory does not work in anywhere near a reliable fashion.

Showing top vs other & top of first page bids estimates to advertisers

In 2011 Google released the ability for advertisers to see the variance in the performance of their Adwords ads that showed on top of the organic search results (usually positions 1-3) vs in the right hand column (usually position 4 – 12)

It quickly became clear that the click through rate is so much higher when you run in the top positions: take a look at this screenshot of a single keyword take in the Adwords interface:

You can see when the keyword’s ad was shown at the top of the page (in an average position of 2.6) it received an average click through rate of 5.17% and when it was shown in other positions it received an average click through rate of 0.22% (average position of 7.2). So a difference by a factor of x 22.5.

And to just answer the point that a single keyword is not representative here is an aggregate across all traffic to the same account over a 10 day period.

So; what is an advertiser to do with this knowledge?

What they should do is to put aside the click through rate and look at the cost per conversion. In both ad positions this keyword received a conversion but the cost per conversion was 2.5 x as high when shown in the top positions as the cpc was twice as high.

However – in this particular case a cost per conversion of £7.98 is still below the target cost per conversion for this account therefore it is still worth bidding up to get more top position impressions, more clicks and therefore hopefully more conversions (assuming all other factors remaining equal).

I checked the variance in the cost per conversion across the account. This is slightly skewed as we are running own brand campaigns and bidding on our own brand in position 1 and getting a good conversion rate with a very low cost per conversion but even without that taken into consideration the cost per conversion is quite even between top and lower position ads:

Warning – do not take this as a hint to bid up – the reason for this is that we have been analysing for months and now have the better performing keywords in the higher positions.

So anyway – my point is that having this visibility is a strong persuader that the higher positions are worth bidding for as they can get you a lot more traffic.

Ad sitelinks extensions

It has been a good few years now since ad extensions were introduced and now there is a good range with a variety of uses – here is a summary of the Adwords ad extensions.

The ad sitelinks in particular can massively increase the click through rate of an ad – although it is difficult to get true visibility on by exactly how much as there is no clear data at a keyword level or even ad group level of how each particular sitelink performs.

We can compare the click through rate on sitelinks with the campaign as a whole and always the sitelinks click through rate is higher than the click through rate of the campaign as a whole but this is surely because sitelinks are only shown when an ad appears in the top 3 positions.

However; it is a safe assumption that if your ad is twice as big as any other ads then it will be twice as likely to be noticed.

With sitelinks the background is that unless you are running in a high ad position (between 1 and 3) then you have no chance of sitelinks showing alongside your ad and you also need to have a good quality score on the keyword in question. Here are Google’s guidelines around this:

Therefore the message is that if you want to inflate your click through rate then you can include ad sitelinks but to get them to work you need to bid up!

Competing with Product Listing Ads

Google are now in the process of transitioning Google shopping from a free service to a paid advertising service in the form of Product listing ads.

Now the paid product listing ads are grabbing some prime spots – usually positions 2 – 4 in my experience in the search ads. These are pretty prime spots and these ads grab a lot of attention as people are drawn to images.

This screenshot shows this pretty well:

Now, I have a theory on how Google earn more money out of these ads: I think that the chances of a research/re-click are greater when it comes to product listing ads.

You are presented with between 4 and 6 products and you click on one to find out more information on the product page; this can work very well for the user as they get to their end destination relatively quickly. However; there are many many reasons that a conversion may not take place – e.g. shipping costs, product cost, desire to shop around etc etc.

Therefore I think that product listing ads are likely to attract a much higher percentage of people going straight back to Google and clicking on another ad to check another retailer of the same product; thus achieving greater revenue for each user and each search.

Also; for normal search advertisers who are yet to add a feed into Adwords product listing ads they have to compete harder to grab the same attention and traffic that they previously did which will result in harder bidding.

Expanded Phrase and Exact Match

In spring 2012 Google introduced (by default I may add) a change to the phrase and exact match keywords which meant that they would also be entered into a larger number of auctions that include misspellings, synonyms and other slight variations on the keyword. I wrote a rant about this at the time.

Just by default of being entered into more auctions it makes the Adwords landscape more competitive and therefore to maintain positions and traffic advertisers are forced to bid up.

Not having a dig at Google here; I used to moan about the things that they do all the time but what would I do if I was in their position? I like to think that I would come up with as great ideas as these.

For the past 10 years you will have intermittently noticed specific products being returned for some of your searches on Google; previously this was pulled from Google Shopping into the natural search listings. The products that were shown in these listings were based more on relevance factors such as the data in the feed as well as number of reviews etc.

Now though the Google shopping results are being switched for paid listings that are driven more by bids and keywords/feed data. The listings are shown at the top of the page where the premium Adwords text ad spots usually are or sometimes mixed in with the organic search results somewhere in the top 6 listings.

Over the past few weeks I have been testing this with some clients data feeds and trying to get my head around it: it is not straight forward unfortunately, which is just how Google like it, making me a tad nervous but so far the results have been pretty good although to date I have kept things relatively low key.

First; a quick overview of the Google product listing ads set up process.

1. Firstly, you will need an XML feed of products submitted to Google Merchant Centre.

If you do not have a developer in your team then get an expert to help on this as it needs to be done properly and preferably by someone who has done the same thing a number of times before and is familiar with Google’s quirks.

Here is the Google Merchant Centre feed spec.

2. Link your Adwords account to your Google Merchant Centre account.

There are 2 steps to this as you have to link both ways for some reason.

First of all log into your Google Merchant Centre account

1. In your Merchant Center account, click Settings, then AdWords.
2. Enter your AdWords Customer ID (CID). You can find your CID at the top of your AdWords account when you’re signed in.
3. Click Add.

Once you have linked this up go into your Adwords account and set up a new campaign for your product listing ads – you need to ensure that in the campaign settings you put it on Google search rather than the display network as Google product listing ads only run under Google search.

Now when you create an ad group you will see an additional type of ad group appear called “product listing ad” – this is shown in the screenshot below. Tick off the “All products” option and then just enter a max CPC bid and save.

Once you have created an ad group you will probably be feeling a little lost on how exactly to match up the feed to your new ad group.

If you go into your ad group now then you will notice a tab called “Auto targets”

Under this tab you will see the green button “Add product target” – click on this.

Now this is where you need to link back to your merchant centre account – you should see the account listed on the page, just click the button to link it up. If you do not see the account listed then you may well not have linked up successfully in the Google Merchant Centre so go back and check that side once more.

Mapping your Google merchant Centre product feed to your Product Listing Ads

Once you are all good then you will see that you have a few options to set up which products in your feed are tied to this ad group. This is basically a process of mapping the products in your feed to an ad group so that you get the correct products matching to users searches; you need to be prepared for quite a bit of work to get this right.

Unless you are feeling suicidal with your marketing budget then do not just select “Add all products”. I suggest that you start by adding an ad group for each of your product categories/sub categories. In order to have good control over the product that Google chooses to show in the product listings you should try and limit the ad group to a potential of only about 5 or 6 products.

There are a number of ways to do this; as shown in the screenshot below:

So far I have only been experimenting with 2 of these options: product_type and brand.

First of all I created ad groups for each category of product in the clients product feed and then mapped them here by selecting product_type = xxxx product group from the feed – you need to get the naming convention exactly right so it is a good idea to ensure that your product category naming is consistent between your website, your product feed and your Adwords account.

You simply match the ad group to a product type and you are done – the ad will start running after a few hours.

However; you will need to be on your toes and ready for some swift optimisations after a few days. As Google are matching user searches to your products they can match them quite broadly. This means that if for example you have a product category called “ladies blue sweaters” and another one called “ladies blue woolen sweaters” and even if you create 2 separate ad groups and match each one to it’s respective grouping in the feed you could still get cross over.

i.e. a person searching for “ladies blue woolen sweaters” could still be shown a product from the feed that is tied to “ladies blue sweaters” even thought the product is less relevant. this is simply because Google look at them as separate instances and see that both are eligible and they in fact compete against each other to show.

But there is a fix!

Using negative keywords to control your product listing ads

Google have been kind enough to allow search query reports on product listing ads – this means that you can see the exact terms which are triggering your product ads to show for each ad group. Therefore in this example you may see a woolen sweater get shown for the non woolen ad group. You simply need to ad the word “woolen” as a negative phrase or broad match keyword to the non-woolen ad group.

As shown in the screenshot below you simply need to go to the “Keywords” tab in Adwords and then under keyword details select “All”. You can run this for all campaigns at once or just your product listing ad campaign.

If you are not familiar with search query reports then read this post on running a search query report.

This example may sound a little confusing but when you run a search query report for your product listing ads you will start to see the cross over and it will be apparent as to what negative keywords you need to add where.

Narrowing down the eligible products in your feed for each ad group

You really want to become a control freak around which products show for which searches as that is ultimately what will get you the sales – if Google keep fishing out slightly irrelevant products for the users intent then you will never get great results.

Therefore there are a few ways that you can create narrower ad groups that allow more control:

1) Use negative keywords as explained above

2) Add additional attributes in your targeting. When we talked about adding the product targets earlier I simply suggested using product_type initially but you can combine these attributes. for example you may want to set up additional ad groups that are brand + product type so that you are relevant on branded searches relating to your product types.

Additionally you can create Adwords labels and grouping on the products in your feed – perhaps splitting by high, medium and low cost for example so that you could match the right products to the user based on the intent in their search e.g. if they search terms like “luxury”, “designer” etc then you may want to show them the products that are of a higher cost whereas for searches containing “cheap” or “discount” you may want to show the lower cost products.

The problem is that I cannot design and although I had the simplicity of Piktochart to help me make it there were still plenty of basic design elements that are probably easy to sort out but that I struggled with – e.g. alignment and colour coordination.

I didn’t want to bother our designer with this so struggled through – hopefully there are some useful ideas here that outshine the design.

Marketing is a discipline where we can quickly go from being the champion of the office to the devil incarnate in a matter of hours. Even with all of the data we have at our finger tips today as digital marketers combined with all of our experience we all still often fail as much as we succeed, and personally I have had some pretty introspective days after big fails.

Both failure and wining have a major effect on my confidence levels but it’s got to the point where I try to play down the wins and roll over the losses in order to maintain a steadier course. I do not mean that I have trained myself to stubbornly ignore my mistakes; I spend a lot of time trying to understand why something did not work and what I can do to avoid making such a mistake again, I just mean that I try not to dwell on negative thoughts – take the learning and use it positively.

However – it has taken me many years and much stress to get to a more balanced emotional level and I am far from immune to increased heart rates when testing something new.

How I have failed in the past

I suppose the catalyst for this post was failing in a job a few years ago. I had been very successful in my previous few jobs, was very confident in my abilities, perhaps a bit cocky to boot so took a large step up in responsibility with the new role. As well as the step up in responsibility I was thrust into a very different business, both culturally and in it’s very nature. It was a very aggressive, fast paced small business that had an incredibly tight understanding of the trading figures and had very ambitious targets, which was at times very exciting and at other times a pure headache.

It was an environment where every week it would be claimed that a fundamental part of the business was broken and that we needed to find the offending issue and fix it; this had many positive outcomes as we all got to know the business and it’s levers inside out and all understood what each other was doing pretty well but it also led to a lot of time spent down rabbit holes looking for something that did not exist.

A few weeks into the job we had one of these crises and my response to it was not emotional; I just felt that we did not have as major an issue as the senior managers felt we did and my seemingly nonchalant attitude was not received well. I do care deeply about the work that i do and take it very personally but I felt that we were wasting time looking for a ghost.

This was the first of many disagreements, and I ended up staying in the job far too long and completely lost the confidence of my boss and the CEO. I argued with them and became increasingly defensive and alienated in the business – it was a horrible experience and I left with very little confidence in my own abilities as I was constantly questioning every decision I made and always felt that I needed to have an explanation ready.

The saving grace was that there were many of my strategies at the company that had worked so I could at least leave the company with an element of my former self in tact, but cockiness had fully departed – it was a very low period in my career.

After leaving the company I partly blamed myself but also blamed my boss and the CEO and I think that it is probably quite important for my confidence that I did not blame myself completely. Now when I look back I can see that I did fail in the job but where I failed was on my communication abilities and my battles were always fought on the detail of the job. If I had been less defensive and more confident in myself and my abilities then I could have made a success of the job.

Although I now realise that it was not a good cultural fit for me I am thankful for the learning experience as it taught me a lot about digital marketing and running a small business but also about relationships, expectations and choosing your battles (still struggle with that one).

Key learnings and what I do differently now

1. Marketing is not a discipline with clear and simple answers and the unexpected often happens. It is not like accountancy where there is a wrong and a right. There are ideas and there are human beings and as marketers we try to be creative in using the technology we have available to us to get a positive reaction from human beings. Human behaviour is largely predictable but there are lots and lots of surprises out there.

2. Spend time understanding why failures happen – if you can find out why something did not work then it gives you the confidence that you know where to go in the future.

3. It is important to approach marketing logically and systematically – have checks in place to mitigate against mistakes.

4. It important to approach marketing passionately but with realistic expectations – we need to be willing to pull the plug on a plan if the data proves it is not working. Everything that we do for a client I question whether I would do it if it was my personal money on the line.

5. Take time to think through important decisions/conversations beforehand. Be clear in your thoughts.

6. Be accepting of differing opinions and be strategic around how you approach them – choose your battles and also take your time to fight them well.

7. No good comes out of blame.

This can increase social sharing of your content, particularly if you have a loyal following of users.

Instead of relying on users finding your tweets within their busy Twitter feeds you can present your most important messages in the form of a tweet embedded in your blog posts on WordPress

By simply inserting the URL of a tweet e.g.

into the body of your blog post, the tweet will be magically transformed into a sharable tweet on publishing the post.

It will appear like this:

Do not make these common mistakes with your pay per click marketing:deepfootprints.co.uk/online-marketi…

— Joel Chudleigh (@deepfootprints) September 11, 2012

There used to be plug ins for this functionality but now it is native to WordPress to incredibly simple to use.

How do you find the URL of an individual tweet?

I knew you were going to ask that!

1. Go to Twitter and find the tweet that you want to embed.

2. Just below the tweet there will be a small piece of text that says “Expand” – just to the left of “reply”, “delete” etc -you need to click on this.

It is shown in the screenshot below:

3. You will then see a small link with the word “Details” next to the date and time stamp as shown below: click on “Details”

4. You will now be on a page just showing the individual tweet – copy this URL to your clipboard.

5. Paste the URL into your blog post in the relevant place.

All done!

As is well documented the Google search algorithm is incredibly complex with over 200 indicators which are constantly tweaked through around 500 algorithm updates per year to create ever more relevant results for searchers.

All SEO’s have an interest in the details of the algorithm and how it may be made up – we all want to know that we are focusing our efforts in the right places, however – I have always been conscious that it is important to keep this interest healthy and to have a general philosophy around how SEO link building should be done and to constantly be open and flexible to small adjustments in my philosophy but to have a general course and to stay true to that in the long run.

My SEO link building strategy is influenced by people like Eric Ward, Garrett French, Distilled‘s many experts, as well as fresher faces such as Gab Goldenberg and also of course by the official words of Google via Matt Cutts and the Google Inside Search blog.

I believe that link building should be about proactively making logical connections amongst sites on the web – a bit like match making. Link building is about getting relevant links from related sites – this brings referral traffic from people who visit your site because they are interested in finding out more about you because they heard about you on the site where you were mentioned.

If you build links in this way then you grow traffic to your site through these links and then guess what; you get more and more search traffic because you are doing exactly the things that search engines pick up as signals of relevance and quality. It is tough going and takes time to gain momentum but once you do start to have your name on many sites across your niche then you begin to become an authority which is when you really notice things starting to happen with your business.

This approach to link building is basically brand building without the TV ads and billboards. It is all about building awareness of and respect for your brand. The activity itself gets links but then the end result, a well known brand, then brings far more links as a consequence.

The importance of branding in SEO link building

In almost every industry the leading companies are highly trusted and because of this their brands are worth a lot. This does not happen overnight – it takes a lot of work but once you have a brand that is trusted then you will find that SEO becomes easier and through good SEO you will grow your brand. The two are intertwined – there is not one before the other, you should be constantly thinking of your brand and how to enhance it’s perception in every part of your SEO work.

Once you have a respected brand then you will pick up links 100x more easily then when you were starting out – bloggers will refer to you when giving examples, journalists will reference you and quote you in their articles and curators will include as a given in lists of potential suppliers.

Here is a great article on branding through SEO by Trond Lyngbø.

How to identify good link opportunities for brand building and SEO growth

This is more on the general approach to link building; I recently wrote a post on creating a CRM database for link building which will help you on the practical side of the process.

So, where do you start?

At Deep Footprints I like to think of a client’s website as a kid in a school. My aim and purpose is to help them become the coolest, most popular kid in the school. All of the other kids have a level of influence over how popular my kid can become and it is important therefore to become friendly with the most influential and popular kids.

Taking this analogy back to your industry – what are the 100 most popular blogs that cover your industry? Who are the 200 most influential people on Twitter within your industry? What are the top informational sites within your industry? What are the key industry bodies and regulators for your industry?

You need to build up lists of all of these sites in a database – I recommend Buzzstream as a great tool for managing this logically as I covered in the above mentioned post.

To determine which sites are worth getting links from I use the following indicators, in this order of importance:

1. Perceived similarity in users to our clients site – are the users on this site likely to buy something from our client?
2. Level of social sharing on blog posts
3. Number and quality of comments on blog posts
4. Traffic according to Compete.com/Alexa rank
5. Page Rank – this can be seen in most SEO browser plug ins – I use the one from SEObook for Firefox

To identify the sites to research you can use advanced operators for running searches on Google and Bing that will return good and relevant link opportunities.

Advanced operators allow you to run searches to find certain link opportunities such as:

“target keyword XXXX intitle:list of suppliers”

Also mentioned in the above post is the Link Prospector tool from Citation Labs. This tool allows you to run searches on a wide variety of link opportunity types such as blogs that you could contact to offer a guest contribution, sites that have lists of websites/resources relating to your industry, directories in your industry, professional organisaitons in your niche, sites that run interviews relating to your industry etc etc.

Create your lists of websites and then group them with similar sites – you can then scale your opportunities by using a single link building strategy for multiple sites.

Understand your link building resources and what you can offer

Let’s be realistic – Other websites will not link to you for no reason, you need to have something that will appeal to them. If you are in an industry awash with blogs then there is no point in just adding to the pile; you need to do something that will stand out and provide value to others in your industry. What is different about your company; what unique knowledge and skills do you have that you can promote and share?

A lot of link building does come down to content creation so you really need to match the needs of your industry to your skillset. For example if there is a dearth of stats for your industry and you have a data miner, researcher or a statistician on your team then it is an opportunity to create some content that will garner a large number of links.

If there are a lot of textual blogs but no video content, yet you have someone who studied media production on your team then you have the opportunity to create a series of videos that will help give guidance and knowledge to others in your industry.

Start by going through your team and understanding the skill-sets they have and who has a bit of spare time, or who could have a bit of time freed up to create content that will be attractive to other sites in your industry. Be clear on the amount of time that is available from your team members each week. Some SEO link building projects may be one off pieces e.g. a large scale research project or survey, but the majority of content that will gather links needs regular creation as you cannot expect to hit the jackpot every time so hedge your bets.

Tie your resources to the link building opportunities

Once you know the sites that you want links from, have identified the type of content that will appeal to them (you could just ask them what they think is missing from the industry) and you know what you are capable of producing then you can get to work on creating the content and selling it in to the target websites.

Guest posts are a great way to get started as all bloggers need help creating regular, high quality content but it is also important to grow the quality content on your own site and to raise awareness of this as eventually you want to get to the position that you have many regular visitors to your site who naturally share your content and link to it.

You will have heard the term “Content is King” and you will have also heard people talking about the necessity for good quality content. These pieces of advice are not to be ignored; when creating content for the web people sometimes disconnect themselves from the fact that they are in front of potential clients for some odd reason. When creating content you should imagine that it is for a face to face pitch with your dream customer as in reality it could be seen by many high value potential clients so make it special.

There is a lot of detail that I have not gone into here on the practical side of the task of link building but I hope that what i have done is shown you how to identify realistic link building opportunities and to be in a position to take advantage of them so that you too can become the cool kid in school!

The fact is that PPC can often be cheaper than SEO; to rank well for competitive keywords through SEO can take years of effort in terms of research, content production, outbound link prospecting etc etc whereas PPC can be researched and set up in a few hours (optimisation obviously longer). I am not saying that SEO is not worth doing; I am just saying that comparing these two seemingly similar (but very different) marketing channels is not a good thing to get into.

PPC is a great channel for all businesses to use; you can quickly tap into demand for the products and services that you are selling; small businesses can launch and grow significantly in a short space of time through leveraging PPC correctly.

However; there are common mistakes and misconceptions that we see time and again when picking up existing Adwords accounts from other agencies as well as business owners doing it themselves. This post will highlight the most common errors of PPC management that we see in the hope that you can avoid them.

1. Overuse of broad match keywords

The aim of keyword management for business growth is to constantly reduce irrelevant traffic over time and also to maintain a strategy of constantly uncovering new keywords that work for your business. We often see Google Adwords accounts which are made up of mainly broad match keywords, and usually without the +modifier. When we run a search query report on these accounts we often see that up to 50 or 60% of the traffic that the client has been buying is completely irrelevant to their business.

If you are going to use lots of broad match keywords then you need to be extremely tight with your negative keywords. It does take time to build negative keyword lists but it can be done quickly.

It is sometimes the case that Google “advise” advertisers on beginning their accounts with large numbers of broad match keywords (no longer in their documentation but nowadays from their telephone service) in order to help the business understand the keywords that are working for them and constantly optimise down. The problem is that a small business will be bankrupt by the time they have an efficient account – careful use of broad match is a good thing but I believe that it should always have the + modifier. Here is a post on setting up a Google Adwords account which will show you how to achieve both relevancy AND opportunism.

2. Not setting up proper conversion tracking

It is vital to understand how well your PPC advertising spend is being invested. Depending on the nature of your website and your business this can be very straightforward or a bit of a pain in the arse.

If you sell products on your website and have most of the sales occurring online then it is a simple case of installing Adwords conversion tracking – here are the instructions from Google.

If however you have most of your conversions occurring over the phone then it may be worth considering call tracking. There are a number of companies now offering this service and that integrate relatively easily with Adwords. These technologies allow you to see which keywords lead to telephone calls to your company through tieing the keywords to variations of your phone number. One such company is Adinsight.

If your business goal is to get leads then you can tie leads in your database to specific keywords; many cloud CRM solutions have the ability to do this with a little customisation. A couple of cost effective cloud CRM solutions that can do this are Zoho and SalesforceCRM.

If you can see how your keywords are performing then you will be able to make constant improvements in your return on investment. Here is a post on creating a PPC bid management strategy. Without reliable tracking this is not possible.

3. Not using reports

Google Adwords offer a fantastic range of reports for advertisers that help us to understand the performance of our campaigns, and to clearly identify opportunities and threats. Arguably the most important report is the search query report which allows you to see the actual search terms that users are entering into the search engine before they click on your adverts. In this report you can clearly see the search terms that are not relevant to your business which means you can add them as negative keywords. Also; in the same report you can see the search terms that users are searching for that are related to your business but that you did not previously think of. Here is a post on running search query reports.

As well as the search query reports you can run keyword reports which show you the impressions, clicks, average CPC’s, average position, conversions (if using conversion tracking). There are ad reports so that you can see which ads are performing best for each of your ad groups. This will help you to develop your ad writing skills and better understand what appeals to your potential customers.

Then there is the dimensions tab – there is a wealth of reports here on things like the location of your searchers, the types of conversions that are taking place, day parting reports (what time of day do most sales occur?), when did calls occur? (if you are using click to call functionality).

If you spend 3 or 4 hours going through all of the different types of reports and downloading them into Excel then you will start to get ideas on how you can better optimise your Adwords account.

4. Ignoring the importance of landing pages

This is a particularly worrying problem with companies that have just had new websites built that they are very proud of. The site gets designed and built and and it has been a large investment for the company so it is mentally ticked off as complete. However; a website is simply your shop window which needs constantly updating to better meet the needs of your customers. All businesses need to have the mindset that their website needs constant work in order to make it more effective.

Here is a post on PCC landing page optimisation.

Always take into consideration that a small increase in your website conversion rate will reflect on the performance of your marketing across all channels.

5. Not taking advantage of ad extensions

There are many ways to increase the relevance (and size) of your Adwords ads using ad extensions. Ad extensions are additional aspects to your ad that give more information about your business and/or products. In the screenshot below you can see 3 examples of ad extensions.

Here is a post on setting up and using Google Adwords ad extensions.

6. Not having clear aims

If you do not have a clear understanding of what your goal is from your advertising then you will not be able to set proper targets and will end up constantly nervous as to whether you are making any money or not from your advertising. This post was referred to earlier in the article; it will take you through working out your customer lifetime value and from that a target for your advertising and finally a bidding model that will allow you to constantly improve your performance.

I hope that this post has been helpful – if you are new to PPC don’t make these mistakes!

One of the Tribes that I have joined is called “Content Marketing, SEO, Social Media, & Web Design” – and as a group we have talked about how to keep the group fun, useful and engaging and most importantly not succumb to a slow decline of involvement. One idea that we had was to run a series of blog posts where the tribe members all contribute their expertise to a different question each week.

The process is as follows:

1) Each week, one tribe member poses a question to the rest of the tribe
2) The other members then give their answers to the question
3) The member who asked the original question writes the answers up into a blog post.

I have been delegated with the first weeks question which was:

“If I gave you $5000 to promote your business/blog online or offline – how would you spend the money in order to get the best long term business benefit?”

I wanted to find out what others would do in this situation as it is one I have found myself in a few times and still do not know if I got the answer right or not, and probably never will.

The group has some incredibly seasoned marketing experts so the answers were very interesting – these are the guys who kindly took the time to help me out on this question and give the visitors at Deep Footprints the benefit of their knowledge:

• Pam Aungst, owner and head consultant of Pam Ann Marketing, has an M.B.A. in Marketing, a B.S. in Business Administration, and is a Google AdWords Qualified Individual. She has been creating websites since 1997 and working in the field of internet marketing and e-commerce since 2005.
• Matt Southern is someone who describes himself as “just a guy who has managed to turn a hobby into a job. I help people use the full potential of social media to build connections that enhance their business.” His fantastic blog can be read at Mattsouthern.com
• Hilton Hamman has always been involved in some or other form of writing, either as a journalist, corporate writer or writer of books. He is quoted as saying “I knew the Internet offered great opportunities but I had little idea of how to tap into them. But, as they say, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and I had no option but to quickly learn how to make best use of social media platforms to promote and market my business ventures.”
• Caimin Jones is the Founder of Genius Startup – here is a quick background on the site from Caimin “My aim with Genius Startup is to provide you with a single place to find clear, concise and up to date information on the most important aspects of setting up and running a web business, without assuming any technical knowledge.”
• Jay Baron is Co-Founder of Mad Town Designs who are a conversion-focused web agency employing an established team of passionate, creative, and entrepreneurial professionals. He is also the Chief of the Tribe.
• Paul Barstow is the owner of advertisinginconstruction.com and introduces himself as “a sales rep who has 15 years B2B product advertising experience behind me. So I am not a marketing guru I come at things from a different angle, I have shown companies how they can get a good ROI from their media spend with me so that’s what I am trying to do for you.”

So, with the formalities over; on with the proceedings – here is what they each had to say on the question at hand:

“If I gave you $5000 to promote your business/blog online or offline – how would you spend the money in order to get the best long term business benefit?”

Pam Aungst

“I would put the money into content creation. I would put some towards freelance writers to help make all the blog post ideas in my head finally come to life, and I would also put some into creating quality share-worthy video content. Perhaps some e-books, too. My thinking behind this is that a large amount of quality content will serve me better in the long term than anything else I can think of. Although, I would of course budget some of the money for more Triberr bones to help me expand the reach of said great content. :) ”

Matt Southern

“I would put most of the money into attending a couple of prominent blogging and social media conferences in USA and my home country of Canada (BlogWordExpo in Las Vegas, for example, is one that I would love to attend). I believe that getting the opportunity to meet and network with other thought leaders face to face would be more powerful in expanding my reach than any strictly online strategy I could come up with.

If I had any money left after that I would put it into getting come professionally produced video content for my blog. I’ve been hesitant to put any up because I don’t want it to look cheap. Got to maintain that professional look and feel at all times!”

Hilton Hamann

“If I had $5000 dollars I think I would spend it on video production, although that is not a major component of my business model. I still believe content achieves more than any fancy SEO trickery and, in my case, producing quality content is more a factor of time, than money. I am already involved in producing ebooks and again, that is more about time than it is about money.”

Caimin Jones (Genius Startup)

“With $5000 I’d develop an insanely useful web app for my target audience. Something they absolutely cannot live without.

If you can solve a common problem for your audience, or make a mind-numbing chore fun, you’ll quickly develop a core of #1 fans. And those fans will till others.

A good example of this in action is Triberr.

What’s the one of the most important things people need to do to promote a website? Get links & social shares.

How much fun is that? Usually, not much. But Triberr makes doing that effective and fun. Which is why it’s a winner.

Your idea doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact it’s usually better if it’s not.

Another example is Yousendit – the only problem they solve is sharing large files with other people. It’s not glamorous and they don’t do anything else.

But their app makes life easier for developers, designers, project managers, photographers, or anyone needing to shunt large files around. Bonus: because this audience needs to do this chore often they become frequent users of the service.

But isn’t developing a web app expensive? Walk into an agency and tell them you want to develop a web app and they’ll have your $5000 eaten in no time.

But base your app on WordPress and use a clever combination of plugins and themes, mix in a little custom development (depending on the idea you may need that) and there are few web apps you couldn’t create for less than $5000.

That may seem like a bold claim but after a number of years as a web developer for smaller business and startups, I’m used to looking under the hood and finding the least expensive ways of doing things.

The most important part of this plan – and the one most people skip over – is generating and refining ideas. Get the right idea for your audience and you’re halfway there.”

Jay Baron

“If I had $5,000 to invest I would focus on developing a meaningful brand. Anything else I invest in can generally be copied by others and does not give me any sort of advantage over the competition.

Putting the investment towards content creation, SEO, or any other marketing is not a long term investment that will last, but a brand lasts.

A great brand does all of that, but better. Having an amazing brand will inherently generate more links improving rankings. Receive greater attention and buzz across social media and press. And content created will receive more recognition because of the name recognition.

A brand leaves a long lasting impression on your audience.”

Paul Barstow

“As it happens I am in the process of launching a new site and I would use the $5000 to drive traffic to the site via a number of methods.

1. Content creation to appear as guest blogs on relevant niche sites and blogs.
2. Ad words on Google to drive some initial relevant users who will hopefully spread the word
3. A strategic online marketing campaign that is well branded and only on relevant niche sites, this will be a brand building campaign so banners, mpu’s etc

The site will launch into a fairly crowded niche market however it has strong usp’s and the only effective way to communicate this is via a clever and effective joint brand building and content campaign.”

So there you have it. I hope that you found these opinions useful? I know that I certainly found the differing points of view of great interest so want to thank all involved for contributing their expertise to this blog post. I think that I speak for all involved when I say that we would all love to hear the opinions of others in the comments section below – what would you do with $5000 to market your business?

http://www.sitepoint.com/seo-is-dead/

http://learntoduck.com/search-marketing/seo-is-dead/

Although I agree with the authors that SEO is indeed changing; stating that it is dead is just naive – and no, I cannot claim to hold an objective opinion here ;-)

This counter opinion is also nothing unique to me; @bill_slawski gave his thoughts here.

The thing is that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have never really changed their tune; for a search engine to be successful it needs to return the most relevant and useful results to users when they key in a search. They have always been actively fighting webspam; you can read this post from Matt Cutts from 2006 that explains what they were doing about webspam back then and why they removed BMW from their search listings. The only difference today is that they are getting better at achieving what they have always been striving to achieve. It is getting to the point now where it is difficult for spammers as well as small scale SEO practitioners to earn a living through short term SEO tactics. When this point is reached, and I do not think that it will be long then we will see a fundamental improvement in the quality of content on the web as well as a reduction in the type of spam that has been prevalent over the past 10 years.

What I think that everyone would agree on is that things have changed a bit and that techniques and practices consequently have to change.

How can I get success from SEO nowadays?

There are 4 main things that you need to do; none of them are difficult, but I do think that SEO is now, more than ever about a long term commitment to building a reputable brand (an individual or an organisation).

1. Onsite SEO

This has never been easier; most web platforms such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal all come with basic SEO built into the platform and supplemented by theme creators and plug in creators who understand SEO and who take care of it for you.

All the end user really has to do is to understand their business niche and to research properly the keywords using tools such as the Google Keyword Tool that users are searching on to look for the right keywords to use within their content and core HTML tags such as the title, H1 and H2 tags, image alt tags as well as the meta description.

For ecommerce sites and also those in the food industry there is also the benefit of using structured markup for seo. I think that the support for structured markup will grow significantly over the coming years as all search engines have collaborated on schema.org. I am not sure if this is the first example of all major search engines collaborating but it is the only case I am aware of.

I think that the focus of onsite SEO will move towards content layout that encourages interaction and sharing. I saw a great blog post by Derek Halpern on the perfect layout for a blog post and there is also the KISSMetrics info-graphic on the anatomy of the perfect landing page.

What is written in the content of the page will remain very important and the use of both internal linking structures as well as external linking structures will also remain very important. Of growing importance will be the authority of the author of the content; this will be the brand domain and/or the individual author of a piece of content (e.g. a blog post).

2. Being Creative in content production

Creating content for SEO used to be about ensuring that target keywords are included a certain number of times at a certain density along with synonyms and variations. There was less focus on the quality of the actual writing. Content for SEO has now gone far beyond simple textual content.

I feel like content marketing is probably much like the wild west days of onsite SEO was 10 years ago (I wasn’t there to verify this). Content for the web is going through a very experimental period as companies try blogging, making infographics, running research projects, video production, interviews, podcasts, content curation, app development, review content, product guides, e-books, white papers and the list goes on and on and on.

This is exciting as companies are being forced to understand what their customers require in terms of information, then think about the best way to communicate this information to them and to then disseminate the information in an effective way so that it reaches the right people.

The key over the coming months and years will be:

• Using data such as web analytics to understand how users are consuming the content on your website – what is popular and what is not and where can improvements be made.
• Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods to better understand your customers needs.
• Using conversion rate optimisation and constant testing to improve the experience on your web properties
• Using social sharing data from your own site as well as competitors to understand what pieces of content garner the most interest and are shared the most.

Once you have a solid understanding of the content that you need then you can put together a content plan that delivers this. But as well as looking back in order to make safe bets going forward it will also become important to budget for some high risk marketing efforts that test new waters and try new things.

Clever use of new tools and apps is growing in importance so staying ahead of the curve on technological developments is also important to do. This may mean having an element of link building/blogger outreach automated at an early stage in the process so that it can be scaled efficiently and then all follow ups handled manually as they will need a personal touch. Or it may mean simply putting tools such as Rapportive and Boomerang to use in Gmail to make your link outreach more efficient.

3. Becoming an authority in your field

This is another long term effort that will not be achievable by all of us as it requires true expertise as well as the ability to communicate that expertise and knowledge so that others enjoy listening to what you have to say.

I think that everyone in the SEO world now understands the ability of social media to aid SEO efforts. There is still discussion as to whether or not social sharing actually impacts search engine rankings; although research pieces such as the Branded3 Twitter research claim that they have objectively proved that it does.

What is for sure is that social media can get your content in front of the right people. If you are in the SEO field and write a blog post that @randfish, @ericward, @seobook and @dannysullivan choose to share then you know that your content is going to receive thousands of views and probably thousands of shares as these four people all have authority and influence in the field of SEO.

If people with authority recommend your content then not only will others view your content and share it but some will also undoubtedly reference it in the content that they are writing (link to it) – in the same way that I have referenced content in this post. As well as that you will pick up a lot of followers on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc that you can then leverage for greater sharing in the future.

Through this kind of experience you will also gain kudos and awareness of your brand (either personal or company depending on how you brand your site and social profiles). This takes you a rung up the ladder towards becoming an authority.

There are many ways to go about gaining authority in your field but all of them involve sticking your neck out and being honest about what you stand for and communicating it well and convincingly. Once you have some awareness through blogging then you can perhaps try to start speaking at events, running webinars, contributing to books as well as conducting interviews; basically anything that gets you a platform where you can have your message heard. Once you have a stage it is then dependent on how strong your message is as to whether you continue to climb the ladder.

4. Blurring the boundaries of your marketing channels to formulate an integrated approach to linkbuilding.

This is perhaps where my opinion aligns most closely with those that are commenting that SEO is dead.

Search results are now heavily personalised for each user; this is based on location, content preferences, past search history, social sharing history and perhaps other things too that I am not aware of yet.

Because of personalisation a ranking in position 1 does not necessarily mean a ranking in position 1 for everyone which unfortunately means that your traffic may not grow in spite of SEO success (by traditional measurement).

Additionally; even if you do the first 2 things stated above – build a great website and optimise it well for SEO and then create fantastic content without number 3 to add into the mix you are not going anywhere fast; as you can see I am not a great believer in the build it and they will come philosophy.

Getting users to view your content is vital to SEO success. How you do this requires creativity and hustle. This is basically how I see linkbuilding over the next few years:

• Building social relationships with influential bloggers, industry experts and press
• Guest blogging on high traffic sites in your niche and promoting your content in your bio.
• Using PPC to target low cost informational keywords that are in the very early stages of the search funnel or even targeting your peers rather than your prospects. The idea is to get people to your content and for them to then share it socially and to link to it so that the SEO ball gets rolling; once you have momentum then PPC is turned off.
• Contacting and interviewing experts in your niche – preferably who are also active social media users and keen to promote the interview along with you.
• Researching content resources and curated resources for your niche that have not included you and then running outreach exercises to get your content added to the resources.
• Submitting to niche directories – yes, I still think that it is worth submitting to high quality niche directories as well as high quality general directories e.g. Yell, Yahoo, DMOZ and best of the web etc.
• Speaking at industry events.
• Leveraging email marketing to drive traffic to your content – on a similar approach to the PPC – you are helping users solve problems; not selling them something. Although outbound email is perhaps a declining industry, and one with a poor reputation it still can be done effectively and ethically through buying your list carefully.
• Running occasional press releases when you have something interesting to announce, not just a new recruit that no-one cares about.

I am going to stop there as this has grown in to a much longer post than I initially intended. There is probably a lot that I have missed so please add to it in the comments.

However, I didn’t just make it up for fun; here is my thinking behind this: One of my first marketing roles back in 2005 was within the retention marketing team of an organisation. It was a membership organisation and I was responsible for selling training courses to the existing members – hence it was a retention activity. I used mainly direct mail, email marketing as well as some very basic search engine marketing in order to sell the courses.

Other members of the marketing team were concentrating on recruitment marketing where they were trying to get new members for the organisation; they used similar marketing channels but perhaps also did a greater amount of face to face event marketing at graduation career fairs etc.

The job of the recruitment team was to fill the bucket and the job of the retention team was to plug the holes in the bucket so that as little leakage as possible occurred. It was always considered in this organisation that recruitment marketing was the more expensive and the trickier of the 2 activities as you are trying to convert a relatively cold prospect whereas with retention marketing you were working with individuals already warm to the organisation. This made sense and the marketing budget was split accordingly with a heavy weighting towards recruitment marketing activities.

In principal this is a logical split of marketing focus and I do think that prior to the internet this definitely made a lot of sense.

With most businesses one of the most expensive activities is recruiting new customers; it is still not easy, however; due to the emergence of social media in particular there is a much greater blurring of the two disciplines and I would say a need to reassess the marketing activities and budget to reflect these changes. I believe that these changes are consistent across all business types and sizes.

I do not have to add any statistics here regarding the growth of social media as a communication medium for both individuals and businesses – we all know that it has been massive and that it has fundamentally changed the way in which many people communicate.

With this in mind here are some ideas around how you should be altering your activities and budgets to grow your business as quickly as possible in 2012 and beyond.

Inspiring your existing customers to help you market your business

Here is a screenshot taken from Google Trends showing the growth of news and search volume for the term “inbound marketing” which is one of the buzzwords of the past few years. If you are not familiar with this term then it is one that has been attributed to the inbound marketing company Hubspot who define it as:

“inbound marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and its products.”

Why is there such a growth in interest in inbound marketing? Because it has been found that it is a much more effective and cheap way to recruit new customers. Hubspot stated in their 2012 “State of Inbound Marketing” research document that companies with a heavy focus on inbound marketing are recruiting new customers for 61% less than it costs companies who concentrate on more traditional outbound marketing techniques.

Inbound marketing really revolves around forming relationships with your customers and potential customers that are strong enough that they come to you without too much of a push; rather they are drawn to you. This is key to my argument about the changing role of retention and recruitment marketing. In many ways retention marketing has become one of the most effective recruitment methods.

The concept of inbound marketing really refers to the process of attracting a customer to you (a recruitment strategy) but due to the nature of the marketing channels used for inbound marketing such as social media, blogging and search marketing it is now possible to build close, often 1 to 1 relationships with large numbers of your customers and potential customers and to then have these individuals then market your business to their social and business contacts.

People do love to share content and experiences. Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman of the Wharton Business School carried out a study called “Social Transmission, Emotion, and the Virality of Online Content” in 2010. If you want to learn about the psychology and social pressures that lead to the behaviour of sharing then this is a useful study to read.

Sharing information is nothing new; people have always trusted personal recommendations more than advertising and this hasn’t changed. All that has changed is that it is now scalable to manage lots and lots of close relationships using tools such as Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook rather than telephone calls, written letters and face to face meetings.

Human nature has not changed at all – we like to physically meet and converse with others so face to face meetings will always possibly be the best way to develop a relationship of any kind; a video call (e.g. on Skype) is now I would say secondary to this followed by a voice call.

But Social media has a roll to play in sorting the wheat from the chaff. It is costly to start a potential business relationship with a 30 minute phone call or a 20 minute conversation at a networking event where it could be a quick conversation via a blog or social media site. Once initial interest has been determined through a short conversation on a social site then the relationship can be taken to the next level if the opportunity and potential value for both parties is there.

Because of the emergence of these new communication channels it is now possible to scale the investment you make in your communications on an individual basis. There is a lot of hot air going on in social media and a lot of time being wasted but if you can over time quickly get a sense for who is serious and who is a time waster then you can develop your marketing strategy accordingly investing your time more and more efficiently.

Now, going back to the whole retention being the new recruitment idea; Once you know who your best customers are and you know who they have the potential to connect you to – through looking at their social profiles on the social networks that they use then you can determine not only their value as an existing customer but also their potential value as an advocate for your business.

Good customers who are also well connected should therefore receive a large amount of your attention as they have the best potential to help your business grow and at the same time you will be strengthening your existing relationship.

This idea is fundamentally at odds with the frustrating marketing techniques of the mobile phone companies who reward new customers far more than they do existing customers. I can see why this has worked in the past but I cannot see this technique having a big future; they should be focusing more and more on rewarding loyalty.

The results – We managed to increase the conversion rate of the site by 11% over a 6 week period of testing and tweaking – this equated to £1 million on the bottom line annually.

After seeing those results it is fair to say that I have been interested to the point of obsession on how much difference the right layout, the right copy and the right design can make to a website’s performance.

This post is going to take you through the things that I consider key to successful landing page optimisation – most of the work I have done with landing pages has been for PPC campaigns but the principles remain the same regardless of the source of traffic, unless you are building a page solely for SEO traffic generating ability.

This post will be focusing on improving your conversion rate.

Here are my 4 tips on creating the perfect landing page.

1. Understanding your target audience’s needs

The way that landing pages need to be optimised varies greatly from site to site. The best place to start is with some pretty basic thinking around who your customers are and what they need. You need to distil this down to one thing. It can be tempting to try and create a page that has something for everyone and that has a number of calls to action each that appeal to one segment of your customers, however, what we have found is that you must resist this temptation and stick your neck on the line by staking it all on one core benefit.

So what do your customers want? They want simple clear solutions to their problem/s.

You have to make things easy for people.

Look at the difference between the following two landing pages. I searched the keyword “PPC Consultant” in Adwords and clicked on (apologies guys) 2 sites to see their landing pages. I clicked on the first and third results.

Firstly, the landing page used by Push was their homepage and there was no continuation between the keyword and the ad with the landing page. The keyword searched was “PPC Consultant” so the user (me) was definitely looking for a PPC Consultant, the ad said “PPC Consultant” and appealed to me because of the mention of the Adwords certification. But the landing page did not mention PPC or the Adwords certification – the landing page was mainly asking me questions (really dumb questions), but as a user I do not want questions I want to be given answers and solutions.

The Periscopix page was a lot better – they are straight in with a solution and a starting point – a free review of my PPC account. They then go on to explain this and also introduce the staff on their team that will do the review (cannot be seen below). The page has one clear aim and it is appropriate for the audience.

2. Give the visitors a credible reason to work with you/buy from you

There are many ways to write a landing page but a well known technique created by the direct marketer Dan Kennedy is the PAS technique. Problem-Agitate-Solve

The idea is that you split your landing page (or sales email) into 3 distinct sections:

1. Problem – you identify the problem and bring it out into the open and explain it so that the user is now thinking clearly about it.

2. Agitate – You masochistically rub salt in the wound through elaborating on the subject.

3. Solve – You introduce your product/service as the solution.

But why should they use your solution rather than anyone else’s solution?

It is a good idea to use social proof:

• Customer testimonials – these can be written or even better; use videos.
• If your product/service is of high value and a considered purchase then use case studies of how others have used your product/service to solve their problems.
• If you have some impressive past customers (e.g. brand names) then show off this fact.

Look how the Conversion Rate Experts do this (they are one of the world’s leading specialists in improving website conversion rates). Basically the whole of their homepage is given over to social proof; they have impressive customers’ names and logos plastered all over the place as well as case studies and testimonials; they try not to do the speaking but let others do it for them as hearing a message from a peer who was in the same situation you are in now is both reassuring and persuasive.

3. Good landing page optimisation is about being specific

When a user arrives on a new site you have less than 5 seconds to convince them to stick around, people are not willing to spend ages searching around your site for answers, unless they have a strong reason to do so. Ideally you need to give specific details on exactly what you are offering and the benefits. For example; if you are selling some software that saves people time and money then give specific examples from your existing customer base (or even your own experience of using your product) on how much time you can save them e.g.

Save 2 hours per week and £500 per month for your business.

rather than

Save time and money for your business.

When planning your landing page you should make 4 lists:

1. What problems can your product solve?
2. What are the specific benefits of using your product?
3. What is unique about your product – how can it be differentiated from the competitors?
4. What do the customers need to know – what are their concerns/anxieties?

Then on your landing page you need to clearly spell out the benefits and how they solve the problems of the customer and then follow this with specific detail on why your product/service is the best solution to the problems – do not hold back; this is your one and only shot at each customer so make the most of it. The over-riding tone should distil trust that you understand the customer and have the right solution for them.

Most important is the headline as this will be just about the only thing that everyone reads; ensure that this is clear and as specific as possible in spelling out the main benefit to the customer.

4. Ensure that your design is consistent with your copy

To achieve all of the above your layout and design is just as important as the copy. People read a lot into the design of everything that they come across. We make snap judgements based on the way things look.

We do this with people, places, books (remember the old saying) as well as websites and pretty much everything that crosses our path.

As an example; I have walked out of plenty of restaurants after taking a look around and just getting a bad vibe about the place before I am actually presented with any food. The decision is made on things like the decor of the place, the attitude of the staff, the menu (how big is it?), the music, the lighting, how busy it is and what it smells like – all of these indicators are relatively subjective (except smell) and could easily be proven wrong by some incredible food but as humans we constantly learn to be selective and to trust our past experiences and instincts.

All of these elements (except smell) will be judged by your visitors through your landing page design. Your design has to work in partnership with your copy to convey your message well. As you will see in the infographic below – colour carries meanings so you need to ensure that you are using the right colours to achieve your goals. Very important is the layout of the page.

The main thing is that you have a call to action above the fold on a landing page – this is the buy now button on an e-commerce site or the contact us form, free download or free trial if you are after leads. Getting the hierarchy right from the headline to the call to action is vital – you want to take users on a clear path from using the headline to make it clear that you have the right solution for them, to then giving some more information in the way of social proof (testimonials, customer logos, case studies) to the call to action.

If your product or service needs a fair bit of explaining then it is no problem to have a lengthy explanation of the benefits following the main call to action button – if you can grab the users attention with the headline and social proof content, follow this with the call to action to make it clear to them what the next steps are then they will know what to do when they are ready so you then have the freedom to go into more detail and then repeat the call to action. But do not omit the early call to action as it carries a risk of you giving additional and unnecessary information to those who are sold in the first few seconds on the site.

For more detail on the design of landing pages take a look at this great post.

This fantastic infographic by KISSMetrics gives some solid ideas for a base to start your landing page design with.

One thing that I have never blogged about here is the bid management part of pay per click marketing. I just did a search in Google to see what others have written about PPC bid management and the SERPs are dominated with details and reviews of PPC bid management tools.

I found this surprising as I believe that for the vast majority of companies there is absolutely no point investing in a PPC bid management tool. Why? Because there will be so few keywords in their account that have high enough search volume and conversion data to allow a bid management tool to run with any degree of accuracy.

This post will be taking you through manual PPC bid management. Why should you read this? Because if you are clear on how to manage your bids manually then you will be able to get 90% as far as a bid management tool will and perhaps just as far in the case of most small businesses but without the costs to your business. Understanding PPC bid management will also put you in a stronger position for speaking to any PPC agencies that are touting bid management tools as one of their selling points.

Understanding your business goals through PPC

The first thing that you need to get clear is what constitutes success for your PPC account – this is a line in the sand that is your break even point; go over and you are losing money.

The best way to define this line is to understand the lifetime value of each of your customers/members/supporters. This is the profit that you will realise from each customer on average over their lifetime as one of your customers.

Here is a formula to use that will help you calculate the customer lifetime value of your business.

The cost of sales relates to your margin – here we have put in a 70% cost of sales for the first year and then assumed some economies of scale have been achieved down the line so profit margins increase to 35%.

Marketing costs decline over time for the same customer, as they become more loyal it gets easier to keep them.

The discount rate relates to interest rates as the value of future profits will not be as much in terms of today’s values. We have set interest rates incredibly high here so that we have an absolute worst case scenario, at least if you are living in the developed world (not that anyone is safe anymore from macroeconomic forces).

This figure will keep rising as the years go by but if we assume that the lifetime of a customer ends after 3 years then we know that any additional marketing we do that brings in a new customer for less than £51.94 is profitable in the long run.

Once you have this figure clear then you are pretty much set up for all of your marketing decision making. The difficulty with applying this figure to Google Adwords is that Google Adwords conversion tracking does not have the ability to split out new and existing customers. With Adwords you will often find repeat customers coming through your branded keywords and also a range of generic keywords too. Therefore there is an additional exercise for you to do and that is to ensure that you are tracking the source of all of your orders in your database.

This could be achieved through using custom variables in Google Analytics. This allows you to track customer specific information e.g. whether they are a new or returning customer and also if you have customer groups then you could split the data based on these too.

Alternatively you could put tracking tags on all your PPC destination URL’s that tie the traffic back to the ppc channel e.g. www.mywebsite.com?aff=adwords tagged onto the end of all of the destination URL’s in your PPC account will mean that the users all arrive with that tag so you know that they came from Google Adwords. If you can set up your database to capture this tag on all sales then you will be able to count the number of sales that relate to new and existing customers in your database. But to tie them all back to the individual keywords you will need to tag all KEYWORDS (not ads) destination URL’s with a unique ID e.g. www.mywebsite.com?aff-adwords123456 or www.mywebsite.com?aff-adwords123457 etc.

Then you will be able to run a keyword report in Adwords to get your costs and then match this to your sales data from your database to see which keywords are bringing you your new business customers and which are bringing returning customers and which are doing diddly squat. Matching this data up in Excel is pretty easy as you can match on the individual tags using a vlook up function.

Now I am going to take you though how to create a PPC bidding model based on your customer lifetime value that will help you achieve constant growth in new customer sales for your business.

1) Set a target cost per new business customer

Your customer lifetime value is what you can afford to spend up to, assuming you have the short term cash flow , to bring in each new business customer. Therefore at an aggregate level if you are pulling in new business customers from Google Adwords at an average cost of £50 (from example above) then things are all OK. However, with almost all Adwords accounts you will find that not all keywords bring you conversions; some will convert every month consistently whereas others will bring you a sale one month and not the next. some will just fail.

You need to factor in for fluctuations as well as budget for testing new keywords and ad groups.

On the other hand you will also have keywords that will keep bringing you new customers at below the customer lifetime value so therefore giving you more budget to spend on other keywords.

There is going to need to be some tweaking as you go but if you start off by setting the target cost per new business customer (CPNBC) at about 80% of your customer lifetime value then analyse after 1 month what the aggregate cost per new business customer has been and if it is over your customer lifetime value then you need to decrease this target CPNBC at a keyword level.

Decide on some rules around how you are going to treat keywords based on their performance

You have probably gathered by now that the basic premise is that if a keyword is good then you can invest more in it (bid up), if it is bad then you reduce spend on it (bid down)or kill it completely (pause/delete). But to what extent?

You can use the cost per new business customer at a keyword level to calculate this.

In the example below I have assigned a keyword level target cost per new business customer of £20. I have then simply split the keywords into 3 groups based on their performance:

• Winners = keywords that have a cost per new business customer that is less than the target.
• Losers = keywords that have had new business orders, but the cost for gaining each new business customer is greater than the target.
• Big losers = keywords that have not had a new business sale in the period.

One thing that you will notice here is that I have been super strict here based on new business orders; even when a keyword has brought in returning customer sales I have still bid it down. In your own model this is something that you should think about as keyword 2 has brought in 7 sales (the highest of all) yet we are bidding it down because it did not perform in terms of bringing in new customers, but retention is also important. In reality, in most businesses I would also reward keywords that bring lots of returning customers back.

In the final column you will notice that I have assigned a new bid to each of the keywords. I did this by creating a rule for each of the 3 groups; the rules were as follows:

Winners

New bid = (1+(avg pos-1)/10) x Max CPC

For example with keyword 10 the formula would be:

(1+(3.42-1/10) x £0.47 = £0.58 so we increase the bid from £0.47 to £0.58

The theory is this:

• I want to move the keyword up into position 1
• I therefore need to find the variance of it’s current position from position 1. (avg pos – 1)
• I am estimating that a bid change of 10% will move the keyword up 1 position – this is why we divide by 10
• With keyword 10 we are 2.42 positions from position 1 so need to bid up 24.2%

Losers

New bid = (1-(5-avg pos)/10) x Max CPC

For example with keyword 1 the formula would be:

(1-(5-2.78/10) x £0.62 = £0.48 so we decrease the bid from £0.62 to £0.48

The theory is this:

• I want to move the keyword down into position 5
• I therefore need to find the variance of it’s current position from position 5. (5-avg pos)
• I am estimating that a bid change of 10% will move the keyword down 1 position – this is why we divide by 10
• With keyword 1 we are 2.22 positions from position 5 so need to bid down 22.2%

Big Losers

New bid = (1-(8-avg pos)/10) x Max CPC

For example with keyword 13 the formula would be:

(1-(8-3.02/10) x £2.99 = £1.50 so we decrease the bid from £2.99 to £1.50

The theory is this:

• I want to move the keyword down into position 8
• I therefore need to find the variance of it’s current position from position 8. (8-avg pos)
• I am estimating that a bid change of 10% will move the keyword down 1 position – this is why we divide by 10
• With keyword 13 we are 4.98 positions from position 8 so need to bid down 49.8%

The above is just an example of one possible way to treat keywords – you may want to create more groups based on more complex rules or you may opt for just bid up / bid down / pause. It really depends on what you are trying to achieve – if you are cash rich and just want market share then you will be less strict whereas if you are a start up on a low budget then you will want to tread more carefully.

Keywords that do nothing consistently

You need to have a method of keeping an eye on keywords that bring you no orders over a long period of time or rather over many clicks (regardless of the time frame). If you run reports regularly then there will be lots of keywords that fall into the no orders bracket so you need an idea of what to do with them; do not let them fall under the radar.

Set a rule that any keywords that reach a certain number of clicks and do not achieve any sales at all get killed – it is a good idea to double check the assisted conversion report in Google Analytics before pausing just in case the keyword is bring you assisted orders down the line through other channels.

The number of clicks that you set your rule at will spend on your website conversion rate. For example if your average conversion rate is 5% then you can expect a conversion for every 20 clicks, so if you have a keyword that has had 80 clicks and no orders then pause it. always leave in a bit of fat – e.g. if the average conversion rate is 5% then let a keyword go to 30 or 40 clicks before pausing just so that you can be satisfied it had a good run.

Having a bidding model is essential when you are spending £1000 per month and up on PPC as you need to know that you are investing wisely. But you should also be running regular ppc ad reviews and improving your PPC ads. You should also be fine tuning your keyword lists through using search query reports.

If you have any questions after reading this then please feel free to email me if you want to speak privately or leave a comment below if you want to speak more generally.