30-second summary:

• Google networks can be tricky when deciding which ones are best for your goals and budget
• Three tips that will help you to utilize the networks strategically
• You first need to understand the difference before selecting a network
• Clean data is key when analyzing performance, so it is best to keep network targeting separately
• Where a user is at in the conversion funnel will tell you if the network brings conversions
• By having two different campaigns that are network specific, you will be able to properly target your audience with clear messaging while being able to access key data points quickly and accurately

There are two networks within Google AdWords – display and search. When you set up a campaign for the first time, you may notice an option to add either one of these within the settings.

The search network ads appear on Google’s search results page, and the display network ads appear on sites, videos, and apps. But what looks like a good idea to get more visibility, may not help you in the end when measuring performance.

To reap the benefits of both search and display, you need to be strategic about how you are targeting users on these platforms. Here are three tips for utilizing the networks within Google AdWords:

Tip #1: Know the difference

Display select versus display network are different even though the listing of display network in your settings can be a little misleading. The display select is a hybrid campaign model. While you can take your search network ads to the next level by adding them to display, it is not ideal for tight budgets.

By nature, the display network expands its reach to a broader audience. When you add this option, you are releasing control over to Google. By keeping everything in search, you are targeting an active user who wants to find something relative to the keywords within the campaign.

The display network will boost visibility, but it is not as targeted and should not be used by those with a smaller budget. When users are on even display select, they may not be ready to buy. In fact, these users are far out in the conversion funnel. Accomplishing clicks is not easy in this network with an ad-driven by copy.

For those who need to increase awareness, then display is for you. Ad space on the network is great, so you can reach and broaden your audience.

Tip #2: Make sure data is clean

If you are using a search network with display select, then your data may not be as clean. The search network has a higher click-through rate (CTR) than the display. So, if you are looking at the overall data of the campaign, you may not be able to get a quick and accurate look at performance.

The impressions and clicks generated by the display network are not applied to the keywords within your campaign. The reason for this is because those impressions and clicks are not actually “search”. Therefore, to truly evaluate performance, you need to take a deeper look.

To measure, you need to go to each individual ad group in Google AdWords and look at how the display select and the search network are each performing. Users are in different places within the conversion funnel, so it is important to understand the industry benchmarks for each network when measuring data. Therefore, it is recommended to divide the campaigns when using both of Google AdWords’ networks.

Tip #3: Understand the conversion funnel

The conversion funnel is made up of different stages, such as awareness, consideration, and decision. When a user is on the display network, they are most likely in the awareness stage. When a user is in the search network, they are at the bottom of the funnel. These users know they want to buy a product or service, but they are evaluating where to buy it.

The reason you need to understand the funnel is not only from a data perspective, but it is also for creating quality ad copy. Your messages should be appropriate for where that user is in the conversion funnel. You would never ask someone to buy from you if you just met them at a networking event. It is important to meet the user where they are at by creating ad copy that is relevant.

A dual-network strategy is not for everyone. So, before diving into both, determine your goals and evaluate if both will help you to meet them. By having two different campaigns that are network-specific, you will be able to properly target your audience with clear messaging while being able to access key data points quickly and accurately.

Ashley G. Schweigert is Owner at Marcom Content by Ashley, LLC.

30-second summary:

• PPC advertising is a highly effective way to drive targeted prospects to websites, sales pages, or blogs.
• Even though PPC can take up some parts of your budget, there are important benefits attached to this practice.
• Did you know, 92% of all keywords that people type into search engines are long tails?
• This article gives you a brief on the benefits of having a PPC strategy, must-haves for PPC advertising through Google Adwords, elements of attractive and effective PPC Ads, and more on optimizing your Google Adwords PPC strategy.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is an important component of online marketing. Specific strategies can be used by advertisers to maximize the return from their PPC marketing. PPC advertising is a highly effective way to drive targeted prospects to websites, sales pages, or blogs. Digital marketers can choose between Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, or Bing Ads. However, most online marketers prefer using Google AdWords for their PPC strategy since it displays their ads on Google SERPs.

A. Benefits of Google Ads PPC advertising

Though PPC marketing costs money, it has five important benefits:

1. Convenience and speed

Advertisers can set up their PPC ad campaigns easily and quickly. They can use PPC ads to target their prospects with precision and get results almost immediately. According to Neil Patel, SEO expert and co-founder of both Crazy Egg and Hello Bar:

                    “With PPC, you can drive visitors to your website in hours, not months”

2. Adaptability

Ad text, keywords, and other elements of PPC ads can be constantly tweaked to optimize and so maximize their effectiveness.

3. Cost-effectiveness

Google Adwords charges advertisers only when there are clicks on their ads and not merely when ads are displayed.

4. Budget flexibility

Advertisers can decide on the budget of their PPC campaign since Google Adwords does not have any minimum spending limits. For instance, they can set a maximum daily budget of twenty dollars and a maximum cost of twenty cents for each click on their ad, which they can change whenever they want.

5. Predictability

With a PPC campaign, digital marketers can easily predict the number of their visitors based on how much they spend. The search engine algorithm is less of a factor. In one of his PPC related articles, Neil Patel stated,

“Spend more, get more visitors. If you want exactly 10,000 visitors, you can get exactly 10,000 visitors”,

Despite all these benefits of Google Ads PPC advertising, first-time digital marketers should be attentive as they may lose a lot on their invested money if they ever fail to properly set up their PPC marketing campaigns.

B. Preparation before starting a Google Ads PPC campaign

The first thing new marketers should do is to read thoroughly the Google Adwords Getting Started Guide, which has a large amount of useful information. Next, they should use the Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool and create a comprehensive list of relevant keywords for their products or services.

Use of long-tail keyword phrases

Since the price per click of PPC ads is determined by competitive bidding of search terms, popular search terms such as “insurance”, “stop smoking”, and “weight-loss” cost several dollars for the top three positions on the search results. On the other hand, long-tail keywords are phrases that are not searched very often but are more likely to be used by people who are willing to buy.

Ahrefs, in fact, reports that 92% of all keywords get 10 or fewer searches per month. In other words, 92% of all keywords that people type into search engines are long tails.

C. Elements of attractive and effective PPC ads

Well written ads are decisive to the success of a Google Ads PPC strategy. They should highlight the key benefit of the product or service so that potential clients click on them.

Marketers should also include these elements in their ads:

1. The price of the product

Users who see the price of the product and still click the ad are more likely to buy the product. If they think the price is too high, they may not click on the ad and save the cost of that click.

2. A strong call-to-action

Specific call-to-action phrases such as “purchase”, “buy”, “call today”, “sign up”, and “order ensures” the prospects understand what they are expected to do after they clicking the ad.

3. The best performing keyword preferably in the title of the ad

Whenever users type that keyword and the ad is displayed, the keyword phrase appears “in bold font” within the ad on the Google search page. This will draw their attention to the ad.

4. The URL of the specific page on the website that has the product

If people who click the ad do not find the product on that page, they are likely to exit and click some other ad.

D. Fine-tuning PPC management to boost its profitability

Advertisers can experiment with different offers and call-to-action phrases and test multiple ads. Google Adwords rotates ads automatically within the ad group and displays, more often, the better-performing one. They can remove keywords that are not getting enough clicks and replace them with others. Also, they can decrease or increase the maximum cost-per-click and check the effect on the performance of their ads.

E. Additional strategies to increase the cost-effectiveness of your Google Ads PPC marketing

Submit negative keywords

Advertisers should make a list of keywords that cause their ads to be displayed but are not related to their product. After that, they should submit them as negative keywords by putting a negative sign in front of those keywords. By doing this, they will ensure that anyone using those keywords won’t have their ad displayed to them. For instance, if the product is about “how to stop smoking”, advertisers should exclude anything like “smoking chimneys” or any other sources of smoke!

“Some keywords might have far different user intent and bring in clicks that are an immediate bounce but won’t turn into a conversion”.

Explained SEO expert Rinko de Jong, in an email interview.

“This could also lead to ad impressions that result in no clicks. Both can weaken the quality score of your ad resulting in negatively impacting your ad placement and cost per click”, he added.

Disallow ads to be displayed in Google’s content network partner sites

Clicks originating from these websites are usually of a lower quality than those from search results because they come from people who are browsing that website, not people who are actively searching for the product of the advertiser. So, these clicks might result in fewer sales but will cost definitely just the same.

Pay-Per-Click marketing has the potential to drive a steady stream of visitors to affiliate sites, sales pages, or websites resulting in increased sales and profits if it is properly set up and constantly monitored.

Jacob M. is a copywriter, marketing blogger, and inbound marketing consultant.

30-second summary:

• Affiliate marketers can use Google Analytics to do the following – Google Event Tracking to monitor on-site engagements, Google Dashboards for analyzing user behavior, and build custom Audiences for improving audience retargeting.
• As an affiliate marketer, Google Analytics does not provide you with off-site tracking, so you can’t see what actions a person performs on a merchant site after leaving your website.
• With server-side tracking and Google Analytics, you can monitor an entire affiliate funnel through one platform. Advantages include the ability to create lookalike audiences based on people who made a purchase, run improved retargeting campaigns, and export lookalike data across multiple ad platforms.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides valuable insights for anyone managing a website. In this article, I will discuss how to use Google Analytics for your affiliate marketing campaigns. I will then show you how to use third-party tools to provide you with additional insights to generate more revenue from your existing traffic and make better use of your ad budget.

How marketers currently use Google Analytics for affiliate tracking

If you are using Pay Per Click (PPC) ads as your primary customer acquisition channel, your profit margins are directly tied to ad costs. Any edge you gain that improves your ROAS will provide you with a competitive advantage in the ad auction.

There are three primary levers of a PPC campaign, the ad copy, the audience targeting, and the landing page experience. The insights you gain through Google Analytics can help you improve audience targeting and the landing page experience.

Google Event Tracking allows you to track outbound clicks on affiliate links. Once set up, the dashboard is accessible through Behavior > Events. If you know the average conversion rate for a product, you can assign each click a value by setting up Goal Values.

You then need to make modifications to the GA tracking code or add a special configuration to your GTM tag. This article covers event tracking in more detail.

With Google Event Tracking, you can monitor your assumed profit margins for a campaign through Google Analytics. Of course, these figures are far from accurate.

When implemented effectively, Goal Values provide you with a theoretical model for predicting your campaign’s profitability. However, it does not reflect your actual sales. To access this data, you need to log in to your affiliate dashboard, check the sales, and see if the predicted profit margins align with the real results. Moreover, affiliate platforms provide differing levels of insights. That means you might only get a “gross sale value” that covers sales from all traffic, as opposed to traffic from one website.

The second thing most affiliate marketers will do is review the information provided through Google Analytics dashboards to monitor what people are doing on their landing pages. For example, you might monitor how far down a page people scroll, how much time they spend on the page, the bounce rate, and more. You can also see the number of affiliate link outbound clicks.

You can run A/B tests and other experiments to check how your actions impact the CTR to affiliate links. You can adjust the position of affiliate links and the placement of the products you are promoting to improve CTR.

Insights gained from Google Analytics provide you with essential data to test your assumptions. You can use this data to improve the landing page experience and boost your CTR.

Any improvements you make to the landing page experience can and should improve your ROAS.

The final thing you can do is use Google Analytics to improve your initial targeting. If you are tracking who clicked on the affiliate link, you can create a refined lookalike audience for Google AdWords through Google Analytics. The following guide discusses audience targeting and Similar Audiences.

Any improvement to your targeting will give you an edge in the ad auction.

What are the limitations of Google Analytics for affiliate tracking?

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for monitoring the on-site activities of your visitors. As a business owner that controls an entire funnel, you can place your Google Analytics tag across your site, including the checkout page where the transaction actually takes place. Therefore, Google Analytics provides you with all the data you might conceivably need to monitor and optimize a funnel.

Rather than relying on assumed transaction values, you can monitor everything through one or more Google Analytics dashboards. Unfortunately, as an affiliate marketer, since you can’t place your GA tag on the merchant “thank you” page, Google Analytics fails to provide you with these insights. You are forced to jump between your affiliate programs, the ads platform, and Google Analytics to monitor how your PPC campaigns are performing. 

I discussed why you couldn’t use GA Event Tracking for the final stages of an affiliate funnel. It is an inconvenience that prevents the real attribution of transactions to an ad click. 

This issue impacts your marketing at two crucial levels, which will inevitably increase your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and your ability to automate your campaign targeting and optimization:

1. Your entire audience is blended into general “buckets,” which prevents you from displaying relevant ads according to the users’ positions in the funnel.
2. You can’t build lookalike audiences of your best possible “customers” because you don’t know who’s done what. 

While these two factors will undoubtedly reduce your profit margins, they will also undermine your long-term business objectives and ability to compete on the ad auction.

The final inconvenience you’ll face is that you can’t share custom audiences generated through Google Analytics across other ad platforms. To be fair, Google Analytics was never designed to provide off-site analytics tracking. However, as an affiliate marketer, enriching your Google Analytics data with off-site conversion data can bring a lot of value to your business. I’ll discuss how off-site tracking works in the next section.

How offline conversion tracking works

Offline conversion tracking ties actions taken by users on your site and actions taken on sites or systems outside the reach of the initial site’s Google Analytics tag. The most common methods for implementing off-site analytics tracking are through server-side tracking API (also known as postback tracking) and manual data / CSV upload.

Out of the two options, JavaScript tracking is the simplest method to implement. However, strict browser privacy settings and AdBlocks have made this method increasingly unreliable. Moreover, with JavaScript, there are further restrictions like browser memory, shortened cookie runtimes, and denial of access to session storage.

With server-side tracking, unique click ID data is passed during the outbound click and is then sent back via a server-side URL. The unique click ID value is the common denominator that links a click from your website to actions on a separate site.

The data flow is managed through a postback URL. In the following blog post, I share technical information about how postback URLs work and why they’re important.

The main benefit of server side tracking is that it is not affected by ad blockers, ITP, ETP.

As an affiliate marketer, off-site marketing analytics provides you with a complete overview of your marketing funnel. You can track an off-site purchase. With this data, you get the same insights and advantages as a business where the end sale is made on their site.

An additional advantage of off-site tracking is that you can sync conversion data across multiple channels/ platforms and then use this data to create custom audiences. You can, therefore, test your marketing funnel utilizing cheaper traffic sources, then use the data to build lookalike audiences for ads on Facebook or Google, for example.

Unfortunately, not all ad platforms support off-site tracking. Google introduced off-site tracking in 2013. Bing Ads introduced the service in 2017, while social media platforms such as Twitter and TikTok have yet to provide a suitable solution for affiliate marketers.

Solutions for offsite tracking

Offsite tracking has multiple advantages for people operating in the affiliate marketing niche. That’s not to say that it’s not without problems. You need a lot of technical knowledge to set up a system to connect data from a browser to the server-side.

Google Analytics provides an extensive API that enables developers to implement server-side tracking. There are three primary methods for implementing off-site tracking:

1. Google Analytics API: Requires the highest level of development skills. However, the Google Analytics API provides programmers with the best potential for complete server-side tracking.
2. Google Tag Manager: A High level of technical skills. Google Tag Manager will only allow you to effectively track off-site actions if you can add Google Tags to the merchant’s site.
3. Third-Party Affiliate Tracking Software: Plug & play solutions that connect Google Analytics and other Ads marketplaces (Bing, Facebook, and other platforms).

Due to the ever-evolving data and analytics space, developing and keeping up with the constant changes requires a significant investment of time and resources. Large companies might choose to invest in a custom in-house solution for off-site tracking. However, solutions that utilize the Google Analytics API are too expensive for most affiliate marketers.

Affiliate tracking software like AnyTrack.io, a company that I founded, provides a native server-side tracking integration with Google Analytics, Bing Ads, and other ad networks. It’s certainly a lot easier than hiring a developer to create a custom solution.

On balance, regardless of your approach, the limitations of offsite tracking are outweighed by the sizable benefits. That is, assuming you want to optimize your marketing funnel and increase your ROAS.

Integrating Google Analytics With Offsite Tracking

Implementing Google Analytics with offsite tracking software like AnyTrack.io is straightforward. Google Analytics already provides the standard dashboards for tracking visitor flow across a site from landing page to conversion.

When you integrate offsite tracking, you are, fundamentally, just gaining the same type of data as someone who manages an entire funnel across a single site would see. The benefit is that you get access to data you can use to improve your ROAS.

Case Study

One of our clients, Cliverse.com, has six websites in the pet care industry. Most of the traffic to their sites comes from organic search. They were facing a data challenge that you may be familiar with; they found it difficult to understand what products were converting and from which pages those conversions were occurring.

In addition, PPC ads were more expensive than needed. For example, they were running retargeting ads to people who had purchased an affiliate product suggesting they make a purchase. With better data, they could improve ROAS.

Using AnyTrack.io, Cliverse could finally see from what page, and which link on a page was generating the conversions. Through analyzing the data, Cliverse was able to increase revenue by 30% thanks to page optimization. Because they have the complete picture, they are now able to run paid media campaigns to their site with full confidence.

Conclusion

Bridging the gap between your google analytics data and affiliate network conversions is the optimal way to improve your position at the ad auction. With a full overview of your affiliate funnel, you gain actionable insights on what triggers conversions and generates sales. It’s a vital edge that can help improve your ROAS.

In this guide, I showed you three ways to use Google Analytics as an affiliate marketer. You can use Google Event Tracking to monitor people who click on your affiliate links. With Goal Values set up, you can track your campaigns’ probable results. Moreover, you can run retargeting campaigns and create Custom Audiences for future ad campaigns.

Through the Google Analytics dashboards, you can gain insights into your site visitors’ actions. You can use these insights to validate the assumptions you make when running conversion optimization tests.

While Google Analytics is a powerful tool, you can’t see what actions people take when they leave your site. If you integrate off-site tracking, you get access to this data. Most third-party tools, such as the one we created, allow you to use Google Analytics to get a complete overview of your affiliate marketing funnel.

As an affiliate marketer, off-site tracking combined with Google Analytics provides you with valuable insights that can help you improve your ROAS. Follow the steps shared in this guide to see the results for yourself.

Laurent Malka is Co-founder of AnyTrack.io, a plug & play conversion tracking platform. He can be found on Twitter @laurent_malka.

Pay-per-click search engine advertising is great for generating short-term profits from internet businesses, but with the difficulties in finding good long-term online advertising platforms, more and more PPC advertisers are seeing their long-term investments lose steam, traffic, and eventually income. Advertisers and internet marketing specialists that were once investing hundreds of thousands per month into the Google AdWords pay-per-click search engine advertising platform are becoming frustrated with the lack of impressions, and are desperately searching for a new place to market their products.

This raises a dilemma for pay-per-click advertisers. The web traffic sources that were once almost guaranteed to bring in tons of visitors are quickly being turned on their heads. From inconsistent pay-per-click search engine advertising network rules to bizarre blogger testimonial rulings, internet marketing specialists and online advertisers are being slapped with business-breaking conditions and limitations. Therefore, diversification is becoming more important, and online marketers that are playing for the long-term are quickly spreading their online advertising spending as wide as they can.

The following five tips will help internet marketing specialists, specifically, PPC advertisers, diversify their pay-per-click search engine advertising campaigns, and avoid having an empire of internet businesses that ends with a single change in the rules of an ad network.

1. Keep backup LLCs and credit cards for internet businesses

With Google’s bans of various advertisers, things are becoming turbulent for internet businesses. While the Google AdWords pay-per-click search engine advertising team is primarily cracking down on online scammers, thousands of legitimate internet businesses are being caught in the mass-bans, and many are left without a source of online income.

Whenever that happens, internet marketing specialists and pay-per-click advertisers need an alternative account to use and advertise on. All small business owners that rely heavily on online advertising platforms should prepare for the worst, and keep a backup company name and credit card available in case their account is ever unexpectedly or accidentally banned.

2. Don’t just diversify with PPC search engine advertising, incorporate SEO into a game plan

When it comes to success with internet business, the real long-term money-makers are SEO-driven websites. Once websites of internet businesses rank highly on search engines for the right search terms, traffic becomes free and all revenues generated from it have higher profit margins. That is the long-term value of incorporating search engine optimization into a search marketing campaign.

“Search marketing offers opportunities for huge web traffic and internet marketing specialists should know that it is not all about publishing good advertisements,”

Samran Raza of UnitedSeo, in a recent e-mail interview, said

“Small business owners who want their online presence to extend and scale beyond paid-for traffic should spend some time and money building high-ranking websites through search engine optimization”.

3. Don’t just depend on social media traffic

When it comes to internet advertising turbulence, social media websites are the worst of the worst. From Facebook’s advertisement approval policies to MySpace’s massive amount of click fraud, the potential for things to go wrong on social networking websites is very real. Pay-per-click advertisers and internet marketing specialists should minimize the amount that social media traffic can hurt their internet businesses by spreading their online advertising campaigns across search engines, social networks, and smaller websites.

4. Build relationships with ad network reps

If something goes wrong with one pay-per-click search engine advertising account, internet marketing specialists need a direct line to solve the problems. While contact forms and email exchanges can solve problems, they are typically slow, and when online advertisers are bleeding money, that is the last thing they need. A power user on any major advertising network should keep in touch and build relationships with their account reps and help desk staff who will be there to offer great value especially when it is most needed.

5. Experiment with small advertising networks

Let’s talk about big guns like Google AdWords. Search marketing can serve up traffic, but when it comes to customer service they are often beaten by their smaller rivals. It is a bad idea for pay-per-click advertisers and internet marketing specialists to spend all of their advertising money on small networks, but spreading a portion of their monthly expenditures into them is a great way to get personal service, caring account reps, and knowledge from people that really know online advertising.

Long-term pay-per-click advertisers think wide, not thin. These tips will help any online marketer spread wide, wield their online influence, and keep their profitable marketing and advertising campaigns going.

Don’t forget to add your tips on PPC advertising in the comments section.

Jacob M. is a copywriter, marketing blogger, and inbound marketing consultant.

I will explain it step by step on how to create a digital marketing strategy that you need to apply in order to get relevant traffic and to increase your ROI.

B2B industrial manufacturers digital marketing tips:

Collect important information from the client

It is very important to collect the following information from the client:

• List of products or services that provide higher ROI
• Competitors
• Keywords or topics  that they consider relevant
• Target market
• The location where the client can deliver products or services
• New products/services
• Industries they serve
• Complementary services/products

This information will give me a starting point about the topics I need to start mapping out for my keyword research. I focus on the topics- keywords that provide higher ROI to my clients and in the main products or services. Feedback from clients about competitors, keywords, and target market are extremely useful.

I know I have tools to find this information but it is always good to get the insights from the source. Many software provides competitors and keywords based on the website’s content. Furthermore, think for one moment that it is possible that your client is not ranking or does not have the right content yet on his/her website. Then the tool will not provide you the right competitors.

After getting the information above, I do an exhaustive keyword research and competitor analysis with at least three competitors.  It is preferred to use tools, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs for these tasks. Having a project in SEMrush and tracking keywords in Ahrefs, provides useful information every month about how my project is doing. It’s easy to create reports and to find the low hanging fruits. I later add these findings to the content strategy.

Learning about my client’s new products/services as well as the industries they service gives an opportunity to plan keyword rich content in the forms of blog posts, infographics, and videos.

In addition to content creation, using industry knowledge about complementary products/services is a powerful backlinking strategy.

For example, my client provides metal stamping services for a variety of different metals. I would create a blog post titled “Choosing the right metal for your metal stamping projects” to live on the client site. And also create a sharable infographic ad that would be perfect for other metal suppliers to share on their websites or social platforms.

On-page SEO is powerful

First, I run a website audit using Screaming Frog. With the results, I can find the bottlenecks which would need improvements through the on-page SEO strategy such as:

• Rewrite short meta descriptions
• Write titles
• Write meta descriptions
• Add keywords in titles
• Shorten long titles
• Add alt tags
• Fix broken links (redirections)
• Add title tags (h2,h3)

It’s never advisable to work on a messy website, so you really need to get this done in the beginning. If the on-page SEO is really off and involves a major project, divide the project into different tasks in order to get it done. I know the power of on-page SEO and I do not want to lose my opportunities here.

Among my practices are rewritten URLs following SEO best practices:

• Short and clear
• Avoiding stop words
• Using on-page keywords

After I have created new URLs I use the 301 redirects.

Example: www.metalstamping.com/blog/the-advantage-of-fourslide-metal-stamping-over-tradicional-power-press-stamping-explained-09_87-5437&5%

www.metalstamping.com/blog/advantage-fourslide-metal-stamping-over-tradicional-power-press-stamping/

I also revamp old content from static pages to add better keywords such as long tail or user intent. A study shows that 50% of queries are four words or longer.

Use long tail keywords to get rankings

Long tail keywords help increase your traffic. The best way to optimize on-page is by using about 50% of long tail keywords. Seventy percent, 70% of searches are long tail keywords. That’s why they are an important part of my SEO strategy. I have a client that offers Metal Stamping services.  Metal stamping had 4400 monthly searches and  699 million results. With a high competitive keyword, it’s better to use a long tail keyword such as “what is metal stamping?”. I actually ranked number one on Google SERPs for one of my clients with this keyword, within days and without backlinks. You can check out my case study about it.

Take your time to learn about the industry

While working with several clients at the same time can be overwhelming. It is not easy to become an expert in many different types of businesses within the industrial and manufacturing sector. I have overcome this challenge by taking time to read about the products or services pages of my clients’ websites so that I get a general idea of what they do (this is a challenge because many products are designed and used for engineers). Nevertheless, this is a crucial part because I am in charge of the content strategy. You could even watch a video about the main product or services to reinforce your previous readings and research.

How I do B2B industrial SEO for my clients

There are many opportunities for B2B websites in the industrial sector. Many businesses in this sector have old websites and they do not have a digital marketing strategy. While doing my research for content ideas, I have found out that there is no content available for many keywords regarding topics on industrial, manufacturing, and engineering. The lack of online results opens a huge door of opportunities for industrial businesses. I have taken advantage of the opportunity and created informative content that covers the topic. As a result, I have earned top positions in search results and leads for my clients.

The buyer journey in the B2B industrial market is different from the other industries. Focus on the personas browsing in B2B industrial websites. Most of the time, the people that are gathering the information to find suppliers are engineers, managers, and CEOs. Make sure you are creating content that speaks to them and make good use of their jargon in the content strategy.

Some content ideas that work well are:

• Products technical data
• Case studies
• A process to create a product
• Products applications
• Terms and conditions of purchase
• Policies of purchase

These are important topics the person is looking for which the supplier needs to find in an industrial website.

B2B industrial content strategy 

I create a pillar page (a pillar page is usually a long-form content, around 2500 words). I also create the cluster pages (cluster pages are related to subtitles of the pillar page) or related content that internally links to the pillar page. Here one of my client’s pillar page that ranks position one on Google SERP for “what is metal stamping?”

The ideal structure of a pillar page

• Intro
• Subtitles (you can use long tail keywords here, if applicable)
• Short meta descriptions no more than 42 words
• Bullet points/list format (use html tags)
• Video or infographic
• Image (alt tags)
• External links (reputable sources only)
• Internal links (cluster- subtitles articles)

The intro must be a short paragraph about the whole idea that will be discussed in the article. Use a good hook or nice intro to engage users to keep reading. Then start with the subtitles. Try to use long tail keywords. Consider the (latent semantic indexing) LSI, user intent as a subtitle if possible. This adds more SEO value to the content. Another good approach for subtitles is to think about relevant/related topics and use these as subtitles. Later, write independent articles about subtitles topic-ideas (use these articles for internal links as cluster pages).

A study shows that:

1. After subheaders, a paragraph with no more than 42 characters increases the chances to get a feature rich snippet.
2. Using bullet points or lists also helps.

I have followed these steps and I have gotten results. I have earned several rich snippets and Google quick answer box sections for my clients. Furthermore, using bullet points or lists helps users to skim the content, and provide a better user experience on mobiles because it provides white space.

I love to create content in different formats in order to take advantage of the opportunities that may arise. That’s why I create videos, infographics, and pdf. Later, I reuse these video or infographics for social media and email marketing campaigns.

We need an alt tag as part of on-page SEO best practices. Infographics can do the job. I use a long tail keyword as an alt tag in my infographics, and I always add the extension “infographic” to let Google know what is my image about. Doing this increases my chances to get ranking in Google image searches. I also use embed codes to my infographics so that it allows others to use them and open my opportunities to get backlinks.

I only use reputable and updated sources to get information from my content and I create external links to them (most of the time I add “nofollow” tag to my external links).

I usually add videos/infographics to the pillar page (upload the video on YouTube to create a backlink). This also is a way to amplify the content beyond the website.

The cluster pages are small articles that support the pillar page. I also add internal and external links (the internal links are always “do follow”).

I add case studies, reviews, data sheets about the product; these work well as clusters (internal links).

To get leads, I create white papers such as ebooks embedded within the content or a landing page with clear CTAs. I recommend creating a goal in Google Analytics to track white paper downloads.

I optimize static pages, product pages and “About Us” pages. The “About Us” page is utmost important in order to build credibility. I recommend you to add a video of the CEO welcoming users and talking about the mission of the company. A short video no more than a minute.

Another good thing to do is to check your on-page and make little changes to add value. I used the SEMrush on-page checker feature to improve my existing pages. This provides great results.

PPC for B2B industrial market

PPC campaign for B2b for the Industrial sector is a little different because the search volume for the keywords is low. I use long tail keywords that include terms such as industrial, manufacture, supplier. For example, industrial pipes. This helps to avoid invalid clicks from users that are looking to buy from the ecommerce or retailer website. My accounts are B2B and my clients only sell big quantities. I use the same approach at the moment when I write the copy.

I regularly optimize the campaigns by adding a negative keywords list that contains words such as:

• Videos
• Pictures
• Images

This avoids wasting my budget with clicks from users that are looking for educational material or to learn a process.

I use the Google AdWords platform to test my ads by using A/B tests. Generally, I run three ads, with the option “do not optimize, rotate ads indefinitely”. I run these tests for a couple of months to see which two performs better. Once I have the data from the two, I’ll continually optimize by testing a new one. The tools I use for keyword research are: Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Keywords Everywhere, and Answer The Public.

PPC goals for B2B industrial websites

The most common goals to set up are:

• Call from ads – This one only works for mobile
• Call from website
• All “Thank you” pages (ebooks download, request a quote, and contact us)

I am recently using the promotion extension, and I have seen that my competitors have followed. My clients don’t offer discounts. Therefore, I have to be creative. I have added lines such as, “100% free consultation”, and “100% free eBook download”. I know that it can sound silly but it works. People are downloading ebooks and my clients are getting leads. The results are what matter.

Email marketing to follow prospect through the sales funnel

I use email marketing to follow up leads that I have obtained with white papers, eBooks, and the other marketing collaterals. I create different campaigns with targeted content depending on the landing page that was collected by the lead. For example, if the visitor downloads an eBook about metal stamping process, I will create a set of emails to follow-up with the person who is interested in the metal stamping products. The email will be customized for his/her interest only for metal stamping products, application, prices, process, etc.

Do not forget mobile and UX

UX is very important to lower the bounce rate. I check my client’s website and the competitors’. Then I suggest changes to be made by the UX/Developer people.

Some ideas I suggest when working with the UX team are:

• Create custom 404 pages
• Test CTAs
• Run A/B test with different home page versions

Seventy-one percent, 71% of B2B researchers start their searches with generic terms (Think with Google) and then get more specific to hone in on more relevant search results. This is a huge opportunity because here we can create pillar pages with CTA and download material to engage with users. Do not forget that B2B for the industrial sector leads takes a little longer to convert than B2C.

Another study shows that organic search is the number one channel that generates traffic to B2B. SEO beats social media’s traffic by more than 300%. We cannot deny that SEO plays an important role in the B2B customer journey. Are we taking advantage of this huge opportunity?

Karina Tama is a contributor for Forbes, Thrive Global and the El Distrito Newspaper. She can be found on Twitter @KarinaTama2.

Search is all about capturing those who have intent related to what you’re selling. Extrapolating and recognizing the audiences expressing that intent should be your goal when it comes to gathering search engine marketing (SEM) learnings.

This article covers some of the easiest ways to gather learnings from SEM and leverage them in paid social.

Pull demographic data

As you run your search campaigns and collect significant data, you should pull in insights on gender, age, household income, and parental status. Google automatically segments out different brackets within these categories to provide insight into how each performs (e.g. how males behave versus females, or ages 18–29 behave versus ages 30–39).

As you gather this data, you can then determine which demographics are converting on your ads and which demographics are poor performers. This will be vital when you craft your audiences to target on social – where you can go after your top performing ages, genders and household incomes, while excluding poor performers. It allows you to be efficient with your budgets based on information you’ve already gathered.

Pull geo data

Similarly, you should take a look at geo data:

• Are there specific locations and areas that don’t perform for your business?
• Are there high performing geos?

Group together geos with similar performance, and leverage that in your social targeting.

For example, imagine you sell luxury home furniture. Using your search data, you have found that your audiences tend to be middle-aged females. Top performing geos are the coastal states; the Midwest performs ok; and the southern states have the worst performance. Segment out ad sets into two groups of geo-targets for your various audiences: one goes after the coastal states, and the other goes after the Midwest. Adjust your budget and bids according to expected performance, then optimize as the social data comes in.

There is, however, one caveat to this: don’t get so granular that audience sizes get too small (segmenting your audiences at the state level based on performance could significantly reduce audience sizes). However, what we have noticed with Facebook is that the smaller the audience, the higher the cost per click (CPC) tends to be. By grouping similarly performing geos together, you are able to retain control over performance yet reap the benefits of moderate CPCs.

Modify social ad copy with search insights

You should always be testing different messaging and copy themes on search. Once winners are validated, transfer those themes into your social ads. They may work as well, worse, or better, but you’ll have a good idea that the message will resonate.

Use Google’s audience insights tool to inform paid social

Take your top converting audiences within Google and run an analysis on the audience insights tool to get additional information about who they are, which can be extremely valuable across channels:

• What are their interests?
• What types of devices are they typically using?
• What are they in the market for?

You can then directly take that information and begin crafting audiences to test within social platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. As a result, your search campaigns will being doing double for your spend: they’re getting you direct responses and helping optimize your performance on other major platforms.

Automated bidding

Automated machine learning as a solution to the decision of what price to bid on paid advertising is becoming an increasingly popular option as the necessary technologies become available to more firms. Bidding too low means missing out on opportunities to reach leads, while bidding too high means sacrificing ROI. Google’s internal automated bidding, on top of being identical to what everybody else is using, doesn’t have access to the information it needs in order to maximize your ROI. Reaching that goal also requires knowing consumer trends, purchase behavior, seasonality, demographics, customer lifetime value, and more. A successful automated bidding model must:

• Estimate the price elasticity of each ad by using statistical inference based on previous bids
• Factor in the actual value expected by a click from each individual ad based on previous clicks
• Iterate in response to new data
• Recognize changes in the bidding landscape or the performance of visits and adapt quickly, rather than falsely assuming past performance will predict future performance in all circumstances.

There are, however, some things to look out for:

• Models that don’t know what’s happening on your site will make bad inferences. For example, if you test a new landing page and it turns out to lower your ROI, your model could start bidding lower on those keywords. After replacing the landing page with a better one, the model may still get stuck bidding low on the keywords, because there isn’t enough new data available to push the bids back up
• Models that rely too heavily on statistical significance may test a losing strategy for too long, but models that fail to incorporate statistical significance can throw away good opportunities while propping up flukes.
• Watch out for feedback loops in your model. For example, you wouldn’t want your model to bid more on an ad with a high conversion rate if the only reason the conversion rate is high is because the high bids are increasing the conversion rate. These types of conflicts should be controlled for.

Pausing poorly performing ads

The quickest way to lose money in AdWords is to continue bidding on an ad that isn’t producing any ROI. When the clicks roll in but the sales don’t, this can be a disaster. Similarly, when an ad is getting the bids but not the clicks, your quality score will suffer, and ultimately your ROI will follow suit. A well-built machine learning algorithm will understand when it is necessary to pause an ad in order to avoid hurting your ROI or quality score. Here are some important considerations your model must account for:

• The model must not be so sensitive that it abandons ads before they have a chance to show ROI. It must use statistical inference to estimate potential losses and gains based on previous performance
• Rather than pausing the full ad outright, the model should factor in individual segments that can be paused, such as traffic from mobile devices, certain browsers that are not producing revenue, times of day or days of the week that repeatedly do poorly, or ad variations that aren’t performing well.

Dynamic ads

AdWords’ Dynamic Search Ads are one piece of machine learning technology that currently come built-in with the platform, allowing anybody who is using AdWords to take advantage of it. Dynamic Search Ads automatically generate headlines to capture a searcher’s attention. After uploading a list of landing pages that you want Google to generate dynamic ads for, Google will identify searches that are a good fit for your landing pages, then automatically generate ad content using phrases from your pages. Google is also generating ad suggestions based on machine learning. These recommendations use models of prior performance to suggest changes to your ads that should boost your results. But the possibilities for dynamic ads don’t end with what is native to AdWords. Machine learning approaches can be used to create dynamic ad content that incorporates the following:

• Mixing and matching copy, image, and audience with multivariate testing and evolutionary algorithms
• Incorporating the influence of external factors such as the weather or time of day.

A few platforms experimenting with this kind of control include Sentient Ascend, IBM Watson, Zalster, and Refuel4.

Available platforms

The previous insights might make it sound like you’ll need data scientists and developers on your team in order to take advantage of what AI and machine learning have to offer, but this isn’t necessarily the case. While full-time dedicated AI staff are a good idea for big businesses, small and medium businesses can still take advantage of these emerging technologies with emerging products. Here are just a few examples:

• Acquisio: This machine-learning platform is designed to improve performance in AdWords, Bing, and Facebook ads by cutting CPC and CPA while raising clicks and conversions
• Cognitiv: Uses deep learning to predict where best to spend your money, self-customizing for each brand based on historical data
• Frank: In addition to AdWords and Facebook ads, Frank is connected to millions of publishers. It launches campaigns automatically and optimizes them by target audience, creative, and channel
• Magnetic: Designed to automatically match audiences to inventory while optimizing bids and cracking down on fraudulent clicks
• Quarizmi: One of few AI platforms that specifically bills itself as being for AdWords. The platform automates keyword discovery, creative, bids and campaigns
• Trapica: Identifies audiences, matches them to creatives, optimizes bidding, and scales your campaigns.

No matter the platform, use the insights discussed to make informed decisions about what will work best for you.

Conclusions

As AI becomes mainstream within the PPC industry, marketers will need to begin shifting their areas of expertise away from micromanaging keywords and bid prices, and towards higher-level strategy. In the meantime, the techniques and platforms discussed still aren’t in use by the majority of your competitors, and taking advantage of that gap would be a wise move.   Manish Dudharejia is the President and Co-Founder of E2M Solutions Inc, a San Diego Based Digital Agency that specializes in Website Design & Development and eCommerce SEO. Follow him on Twitter.

You can now use a combination of the following techniques/features:

• Functionality within the main AdWords dashboard
• Features in the shared library within your AdWords account
• Creating and using a My Client Center account (MCC) for managing multiple accounts
• Other Google tools such as Google Editor (3), AdWords App and Google Data Studio
• Use of third party scripts, tools and software (free and paid).

This article will just focus on how to save time by using the features and functionality of the AdWords dashboard, though some of these features may also be available at the MCC level.

Time-saving functionality within the AdWords dashboard

The updated AdWords dashboard was rolled out through the later months of 2017. During this process, many features were gradually moved across from the old dashboard. Currently, it is still possible to switch between the old and new interface; however, the old dashboard is expected to be retired by the end of 2018.

The new dashboard (shown above) has received a mixed response from long-time users. However, it does have the advantage of some new functionality, which was added in the first half of 2018, such as:

• To provide better insight and analysis for users (e.g. the new Overview Tab)
• The incorporation of machine learning or functionality to automate and speed up a lot of routine tasks (e.g. the new Recommendations Tab, which replaces Opportunities in the previous dashboard).

The time-saving functionality can be divided into three areas:

1. Displaying and analysing data
2. Creating and/or editing campaign elements
3. The Recommendations Tab.

Displaying and analyzing data

Using the new Overview sheet for insights

The new Overview tab replaces the old Home tab. It has a number of summary cards, each with a link allowing you to click through to more information.

The cards are based on information that Google thinks will be useful, rather than saved filters from your account, which were used to create the old Home tab. The cards are also more graphical than the tabular data of the old Home tab.

Here are examples of cards from the new Overview tab, with data taken from a number of different accounts.

Comparison of the old and new dashboard (for the keyword tab)

In the two screenshots below, we have compared the features and marked the same features in each version of the dashboard (using color-coding). The old dashboard uses a lot of text links, while the new dashboard relies on more graphical icons or symbols.
 

From this comparison, you can see that some of the functionality does not seem to appear in the new screen (e.g. the Edit button). However, once you select (or tick) keyphrases, then additional options appear in the form of a blue action bar:

Methods to display data to aid analysis

Use of filters is similar functionality to the old dashboard and can be found using the funnel symbol. There are now over 100 metrics to filter.

Use of segments and dimensions combines the segment and dimensions tab functionality in one place and can be found using the bar chart symbol.

The Dimension tab appears to have disappeared from the dashboard, but it is hidden within the reports icon at the top right of the dashboard – as a ‘Predefined report’.

Use of standard and customized column has similar functionality to the old dashboard and can be found using the 3 vertical columns symbol. Although there are over 100 metrics to choose from, not all have been copied over from the old dashboard.

More features within the main display panel

The remaining symbols are as follows:

• The down arrow is the symbol for downloading your data and is the same as the old interface
• The two lines with an arrow compresses the rows
• The square sign allows you to toggle between a full screen of data or having the side menus visible
• The symbol with three dots has additional useful features that vary depending on which tab you are on. This hides some of the time-saving features of the old dashboard, such as automated rules, diagnose keywords and the new notes panel. These are described in more detail below
• The final symbol is an arrow that allows you to show or hide the graph.

More features (three-dot symbol)

On the campaign and ad group tabs

On the keyword tab

Create an automated rule

Notes (for whole account, campaigns and ad groups)

This is a new functionality only available in the new dashboard. Once you open the notes panel you can see any existing notes or create a new one.

Keyword diagnosis

The first part of a test is to define the test conditions (language, location and device), which is the same as the old dashboard.

The second part is new and allows you to define the format of the file for your results. This is also different in that the results can be saved and are not live in the dashboard.

In the old dashboard you could filter the results as shown below:

The downloaded report can be found in the reports tab (using the small graph symbol in the top right corner).

Below is an example of a downloaded Diagnosis report with examples of different keyword status.

Creating and making changes

Editing

The Editing function on each of the main tabs has changed quite a lot. The biggest difference is the need to select a row before the edit function will show (as a new blue bar) and the removal of bulk editing functionality.

If you want to copy and paste individual elements (like a keyword or ad), you will need to select the individual row and the new blue edit bar will appear allowing you to edit. You can click paste from here and then go to the campaign or ad group where you wish to paste the items. There is a paste option in the more menu (with three dots).

Comparison of the editing functionality between the old and new interface

	Old dashboard	New dashboard
Campaign tab
Ad group tab
Keyword tab
Ads tab

Bulk editing

The bulk editing facility is no longer within the Edit functionality on the main pages (see old versus new screen shots above). There is now a separate section in the main heading called Bulk actions (see the next section).

In addition to the bulk action area in the main header, it is also possible to upload a sheet for editing by pressing the symbol with three dots, when on the other tabs (i.e. the campaign, ad group, keyword and ads tabs).

Bulk actions (replaces Bulk operations)

The previous interface had a Bulk operation section, which was found in the left-hand sidebar beneath the shared library. This had four operations (see below).

‘Bulk actions’ is the name for this functionality within the new interface. It currently has three operations; Rules, Scripts and Uploads.  There have been a couple of changes in the new version:

• The Bulk edits screen is no longer available – this screen used to show a log of any bulk edits that had been made in other areas of the account; for example, a bid change across multiple keywords
• Uploads replaces some of the bulk editing functionality.

Rules

The Rules screen will show a log of all the Rules that are currently active, who created the rule, the frequency that they run and any scheduled emails. It is also possible to create new rules from this screen.

There are currently 12 Rules categories and each typically has four to six types of rules (such as pause, enable, send email, change bids). You can see some examples in the table below.

	Examples of Rule categories

Scripts

Scripts can be used to automate a range of tasks. By clicking on the Scripts feature, you can see any scripts that you are currently running, or you can create a new one.

Scripts require a working knowledge of JavaScript and should not be added to automate your account without some prior research or training. However, you will not necessarily need to create a script from scratch, as you can find free scripts at sites like Free AdWord Scripts, or reviews of scripts.

In addition, many PPC management tools (such as Optymzr.com) provide a range of free scripts as part of their monthly package.

Uploads

Uploads can be accessed from the individual tabs by selecting the three dots or from the Bulk Action menu in the top.

The old and new screens are shown below:

Old
New (from top menu)
New download template
Excel template example

Drafts, experiments and new ad variants

The drafts and experiments functionality are like the old feature, which was previously in the left-hand menu bar above the shared library.

Drafts can be used to create test versions of campaigns before putting them live. Experiments can be used to test changes on a proportion of the traffic, for example a new ad or bidding option.

In addition to these legacy features, there is a new functionality called Ad variations, which is only available in the new interface. This is designed to test new elements of ad and apply across your whole account or selected campaigns. This makes ad testing much easier.

The Recommendations Tab: using Google to identify Opportunities and changes

The Recommendations tab replaces the old opportunities feature, but there have been additional cards that have been added.

There are around 20 recommendations at the account level and even more at the MCC level. These are divided into different categories:

Account level

MCC level

Examples of Recommendations

Conclusions

The new AdWords interface has many features that can help users save time when managing their PPC account. Some of these are completely new and not available in the old dashboard.

As the old dashboard will be retired by the end of 2018, it may be worth implementing the new dashboard as soon as possible, in order to benefit from these many new features.

In this beginner’s guide to paid search we will share:

• A detailed explanation of the fundamentals of paid search
• Tactics used by some of the world’s most successful digital marketers
• The five most common pitfalls when using paid search and how you can avoid them
• How you can predict your likely results before you even spend any money.

What is paid search?

Paid search is a form of digital marketing where search engines such as Google and Bing allow advertisers to show ads on their search engine results pages (SERPs).

Paid search works on a pay-per-click model, meaning you do exactly that – until someone clicks on your ad, you don’t pay. This makes it a measurable and controllable marketing channel compared with more traditional forms of advertising.

Ad formats include text ads, which are shown at the top or bottom of the organic search results, or shopping ads shown above the search results.

A quick note on the organic search results: if your website appears here, you will not pay for a click to your website and you cannot pay to appear in the listings either.

What can paid search do for you?

Every second, tens of thousands of people are searching on Google for products, services and solutions.

This presents an incredible opportunity for you to promote your business to a relevant and engaged audience that is actively looking to research or purchase products or services.

Some other forms of advertising, such as banner ads, are known as ‘interruption marketing’, meaning that the person who sees the ad may not actually be in the market to buy something at this stage. Where paid search has the edge, is that by typing something into a search engine we know that the user has the intent to research or purchase.

Avoid pitfall #1: Not tracking return on investment

The first mistake new advertisers make is forgetting to track return on investment. The great thing about online advertising is that everything can be measured. In addition to being able to see how many people have clicked on your ads, and how much it has cost you, you can easily see how many people then take action (i.e. how many conversions you have).

Examples of conversions you could track include:

• Contact form submissions
• Online sales
• Live chat engagements
• Phone calls.

This means you can easily see how many leads or how much revenue your ads have generated for you. All websites should have conversion tracking set up in Google Analytics so that you can measure which of your marketing activities bring the best returns.

PPC terminology

There are some common terms used across paid search platforms – some more self-explanatory than others.

• Click: when a user clicks on one of your ads
• Impression: when your ads are shown. It is important to note that this does not meant that users have seen your ads. An impression will still be counted if your ad is shown at the bottom of the search engine results and a user does not scroll all the way down to see it
• Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of impressions of your ads that result in clicks – the higher the better
• Average cost-per-click (CPC): how much on average a click has cost
• Average position: where on the results page your ads have shown (position one being the highest)
• Cost/conversion: the amount you have spent on paid search, divided by the number of conversions generated. The lower the better
• Conversion rate: the percentage of users who completed a conversion after clicking on your ad. The higher the better.

How does paid search work?

Most paid search platforms work in the same way.

Step 1. Choose your location settings

You can choose to show your ads in specific countries, cities and zip codes.

Step 2. Select your keywords

Keywords are search terms that people type into search engines such as Google, for example “womens shoes”, “tv repair shop near me” or “best sushi restaurant”.

Finding the right keywords

Google’s free tool, the Google Keyword Planner, allows you to discover what words people are using throughout the world to find products or services like yours. Bing has its own as well, and there are plenty of other third party tools available.

These tools will show you a range of potential keywords, plus how many people per month are searching for them, how much competition there is, and how much they’re likely to cost-per-click.

Step 3. Choose the correct match types

In paid search, there are four different keyword match types that impact when your ads are shown.

1. Exact match – where keywords are represented like this: [womens shoes]. By using exact match keywords, your ads will only be shown when someone searches for that exact term. It will also pick up plurals and spelling mistakes, so [womens shoes] would also show ads for [women shoes]
2. Phrase match – where keywords are represented like this: “womens shoes”. This keyword would trigger your ads if a user searched for the exact phrase, but with words before and after (e.g. ‘red womens shoes’ or ‘womens shoe stores’)
3. Broad match – where keywords are represented like this: womens shoes. This keyword would trigger your ads if a user searched for this phrase in any order, and with synonyms too (e.g. ‘cheap womens shoes’, ‘womens blue shoes’ or ‘ladies shoes’)
4. Modified broad – where keywords are represented like this: +womens +shoes. This keyword would trigger your ads if a user searched for this phrase in any order, without synonyms (e.g. ‘womens training shoes’ or ‘shoes for womens running’).

There is also a fifth keyword match type: negative keywords. Negative keywords can be added into your campaigns to stop your ads from running on searches that are not relevant to your business.

Avoid pitfall #2: Running on all broad match keywords

One of the most costly mistakes that new advertisers make is to only use broad match keywords because this is the default match type.

As a result, ads are shown when people search for the advertiser’s specific keywords, but also hundreds or even thousands of other variations, some more relevant than others. Advertisers then blow through their budgets quickly and don’t see any sales or enquiries.

Make sure you think about which match types to use and create a good negative keyword list before you begin.

Step 4. Create your ads

You will create ads to show when a user searches for one of your keywords.

Text ads have three primary elements:

1. Headline 1, 30 characters
2. Headline 2, 30 characters
3. Description, 80 characters.

However, there are a number of things your ads cannot contain, including but not limited to:

• All caps (e.g. FREE DELIVERY)
• Symbols to draw attention to your ads (e.g. ***Free Delivery***)
• Additional spacing (e.g. F r e e  D e l i v e r y)
• Trademarked terms
• Exclamation marks in the headlines.

What makes a good ad?

Ads should engage your audience, guiding them to choose you over the other ads or organic listings on the page. A good ad will contain:

• Words and phrases that are relevant to your keywords
• Unique selling points
• Calls to action.

Step 5. Set your bids

You set how much you want to pay for a click on one of the ads showing for your keywords. This is called a ‘Bid’ or ‘Max. CPC’. Every keyword can have a different bid.

Paid search platforms give you a guide on how much you should bid, but ultimately it’s down to you. If Google is recommending a bid of $2.50 but you only want to bid $2.00, that’s fine – it may just mean your ads show lower down the page or less frequently.

How do search engines decide where your ad appears?

When someone searches for one of your keywords, your ads are entered into an auction. There are two factors that are taken into account and define where your ad appears on the page. These two factors are combined to give you an ‘ad rank’. The advertiser with the highest ad rank in the auction will appear in the first result. These two factors are bid and quality score.

Quality score is the score from 1–10 that paid search platforms assign every keyword in your account, 10 being the highest. This is calculated based on three factors: expected click-through rate; ad relevance to your keywords; and landing page experience.

Quality score was introduced to stop advertisers from simply paying the most to appear at the top on search terms that their website isn’t relevant to. Now paid search platforms reward higher quality advertisers – and not just those with the deepest pockets.

Step 6. Add ad extensions

Ad extensions are additional pieces of information about your business you can show alongside your ads. In addition to providing a better user experience, they can also increase the quality score of your ads and help your ads take up more space on the results page.

Some of the ad extensions available are:

• Sitelinks – links to additional pages on your website
• Callouts – additional text about your business
• Location – show your business address
• Call – show your phone number. This also gives users on a mobile the option to click-to-call
• Price – show different services or products along with the costs
• Seller ratings – these are automated snippets that may show if your business has reviews on sites like Google My Business or TrustPilot. This does not work with all review platforms so be sure to check first.

There are more ad extensions available.

Step 7. Launch your ads

Typically your ads will start showing within a few hours and you can see the results in your paid search accounts. You can pause your campaigns at any time.

How do I pay for paid search?

Every paid search platform is slightly different when it comes to billing. When you create your account, you enter your credit card or direct debit details. You are charged either after a certain threshold has been met or every 30 days, whichever comes first. It is normally possible to get some free credit applied to your account – it’s worth a quick search to find out.

Avoid pitfall #3: Focusing on activities not outcomes

Most marketing campaigns that fail do so because they haven’t started with the end result in mind. Before you begin your paid search campaigns, it’s vital that you think about what you want to achieve.

What are your goals?

There are two very important questions you should ask yourself:

1. How many new customers do you want?
2. How much are you willing to pay for them?

You might respond with “as many as possible for as little as possible”, but is that really true? Could your business handle 1000 enquiries in 1 day?

Campaigns without specific goals are inevitably going to waste money. Without setting a target, how will you optimize your campaigns? If your cost/conversion is $50, how do you know if that’s good?

Avoid pitfall #4: Not calculating the conversion rate required

Once you have set your goals, you can work out whether they are achievable by calculating the conversion rate required. The average website converts at around 2%.

Safer:

If you are happy to pay $50 per conversion and you know the CPC is $1, then 1 in every 50 clicks will need to convert. The conversion rate required for this is 2% (1/50).

Riskier:

However, if you were only happy to pay $5 per conversion, 1 in 5 clicks would need to result in a conversion, meaning the conversion rate required is 20%. This is much less likely to happen.

Simply divide your target cost per conversion by your expected CPC to work it out. Many advertisers set out on paid search campaigns without doing this calculation and learn that a campaign is not viable the expensive way.

Once you’ve done your keyword research, calculate the average CPC. Then look at your desired cost per conversion. From this you can calculate the conversion rate required. Below is a conversion benchmark for most brochure websites:

• Low risk: 0–2%
• Medium risk: 2–8%
• High risk: 8+%.

Expensive keywords

One of the common myths about paid search is that it is too expensive; I bet you’d be horrified to learn that a click on the keyword “car insurance quotes” could cost $132.59.

Remember this is set by the market, which means one of your competitors is happy to pay this amount per click, which means they are either making money, or running an unprofitable campaign – and it’s more likely to be former than the latter.

Before you rule a keyword out, you need to consider what the conversion rate required is. For example, let’s say that an insurance firm is happy to pay up to $4000 for a new customer once they take into account cross-sell opportunities and lifetime value.

By dividing the target cost-per-conversion by the CPC, we can calculate that 1 in 30 people who visit the website need to become a customer, which is just below a 3% conversion rate, meaning it’s competitive but possible to compete and make a good ROI on this keyword.

Avoid pitfall #5: Not forecasting your likely results before you begin

By using some clear thinking and making some well-reasoned assumptions, you can predict potential outcomes before you invest.

Use the Google Keyword Planner to see how many people search for terms relating to your business.

This relatively quick calculation means that before we even begin our campaigns, we can predict whether the results are likely to meet the goals we set earlier. You can also use the ClickZ CPM Calculator to get an idea of the cost of a campaign.

Most advertisers who claim that paid search doesn’t work have not done these two basic things:

1. Set your goals: what do you want to achieve?
2. Forecast: how likely are you to achieve them?

Basic paid search optimization

A couple of important checks and changes you should be doing include:

Bid adjustments

You can adjust your max CPC at any time. Increase bids on keywords that generate a high volume of conversions at a low cost/conversion to get more clicks. Reduce bids on keywords with a high cost/conversion. You can also pause keywords that are not delivering results.

Check the search term report

The search term report shows you exactly which words users typed into the search engine and saw your ads. If you are using broad or phrase match keywords, make sure you are doing this regularly. Where you find irrelevant search terms, add them as negative keywords.

Paid search versus organic search engine optimization

It’s often asked which is better; paid search or SEO? SEO is the process of increasing your website’s rankings in the organic search results. You cannot pay Google or other search engines to increase your ranking.

On the face of it, SEO sounds like a better option: once your website ranks in position one, the clicks you get are free, and more users click on organic listings than paid ones. But the important thing to remember is that there is a CPC to SEO as well.

SEO takes time. If your website is very new, and you want to rank for very competitive keywords such as ‘insurance’ or ‘buy a car’, it can take years of work before your site will even rank in the top 10 results.

All of that work costs money regardless of whether you pay an agency to do your SEO, pay an employee to do it, or even do it yourself. Every hour invested into organic optimization costs money.

You can factor in these costs versus the increase in traffic the activity generated. Let’s say you run an SEO campaign, costing $2000 in agency/consultant fees, and this campaign increases your ranking from position 10 to position 2. This ranking increase looks to generate an extra 4000 organic clicks. Therefore, you could say that your organic CPC in this scenario is $0.50. You can then compare this to your paid campaigns to see what’s providing better value.

Next steps

This article is just an introduction to the world of paid search. There is much more to be learned and tested, and new features are being added to the platforms all the time. Some good next steps for increasing your knowledge include:

• Account structure and ad groups
• Ad extensions
• Ad scheduling
• Device bid adjustments
• Location bid adjustments
• Shopping campaigns.

When done properly, paid search can grow businesses exponentially. Set your goals, forecast your outcomes and avoid the pitfalls we’ve listed in this article, and you will benefit from the results.

Do remember that success will often depend on the quality of your website in relation to others who are also running ads on the same keywords. Conversion is king and sending traffic is only half the job.

By Fountain Partnership, a Google Global Award Winning Paid Search Agency. All images provided by Fountain Partnership.

There is nothing wrong with that approach, as you would expect that any agency worth their salt would know best practices. However, all too often best practices are overlooked. The most effective change that can be made when taking over a new campaign–and even after managing for a while–is revisiting campaign structure. This might be the most basic detail of all, but it is critically important.

Google rewards relevancy

As you know, Google changed the game when it introduced Quality Score into the bidding equation, and this remains a huge factor today. If you consider that you can’t control the number of advertisers in the auction, and you can’t stop someone from having deeper pockets than you, then how can you beat them? Quality Score.

Quality Score is heavily tied to campaign structure. The way in which keywords in the same ad groups are related to one another and follow a common structure is paramount. This may feel like a lot of extra work to create more ad groups when the differences do not seem substantial, but the pay-off is worth it. For example, if you are a retailer and you are putting all shirts in one ad group, you should consider breaking them down into specific types (sweatshirts, t-shirts, tank tops, etc.). Also, by sending keywords to their specific landing pages, you also increase relevancy, which is rewarded with higher quality scores.

Ad copy and ad extensions

Linked with relevancy is the ability to write ad copy that is clearly linked to the keywords in the ad groups. Again, this might seem obvious, but it is something that many don’t take the time to appreciate. Ad copy that is more directly related to your keywords will increase relevancy and consumer response rates (i.e. CTR).

In addition, a number of ad extensions can be impacted by campaign structure. AdWords decides when these show based on 2 factors:

• When the extension is expected to improve your performance
• Your ad’s position and Ad Rank is high enough for extensions to show.

Ad Rank has a big ad quality component that substantiates the value of a strong campaign structure.

Campaign structure determines how settings are used

As a result of the way in which AdWords is set-up, there are certain decisions that can be made at each of the three levels (campaign, ad group, keyword). For example, geo-targeting and budgets can only be controlled at the campaign level. Ad copy is uniquely controlled at the ad group level. These levers are critical to success, and campaign structure is the way in which you ensure success can be capitalized on. For example, if you have a keyword that is high volume in an ad group with lower volume keywords, it is possible that high volume keywords are suffocating those smaller volume keywords and limiting their exposure within the campaign. A key campaign structure decision in this instance might be to break these out into their own campaigns so you can more easily control the budget.

Conclusions: you’re never done

Campaign structure is something that should be revisited again and again over time. The people who are managing a campaign change, consumer behavior changes, websites change, and AdWords evolves their policies. All these factors and many others require that the structure is revisited. I recommend that you have a strategic campaign structure review annually and ensure that it aligns with your performance and strategy.

You will of course have the urge to not spend any time thinking about campaign structure, because it can be tedious and you will assume you did a good job at the outset. However, over the course of time you will add and delete keywords, and update and test ad copy/landing pages. These decisions erode the original intent behind your strategy. Revisiting the structure will ensure that best practices are followed and, even if you don’t make any changes, reaffirm the decisions you have historically made. Campaign structure is the secret weapon that will help you beat your competition–without having to increase bids or your total budget.