Category: News & Trends

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The Specialization of the Web

In the last two to three years I have seen a growing trend of specialization on the Web. When I started out in business in 2001, we could do it all for clients: web design, optimization, and site promotion. The Web environment was simpler then. With the advent of e-commerce, that all changed.

Now, you really need specialist in many areas such as e-commerce, mobile website, mobile marketing, pay per click, YouTube videos, web design, and content creation. The days of one business being able to supply all the needs for your online presence is rapidly changing. Why is this so? The degree of complexity and uniqueness of each of these avenues has changed immensely over the last few years.

The best case in point is with e-commerce. As complex as shopping carts are now, and the degree of difficulty in setting up accounts and implementing credit card security you must know what you are doing to be security compliant. Add in issues such as New York state having a terribly complex sales tax situation (where the percentage is driven by zip code and not necessarily by county or city) and you add in another layer of difficulty.

In this year, I expect to see a boon in web design for smartphones and tablets. Although many websites still look good on smartphones having to pinch and drag the screen to navigate to important contact information is simply irritating. Having a great mobile site this year may be one of your most important items on your own wish list.

Specialization in search engine marketing has also been another growth area. With Google AdWords becoming so complicated, many consumers are looking to professional managers, such as ourselves, to off load the degree of difficulty and time it takes to use and understand Google AdWords for online lead generation.

As I look back over the years I’ve been in business, it is interesting to see these trends develop. All I can say is, that I am glad we chose to diversify, and will continue to do so to stay relevant to our customer base.

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Facebook Page Creator PageModo Reviewed

It’s a good thing to try out new things, but sometimes those things you try out simply aren’t very good. Pagemodo automatic Facebook Page/Tab creator is one of them.

I read about www.PageModo.com in PC World Magazine. I decided to take a look to see if the online application was as great and as easy to use as PC World Magazine said it was. I ran it through set up and published my page using their free version. I spent quite a bit of time working with the interface adding images and text. What I found was that this was more frustrating to use than creating your own developer page with HTML.

This is my feedback:

  • It was impossible to resize the images in the template. The grab and pull action to the bounding box would not work on the two templates that I tried.
  • When I tried to load my image in one template a black box overlayed it even in publishing, no matter what I tried my header image was obscured. I changed to a new template and did not have this issue, but what a time pit getting the image and content in just to scrap the template as unusable.
  • Text was easy to add but better make sure your character count between columns is exact as there is no way to balance the content short of removing words.
  • Want a Fan Gate or another page, you’ll pay a monthly charge for use. With Facebook turning your business page wall into a community site where anyone can post I’m not sure if in the future world of Facebook a Fan Gate will even be allowed.

I have to say that for people who have no HTML skills and hours of time on their hands, they may be able to painstakingly create a nice looking page for their Facebook Business page. Will I use it again, no, it is too time consuming and buggy for professional use.

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How Do You Know How Much a Click Will Cost on AdWords?

So you want to try AdWords, but want to make sure you will get performance. You understand you need a high enough maximum cost per click to be in the auction and your daily budget needs to be high enough to support your maximum cost per click to get AdWords to serve your program, but how do you estimate for planning your cost per click to see if you can even afford AdWords?

Google AdWords has a tool that will allow you to see estimate cost per click figures. You can visit the tool here. If you have an AdWords account when you click the link, AdWords will send you to the tool page within your own account so you can benefit from your own account history. What I recommend with all new potential AdWords advertisers is to run a few keywords that they consider important to their business to get an idea of where the bid auction is to that an effective and practical monthly click budget can be set.

Make sure that when you use the tool that you select in the drop down menu for columns the “Approximate CPC”. Remember this is an approximate. In my experience is has even been on the low side. The figures you will typically see will be for the United States by default if you are in the US, but make sure that you are not seeing global results. You can reorder the data with your selections. The local search column is not to be confused with “local” like in your region. Local in this case means your entire country based on your initial tool settings.

Do not budget your AdWords program based on the numbers you see in the tool. Remember every chance you have for a click once your program is running will be based on an auction. The figures the tool gives you should be considered a range and the real costs will typically be higher.

Once you have an estimated cost per click, then factor in how many realistically priced clicks you want per day to try to achieve your marketing results. You may find out that your budget of $2,000 per 30 days you thought you wanted to spend will simply not be enough when your click cost may be $10 per click. Additionally you may have felt you wanted to run 6 ad groups but can realistically afford only two to run or you will parse your budget between too many programs.

Although AdWords says you can set your 30 day click budget and maximum cost per click to anything you want, they also have the option to not serve your program if your settings are simply not competitive in your marketplace.

For more AdWords help, make sure to visit our website to read about our AdWords management services.

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Is Your Daily Budget Keeping You Out of the AdWords Auction?

Not only is your maximum cost per click a factor in deciding if you are in the Google AdWords auction, but your daily budget may be a factor keeping you out! It is important to understand a few things first. AdWords account managers will talk about your 30 day budget spend, and it needs to be high enough to support your accounts daily budget based on your maximum cost per click. Not your average cost per click, but your maximum cost per click.

Here is a fine example of a client who by having a low 30 day click spend has effectively kept Google AdWords from being able to serve his account for best performance.

30 day click spend $150
Daily budget $5
Typical max. CPC for other clients in the same industry $6.50
His maximum CPC based on his daily budget $5

As his maximum CPC is constrained by his daily budget, can never be set at a level to truly be in the auction, he gets spotty click results and sometimes Google cannot even spend his $150 monthly budget.

In scenarios like this what we see happen is that an account manager gets desperate and starts adding broad match keywords to an account in an effort to get low cost traffic. Here are some of the results we then see when that happens:

30 day number of impressions 11,930
Clicks in 30 days 36
CTR in 30 days .30%
Average position 6.8

It looks like the account is performing, but look at the impressions. They are high and the CTR is low. This account is getting clicks, but they are typically poor quality and untargeted clicks because the client has set the daily budget too low and so can never raise the maximum cost per click to get in the keyword auction.

This is just one example of problematic account performance. In some cases as you monitor clients such as this you will even see Google saving up money to try to serve their program by even going a day or three without any clicks at all and then getting a few clicks a day or so later.

If you are looking for a savvy AdWords manager we invite you to read our client reviews. We resolve AdWords problems all the time and do work in some cases on an hourly basis to help re-mediate AdWords problems.