25 Pay Per Click Tactics – SEO Relevancy – Landing Pages and Google Adwords Information

Not many years ago, successful pay per click campaigns could basically run on auto-pilot but not these days. As this marketing medium has matured, good Return On Investment (ROI) has become increasingly difficult to achieve. This post focus’s on some tactics and strategies, to keep your campaigns afloat, in these competitive and changing times.  Information provided by, Aspiring Web Design, pay per click marketing and lead generation department.

  1. SEO Your PPC Landing Pages: Recent changes to Google’s Quality score now look at content and on-page text as well as load time also to determine relevancy, and therefore your final click price and ad positioning. By applying basic Search Engine Optimization tactics and online marketing best practices to your landing pages, websites and online forms, you can save a bundle and improve your ad positions.
  2. Turn Off Auto-Matching: Apparently, Google doesn’t think the average PPC marketers are good enough (or smart enough) at picking keywords, so they want to do it for us. They’ve done quite a good job at spinning this one, but don’t fall for it. With auto-matching, Google will automatically show your ads for queries that they think are related to words you already bid on.  Which will cause your keywords to attract more clicks, with less relevancy, which could drive up the cost of your keywords and campaign.
  3. Set Cost Per Conversion Goals by Product Category: How much are you willing to pay a customer? Looking at your gross and net operating margins, set a goal / budget on how much you are willing to pay to acquire a customer through Pay per click. Then stick with it, and adjust or cut your ad groups in order to meet this goal. Taking this a step further, determine how much you can afford to pay for each product category. For example, you can obviously pay more to acquire a PPC sale for a 70% margin product vs. a 30% one.
  4. Calculate Your Lifetime Customer Value: In addition to understanding your customer acquisition cost, it’s crucial to know the long term value of customers you acquire through PPC. For example, on average how many times will your typical customer buy per year? Sometimes marketers are willing to take a hit on the first sale if they know the customer will generate many future sales resulting in residual income. Recently, we analyzed an Adwords campaign, and broke it down by long term value (LTV) for each adgroup. The results were surprising. We discovered that many groups were performing well up-front (low cost per conversion), but weren’t ever generating future orders. In contrast, some groups were generating poor up-front results, but great LTV.
  5. Recognize Cross-Channel & Untrackable Conversions: Because ROI tracking is so easy, we sometimes think its infallible. Realize that customers who click on your ads, will often convert through other channels such as through your call-center, store, or catalog. In addition, its nearly impossible to track sales from customers who use multiple PCs (home, office, laptop). For example, a customer may find your website from work, but make their first purchase at home after typing in your URL directly.
  6. Dis-Allow Trademark Bidding for Affiliates: If you utilize affiliate marketing, take a close look at your pay per click bidding policy for affiliates. If you’re not careful, affiliates will bid on your brand name terms, (keywords that you likely already rank organically for). This type of affiliate theft adds unnecessary marketing costs, since you’re now paying affiliates for a sale you would have likely received without them.
  7. Use Appropriate Data Samples for Decisions: One mistake we see frequently is making decisions to cut or increase PPC spending, based on an inadequate amount of data. Before making a drastic decision, make sure you view several months worth click and conversion activity to get a good sample size to work review. We frequently come across ad groups that perform well one month, and terrible the next.  So it is important to use accurate data.
  8. Turn Off the Content Network: In our experience, the content network is extremely difficult to generate acceptable ROI with. Even if you’ve had success with the content network, be sure to separate it from your keyword campaigns, as mixing them will blur the ROI between the two and make it difficult to track the progress.
  9. Test Your Ad Copy, But Not Too Much: A/B testing your ads is so easy, there’s no reason not to do it. However, don’t stress about changes that are too small to track. Changing insignificant words in your ad copy may show slight changes in click-through rates, but the results are likely random.
  10. Test Landing Pages: More importantly, test which landing pages result in better conversion. You can accomplish this by creating an identical ad, yet linking to a different destination.  Also, by showing the ad to several outside sources and getting their opinions, regarding the ad you anticipate on running.
  11. Make Your Ads Less Appealing: Yes, you read that right. If your goal is good ROI, then you actually don’t want everyone to click on your ad, only qualified customers. This might mean adding the price of your product to your ad, with the intention of filtering out discount shoppers and pre-qualifying them before they click through to your page. The key is to qualify your clicks, not to cast a wide net. This is especially important with high volume, broad keywords woth high cost per click rates.
  12. Build Custom, Focused Landing Pages: One of the major advantages to Pay Per Click vs Organic SEO, is the ability to send visitors exactly where you want to. Make sure your landing pages feature the same  keywords you bid on in order to reinforce relevance. In addition, ensure that the next step is impossible to miss, featuring a strong call to action, otherwise you are losing money and leads.
  13. Use Negative Keywords Exhaustively: Not bidding on keywords can be as important as bidding on them. Use Google’s Ad Preview tool to help determine whether your ads are showing up for irrelevant queries.
  14. Avoid Bidding Wars: Focus on ROI, not your ego. The number one spot doesn’t always convert best. In fact, some think spots #2, and #3 outperform #1, since it tends to get clicked automatically.
  15. Use Phrase Match & Exact Match: More and more, I’m finding it difficult to achieve good results using broad match keywords. Instead of a shot-gun approach, use phrase match or exact match to focus in on specific phrases.
  16. Don’t Compete with Your Organic Listings: If you rank in the top 3 organic positions for a keyword, you’re probably better off bidding for the 4 or 5 spot with PPC rather than competing with your natural listing.
  17. Don’t Worry about Click Fraud: Yes, click fraud happens. It happens in some industries more than others. However, its best just to consider it a cost of doing business with paid search. If you focus too much of your time trying to catch it, or you know its happening and you can’t do anything about it, maybe you shouldn’t be using PPC in the first place.
  18. Use PPC for Organic SEO Research: Let your paid and natural search campaigns feed off each other. As you analyze your top performing PPC keywords, consider optimizing for them organically. PPC makes great testing ground for SEO, since you can roughly gauge the success of keywords before going into all the trouble of optimizing for them.
  19. Use Keyword Management Software: Campaign management software such as Google’s adwords editor simplifies repetitive tasks that are mundane in the web-based Adwords admin. Microsoft adCenter is also featuring beta testing for a similar future product.
  20. Track Secondary Conversions: It goes without saying that sales conversions should be tracked. However, what about that other 97% percent of visitors that don’t buy on the first visit? The next best thing to a purchase is often an opt-in, since a certain percentage of your opt-in list will eventually buy. Consider tracking “mini-conversions” such as email or RSS signups.
  21. Double Check your Ads and Landing Pages: Over time, links get broken, copy gets out-dated, and products go out of stock. For these reasons, its important to test your ads on a regular basis, removing ads that should not longer be showing.
  22. Watch your Traffic from Parked Domains: Take a look at your clicks and conversions from parked domains. While there is some debate about this, many marketers find this traffic is lower quality, and converts poorly. Contact adwords support centerfor how to turn this off.
  23. Track Branded vs. Non-Branded Keywords: Make sure you separate your branded keyword campaigns from your non-branded ones. Realize that while branded keywords usually boast a much lower cost per conversion, they are often the result of other marketing campaigns.
  24. Use Your Time Wisely: Whether your paid search program is managed in-house, or by a third party, your time resources are limited. Make sure you spend that time effectively, doing the things that will make the most difference. Aspiring Web Design suggests a break-down of how to allocate you time between term list management, bid management, landing page/site layout, and ad copy tweaks.
  25. Make Big Promises; Overdeliver: Your ads need to make big promises in order to get clicks. Your landing pages need over deliver on the promise of your ads, then make more big promises to keep visitors engaged and inspire them to act. Your product pages need to fulfill the expectations from your landing pages, and so on. Top this off with a product that actually exceeds expectations supported by great service, and you’ve got yourself a winning formula for any type of marketing.  If you want to discus your website design, development, online marketing, landing page creation or anything that relates to your online business please contact Aspiring Solutions Web Design today at any of the contact information below:

Aspiring Solutions Web Design Firm – www.AspiringWebDesign.com

3711 W Irving Park Rd Suite 2, Chicago, IL 60618

(800)978-0075 OR (312)878-1341 – Ask for Sales or a Project Manager

 

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Content Management Systems (CMS) – Web Design and Development Basics for Business Owners – WordPress VS Joomla from Aspiring Web Design Company

When business owners or individuals are looking to create a website, you will probably try or  explore some of the content management systems or most commonly called CMS. There are different options but predominantly, two of the most popular among them are WordPress and Joomla. In this article, we will try to explain some of the major advantages and disadvantages of those systems for some of our more curious clients who contemplate hiring a Chicago Web Designer.

We would like to start with WordPress, which is one of the easiest for use systems available today in the internet or on the market.  Although, many people think that the WordPress can be used for blogging only, you will soon find that you can easily configure it to work in many other ways. Furthermore, to install that CMS on a server is relatively easy and intuitive from a web designer or developer standpoint. That way you will allow people, who do not have any knowledge in web development to create their website for just a couple of hours. Furthermore, you will not have to develop additional scripts to get the comments of other visitors for example, because they are already built in it with widgets and applications that come preloaded through the software. On the other hand, WordPress does not provide suitable workspace for developers, because when you try to make some modifications in it, for example to create a shopping cart, the whole system is likely to crash. Furthermore, you will not find proper advice from the WordPress community, because they mainly complain about the features of that system. Finally, when you try to upgrade your existing system, you will usually end up having a lot more bugs than you used to.

Joomla on the other hand is one of the best content management systems for designers, web developers and administrators. The system allows all its users to create great looking websites and also it is really easy for use, by beginners. Furthermore, there are many developers, who create tools, which rapidly improve the performance of Joomla. If you are a developer or programmer, you can choose that system, because it offers large capacity for customization and development. Joomla’s features have constantly improved in the past 3 years and so you will enjoy many more features. However, when you take a look at the user interface of that system, you will find that actually it is not so easy for use by people, who do not have any idea of web development and also it is far from user friendly.  Even thought the system is intuitive for technically enabled individuals, it can sometimes be difficult for the average Joe since they are typically not internet marketing specialists, web developers or working with an online marketing agency.  Furthermore, after the recent update of that system to version 1.5.x, there are still many users, who stick to the old one.  However, Joomla is a great tool, content management system (CMS) and back end builder for your site.

In conclusion, we would like to say that the choice between those systems depends on the purpose of your website and also on your knowledge of web development and design. In addition, when you compare the simplicity of both systems, you will notice that working with WordPress is a lot easier, so there are many beginners, who choose it instead of Joomla. When you take a particular project, you should check exactly what are the requirements of your business, before you choose any of these content management systems.  However, the good folks at Aspiring Solutions Web Design are experts when it comes to building the perfect website for your business.

Posted in Content Management System (CMS) Discussion, Web Design and Development | Tagged , , , , | 19 Comments

Aspiring Solutions Web Design and Development – Chicago SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Chicago SEO

The moment your website starts reporting lesser visitor traffic, it is a signal that there is something wrong with your website. It does not make a difference whether you are a small or big business enterprise, if your website is not able to attract sufficient visitor traffic, it will not have a good web presence on the internet. This can have a negative impact on your page rankings and if not rectified soon, your competition will take over from you. However, hiring a reliable Chicago SEO Company will help you take corrective action.

Why SEO

Consider the following facts:

  • Almost 90% of search engine traffic is generated by the Top Five listed sites
  • Approximately 62% of visitors do not search beyond the first page
  • Close to 36% of visitors equate brand equity with page rankings

With most of the search traffic generated by only five websites, there is a very narrow space for the rest. This is precisely why search engine optimization plays a very important role in the success of a website. Realizing the importance of SEO, a reliable Chicago SEO Company offers unique and innovative solutions that help in attracting visitor traffic to your website, thereby ensuring better conversions.

What to Look for in a SEO Company

There are a number of Chicago SEO companies that boast of services that can attract more visitors to your site and improve your page rankings. However, the real success of any SEO Company lies in the results that it generates. This is where a lot of companies fail as they are not able to sustain the page rankings for consistently long periods of time. Look for a reliable Chicago SEO Company that offers a host of search engine solutions.

How Can a Chicago SEO Help?

A Chicago SEO Company makes use of a wide range of services like Link Building, Social Media marketing, Keyword research, Blog Writing, Article submissions, Newsletters, Press Releases, etc. All these services are focused on ensuring more visibility for your website online. This not only draws more visitors to your site but also ensures higher rankings on the search engine results.

Posted in Chicago SEO, Web Design and Development | Tagged , , , , | 60 Comments

Business Website Design – Informational Websites, E-Commerce Development

Website Designing – A worldwide phenomenon

The World Wide Web has probably undergone the most dramatic changes in the past two decades. Every identity in the world may soon have an internet presence, whether it is a large company, a small business firm, or a non-profit organization. Individuals are also enjoying being visible on the internet and sharing their knowledge and opinions through mediums such as blogging.

The origins

Most websites are created in a computer programming language HTML, known as markup language. However, any web design service may concord that programming languages for web design are becoming increasing complex. Web design uses hyperlinks which easily connects you to similar content in other web pages of the same site or a different site. However with the constantly changing options in software and programming languages, websites also need to continuously modify and adapt to stay afloat and be cutting edge.

The need for web design services

The need of the day is for every company to get wider exposure.  Having a website on the internet is a must. This has lead to the growth of many web designing companies across the world. A web design service needs to be technically sound and have a good sense of marketing. Combining these two elements is the key to the success of a web design service. If such services can deliver well, a great future is guaranteed.

Web design in Chicago

The best web designing companies in Chicago are all about great planning, innovative design and flawless execution. Web design in Chicago is completely in tune with the clients’ expectations and requirements. As web design has become the essential business requirement, clients need to be ensured that the web design service they have chosen is nothing short of the best.  It is believed that the kind of web designing implemented goes a long way in deciding the popularity of the website. Also web design in Chicago is done in a way that ensures that all aspects and applications are easy to access, as most people who may need to visit a clients’ are not highly net savvy.

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Google Adwords Promotional Code – Free Pay Per Click Advertising – Adwords Promotional Codes

The inside scoop from Aspiring Web Design!

Google often provides a Google Adwords promotional code through web hosting companies, banks or other entities who frequently deal with online businesses.

These codes offer credits to businesses when they sign up for the service. You can get a Google Adwords promotional code from other places, particularly online vendors who partner with Google. GoDaddy and BlueHost are two vendors who offer the promotions, and sometimes they are available directly from Google itself.

Naturally, Google is anxious for you to try out their program, and most businesses these days are trying to save money wherever possible, so the Google Adwords promotional codes work well all around.

In order to get your code to work, you’ll need to set up an Adwords account. If you already have an account, you probably can’t use the code, since they are generally meant only for brand new accounts.

Step 1. Browse over to the Adwords homepage at https://adwords.google.com

Step 2. Click on the button that says, start Now. Create an Adwords account by following the steps in the sign up wizard.

Step 3. After you have an account established, sign in.

Step 4. Click on the tab labeled my Account.Click on the button labeled Billing Preferences. When asked for billing information to activate your account, you’ll get to the third step. There you’ll find the field where you can enter the 12 digit promotional code. If you received a URL with the code, then go to the URL first, and you can leave the code field blank. Your promotional credit is applied to the account automatically.

Step 5. Click on the button labeled continue, and you’ll be prompted to enter the rest of your billing information.

Step 6. Clicking on activate, will complete the setup process.

There are some caveats to remember when using a Google Adwords promotional code. First, they are meant for new advertisers only. They’re only good for 14 days after creating the account, or until the credit is exhausted, whichever comes first.

If the promotional credit runs out, you will start being charged for the campaigns you’re set up. (That’s why they still want your complete billing information, of course.)

If you’re not prepared to pay, or you don’t think it’s working out for the time being, go into your account and click on the feature for your campaigns.

Naturally, you can’t combine a Google Adwords promotional code with another promotional code or any other offer from Google. As it says in the fine print, limit one per customer.

The code is usually only valid for two weeks after you create the Adwords account, so be sure to get started right away with your campaign.

It’s a good idea to check with Google if there is a service or other online company that is offering you a Google Adwords promotional code in exchange for signing up with their service. Be sure Google has a relationship with them before you grab that offer.

If you get a code out of the blue from a company you’re never worked with, be skeptical, the code may not be valid.

BUT! Here’s A Valid $100 Code For New Adwords Account!

This offer is valid only for new Google AdWords customers with self-managed signup accounts. And Promotional credit must be applied to a newAdWords account within 14 days of creating the account.

To sign up for AdWords and take advantage of this USD$100 offer:
1. Visit http://www.google.com/ads/webmastertools and signup with your google account
2. On the Billing tab, enter your information in the Billing Preferences section.
3. To claim your free USD$100 of advertising, enter your code into the billing section of your adwords account

You can also contact us here at Aspiring Web Design and talk to one of our internet marketing experts at (800)978-0075 or sales@aspiringsolutions.com. Enjoy the free marketing and take care!

If you still have questions regarding Pay Per Click advertising you can also check our site out for valuable information or talk with our Pay Per Click department at no cost.

Posted in Internet Marketing - Google | Tagged | 49 Comments