Category: Pay Per Click

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2014 Trends for Business Websites and Online Marketing – Part Two

Looking into 2014.
Looking into 2014.

In continuation from Tuesday in this blog post on trends for business website marketing and visibility, I’ll talk about Google+ Local pages and YouTube.

Google+ Local Pages Also Known as Google Places

Big changes happened last year for Google+ Local pages. First, Google removed many of the fields you can use to add information, removing any degree of optimization you could previously do on keywords. Once the account is set up, what the customer sees about your business is limited. Google now returns listings not based on optimization or the number of reviews but based on the smartphone user’s location. For desktop searches, Google Places/Local Page listings are shown based on proximity to your location and possibly in some markets based on the number of reviews and possibly again on click through rates.

What a business owner used to be able to do to get placement on location specific keywords is gone. We do still recommend a regular update of videos and pictures on the account, but there is simply not a lot of updating to be done once the account is set up. In fact in the last three months, Google even removed the owner’s comment field where promotions and specials were listed.

YouTube Videos

For many businesses we work with, YouTube is still “undiscovered country”. Many business owners feel that they have to pay to have professionally created video for YouTube, but actually even videos made with your phone or camera are considered the same to Google. Videos that show your products, explain your services, explain briefly a concept are still excellent for business owners to use for exposure. As videos may be shown in with organic results and not even associated with a link to your website utilizing YouTube better should be a New Year’s resolution for business owners for 2014.

Product Listing Ads Now Called Google Shopping Campaigns in AdWords

If you have an ecommerce store and are an AdWords advertiser and are not using Product Listing Ads – soon to be called Google Shopping Campaigns, you are missing out on one of the best things that Google has brought to the AdWords arena. Google shows pictures of products within the organic results and you pay be the click for activity on your store products. Although the data feed is onerous to create and requires much more than just a download of your products (it requires the use of Google’s own taxonomy for each product,) implementation can really boost your individual product sales. Your competition is already embracing Google Shopping Campaigns!

2013 has brought us some sweeping changes at Google. It will be interesting to see how these important changes will impact business and visibility as we enter 2014.

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Facebook Ad Types Explained

We’ve really checked it out!

If you are still in love with Facebook, you may like my short and easy to understand primer on Facebook Advertising. Here’s what you need to know in a nutshell.

  1. You have four ad choice options on Facebook in their pay per click model – web ads, social ads, sponsored stories, and post ads.
  2. Web ads have your own verbiage, super small image about 120 pixels wide and can point to your Facebook page or to your website.
  3. Social ads are automatically generated by Facebook based on subscriber and visitor interactions to your Facebook Business page. They can either be a “Like Us” ad or an ad showing an action a recent visitor to your page took such as leaving a comment, posting to your wall, or other interaction.
  4. There are also post ads and sponsored story ads as well on Facebook and these two ad types will typically have a lower cost than web ads and social ads.
  5. Ads that promote an event have been shown to statistically have the highest cost per click but also the lowest click through rate.

“… the study also notes that Sponsored Story promotions for likes and app usage drive the highest conversion rates. In fact, on average, almost 80 percent of all people who click on Sponsored Story ads that promote Page likes convert to fans, while Sponsored Stories that promote app usage average a 60 percent conversion rate.”

This very interesting data and ad type nuggets are expounded in this online article and it is a good read if you want to learn more about Facebook advertising or see ad type examples.

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Twitter Advertising Tips

Right now I am advertising on Twitter and for FREE thanks to American Express and Twitter! I’ve gotten $100 of Twitter advertising free in order to check out Twitter’s new small business pay per click program. This post will tell you a little more about the options you have in advertising on Twitter.

First off, you can’t link to a page on your website with Twitter pay per click like you can with Facebook pay per click. These are your options when you set up your advertising account:

  • You can choose to have your Twitter account placed in the promoted account section on Twitter profiles. That’s the spot where Twitter says “You may want to follow these people.”
  • You can choose to have one of your tweets be a promoted tweet, but the catch is you don’t necessarily pick a tweet, Twitter picks it for you based on click rates of your followers. Actually Twitter will select 5 of your top rated tweets and then rotate through five of them. You can select, once your account is running, which tweets NOT to promote, but not hand pick one to promote.

For people like me who don’t tweet about my own services constantly that may mean that the tweet that is promoted actually goes to a news site or blogpost on an interesting topic that is not about my own services. As Twitter advertising matures, I may be able to craft a tweet and select it specifically and so move people into the page on my site that I choose, but for now, you have to work with what Twitter selects.

So far in less than one week, I have spent $10.86 on advertising and gotten 12 new followers and had 13 clicks on my promoted tweets. I’ll keep you posted on the results once I’ve had more experience with the program.

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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.