Pay Per Click Marketing Centricity

Pay Per Click: When Free Shipping Isn't Always Free

Do you have an ecommerce site? If so, do you offer “free shipping?” Do you use this benefit in your pay per click advertising?

While conducting some research for a couple of potential ecommerce PPC clients, I noticed the extensive use of “Free Shipping!” in the pay per click ad copy of many of the PPC competitors for that industry. It makes sense, of course, because the use of “free” in your ad copy can sometimes lead to increased click-through rates.

What I found interesting about these two industries, though, is that when you clicked through to the landing pages, you discovered that there were important caveats to the “free shipping” as claimed in the paid search ad copy. Specifically, you found the shipping was only free if you spent over a specific amount of money. While the ad copy in all of the pay per click ads stated “Free Shipping!,” with no conditions or clarifiers, the landing pages specified that you only received the free shipping if you spent over $75, $99, $100 or other amounts.

Is this misleading advertising? Well, it probably depends upon who you ask. So, I thought I’d ask my contacts at Google AdWords since these examples were in their PPC Network and see if this particular example was against Google’s Editorial Guidelines.

Not surprisingly, the response I received from Google AdWords was that they were okay with this scenario so long as the paid search advertiser stated on their site, “Free Shipping on Orders Over $99.” I wasn’t surprised because Google understands the use of “Free Shipping” generates more clicks for their advertisers. More clicks equates to more revenue for Google. In addition, if a visitor clicks on an advertisement because they see “Free Shipping,” only to discover the “free” is conditional, they may very well hit the back button and return to the search results to click on another paid search ad. This is not a bad result for Google either because it generates even more revenue.

Let’s go back to the original question. Is the advertising misleading? Personally, I think it is a perfect example of a “half-truth” used by our politicians and advertisers for years. If I were conducting the search and clicked on a pay per click ad because it said “Free Shipping,” only to later find on the site the shipping was only free if I purchased above a specific amount, I’d click the back button and go to the next pay per click ad. Trust is a primary consideration to me when purchasing online and the use of misleading advertising is certainly an indicator that a site/company cannot be trusted.

Now, that’s just my personal opinion. Many potential buyers may experience the exact same scenario and not have any issue whatsoever. That’s why I think it would certainly be something that would need to be tested for your particular audience. You may find that it has little impact on your conversion rate or it could impact your conversion a great deal. As always, the best way to resolve any question is to test and see what happens.

I’ve noticed that large, well-known brands like Amazon use the ad copy, “Free Shipping on Most Orders.” To me, this is much better ad copy and you have much less chance of diminishing visitors’ trust.

Rob Reed
Terrakon Marketing
Pay Per Click Consulting and Management

PPC Management: What's the Best Ad Position for Conversion?

What's the best PPC Ad Position for conversion? That's a loaded question, but the answer appears to be: it depends!

It depends on a number of interdependent factors and the only way to truly find out the answer is to test, test and test some more. Some of the factors that will determine the best ad position for conversions include:

• Industry
• Product or service offered
• Competitive ads
• Organic search results where ads appear
• Keyword phrases used
• Time of day
• Day of week
• Time of year
• Ad copy headline
• Ad copy body
• Ad copy display URL
• Landing page or destination URL
• Top-level ads (blue area) or not
• Pay-per-click program used
• And more

What I can tell you with some degree of certainty is that you should not assume the top position will result in the most conversions and especially, the best ROI.

Here's a study Terrakon did with one of our clients to identify the best ad position for conversion. This study was based on results over a nine-month period and included thousands of conversions. Conversions in this situation were purchases. It's important to note that these results include a number of keywords combined and over an extended period, so we're not giving anything away and please don't assume these results will fit your situation - they most likely will not.

As you'll note in the graph, the number one position did not fair very well for conversions when compared to most all of the other PPC ad positions. For the cumulative number of keywords this graph represents, we would probably look to position ourselves somewhere between position 2 to 6. Of course, we'd be very happy sitting consistently in positions 5 or 6 if we could generate enough clicks there at a much lower cost than positions 2 or 3.

The most important pay-per-click myth I hope to break with showing this graph is the belief that you have to bid for the top position every time to make the most money. Simply not the case if conversion is your primary objective - and it should be!

Rob Reed
Terrakon - A Pay-Per-Click Advertising Management Company

Pay Per Click Management: How Long Should Your Keyword Phrases be for Your PPC Campaigns?

Post: I ran across this interesting data on the SearchEngineWatch blog. This post discusses data based on 2 million visitors. They ranked the number of words that are used in search phrases.

Here's how the top five breakdown:

1. Two-word phrases -- 28.38 percent
2. Three-word phrases -- 27.15 percent
3. Four-word phrases -- 16.42 percent
4. One-word phrase -- 13.48 percent
5. Five-word phrases -- 8.03 percent

The percentages begin to drop off signifcantly after five-word phrases. So, when you're conducting keyword research for your pay per click campaigns, you can use these figures as another means of prioritizing the keywords and phrases that are most likely to be searched on by potential visitors.

For instance, it is usually a good idea to focus on two or three-word phrases because those phrases are searched on the most and they tend to provide more qualified visitors. One-word phrases, on the other hand, are typically searched on a lesser amount and tend to send less qualified traffic to your website.

In some niches, though, you can still be very successful with one-word phrases. With one of our clients, for instance, we use a one-word phrase that provides a signficant amount of qualified traffic that converts very well. However, it took a little while to get the keyword to oustanding profitability by constantly testing new ad copy and adding negative keyword phrases to better focus the traffic.

Syndication Header: Terrakon Marketing is a pay per click firm in St. Louis that specializes in helping clients optimize and manage more profitable pay per click campaigns.

Rob Reed
Terrakon Marketing

Internet Marketing Seminar Announced

FYI. I've been invited to speak at an upcoming internet marketing seminar by Lorman Education Services. The internet marketing conference (or seminar) will be held on February 27, 2008 in St. Louis, MO. The agenda is still being finalized, but my part of the online marketing seminar will focus on pay per click advertising optimization and management. I'll share a great pay per click optimization case study one of my current pay per click clients who was able to significantly increase their bottom-line profits through a ppc optimization project.

There will also be other experts discussing search engine optimization, public relations SEO, analytics and more. Should be a great internet marketing seminar. I'll post more information on the internet marketing seminars page of the Terrakon Marketing website and the PPC Marketing Centricity Blog.

Click Profitably,

Rob Reed

Terrakon Marketing
A Pay Per Click Management Company

Google Makes Change to Top PPC Results

It appears Google is either testing or has implemented a new design for their top cpc ad results. These ads are the top one to three ads that sometimes appear above the organic search results. In the past, these ads have had a light blue background. As of about five minutes ago, however, the top cpc ads now have a light pink background.

The change certainly makes the bold headline words even more important as they stand out more than before with the light blue background. It will be interesting to see if this is a permanent change and if so, the impact the new background will have on click through rates for the top results.

We'll be tracking...

Rob Reed

Terrakon - A pay per click advertising management company.

A Must Have Service for Website Design and Maintenance

For over one month, I observed an obvious typo on the home page of one of our SEO/web design competitors. I must admit, I enjoyed looking at their site every few days to see if they had discovered the error or not. Eventually, it was corrected. I'm not sure if they ever found the error or simply updated the copy and removed the error inadvertently.

Recently, I've been researching materials from one of the top web conversion firms in the country. These folks have written a number of books on how to persuade website visitors to become customers. Unfortunately, when I went to purchase an e-book from their site, I was dissuaded from purchasing because they had four text errors on their offer page. Talk about practicing what you preach!

Those two occurrences, within a short period of time, led Terrakon to sign-up for a service which finds those website text errors on your site that have been missed. TextTrust.com offers an online website spell checker that scans each page on your website and provides a detailed report of any spelling errors found.

It's a great service and I highly recommend signing-up. It currently costs $49.95 for one year of unlimited spell checks for a website which is currently 250 pages or less. Other pricing options exist for larger websites. TextTrust also offers a free trial where their spell checker robot will scan a subset of your site.

At Terrakon, we consistently preach that it is the small things you do or don't do versus the competition that can differentiate you enough to win the business. This is another great example of something small you can do that could have big benefits.

While this post may sound a little more commercial than most, we are not in any way affiliated with Text Trust. I just think they offer a great service that is badly needed by a lot of companies and I think you'll benefit from checking out their service.

Best,

Rob Reed
Terrakon - A search engine marketing firm.

Should You Trust Google Data?

I'm a pretty big fan of Google. They have their shortcomings, like any other big company, but overall I've had a pretty favorable impression of them. After a recent finding, however, I must say that my level of trust in the organization has decreased significantly.

I've been working with a client to optimize their large pay-per-click campaign. They spend a few thousand dollars each day on PPC programs. I was conducting some analysis as a part of a PPC consulting project and found something that was quite disturbing in the Google data.

I was using the external Google keyword tool to generate search volume trends by historical month for a particular keyword phrase. I ran the query for a general phrase and asked for synonyms. The results included the specific keyword phrase I was targeting. I then entered the specific keyword phrase and asked again for the same information - search volume by trend. This data shows you the relative search volume by month for your keyword.

I exported the data to an excel spreadsheet for analysis and noticed something very peculiar. The data for the exact same keyword was very different in the two searches I conducted. In other words, the data that should have been exactly the same, was not. I've removed the specific search term for confidentiality reasons, but here is the actual resulting monthly data for both searches:

Notice that the trend data for each month is entirely different for the same exact search phrase. Even the data for the most traffic volume in a given month doesn't correlate. In the first line, it says December has the most search volume. In the 2nd search, it says October has the most search volume. That is not data you can trust.

I contacted Google. The customer service rep from the Google Adwords Team was able to duplicate the error and pass along to their engineering team. Here's a snippet of the service reps message from their finding:

I wanted to update you that our specialist team found the same behavior you described. Currently, our engineers are investigating the situation and are working to resolve it as soon as possible.

Now, I will give Google a ton of credit in that they admitted their tool is not working correctly. The issue I have, though, is the tool is still operational and does not include any message notifying users that the data may not be valid. That's a little scary in my opinion.

Here's the deal. If the data is completely wrong for some search trend data using their tool, what else could be wrong in the data Google provides? Should you believe the click-thru rates they provide? Should you believe what they say as far as click fraud is concerned? Should you believe what they tell you about impressions, maximum CPC, conversions and a myriad of critical data that you rely solely on them to provide?

I'm not saying anyone at Google is doing anything intentional to mislead customers. It is disconcerting, though, when they continue to knowingly provide misleading data to users of their service.

What was Ronald Reagan's axiom? Trust, but verify. Sounds like something we need to do with Google.

Rob Reed
Terrakon - A sales consulting and internet marketing firm.

SEM: Why use website instead of Web site?

It seems most of Terrakon's search engine marketing competitors choose to use the term "Web site." Terrakon, on the other hand, uses the term "website." What's the deal? Are we a rebel organization just trying to be different? Do we just not know what we're doing? Who's right?

Like many controversial issues, it depends upon who you ask. Most style guides, like the AP style guide that newspapers use, say the correct spelling is "Web site." Dictionary.com lists "Web site" and then "website" as an alternate spelling. Sometimes, though, it takes awhile for these style guides to catch up with new trends that become fixtures in our society.

One of the keys to successful search engine marketing is understanding the number of potential prospects who search on a keyword phrase that describes the products and services you offer. In our case, we selected "website" because that is how most people spell the word - at least when using Google.

   

Using Google Trends, you'll notice that "website" is used far more often than "Web site." If you look at the bottom graph labeled "news reference volume," you'll notice that even news organizations have started to use the official "Web site" term less often - notice how the gap between the two has decreased between 2004 and 2006?

I think it's just a matter of time before the style guides and other SEM firms "catch up" with how most people think about the "website" term. Kind of like "email," instead of "e-mail." Oops, that's another issue...

Rob Reed
Terrakon - a search engine marketing firm and sales consultancy

Web Design Tool Shows What Others See on Your Website

Have you ever wondered what your website looks like to other people with different browsers, operation systems, screen sizes, etc.? There are literally thousands of combinations which makes it nearly impossible to design a website to appear properly in all combinations.

At the very least, you should be testing your new website with the "major" combinations of browsers, operating systems and screen sizes. Even tackling only the latest major players, however, is still very difficult for most organizations.

In steps BrowserCam. BrowserCam will check any website from a multitude of these combinations and take an image of the web page so you can see what it looks like from systems other than your own.

While there is a charge to use the system, they do offer a free trial for up to 24 hours and 200 screen shots. This will limit you to one screen size and a subset of the browser/operating system combinations. It seemed to have a few hiccups in the nearly 200 screen shots, but I still found it to be a website design worth checking out.

Rob Reed
Terrakon - a sales and internet marketing consulting firm

Where Do Your Prospects Notice Your Advertising?

I found another advertising survey that may be of interest to many of you who read this marketing and internet marketing blog. comScore conducted a survey of 1,000 Internet users and asked the following question:

Where are you most likely to pay attention to or notice advertising for any product or service?

Advertising Medium - Percent of Respondents

1. TV - 85%
2. Print - 60%
3. News/Media sites - 53%
4. Corporate sites - 51%
5. User Generated Content sites (e.g. My Space, YouTube, etc.) - 28%
6. Billboard - 22%
7. Radio - 22%

Of course, since I'm an avid Tivo user, I wonder how long TV will be able to hold the number one spot? It would also be interesting to see how this has changed and will change over time as electronic advertising continues to eat away at traditional advertising.