Internet Marketing Blog » Pay Per Click

Huge arrows on PPC sitelinks in Google

mercurythread — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:25:47 +0000

I’m really starting to hate the PPC testing at Google – they call it usability improvements. There again I can’t blame ‘em for trying to improve the profitability of their products. Today I was searching for a few brands to see about getting some new life insurance. And I see the following when I search google.co.uk for “Sun Life Direct”:

Sun Life Direct PPC ad with arrows on the sitelinks

Huge blue arrows next to the site links – all that is missing is a couple of large neon signs which say “CLICK HERE” in blinking text to attract even more attention. Yesterday the background colour of the top PPC ads (yellow above) had changed to pink on my machine and green on another computer! I thought I was going colour blind -apparently not.

OK back to follow CTR improvements on PPC sitelinks for a while and determine if this increases the value of these for clients.

You, Me, Carpark, NOW…

mercurythread — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:21:12 +0000

Always liked the ring of that phrase. Far better than ‘Hi, how are you?’. Anyway have been running about the web trying to work out WTF Google has been upto recently – results are so screwey its half cock up (think Chris Iwelumo against Norway) and half comedy show (Homer Simpson’s been left in charge of the big set of Google buttons and smoking crack).

That’s an aside I just thought I’d post a cool image that I found over @ crackunit (nice blog – you should read his description of ‘digital planning‘).

If the answer is no – then I guess you must be doing PPC for a living – poor souls…

Imagine Google being your Affiliate on your Programs

mercurythread — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:23:42 +0000

There is no point in getting too angry too often. And when it comes to PPC I rarely get angry or feel any other emotion. Everything in PPC can generally be scoped, planned, projected, dissected to within an inch of its ROI driven life. To me personally that makes it a bit dull – its a bit like Internet Marketing on auto pilot. But is does generate sales for many sites, and cost effective high ROI sales. Even affiliates can make good profits with PPC. So I guess it was only a matter of time before the money hungry share holders at Google wanted to get as much money from it as they can.

For the first time I saw Google trying to steal everyones sales with their price comparrison function. Right at the top of the results, displayed to distract users from the other results they’ve rattled in a price comparison function. I was doing some research for a potential client in the financial sector – rather than looking to strangle myself with expensive debt. I think the ditraction factor is hugely important – by creating a level of abrasion on a page you can increase clickthrough rates on your on screen items. Highlight it, change the font, do anything just to make to clash with other elements – not so much as it annoys people but just enough that they have a thought of “whats that” as they read through your content. The new item certainly did that to me today – so much so that I got a PPC expert to explain it to me. Apparently its part of Googles Merchant Search functionality.

Google Price Comparisson function

You select an amount from the drop down and click compare lenders and you’re sent to: http://www.google.co.uk/MerchantSearchBeta/search. And you get:

Is google an affiliate?

The swine @ Google must be getting commision on sales – or the cost per click must be massive.

If you’re an affiliate relying on PPC be on the look out. Google may be coming to steal all your luctrative sales. May be time to get into some SEO and stop developing bridge pages to make your sales. If Google expands this to many more queries it could be a fun ride.

Why does your website not rank in Google?

mercurythread — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:50:09 +0000

I’ve just found evidence to prove the main reason behind why so many websites dont rank effectively in Google.

This is probably the truth! Nuff said.

BigMouthMedia Internet Marketing PDF Documents

mercurythread — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:57:18 +0000

Bigmouthmedia are pretty much the largest Internet Marketing providers in the UK. I’ve always been based in Scotland and as such they’re always in the forefront of the industry gaze. When I worked at Oyster Web, at one stage there were two of us working out a bedroom, and we were beating them hands down in the SERPs for everything to do with SEO: they got more clients – and higher spending clients at that. As such I’ve kept an eye on them for about 6 years.

Anyway one of the things they do which I really like, and I’m thinking of doing in the next couple of months, are their PDF handouts. For their Internet marketing services they provide small PDF documents for clients, prospective clients and anyone who wants them. Today I got sent a link to their new affiliate marketing guide.

I’ve stuck links below to the docs I know of that they’ve made so far – there are more I’m sure but I dont have all the URLs to hand. I list them not because I think it’ll change how you think about your marketing online but because they may help you develop your own ‘soft sell‘ documents. If you’ve got a new service what better way to announce it than by sending all your clients a nice little doc that’s a bit fun. Or if you’re in pre-sales mode with a new lead arises send them the bundle by email – it’ll be cool, branded and keep you in their thoughts.

Bignmouthmedia PDF Links

Have fun.

Affiliate Networks dont work hard enough for merchants

mercurythread — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:27:49 +0000

I’m getting constantly fed up with affiliate networks doing very little to help merchants protect their brand. Be honest – would you in their shoes. For every sale that an affilate network member makes the network gets a comission. So why should they protect the brands – more sale means more money in the bank!

Direct Links from PPC Ads

Many merchants have in their terms and conditions that you should not direct link to their website from PPC ads. Its a logical step as the advert then becomes part of the advertising that the consumer sees as being paid for by the brand. If its misleading its the brand that’ll get flamed – not to mention all the stuff related to the Google quality score for the merchants running PPC campaigns.

But no one @ a network level seems to care. They should be monitoring this to help protect merchants from this online. The only way a click can go to a merchant through an affiliate network with a referrer being MSN, Google or Yahoo! is if the click is through PPC. If the network got the document referrer and cross referenced this with the program details they could easily choose not to set their cookie on these programs – that said they’d lose money on it.

PPC Affiliate Bidding on Brand

In some cases where direct linking to the merchant site is allowed bidding on the companies brand terms is not allowed. As to do so would allow affiliate to force up click costs on what are likely to be the merchants best converting terms. Why should merchants be forced to pay more for clicks and then also pay the offender a comission!

All you have to do is again strip out the search engine query from the referrer string and cross reference this against a pre built list of terms – if the term falls within the offending list redirect consumer to website but dont set the tracking cookie.

If affiliate networks did these things the days of merchants having their brands raped by affiliates would be one day closer. But we all know they have no intention of doing so. It would not only cripple their business but would also lead affiliates to simply join networks where they could get away with these things.

Here endeth the rant & sorry for the poor english (I’m having a bad day)…

Direct Response (Behaviourally Adaptive) Websites

mercurythread — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:38:49 +0000

What if your website could talk directly to your consumers? I don’t mean just simply be relevant but be able to intuit from their actions what they really wanted from your website and then return tyhe appropriate messages? It would deliver better conversion rates and drive up your profitability. Irrelevant of how much it cost you’d be onto a winner.

It’s something we’ve been developing for about three months. It’s kinda low level but it takes information about a user and then uses this to intuit their intentions when they reach a website. We thought it was great little thing and the more we’ve got into it the more excited we’ve become.

The problem with your website is…

Your website talks to each consumer as if they wanted the same things.

Every user gets the same experience – irrelevant of intention. It’s not great for the consumer and it’s not great for your business. You can go to Google, or a click on a link on another website, visit somewhere from an email and get the same experience as every other user. Inspite of the fact that I may not have the same intent as every other user.

In essence all that marketing budget you spend online is to ‘engage’ prospective visitors and get them to click to your website. And once they get to your website they will be given content/information/pretty pitcures and with this information they decide to buy your services or your products. But often a website can’t cope with the myriad of expectations which your website has. It just can’t.

If you think of it channel by channel you’ll see what I mean:

SEO: you optimise your website titles and content, get great navigation, get great images and you test and refine till you get great positions for your brand terms and some core generics. For a simple example have a think about a hotel chain. If you type ‘ramada jarvis hotels‘ into Google.co.uk you get the Ramada Jarvis homepage – makes sense that you’d find it in top position.

If you type in ‘weekend break hotels’ you’ll find them at about position 4 in Google.co.uk, you’ll get the same webpage and the same experience as someone who entered the brand term. Inspite of the intention of you, the user, being completely different you get the same experience as someone who is brand aware and knows what the site does. With the ‘weekend breaks’ query resulting in traffic the psychological link between the query and the resulting website are incorrect – in effect the website has led the consumer to ‘lose the scent’.

This is often unavoidable due to the way that search engines rank pages: Ramada should be relevant for ‘weekend breaks’ their hotels are affordable and useful for trips away – but the search engine result isn’t 100% appropriate, and developing a new page for every term under the sun would make their SEO campaign hugely more expensive (and their SEO campaign is good – this was the third hotel chain I tested and the only one to have a generic term on the homepage that ranked well). If only the search engines were able to intuit more and give better results for the website owners they’d make more money.

PPC: Every man and his dog is (OK should be) using landing pages and deeplinking in their PPC campaigns. Specifically targeting pages with content relevant to the query drives better conversion. But with broad match on, even using a ton of negative keywords, you’ll find some irrelevant or unexpected traffic coming through. Try something like “Holidays in Scotland” – the result set you get may be different from mine. But if you click on the link to Hoseasons you get this page. (Yep we’ve just skewed up their PPC stats for the month as their onsite trackings just been given a dunt judging by the URL). But I can’t see anything on this page which is relevant for this query – they’ve probably bid so high on the term ‘holidays’ that they’re popping in all over the place. Their PPC agency should be shot but it highlights the point that the bids are going to waste.

Again the traffic you’re generating – what’s more you’re paying for – isn’t quite going to the page that is most appropriate for them – reducing your sales, reducing your competitiveness and making your online return on investment lower.

Affiliates: Affiliates help you make more money from your website. You pay them to get you clicks and should one of those clicks turn into a sale you pay them commission. But affiliates can be lazy – affiliate networks can be lazy – and your affiliate agency can be lazy. Take the Butlins affiliate program it has nice banners that say stuff like ‘Altogether more fun” but takes you to a page advertising “The big deal” – the disconnect is huge. You as a consumer had experience A in mind and what you get is something altogether different.

This is a bad for you – you’re not making the sales you could, for your affiliates – who will leave your program if its not making them money and ultimately , and most importantly, for the consumer.

The solution for your website is…

Make your website respond to what your customer has asked from it.

Let the behaviour of the customer before they reach your website and during their visit allow you to enhance their experience. I’ve heard people talk about website that do this as ‘Web 2.0′ websites, I call them ‘Direct Response’ websites and some call them ‘behaviourally adaptive’ websites. It’s not important what you call them it’s what they do that’ll help change your online thinking forever.

We’ve developed a very small system that does this – it uses three things it learns from users and enters beta testing in two weeks, we’re really pleased with it. The alpha tests were going well and then yesterday I attended a meeting in London. Was great – I got up at four, flew from Glasgow at 6.15 (which I only just caught), endured trains across london, got to conference venue at about 9.30 (I’m late), register (find that the early morning sessions are in one big hall and there are no seats left, the coffee doesn’t get served till 11.

I’m not a happy bunny at this point.

And then I go to one of these early morning seminars and from the first moment I felt like everything we’d been messing with to get cash out of our sites had been trumped. I was expectiong some stuff about how to target and test your website to make more cash. You know the usual A/B testing, multivariate testing that we all promise we’ll do and then I saw how strong a product from Omniture called “Test& Target 1:1” was.

It does your A/B and multivariate testing on the fly – to work out which configuration of your high traffic pages is best for users. When I say high traffic I mean really high traffic pages – you know the blue chip, high street, brand name webistes that we have probably all used at least once. It takes about 40 things about a user and seeks to derive their intention.

I’ll show you one cool little example of this – go to Google and do a search for “car insurance” – click on the directline.com result in natural search and the homepage will have the leader image below.

Direct Line Homepage image called in by Omniture Test& Target for the natural search traffic from ‘car insurance’:

Go back to Google and search for “home insurance” and again click on the directline result. You get the same page URL with different image presented.

Direct Line Homepage image called in by Omniture Test& Target for the natural search traffic from ‘home insurance’:

It’s cool – a huge UK brand is changing the content based upon your query. Not only that the system has probably tested three or four versions of that graphic to work out which one leads visitors to complete the goals most often.

What other ‘behaviours‘ can Omniture use to target websites?

If you think that this message can be changed by looking at your IP (to determine your location), your browser (as your browser can be a social calling card), you connection speed (Flash movie or animated gif depending on how fast teh files likely to download), which pages in the website you’ve already visited in the session, which pages you visited in previous sessions and its after midnight so I’m not going to put them all in. You can see, even from this short list, why I went WOW!

It was a bit dissapointing that during the Q&A that their seemed to be a lot of things that teh account handlers were ghetting batted back – as they hadn’t fully informed clients of what this ‘Test& Track 1:1′ could do for them. This thing should be flying off the shelves. Maybe it is maybe it isn’t how do you tell when the level of intimacy with the website is so subtle that you can’t see it unless you know that it is there.

Getting Test& Target isn’t going to be cheap (they never said as much). But when you think that you may need a set of 60 creatives for your homepage alone – rather than just one, the system itself will no doubt have a highish cost and you’ll have to mess about with your code a bit but if you’ve got enough traffic and your conversion rate is poor (they talked about conversion rates of below 4% at one stage being poor!!!!) it could be a viable way to go.

Until we have such a website @ mercurythread we’re gonna keep pluggin away with our little system and get better ROI for our clients by spending budgets effectively and efficently. And then when we go and sign up Sony/BMG or Hilton I know right where I’m going to be looking to get them to invest. I just hope by this stage Omniture have an affiliate program…

PS: Sorry for the epistle about behaviourally targetting websites but I think it’s damn cool. If you’ve got any comments – or know of any other systems that do this – drop us a line in the comments below.

3 reasons why your PPC traffic isn’t converting

mercurythread — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:38:35 +0000

I could never do PPC for a living – the whole idea of bidding up & bidding down to earn a crust would drive me not only to distraction but also mad. One thing with PPC you can do with great accuracy, that its very difficult to do with other Internet Marketing channels, is predict a level of return that is likely to be achieveable. The best way to get the most out of your PPC budget is to target your onsite conversion after your initial three months testing process – getting conversion up will allow you to get the largets returns on your investment. This said during your first three months getting your bidding stratgey into shape should be your prime concern. So here are the three things I often find are causing problems in PPC campaigns.

Reason 1 – You’re PPC’s too generic

Please if you’re selling anything through PPC get your keywords as targetted as humanly possible. I know that the keyword ‘holiday’ may get a couple of hundred impressions every month but if you sell a cottage in South Wales don’t waste your money. Get your search terms as narrow as possible and expand out. By doing this you’ll find the niches that will give you ideas not only on ‘what’ people are searching for but also ‘how’ they are searching for them.

Reason 2 – Please talk ‘with’ not ‘at’ your customer

If you’re selling anything in PPC you need to know how people are searching for it and then use this effectively. This is the first step of your ‘scent trail‘ onsite. Make sure your PPC ad corresponds to what your target consumer is searching for – and make sure that your landing page reinforces this language. It all comes down to combining your Keyword Research with your onsite stats. Some people belive in analytics too much – some people use statistics like drunks use lamp posts (they use them for support rather than illumination), but they are useful. See which keyword patterns evolve from your conversions are they all using the same language or does it change about. Map your keywords to pages – do your succesful keywords point to pages which use the same words as your ads and the others don’t match up. Get your site matching your ads and get both using the words your consumers search with. It seems simple but can have a hge impact on your onsite conversion.

Reason 3 – your website sucks

Ok maybe it doesn’t suck. I am sure it looks really nice but don’t forget the basics. I’ve been hearing stories about a number of websites investing heavily in PPC and forgetting simple things like calls to action. A basic thing is to remember that customers ready to buy – those who really just want to get in and get out with their purchase in the post. Have a strong call to action in the first paragraph – make life easy for your consumer. Have a button that stands out – but doesn’t detract from your design.

What to do now?

Get down and dirty with your Pay Per Click and start making it bigger and stronger than ever before. If you have any tips please drop us a comment below.