It’s too good an opportunity to ignore in today’s digital landscape – even if your mobile landing-page experience isn’t up to snuff. Maybe you’ve got a completely new mobile experience in the works, but you don’t want to pass up a few months of good traffic while development and launch is underway.

So how do you continue to scale and drive incremental conversions? You use Facebook mobile ads as an “interest indicator”.

What this means is that you’ll want to still create ad sets targeting your audience on mobile. However, the purpose of these ad sets is to have clear-cut creative and copy so users know what your service/product is and, if interested, click on your ad to get on your site.

It is crucial that our ads are as transparent as possible in what our product/service is about, so we essentially pre-qualify the user. The following is a good example:

Now with these being mobile ads, they may not convert as well due to your less-than-optimal mobile experience, but you now know the exact users who are interested in your offering.

The next thing to do here is create a remarketing ad set on the desktop News Feed and serve your ads to users who have specifically clicked on your ad via mobile. So how do you set this up?

1. When building out your mobile ad sets to prospect for mobile users, add an extra parameter to your URL. For example: device=mobile. This will help in identifying users coming in from your mobile ads.
2. In the Facebook audience section, create a Facebook remarketing audience based off of the URL parameter:
   
3. Next, create your ad sets remarketing to that mobile-specific remarketing list and select the desktop News Feed to ensure that you are only pulling them into your site via desktop.

Let’s use an ecommerce scenario as an example.

Users love to browse around on their mobile devices, but actual transactions are clunky for multiple reasons – shopping experiences are poor, there’s a lot of information to enter on a mobile device, people on mobile devices are in public places and squeamish about typing credit card info, etc.

The goal shouldn’t be to get them to convert; it should be to get them to come back on a desktop device, where they’re much more likely to buy.

In this scenario, we’d retarget users with Facebook’s dynamic product ads, which feature products someone has viewed on your site. Create a separate ad set to leverage Dynamic product ads on the Desktop News Feed that exclusively targets users who have come through on your mobile acquisition campaigns.

In short, even if your mobile experience is sub-par, you can bring mobile users into your funnel and convert them on desktop. (Note that this is a good tactic even if you DO have a good mobile experience.)

Don’t let weeks or months of mobile opportunity slip past; get ahead of your developers, use the customer journey to your advantage, and keep the conversions coming.

Sana Ansari is General Manager of 3Q Accelerate, the high-growth division of 3Q Digital, and a contributor to Search Engine Watch.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about managing paid search accounts efficiently. Optimizing pay-per-click accounts requires heaving lifting from analysis, implementation, communication, strategic planning, and the list goes on and on. You need to streamline each process as much as possible in order to be agile, thorough, and productive – and provide stellar results.

Saving time on front-end analysis can help build out your task list for the day and get to making awesome optimizations swiftly. There are numerous tips and tricks to get to data quickly and this article will focus on what I consider an under-utilized element of your AdWords account: the Home screen.

I’ve been polling folks lately and most everyone I’ve asked said they go straight to the “Campaigns” tab within AdWords and dive head-first into a sea of data, campaigns, and everything else that awaits in their account. Most account managers don’t even look at the Home screen.

One Size Fits No One

There is a pretty good reason to ignore this section of your AdWords account: it’s not that useful. The Home screen contains template modules including:

None of these modules are all the helpful, and they most certainly aren’t geared toward the core metrics that matter most to your specific campaigns. However, if you take a few minutes to customize the Home screen, this can be an excellent starting point every time you log into your account. Imagine if you clicked on “Home” and it gave you wealth of data and action items? Yes, we can make this dream happen!

Quick Detour for Saved Filters

Let’s take a quick detour off the Home screen for a minute. Trust me, this is necessary.

More than likely you analyze similar stats in your AdWords account every day. You might be looking at cost-per-acquisition or high-volume keywords that need close attention. In AdWords, you can apply filters to acquire the data you need.

One quick way to streamline your filtering process is to create custom filters. Whenever your filter is set up just right, all you need to do is click “Save Filter” at the bottom of the screen. Now, this saved filter will always be here and you don’t need to re-create it every time!

In this example, I wanted to save a keyword filter for terms that have spent more than $35 with less than one conversion (they aren’t doing very well). I created the filter, and then saved it.

Personalize Your Home Screen

OK! Now, let’s get back to making the Home screen helpful. To personalize your Home screen, just click on “Customize Modules,” at the top of the screen.

What the heck is a “Module”? It’s a fancy term for saved filter! Now, you can see why we needed to take that quick detour to set up saved filters. Your saved filters will be within the Modules screen when you click on “Customize Modules.” Then you can remove the template modules and replace them with modules that mean something to you.

Below is a Home screen that can provide quick insights. The first module shows keywords that are spending and not converting. The second module shows keywords that have good volume but their ROAS is a bit under goal. And the third module shows keywords that are rocking and could perhaps gain even more exposure.

And at the bottom of each module, you can click on “View saved filter,” and you can go straight to these keywords in your account and take quick action. Nice!

Summary With Coffee

I envision you logging into your AdWords account, cup of hot coffee in hand, ready to dig in and do some awesome work. And the first thing you do is check out the Home screen and it has a handful of customized modules that display super-relevant data and helps you get to work quickly. Heck, you could even have your analysis and action list built out before you finish that cup of delicious coffee.

One consistent problem I have seen while analyzing Panda hits has been aggressive and deceptive advertising. And I’ve seen that much more since Panda 4.0 (including P4.1, which just rolled out on September 23).

Specifically, sites employing deceptive or aggressive advertising are facing big problems Panda-wise. For example, sites that trick users into clicking affiliate links, blended ads, low-quality supplemental content, etc. In addition, I noticed a number of sites impacted by both 4.0 and 4.1 that heavily used pagination to break up articles into many component pages (to gain more ad impressions). And I’m not talking about two or three pages of pagination. I’m talking about 10, 20, or even 30 pages of pagination. Yes, I can feel you cringe as you read that. I did, too.

The Traffic Monetization Catch

So, when Panda focuses on user happiness, it’s not hard to see why sites employing deceptive tactics like what I mentioned above would have a hard time battling the mighty Panda. But you might be wondering why those sites would employ such risky tactics (especially when our furry black and white friend is actively roaming the Web). There’s an easy answer. Money.

With larger-scale websites, there are typically multiple teams working together. And I use “together” loosely here. You have the marketing team, content team, dev team, design team, etc. And of course, if the purpose of the website is to make money, you have the monetization team (or ad team).

Advertising-wise, as traffic climbs the ad team sees the potential of boosting revenue. And that’s totally fine. I get it…companies need to make money. But in my opinion, some ad teams have been too aggressive and have caused situations that heavily contributed to Panda attacks.

Like this one. Notice the giant bamboo slide to no traffic on May 20 (Panda 4.0):

And there’s the catch. The marketing team drives traffic. The ad team monetizes that traffic. And they often don’t see eye to eye. Part of the problem is SEO education, and part of the problem includes financial goals. Sure, everyone has goals and the ad team has their own. But that can lead to aggressive ad tactics that put websites at risk.

Let’s Run Some Numbers

Hypothetically speaking, let’s say a website is generating $200,000 in revenue per month via advertising and affiliate relationships. But let’s say the site is employing overactive ad tactics like many full-screen floating ads, blended ads, low-quality supplemental content to third-party sites, masked affiliate links, etc. Panda 4.1 rolls out and kicks the website in the gut and it loses 70 percent of its traffic. By the way, I’ve had a number of companies reach out to me with severe hits like that. I even had one company lose 90 percent of its traffic overnight with Panda 4.1.

The site that was generating $200,000 per month could lose $140,000 per month in advertising revenue due to the Panda hit. If that’s the case, then it would be left with only 30 percent of its original $200,000, which is just $60,000. Wow, that’s a huge loss, right? I’ve seen this scenario many times during my Panda work (to various levels). It’s ugly and causes massive amounts of stress for everyone involved.

The Sinister Surge Doesn’t Help… That’s Why It’s “Sinister”

Another phenomenon that upsets the Panda balance is the sinister surge in traffic prior to an algorithm hit. I wrote about this disturbing situation after seeing it many times since February of 2011 when Panda first rolled out.

Google ends up dishing out more and more organic search traffic, even when there are problems on the site engagement-wise. That means that Google is getting even more engagement data during the surge, even when the site has serious problems. And if Google sees unhappy visitors in aggregate, then Panda can stomp all over the site. I’ve seen it a thousand times.

Warning: Important Point Ahead…Pay Attention

So, you have a surge in visits from Google organic and many of those users are experiencing deceptive or aggressive ad tactics. Both marketers and the ad team often mistakenly believe the surge is a good thing, since they aren’t familiar with Panda. Then boom, the wave crashes, and takes a huge portion of those visits with it (including ad revenue). Then you’re left with serious questions, stress, and confusion. And all of this can happen overnight by the way. Not good.

Advertising Problems and Panda – What I’ve Seen

While helping Panda victims, I’ve come across some glaring advertising issues that cause serious engagement problems. I thought it would be important to list some of them below so you can better understand what I’m referring to. I already mentioned a few above, but I’ll list them below for clarification purposes. Note, these are not the only ad problems that are being employed across the Web. They are simply some of the most common issues I have come across.

Full-Screen Floating Ads (aka Overlay Ads)

If you are employing full-screen ads that take over a user’s entire browser window, then you need to understand a few things from a Panda standpoint. Users hate them, so be very careful when you trigger full-screen floating ads and how often you employ them per session. The more people that get annoyed by takeover ads and then jump back to the search results, the more bamboo you are building. Engagement drops, dwell time is low, and you are sending horrible signals to Google about user happiness.

A mockup of an ad overlay:

If you do employ full-screen floating ads, then make sure users can exit out of the takeover and that’s it very clear how they can exit. During some audits, I found myself extremely frustrated being forced to watch a full-screen ad (which I would never normally do by the way). Full-screen ads that literally take over my screen, don’t let me exit, etc. annoy the heck out of me. And many others feel the same way.

Auto-Play Video Ads (or Audio Ads)

There’s nothing like hitting a Web page for the first time and immediately seeing a video trigger with audio. Most users frantically try to pause the video or at least mute the audio. I’ve seen ads like these on many Panda victim websites.

And there are times that I’ve seen multiple video ads on one page, and both have started playing! I wish I had video of myself trying to find, and then pause, multiple video ads at one time. Needless to say, employing autoplaying video or audio ads can kill engagement.

An example of an autoplaying video ad, plus other serious ad problems:

My recommendation is to make sure users trigger the video and/or audio. Do not autoplay those ads. Again, think about the user and what will drive strong engagement.

Roadblocks (Interstitials)

A roadblock is similar to a full-screen ad, but often redirects to you a different URL where an ad is displayed (in between page visits or even before the first page a user visits). Not only does this completely interrupt the user experience, but you are sending users to a different url automatically. Upon experiencing a roadblock ad, many users frantically try and return to the page they were on or to get through to the destination page. Roadblocks tend to anger a lot of people.

If you are using interstitial ads, I can tell you that a distinct portion of your traffic is not enjoying the roadblocks you have in place. And there’s a chance that many of those users are popping back to the SERPs. And as I’ve mentioned before, low dwell time is something you want to avoid.

Blending of Ads With Content

During Panda audits, I have seen affiliate links and ads cloaked as content. They match the content so well in design, color, etc., that it’s hard to tell they are ads. But when you click them, you sure know they are…

Being transported to some random third-party site is not exactly what I had in mind after searching for a product, service, or solution. And some of those third-party sites are aggressive with their own tactics (and some even have malware problems, viruses, risky downloads, and more.)

“Hell hath no fury like a user scorned.” If you deceive users into clicking ads, then it will come back to bite you. And a Panda bite is worse than your typical animal bite. The pain can last for months (or longer). Do the right thing. Don’t deceive users. Stay out of the gray area of Panda.

Heavy Pagination (for Ad Impressions)

This isn’t as much deception as it is just a horrible user experience. Many publishers charge per impression (typically a CPM, or cost-per-thousand impressions). So, if you have 1 million impressions per day, breaking up articles into smaller pieces across a paginated set could yield 10 to 20 times the number of impressions. The ad team might run the numbers and push to do this.

And I’m here to tell you that excessive pagination can drive users crazy, while also yielding horrible engagement signals. I’ve seen the use of heavy pagination a lot during Panda work (and I’ve seen a serious uptick in sites employing this tactic get hit during Panda 4.0 and 4.1). I’m not sure if that signal was added to Panda recently, but I saw it a lot during my analysis.

38 pages of pagination:

And it contains a “view all” page, which would be great if the site didn’t force me to register to see it…

As a quick example, I’ve been helping a company that got pummeled by Panda (losing more than 60 percent of its traffic overnight). Upon analyzing the site, I noticed they were breaking up their articles into many small pieces (sometimes 10, 20, or 30 or more component pages). On desktop, it was painful to go through an article. Each component page only housed a paragraph or two of content. Then I had to click through to the next page, which of course loaded more ads. But desktop was a breeze compared to mobile. Trying to click through 30 component pages on your mobile phone will literally drive you insane…It was a horrible user experience.

Excessive Pagination – Possible Solutions

Each website is different, and there are several ways to tackle excessive pagination. You could simply migrate all content to one page (the best solution SEO-wise). You could also add a “view all” page and set that up properly SEO-wise – and not force people to register to see it! Then Google would surface that page in the SERPs. And then of course, you could add more content per component page and cut the pagination down by 50 to 75 percent. That’s not the best scenario, but better than providing 20 or 30 pages of pagination.

Low-Quality Supplementary Content

Supplementary content (used by Google in its Quality Rater Guidelines) is any additional content on your Web pages that’s not the core content on the page or ads. For example, you might be providing related articles, your right sidebar probably contains a lot of supplemental content, you might be employing content syndication links from Outbrain, Taboola, and others. And of course, some sites are stacking several content partners on their pages (adding even more supplementary content).

You need to be very careful with the quality of supplementary content and the amount of that content included on your website. Many users don’t know where that content will take them, and they are inherently trusting that clicking those links will be OK. But in reality, some of those links lead to ultra-low-quality pages. I’ve come across many examples of heavy sales landing pages, irrelevant content (based on the original article being viewed), and even some sites with malware and risky downloads.

And as mentioned earlier, supplementary content has made its way into Google’s quality rater guidelines. So yes, this is on Google’s radar for sure. Always think about your users, where you are sending them, and what type of experience they will have. If you can’t guarantee a positive experience, then don’t do it.

An example of supplementary content. Can you tell which links are external vs. internal?

Fixing Advertising Problems After a Panda Hit

Once ad problems are identified, the solution is clear from my standpoint. Companies hit by Panda need to significantly cut back on their aggressive ad tactics. That means removing roadblocks, cutting down full-screen takeover ads, removing blocks of low-quality supplementary content, removing deceptive blocks of advertising, and more.

I explain to clients that they need to do this quickly, so users can start sending positive engagement signals to Google. I also make it clear that this can take a while (months). Some clients move fast to follow my recommendations, and they can often see recovery in a quicker timeframe. But then there are the companies that experience a civil war over advertising strategy.

For example, some ad teams might have sold through deals that they need to honor. But the problem is that there’s no traffic. So the ad team wants to monetize the remaining traffic even more. The marketing team (typically being guided by me), now understands Panda, how severe it can be, and how long recovery can take. They want to recover quickly, so they are ready to take action.

In my opinion, Band-Aids are not a long-term Panda recovery plan. Temporary recoveries can happen (as I documented in a recent case study). Avoid the Panda rollercoaster by making significant changes based on an audit. That’s how you avoid subsequent Panda visits.

A Final Note About Panda Recovery and Ad Tactics

When clients recover from Panda, I’m quick to explain a few key points. First, now is not the time to turn back on the ad fire hose! As I explained above, I have seen temporary recoveries. Panda rolls out frequently and if you add the problems back to your site that got you hit in the first place, then you are asking to be hit again. Panda is about long-term quality changes to your site. Don’t revert back to aggressive advertising tactics once you see a surge in traffic.

Second, now is also not the time to stop working on Panda remediation. My advice is to act like the recovery didn’t happen yet. Keep driving forward to fix the problems that were surfaced during the Panda audit. There’s an inherent gray area to Panda (and all algorithms). You want to get as far out of the gray area as possible. If you barely cross the threshold, you can get hit again. I’ve had companies reach out to me with rollercoaster Panda trending over the years. It’s maddening. Avoid that at all costs.

Summary: Understand Your Ad Problems… Because Panda Does

There’s a fine balance between simply providing advertising on your site and annoying the heck out of users to the point of insanity. From a Panda standpoint, it’s critically important that you don’t cause serious user engagement issues by employing aggressive or deceptive ad tactics. If you do, users will be unhappy, they will bounce off your site back to the SERPs, low dwell time will ensue, and Google will pick this up. And that’s a recipe for SEO disaster. Always think about user engagement. Panda does.

While revenues increased by 20 percent year-on-year to $16.52 billion, Google’s profits took a battering, which has been credited to increased spending at the company.

The firm splashed out on almost 3,000 new employees, while Google’s real estate costs – covering its data centers and hardware inventory – increased by 37 percent year-on-year to $3.35 billion.

Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said, “Google had another strong performance this quarter, with revenue up 20 percent year-on-year. We continue to be excited about the growth in our advertising and emerging businesses.”

There was some good news hidden away in Google’s earnings report, however. The firm revealed that average ad prices, or “cost-per-click,” in the third quarter dipped by just 2 percent from last year, the smallest decrease the firm has reported in three years, and down from a 6 percent dive in Q2.

Google’s ad prices have been sinking owing to the growing popularity of smartphones over laptops and desktop PCs.

Marco Veremis, chief executive at Upstream said, “Google’s lackluster earnings in Q3 shows the struggle to bring increased mobile advertising revenue is going to go on a while longer.

“Its strategy in most markets of letting partner companies alter the Android OS has led to Google losing grip on that revenue stream.”

Google also announced that the total number of paid ads expanded by 17 percent in the third quarter, down from the 25 percent climb announced last quarter.

The company also revealed that it had appointed Omid Kordestani as its new chief business officer, replacing Nikesh Arora who had left to join Japan’s Softbank.

Google’s third-quarter earnings announcement comes just days after unveiling Android 5.0 Lollipop, the Nexus 9, and the Nexus 6 smartphone.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

And it appears that lots of clients have adopted them as part of their copy strategy.

But how are they performing so far?

Granted, this is a very new offering, and there hasn’t been a lot of time to get data. And being a non-clickable search format, this is a very new concept. Not like the other extensions.

However, I wanted to be an early adaptor. Always the pioneer, I decided to set up a controlled test with one of my client’s campaigns.

It was a small campaign that doesn’t spend a large amount of money per month, and has a small number of adgroups and keywords. I added callouts on 9/10, and made no other changes to the campaign for a month to see if the callout change alone would have any impact. We built a graph to compare the average cost per clicks (CPCs) and average position.

Our overall position slightly improved, but our CPCs showed some elevation. With another client, we saw an increase in CPCs as well.

When we specific pulled the data on the three callouts, the numbers were rather interesting:

It shows the first two callouts to be virtually identical in all of the metrics.

Since callouts are not a clickable link, why are the callouts broken out individual, if they are showing almost the same data?

In looking at another campaign that we set up callouts for (which were set up at the ad group level as opposed to the previous example which was at the campaign level), we saw the same issue with the impressions and clicks not showing any diversity, but we also saw no clicks for the extension:

In discussing this with Google directly, we found out we were not the only ones who had noticed this! Callouts are of course not clickable – so when you see click report with callouts, you are seeing clicks based on a person clicks on the ad itself, or another extensions. Callouts are also not served up every time with an ad, which can result in variances, and the number of callouts displayed can also vary. Since you can have a total of two to four callouts per ad, each time your ad is served, the number of callouts can be different, or the callout may not be served at all.

In the data above, the “other” clicks are coming from other things in the ad that are clickable, as the callout is not. All that can be shown for the callout is the impression data only. Yet this can be a bit confusing when you look at the reports for the first time.

For mobile, Google will typically display three callouts, and for desktop and tablet, two to four.

Back to our question as to why each extension is showing similar data…

Per Google, this will change over time. Since callouts are so new, the data gathering is still in process. Once more data is obtained we should start seeing which callout is more of the “clear winner.”

Have you implemented callouts in your AdWords campaigns, and what are you seeing? Would love to get your feedback!

The lessons are in no particular order, but include challenges from starting, running, growing, and automating processes to adding new services, adding technology, raising money, and selling an agency. (Here are four common mistakes agencies make to lose clients.)

The number one lesson: drink more beer, as seen below. Especially if you have a client stiff you on a huge AdWords bill that you were running through your agency like this example!

My journey started back in 1998 when one of my former college classmates and I decide to make websites for local businesses in New England. Two years later, referrals were the lifeline of the business, and clients were happy with their websites. But, back then people thought you just had to be on the Internet or WORLD WIDE WEB to make millions. Reality eventually hit, and most of them realized they needed to market their website in order to make money. For each client ready to invest, we decided to test all online marketing channels which only included these three:

1. Email Marketing (Spam was legal)
2. Banner ads (no ad networks, no remarketing, just banners on sites)
3. SEO or search marketing (PPC was not invented, just organic SEO)

By far search marketing was the most profitable channel so we changed direction and became a search marketing agency. There was no paid search in the late ‘90s-early 2000, so we only offered organic SEO to rank on Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Webcrawler, and Dogpile (anyone remember those days?).

Next, I met one of the first true organic SEO pioneers though a mutual client and the rest was history. We started doing SEO consulting and services for Lego, Ford, IBM, Iron Mountain, Boeing, and Stanford University, just to name a few.

We partnered and started offering search marketing services while developing software to track keyword conversions. PPC changed everything from, “I’ll take as much traffic as you can get me,” to, “If I’m paying for every click, then it needs to convert.” We brought IndexTools to North America, which eventually was sold to Yahoo in 2008.

After the sale of our core technology (which turned it into Yahoo Web Analytics and eventually was FREE), we had to focus back on services to grow revenue. In 2013, we finally sold the service/agency division of Engine Ready to BRIM Agency and here are some specific lessons I learned along the way.

Lesson #1: The People You Hire Will Make or Break Your Agency

If you can’t pay top dollar and hire amazing people, you better have a kick-ass culture or career path to get quality employees, because the people you hire will be the number one driver of success or failure. Here are five great questions to ask a potential search marketing employee.

Image Credit: http://blog.smartbear.com/wp-content/uploads/imports/interview.jpg

Do not hire full-time employees too early or they will drag you down if a big client cancels. Do as much work as you can yourself or with contractors before you hire employees. Make sure the business has enough recurring revenue to support the salary you offer the first few hires and do a complete background check and interview process.

Lesson #2: Know Your Numbers – Profit per Customer and Revenue per Employee

Budgeting, financing, and measuring profit are all very important, but the last thing I wanted to do was track hours for each client and make employees use time tracking tools. I tried to focus on culture and a cool working environment, but I lost track of which clients were eating up everyone’s time and which ones were getting the service they deserved. Ultimately, this lack of tracking cost me thousands of dollars in profit.

Image Credit: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/DM-Resize/photos.demandstudios.com/getty/article/192/56/80410231.jpg?w=650&h=406&keep_ratio=1&webp=1

Pricing accurately, understanding margins, and showing value to clients is one of the hardest tasks to master. In the beginning, the only number that matters is revenue growth, but once a stable client list is built the focus needs to shift. Revenue is good, but I see several agencies drowning in debt because they are forgetting about the bottom line.

It becomes even more important to focus on the finances and bottom-line profit when negotiating to raise money or sell your agency. Knowing your numbers will be the main leverage in the negotiation process.

Lesson #3: Invest in Thought Leadership and Marketing

The referrals will dry up or at least slow down and you have to have a plan in place to generate leads and gain new business. Marketing will have to be implemented, so what is your sales and marketing plan?

Image Credit: http://www.inboundgrowth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/thought-leadership-slider.png

Trade shows can sound like a good idea, but only if you can speak as a thought leader. Exhibiting alone was rarely profitable. Paid search, display ads, remarketing and SEO, or content marketing were channels that proved profitable after several months of optimization.

Lesson #4: Treat Your Clients Like GOLD, or the Gold Rush Will End Quickly

Part of the reason companies hire agencies is to be “wined and dined.” They want to feel special, especially if they are a big brand or have a large budget. If you provide an amazing customer experience, they will buy more services from you and stay on longer. It is VERY expensive to replace clients and lost revenue.

Image Credit: http://www.realestateinvestingnewswatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/customer-service.jpg

It is much easier to upsell an existing customer than to replace them with new clients.

Client retention will be the lifeline of your agency. The more you focus on the best possible customer experience, even when results are not hitting the goals you’ll be able to keep clients longer.

Lesson #5: Do Not Try to Be All Things to All People!

Define which service you are really good at and continue to do it well. Once you have your core service defined, determine what makes you different. Define your target market or ideal customer and focus 100 percent on them. All too often we get caught saying yes we can do that to every request a client makes and it can really backfire. There is nothing wrong with being a focused, specific boutique agency, but don’t say you do everything when you really don’t have the team, process, or proven results for that service.

Lesson #6: First Impression and Client Meetings

You only get one first impression and one chance to present your proposal. Rule number one: make sure decision-makers are there. Never email a proposal; if you are going to invest time doing the research and putting a proposal together, they can give you full attention for one hour.

Always have an agenda for every meeting and estimate the time needed. It can be very frustrating for Clients to not have a clear understanding of the meeting, purpose, goals, and action items. I end every meeting with action items and I would recommend you do the same thing.

Define specific goals with KPIs or dashboard measurement in the proposal before the contract is signed. Expectations can be very tricky to manage and agreeing on the metrics that will define success or failure upfront is extremely important.

Lesson #7: Understand Your Competition!

There are several agencies in every state and country, but who do you really compete with? Who offers a similar service to the same market? How do they price services and deliverables compared to your proposals and agreements? Learn as much about your competitors as you can so you can figure out how to stand out and position yourself as the better choice.

This same process must be done on your clients and here is a post I wrote about using competitive intelligence tools to generate more profit. These tools can help you win more business by including competitive, keyword, and specific ad performance data in your proposal.

Lesson #8: It’s a Rollercoaster!

Limit your celebration of big contracts and don’t fear the occasional drop in client revenue.

Managing the highs and lows in any business can be tough, but agency owners have unique challenges. It’s impossible to keep all of your clients forever and what is especially challenging is when your staff doesn’t support the revenue. Having employees as your number one cost of goods makes hiring and firing much more important and something you have to get good at managing or else you’ll fail.

Image Credit: http://www.picgifs.com/clip-art/entertainment/rollercoaster/clip-art-rollercoaster-428971.jpg

There is no agency that doesn’t go through major peaks and valleys usually revolving around landing a BIG account to losing your biggest client. The highs of winning a big proposal over several agencies can be amazing. The lows of having a slow quarter and having to let people go can be devastating.

I understand that the rollercoaster ride can be exhausting, but if you are good at what you do, it will usually will go back up but only if you apply lesson #1 and hire the right people. Try to stay focused on your mission statement and long term goals to limit extreme emotional highs and lows

Summary and Action Items:

If you love marketing, enjoy people, like to work hard, and can deliver real results for your clients, you will be able to build a successful agency. Remember to begin with the end in mind.

Why am I starting this agency? Am I looking to just do consulting on my own? Have a small shop focusing on specialized services?

Or are you trying to grow into a multi-million dollar full-service agency that can be handed to your children or sold in the future?

If you want to eventually sell your agency, to get anything more than .5 – 1x revenue or 4-6x EBITA, you typically need to be generating more than $10 million in annual revenue and don’t name it after your first or last name. This is a common mistake I see people make; they call their business “my name consulting,” which seems logical. The two biggest problems with this is that sometimes larger clients might not think you are large enough and most importantly a potential buyer knows all the brand equity is in you, versus the name of a company that they can keep growing even if you are not there.

Do your best and apply some of these lessons where appropriate. Please share your agency stories, lessons, or comments below as I always appreciate the feedback.

With 72 percent of consumers searching for local information on a smartphone visiting a store or location within five miles (and likely within five to 10 minutes), the local opportunity is clear. But local marketing consists of more than just optimized pages and listings – it’s a complex ecosystem that is always on and always changing. Because local truly puts the customer at the center of cross-functional corporate marketing programs that span paid, earned, and owned (think search, social, and mobile), many multi-location marketers have struggled to rally their teams to define, implement, and track their local efforts.

Enter the local marketing adoption curve. By taking a phased crawl, walk, run approach to building a comprehensive, cross-functional local marketing program, brands can be more visible, relevant, and engaging in the eyes of their consumers and, ultimately, drive customer acquisition across hundreds to thousands of locations.

Crawl

Listing management is the required foundation for a local strategy. At the crawl stage, you want to focus on achieving brand consistency by getting the basics right with your local listings: have you claimed all the local listings where your name belongs? Is basic yet essential information about your local businesses accurately listed? Here, you want to cleanse your data and ensure that it is consistently distributed to the major search engines, IYPs, directories, and social media networks. You should also distribute data to aggregators, including Acxiom, Neustar (i.e. Localeze), Factual, and Infogroup. With clean, accurate data being pushed out to the entire ecosystem, you will ensure continued data health that will translate into accurate listings.

Walk

In the walk stage, you should think more about how location pages are optimized. Location pages should be created with links to social media and review sites. Title tags should include city, and meta descriptions should include categories. You should claim and optimize your listings on Google+ and add location-specific images and videos. During the walk stage, your data analytics should be complete enough to help you identify opportunities to grow your brand based on performance of local sites and any insights into customer behavior you can gain. At this point, you should be getting enough analytics data – through clicks as well as click-to-call tracking – to start capitalizing on the opportunity to build market leadership for your brand. The outcome of the walk stage should be improved brand visibility (as measured by such key performance indicators (KPIs) as improved rankings).

Run

When you are running, your local marketing efforts should be getting more sophisticated through the use of hyper-local paid search and paid social targeting DMAs and other defined demographics. You should be adopting a multi-location strategy across an extensive network of mobile apps and incorporating local promotions. In essence, at the run stage, you should be ready to consistently share information across search, social, and mobile to improve customer acquisition. Paid search and paid social should drive visitors to the location pages created in the “walk” stage. The outcome of the run stage is increased lead volume and a lower blended cost per lead. At this point, there should be no question about measuring the value of local.

And what happens after you run? Well, you should optimize your local marketing efforts based on a more refined understanding of how your customers behave across your network. You should optimize all your local marketing for customers who use multiple devices to find your brand. In other words, once you are running, you really are “all in” with local marketing. But don’t stop running. Local marketing success is dependent across search, social, and mobile – a complex ecosystem that is always on and always changing. To be successful, marketers must be agile and continuously adapt to the changes.

Success with local is all about commitment. If you apply the time and resources to implement and track local campaigns, these efforts will yield solid results. Local digital marketing can drive the best ROI for large multi-location brands. Where does your brand live on the “Local Marketing Adoption Curve”?

All of these things are worth looking into when considering what to try but finding the right elements to A/B test can be very difficult.

Today, I’m going to introduce a shortcut for coming up with winning test ideas. Instead of staring at your page over and over again to come up with one or two new ideas, you can use this shortcut to generate a plethora of ideas in a short amount of time.

Introducing Competitive Keyword Research

Competitive keyword research helps PPC advertisers find out which keywords their competitors are bidding on. This can be done using tools like iSpionage, TheSearchMonitor or Adgooroo. Not only do the tools make you feel like the James Bond of search advertising, but you can then use the competitive data to find profitable keywords you aren’t bidding on and to identify new ad groups you should create.

It’s possible your competitors will send you down a rabbit hole of unprofitable keywords if they don’t know what they’re doing, but it’s even more possible that you’ll uncover keyword opportunities you haven’t thought of yet.

Think about it this way: When you do keyword research with the AdWords Keyword Planner, you’re limited to the number of ad group ideas that you come up with on your own and that AdWords suggests. Oftentimes there are keywords you aren’t bidding on that have high volume and low cost per click. You’ll catch these types of terms by doing competitive keyword research and learning from what the top advertisers are doing in your industry.

Being able to start with a keyword list that’s already working for someone else will shorten your time to profitability. But not only can you use it to find new keywords, you can also use it to spy on your competitors’ landing pages in order to come up with testing ideas. Here’s how.

How to Spy on Your Competitors’ Landing Pages

To begin, you need to choose a competitor to spy on. We’re going to use SalesForce for our example and enter their domain into iSpionage to get started.

Conducting a search like this provides a lot of useful information. You’ll learn approximately how much SalesForce is spending per month on PPC ads, their top keywords, their top competitors and their top ads, all of which is very useful.

But, as we mentioned before, the most helpful information for CRO is which landing pages your competitors direct their traffic to, which is something we can find out by clicking on the destination URL for an ad.

After clicking, you’re taken to the exact landing page SalesForce uses for each ad in its account. When we do that for the two ads listed above, we’re taken to the following page for the Keyword: “partner portal.”

We are taken to this page below for the keyword: “sales team tracking software.”

So what can we learn from these pages?

• Salesforce uses a very simple design that places the emphasis on the demo sign-up form.
• They offer access to all of their demos through a single sign up.
• The offer on the landing page matches the keyword being bid on. Instead of directing their ads to the same landing page, they direct visitors to a page with copy that matches what people are searching for. They also reuse the same template, which saves design and development resources in order to efficiently create landing pages that match the keywords without costing a ton of money or time.
• They include stats to show how customers benefit from using their product.
• Trust symbols are placed at the bottom of the page to make visitors feel more secure about giving their information.
• A phone number is included at the bottom in case people want to pick up the phone and talk with a real human. Yes, some people still like to use the phone.

These are very useful bits of information and reveal that SalesForce employs a number of industry best practices with its landing pages. And as mentioned before, you can use this information to come up with testing ideas for your own site.

For example, maybe you aren’t currently using landing pages. Your boss hasn’t bought into the idea or approved the budget to design and create landing pages for your products or services. You can create a presentation with screenshots of your competitors’ landing pages and explain, “We’re getting killed — they’re using custom landing pages for different keyword groups. If we want to keep up, we need to do the same.”

Those are some of the main things we can learn from ethically spying on competitors’ landing pages without clicking on their ads and making them pay. Although who doesn’t want to drive up your competitor’s AdEords bill? Ha.

But — wait, there’s more.

When we do a keyword search for “CRM software,” we see the following list of top ads.

SalesForce has the top ad listed, but there are four more competitors: QuickBase from Intuit, Syspro, Zoho and Oracle. Let’s look at QuickBase’s landing page to see what we learn.

Here are some things that stand out from the page:

• They offer a 30-day free trial compared to SalesForce’s offer to view demos.
• They include a link to learn more about QuickBase in case the information on the page isn’t sufficient.
• They show off the fact that 50 Fortune 100 companies use the product.
• They also include trust symbols and mention the other award-winning products they’ve created: Quickbooks, Quicken and TurboTax.

So what could you test from this page?

• You could consider offering a 30-day free trial on a landing page in place of your current offer to see if conversions go up.
• You could consider including a link to learn more to see if that leads to more conversions compared to only offering the information included on the landing page.
• You could consider adding logos of your top customers to show off your clientele and gain more credibility.

Do you see how this works? You can go page by page to learn the best practices of advertisers in your industry or in industries with effective advertising practices.

The best part about it is that you learn from the tests that companies with big budgets have run. It’s possible that SalesForce and Intuit have A/B tested their pages 100 times to get to the version they currently use. If you know an advertiser takes A/B testing seriously, you can piggy-back off of their tests, glean some lessons and ideas and then test those ideas to see if you can tighten your funnel and improve conversion rates.

In summary, you can use competitive keyword research to:

• Find profitable keywords you’re not currently bidding on
• Improve ad copy by learning what the top advertisers have written
• Come up with A/B testing ideas by studying your competitors’ pages

So go ahead and do it. Conduct some keyword research, write down some notes, take some screenshots and show your boss how much you’ve learned about the competition and how you can use the insights to improve your company’s conversion rates. Any comments or other examples of how to generate landing page testing ideas are welcome.

How this new wave of gTLDs will affect click-through rate and domain trust is anyone’s guess, but the folks at online marketing agency Globe Runner wanted to figure out if the new gTLDs fare better or worse than — or the same as — .coms.

The agency explored this idea by running a test on a handful of paid search campaigns. The tests consisted of AdWords campaigns where all else was equal, including the keywords bid on, the ad copy, the landing pages and so forth — the only piece that was different was the gTLD.

The test was run against two pairs of domains:

www.3caratdiamonds.com versus www.3carat.diamonds

and

www.mattitosmenu.com versus www.mattitos.menu

On the .com versus .diamonds test, Globe Runner found that when it came to ad impressions, .diamonds was a clear winner, and even showed more clicks, but still a lower click-through rate (CTR) than .com:

Interestingly, the conversion rate was higher on the .diamonds gTLD – even when the landing pages and call-to-actions (CTA) were the same for both domains in the test (note that each landing page had two different CTAs). Ultimately, the .diamonds campaign cost less.

On the alternative test with the .com versus .menu domain extension, the result showed more impressions for .com, but a higher CTR for .menu and lower cost per click; in fact, the .menu campaign cost less overall.

Once a user clicked through to the landing page, it appears that those who went to the .com version spent more time on the site than those who went to the .menu version (even though the pages were the same).

The report states that at least one of the takeaways is that the new gTLDs are able to compete well in the paid search channel:

When using Google AdWords, the gTLD domain names are ultimately “up to par” with a .com domain name. Whether or not you choose to use a .com domain name or a new gTLD domain name, if you use Google AdWords, there’s no clear “bias” when it comes to the end users and consumer buyers.

Globe Runner Senior Strategist Bill Hartzer authored the report and echoed that statement in a quote, saying, “Based on the results of our testing, it appears that the new gTLD domain names are definitely here to stay.”

He added that there may be some benefits to using a newer gTLD domain name over a .com domain name in certain cases.

“So don’t be so quick to dismiss using a new gTLD for your website or search engine marketing efforts,” Hartzer said.

For more information on the test and to access the full report, go here.

The report analyzed who spent the most on AdWords campaigns, which health insurance keywords were the most competitive and more. The five advertisers examined included:

1. IndividualHealthQuotes.com
2. Humana.com
3. GoLong.com
4. eHealthInsurance.com
5. HealthPlans.com

The following chart outlines the AdWords investment of the top advertisers for January 2014 to June 2014, with IndividualHealthQuotes.com leading with more than $4.4 million in spend.

Looking at a comparison chart, we can see the performance snapshot of those five competitors as it relates to spend, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and more.

HealthPlans.com had the highest coverage, with ads showing about 30 percent of the time, but eHealthInsurance.com had the highest CTR and lowest CPC at nearly 6 percent and at $2.91, respectively.

Which keywords did health insurance advertisers spend the most on in the first six months of 2014?

The following image shows the Top 20 keywords and their respective spend, with “health insurance” ($8.2 million in spend), “medicare” ($5.5 million in spend) and “blue cross blue shield” ($4.4 million in spend) as the top three:

Spending more to secure visibility for popular health insurance terms is widespread. In February, Kenshoo released findings of a report that showed health insurance was among the top subsectors in the insurance category that advertisers spent money on.

And with good cause. A Milward Brown Digital study showed the potential of search traffic to insurance brands. Its data showed 30 percent of website traffic in June 2014 was a result of search traffic – specifically for auto insurance brands.

For more highlights of AdGooroo’s latest findings on paid search for the health insurance sector, check out this post.