Pay Per Click Head Term ROAS Challenges

For PPC clients struggling to meet ROAS goals, we usually set out to find a solution with PPC best practices. In such cases we apply tactics of increasing the keyword Quality Scores (QS) and optimizing existing campaign structure and elements; also, adding many long tail keywords along with corresponding landing pages related particular descriptive words.

The PPC budget and account keyword performance history are important factors in the PPC campaign optimization process. In case of an insufficient budget and a poor keyword performance history, Google could apply a cost per click premium on your head terms and your long tail terms could realize minimal impression share.  Over the course of 1-2 weeks, after much pushing of buttons and pulling of levers, it could become clear that you are not getting impressions on most of the long tail keywords. When this happens, then the big questions arise:

• what do you need to do to pull out of the PPC tailspin?
• is it possible to obtain positive ROAS with head terms?

Yes, the head terms are obviously important as part of a PPC campaign but does your business have the budget, reputation, and maturity in business to compete with aggregators and businesses that have 10+ years of customer acquisition and reputation-building under their belt?

Figure Out & Measure Your Approach, Then Start Fresh

A conclusion we might reach is that our client is hard-pressed to challenge the “big fish” with head terms. What can be done if the account historical performance and 2 weeks of experience reflect that the economics of the approach with head terms do not work out positively? In this case, to pull out of a PPC tailspin we suggest to:

• trim head terms to 10-20% of the budget and to focus primarily on long tail keywords
• step back and re-evaluate your entire business and marketing strategy as a challenger against other bigger brands; take a holistic approach to PPC success
• launch the PPC campaign in a new AdWords account that is not affected by negative performance history (against AdWords’ Policy, but certainly justifiable in some situations); dealing with a poor QS history can otherwise take 1-4 weeks to deal with

Besides the usual campaign management, these steps require considerable effort and the second point is especially important. While we can move forward with PPC campaign management tactics and work on the long tail to incrementally improve performance, we had better start to dissect some core business issues that are related to PPC success.

Be Aware of Brand Equity Advantage

A stark reality of the “big fish” is that they usually have an advantage of an already recognizable brand. They benefit from significant number searches on their brand that they buy for less than anyone and their high CTR boosts their QS. They usually have a bigger budget. In short, big brands are perched at the top of a PPC upward spiral related to high CTR and Ad Position and low CPC. Consequently, good ROAS comes easier for recognizable brands.

Plan to Break Out of Your Industry Mold

It turns out that the general business evaluation and planning also solves how we could possibly be successful with PPC head terms. Most businesses require very significant investment in time to iron out  general business, branding, value proposition, and online marketing implementation strategy. Again, PPC Marketing activity does not solve these general issues and they must be ironed out before venturing to grow business with PPC head terms.

Here are some important questions and topics that any business must think about:

• What makes your business, products, or services distinct? Can you communicate this in one sentence? How does this distinction break with the immediate past and status quo of the industry?
• What does your brand deliver beyond the practical needs? (secure, cool, intelligent, sexy, successful – what emotions does the brand inspire?) While it might seem silly for a business to consider and strategize about what type of emotional response or connection to evoke, we found that top PPC competitors have either:
  • created and invested in a brand personality that creates an emotional connection; and/or,
  • have been first to market with a product or service that essentially defined their category
• Do you make it clear why your product or service features are better than the competition? What is memorable about this difference?
• Do you have a constant schedule of compelling, limited time offers? Constant Hot Deals are usually an imperative to compete nowadays.
• Why should I trust your company? Can you show me recognizable brands that use your company services?
• Do you completely articulate the features of each of your products and services? It is important that customers have the sense they are getting full featured products or services.
• Is your checkout process very clear, fast, and tailored to specific offers while offering non-intrusive upsell?

While it might seem obvious, it is important to point out that it is the ideas, planning, sacrifice, and leadership that will make your business to succeed and not your PPC marketing campaign. At the same time, your PPC campaign is an important and powerful tool to support your business branding and growth.

Exclusive Affiliate Promotions and Policy to Mitigate Affiliate PPC Arbitrage

Are you a Manufacturer or Publisher that is trying to sell direct while also growing a network of active Affiliates?

In general, affiliates need exclusive promotions and your channel and direct e-commerce also need exclusive promotions. The challenge is to carefully define and mix up these promotions so that the various promotions do not conflict with or detract from each other.

Do your Affiliates offer a reach into unique networks and communities of customers? If they are driving most of their transactions through PPC with Affiliate arbitrage, then their value to your company is debatable.

What is Affiliate PPC arbitrage? This is basically when Affiliates are buying traffic (Pay Per Click) at a particular price and then converting that traffic to sales at such a rate that they make money. Sometimes Affiliates will convert that traffic within their own targeted landing pages, and sometimes they will send traffic direct to the e-commerce site or shopping cart (direct PPC arbitrage). The general idea and goal of PPC arbitrage is to figure out the average $ earning from each visitor, and to buy sufficient quality traffic at such a $ rate so that the arbitrage venture is profitable.

Having Affiliates who do arbitrage usually hampers your company PPC efforts because they are bidding against you. Also, if you do not have an Affiliate Policy that addresses branding and messaging, then Affiliates can quickly and effectively damage your brand reputation. Furthermore, Affiliates who do direct PPC (with your company URL as the Display URL) can actually supplant your Ads so that your company Ads will not show. The largest concern is with your bottom line -  probably your PPC-derived revenue costs less than your Affiliate derived revenue. Naturally you want to protect your PPC derived revenue and this is why we need to discuss Affiliate program management and Affiliate compliance policy.

Affiliate Program Management

Work must be done on the Affiliate management side to cultivate relationships with various breeds of affiliates, and to structure an Affiliate program that limits Affiliates to engage with only certain PPC networks and/or to use specific keywords.

For example,  a usual Affiliate PPC management strategy is to allow affiliates to offer exclusive $ or % off coupons and to bid only non-branded keywords, and/or specifically only on “coupon” or “discount” related keywords. You know specifically which keywords provide the highest Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) right? Then be sure you have maximum Impression Share and CTR on those, and do some analysis before relinquishing that low hanging fruit to Affiliates.

Does your company have an Affiliate Compliance Policy in place that at least addresses keywords, bidding levels,  ad messaging, and direct linking?

The best value of from Affiliates is realized when they are tapping into their own community. For example, Super Affiliates such as Fatwallet and SlickDeals can enable exposure for your brand and product offers with a focus and magnitude that would be difficult to accomplish with PPC efforts.

What are Super Affiliates? These are Affiliates that generate at least $1,000/month in revenue for your company. Maybe $1,000/month is not so super, but this seems to be the rule for earning that moniker.

Affiliate Promotional Strategy

Here we’ll share a specific Affiliate promotional strategy.

• 10 days in advance, the Affiliate channel gets an exclusive, high-incentive offer – $20 off coupon, for the “super sale” on a unique bundle or SKU.
  • Why a unique bundle? A potential problem with this type of offer is that when Affiliates publish it, then it will persist online for all eternity and show up in Natural Search. It could create an expectation from customers that they could get this type of offer in the future your usual product. By offering a unique SKU and tying the promo to a useful marketing message, there is protection against eroding the value of the product and at the same time a positive use for SEO
• The Affiliates are not given a coupon code, but rather a link to a “super sale” landing page that will be enabled at a particular time in xx days – 8am PST Friday morning (or whenever).
• Meanwhile offer your product at the usual price; if you offer a trial version of your product, then users can still use the product now, then buy it later during the one time, limited offer (there is a limited quantity available at that price).
• On the day of the super sale, after the allocated qty is sold, then update the page to show this “super sale” has ended, and of course merchandises other products.
• Affiliates can still earn based on the client cookie for some number of days.

In this case the affiliates are not likely to be active with PPC (because they can’t convert right away), but to create awareness at their affiliate site, forum, or wherever they publish, instructing people to visit the “super sale” page at a particular time. They might do PPC marketing, but only on a particular day for a few hours until the promo is over.

There is growing interest in hot deals and daily deals. So, what is a hot deal? A good way to test if it is warm and worth merchandising as a special is simply to ensure it is at least 10% lower than any other online price (Amazon, Buy.com…). If your product is a commodity type of product then it might not be considered as a hot deal unless it is 40% off.

Building A Network of True Content Affiliates

Managing Affiliate promotions can certainly be tricky business. A challenge now seems to be in figuring out how to move from relying on Affiliate PPC arbitrage related revenue to what we call True Content Affiliates who are publishers (Blogs, Squidoo-type article marketing, Social Media). The type of promotional strategy described above is interesting for True Content Affiliates, and engaging and activating a network of True Content Affiliates should be a part of any Affiliate Network marketing strategy.

SEO for E-Commerce Sites

Search Engine Optimization best practices for e-commerce are necessary to competitively capture and to grow valuable Natural Search interest and related traffic.  E-Commerce SEO techniques and information are always changing, and in this post we’ll share some current and useful on-page E-Commerce SEO tips that we have employed within our SupplyExpert E-Commerce Platform.

Off-page E-Commerce SEO will be covered in a future post, so check here later to learn approaches beyond using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks for link building.  For instance, true content Affiliates that directly link to your site are powerful vehicles for building site authority.

Back to on-page E-Commerce SEO tips – the main pages / templates of your e-commerce site are usually your Home, Category (and subcategory), and Product Pages. These are the pages that you want to pay special attention to with regard to SEO.

Optimizing Distribution of your E-Commerce Home Page Rank

The pages linked most consistently from your Home Page are likely going to rank the best in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This is because your highest PageRank is probably assigned to your Home Page. In general it is good practice to keep all your pages within 2-3 clicks from the Home Page. Other best practices for E-Commerce Home Page SEO include:

• Use a pure CSS based design, and avoid HTML tables. This is more SEO friendly, and also will cause browsers to load the pages faster.
• The page navigation should be easily crawlable so use a JS or CSS-based navigation that spiders can crawl and avoid forms-based navigation.
• Make sure you use an H1 and H2 heading and subheading, but do not overuse these tags; use no more than one H1 tag per page that contains the main keyphrase related to that page.
• Keep content and links on the Home Page fresh with a dynamic category-based Top Sellers showcase featuring Best Selling items in your most popular categories.
• Optimize your link anchor text – avoid “more” and “view” type links and instead link the product name or part number; use title attributes in links (e.g. <a href=”/product_xyz” title=”keywords here”>).
• Link to main Brand Showcase pages from the Home Page.
• As on all pages, your E-Commerce page titles are important; consider the keyphrases carefully but do not stuff keywords into the page titles.
• Optimize all your site images, and be sure to use Alt text for all your product images.
• Pay attention to your Internal Site Search – what are the top searches? Be sure to link to these products or results pages from your home page. You could put the top searches near your Search box.

Proper Linking & Redirects for E-Commerce Sites

• Make sure your Home page is linked to at your site root folder “/” and not at a page such as “default.aspx” or “index.html.”
• If your site is located at www.mystoredomain.com then create a 301 redirect from mystoredomain.com to www.mystoredomain.com.
• Avoid use of SessionIDs in URLs.
• Rewrite your URLs descriptively in a format that coincides with relevant keyphrases with a structure such as
  • Product Page – /[product_name (first 6 words)]/[product_id]
  • Manufacturer Page – /[manufacturer_name]/
  • Category / Subcategory Page – /[category]/[subcategory]/[cat_id]/
  • Internal Site Search – /find/[key+words]/
• If you have multiple URLs to the same page content then use the Canonical URL tag; with an absolute path; for example,  in these cases:
  • If you include the category name in the product URL and the product belongs to multiple categories; or,
  • if there is a “print” version of the page; or,
  • if your pages require SessionIDs.

Product Page SEO for E-Commerce Sites

Many of the above practices could apply to your Product Page template. Furthermore, on this page your content is especially important and optimizing around targeted, relevant product keywords can help you to rank better.

It is important that your e-commerce platform supports a keywords field for each product so that those can be strategically placed within your Product Page template.

Consider these questions for your Product Page:

• Is there a Heading Level 1 (H1) containing the main product title?
• In the product description, does the first sentence contain the main product keywords?
• Does the URL contain the product keywords?
• Are the desired product keywords proximate to one another?
• Are other product keywords towards the beginning of sentences?
• Are important product keywords in italics or bold?
• Are other product keywords present in the body text (not at beginning of sentences)?
• Where an image is used as a link, are Alt tags present?
• Does the meta Description tag contain the main product keywords?
• Do the meta Keywords tag contain the main product keywords first, followed by others?
• Are there product keywords in the last paragraph of the page?
• Do you show related products, with related product keywords as anchor texts?

Always avoid using product descriptions from manufacturers (otherwise, your pages will be penalized for “duplicate content”), and take time to develop quality content especially for your top products.

E-Commerce XML Sitemap

Does your E-Commerce platform generate an XML sitemap? This is necessary so that search engines can readily reach all the pages of your e-commerce catalog, especially all the sub-category and product pages. To add additional valuable  and targeted pages into the Natural Search index, we suggest to include search result pages for your top site searches within the XML sitemap.

Last but not least among these e-commerce SEO tips, we recommend to use Google Webmaster Tools to monitor and control many aspects of your SEO activities.

Be sure to check MarketFlare later for coverage on off-page e-commerce SEO tips. To learn more about our SupplyExpert .NET-based E-Commerce Platform, please visit http://www.supplyexpert.com

Increasingly we have been building Facebook targeted marketing campaigns and the results are always impressive.  For agencies that understand best practices for targeted Paid Search campaign implementations, advertising with Facebook is effective because the campaigns yield good Paid Search metrics while allowing a fairly high level of visitor targeting.

We know that visitors are primarily preoccupied with the social interactions at Facebook and so it takes expert attention and planning to engage users within landing pages for more than 5 seconds. Some ways we work to engage users within targeted landing pages include:

• Grow the # of fans; leverage a company Fan Page so that visitors do not exit Facebook and can become a part of your company social network
• Give it away now;  trial downloads, free product offers, or other high value incentives to become aware of and familiar with your company
• Offer awesomeness and allow it to be shared; direct traffic to a Landing Page with exclusive offers or valuable content

These visitor engagement tactics then allow additional performance metrics / goals – # of fans, # of downloads, # of shares.

For reference, below are the Facebook targeting options.

• Location – Facebook Ads uses IP address and a user’s profile information to determine a user’s location.
  • Everywhere
  • By State/Province
  • By City
• Age: [range]
• Birthday: [target people on their birthdays]
• Sex: [Male or Female]
• Keywords - Keywords are based on information users list in their Facebook profiles, such as Activities, Favorite Books, TV Shows, Movies, etc.
  
• Education:
  • All
  • College Grad
  • In College
  • In High School
• Workplaces
• Relationship
  • Single
  • In a Relationship
  • Engaged
  • Married
• Interested In:
  • Men
  • Women
• Languages

Real-time targeted marketing can obviously mean a lot of things. This information is based on our technical experience, and without giving out specific solution details we’ll describe real-time online marketing in a way that could inspire some solution ideas for your now web business or clients.

Change is constant, and the pace of change is increasing. As a result, the ability to rapidly perceive and respond to this change requires a processing ability that goes beyond any group of marketing professionals with their “ear to the pavement.” While the immediate intuition of an online marketing or dynamic PR expert can be enough, real-time requires lightning fast automation, marketing intelligence and communication.

In the online world, marketing is a science and an art. While traditional advertising agencies might have enormous creative talent, in general they have struggled to transition to be effective in the online world. The emerging requirements for success surrounding real-time marketing requirements will further distinguish traditional agencies from Interactive and Social Media marketing agencies. Now, the most cutting edge breed of online marketing agency will require a technological distinction that involves creative, real-time web service-based integrations and solutions.

Consumers group together and create new trends and demands that can rapidly coalesce into phenomenal opportunity. Real-time marketing technology capitalizes on this opportunity. Utilizing real-time data and personalization in marketing messages produces more impact. Interesting real-time data is any data that can change and influence the customer response: price, inventory, popularity /  social groundswell, etc. Being at least being knee-deep in the social stream, real-time-enabled marketing apps provide instant and relevant responses that answer customer demands and needs as they present themselves.

No wonder Google has amassed an enormous amount of data and processing power to be able to make real-time contextual and interest-based targeting solutions for publishers and advertisers. I expect that these solutions, especially the interest-based advertising solutions, will cost more of a premium and likely become impression-based (CPM) and not pay-per-click (PPC); this is because real-time interest-based targeting is enabled ideally in social media content networks, and while such users are likely to “view” ads they are not likely to engage with such ads unless they are related directly to their social circle or activity.

Google Insights for Search and Google Trends are destined to become powerful tools as availability of data approximates real time. Below is a quote from Larry Page at the recent ZeitGeist Europe 2009:

…people really want to stuff real time and they (twitter) have done a really good job about. We have done a relatively poor job of doing things that work on a per second basis. I have been telling our search team that they need to search on a per second basis. They laughed at me and said it’s ok it’s just a few minutes old.

I said “no” it needs to be every second. Now I think they understand that. I think we will do a better job at some of those things now that we have these examples. It does take time to really integrate information. If you really want up to the second information it is not going to be as good as if you wait up to a couple of minutes. That’s an important aspect of what’s going on, you need to make people get sense of things.

An advanced, integrated solution is required to be able to “listen” to a collective voice and to “respond” in a relevant and engaging way.  As more web service APIs become available, the possibilities to effectively exploit real-time demand scenarios become very interesting. We are especially interested in solutions that connect a database to a decision engine that is integrated with Google Adwords and other PPC networks, along with Analytics data to complete a feedback loop.

But the real real-time marketing action is happening around the Twitter ecosystem where the most demanded now web services are  open, dynamic, responsive and intelligent to immediately extract, filter, amplify or attribute meaning  to the activity stream.

MarketFlare offers customized technology and services that are focused on real-time targeted marketing. If you are interested in this topic, we’d love to hear from you! Or share your ideas or approaches in the comments below.

Since April, publishers who use Google Adsense have noticed that ads are now coming from the DoubleClick.net URL rather than the googlesyndication URL. Apparently this was done mainly to support the interest-based advertising features. DoubleClick actively utilized behavioral targeting technology, and Google is finally incorporating this feature for advertisers that use Adwords in the content network.

This behavioral targeting/behavioral advertising/interest-based marketing feature is currently in beta for select Adwords accounts. For publishers who use Adsense, interest-based marketing is supposed to maximize their earnings potential. In concept at least, this type of targeting is clearly a benefit for advertisers and for publishers.

As for consumers, there is a tendency to become spooked by such ad targeting – especially while imagining some violating or embarrassing scenarios. What if you are categorized as diseased, impotent criminal with a gambling addiction?

Also, this feature helps Google to compete with behavioral targeting options within other large content networks such as Facebook. For instance, the behavioral targeting options at Facebook lets advertisers target users “in college” including up to 20 schools and/or 20 majors. Also they now support city level targeting, with a selected radius option which will help narrow in on specific university hot spots.

In April, the Adsense team informs content publishers:

… with our latest addition of interest-based advertising, advertisers will be able to reach users based on their interests or previous interactions with an advertiser’s site.

And in early May Google began using this same DoubleClick.net URL for Feedburner to enable interest-based targeting of ads in feeds.

Google Privacy: Interest-based Advertising

Below is an official statement from Google, and the video is below. Google has also published another statement regarding consumer control and an interest-based advertising FAQ that is quite informative.

Our goal is to help you, our users, to find the information you’re looking for.  We do this by showing you search results, but also by showing you ads that you might be interested in.

Some of these ads are on sites around the web, such as news sites or blogs that partner with Google to show ads. And some are on our video site – YouTube. You can recognize many of our ads by the “Ads By Google” label. We want these ads to be as relevant as possible for you.

Sometimes we show ads related to the content on the page you’re currently viewing. Other times we’ll show you ads based on interest categories. So if you love to travel and frequently visit travel-related websites, you’re more likely to see interest-based ads about vacations and travel deals as you surf the web.

Here’s how this works:

When you visit a website that shows “Ads by Google,” Google stores a cookie, a string of random numbers and letters in your browser to remember your visit. If many of the websites you visit, or YouTube videos you watch, are about travel, Google puts your cookie number in the travel interest category. Now, when you visit websites that user interest-based “Ads by Google,” Google recognizes your cookie number and shows you more travel ads.

Google also uses your cookie number to allow advertisers to show you ads based on your previous interactions with them… such as visits to their websites. For example, if you visit a website that sells pet supplies, you might see an ad for that particular website next time you browse a website showing interest-based “Ads by Google.”

It’s important to remember that when you see interest-based “Ads by Google” they’re not based on any information that’s stored in your Google account such as your  email; or, any visits to websites with sensitive content, such as medical information.

Your cookie doesn’t tell Google who you are or any personal information about you – such as your address or phone number. We don’t collect personal information or share it with others without your permission.

Google lets you edit the interest categories associated with your cookie using our Ads Preferences manager. This lets you customize which interest-based advertisements you see so they’re even more relevant to you.

To set your Google Ads Preferences type “google.com/ads/preferences” into your browser. Or, in many cases you can click on “Ads by Google” then click on “Ads Preferences.” Click “Add Interest” to scroll through a list of interest categories. If your interested in sports, just ad the sports category, and we’ll show you more sports related ads. You can also remove interest categories if you’d like to see fewer of those types of ads.

Your preferences also apply to ads you see on YouTube. If you’re curious, the Ads Preferences Manager shows you the cookie number that Google associates with your interests.

If you prefer not to see interest-based ads from Google, you can opt out at any time in one click. After you opt out, Google won’t collect interest category information and you won’t receive interest-based ads. You’ll still see the same number of ads, but they may not be as relevant to you.

Remember, if you set your ads preferences or opt out of interest-based ads, this information is only stored on the browser of the computer that you’re using at the time. If you delete your browser’s cookies, you’ll need to reset your prefences or opt out of interest-based ads again.

You can also save your opt-out settings permanantly. After you opt out, just click the download button and follow the instructions to install a browser plugin that saves your opt out settings even when you clear your cookies.

I hope this gives you a better idea of how Google users interest based ads and how you can set your Ads Preferences.

Google Interest-based Ads & How You Can Set Your Ads Preferences: Video