Today, we examine one last misconception related to the use of your ad space and a final mistaken belief for the whole existence of pay-per-click.
 
Misconception#4: A company should include their name in the ad so people know who they are.

A pay-per-click ad allows for 25 characters in the headline and two lines consisting of 35 characters each. That’s not a lot of room to get your message across to qualified prospects while using your budget wisely. People often waste their characters repeating information.

For example, an ad will read “Great discounts at shoes.com” and the last line is the URL www.shoes.com

What I’ve learned: Every word counts in the pay-per-click ad space. Don’t waste your characters.

Google allows you to insert your website at the bottom of each ad, yet people still find it necessary to include it in the body.  With such limited space, the body of a ppc ad must be used as efficiently as possible. Convey your message well and interest in your website will follow.
 
That’s right. I said convey your message to generate interest in your website. This brings us to my final misconception.

Misconception #5: Pay-per-click ads should be designed to sell the product.

People often fall into the belief that they need to sell their product with their ppc ads similar to the way they would with traditional advertising.
 
What I’ve learned: Sell your website and the product sales will follow.

Pay-per-click ads offer such limited space to convey a message which makes it very difficult to truly sell your product or service. Use your ad to create interest in your website and then set your website up to convert the people who come in via your ppc ads.
 
Overall, generating success with ppc advertising campaigns is a process that is built one component at a time. A successful campaign must be built on a deep understanding of your customer, well-researched keywords, a well-managed budget and thoughtful messaging. I hope that you walk away having learned something new about this subject. After all, I got to learn these lessons the hard way. Here’s hoping you don’t have to stumble through these same mistakes.
 
My next series will tackle usability practices and the common misconceptions about how people use websites. You’ll be surprised how common assumptions result in big losses of consumer traffic.

This blog series is all about Search Engine Marketing

The purpose of this series on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is to reveal the truths behind the misconceptions and to clear up some of the confusion regarding digital marketing and its practices.
 
So let’s define search engine marketing…

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, search engine optimization and paid inclusion.

It is important to know that SEM is the larger umbrella under which many elements of digital marketing are placed, but is also the term most commonly used when referring to the pay-per-click ads found at the top and right hand side of SERPs.

For the sake of this blog series, SEM will refer to pay-per-click ads or paid search listings.

Users can access pay-per-click services, such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing Search to create, manage and distribute paid search campaigns. Armed with the overall definition of SEM and free tools, can’t we simply move on and begin creating paid search ads? Stay tuned for the answer in my next blog.

We recommend that our clients use the month of September to get ready for November and December. That gives us (and them) enough time to check and double check everything. While there are countless items to check off the list, a few things move the sales needle the most.

It’s mid-October, so it’s crunch-time and every day really counts.  This isn’t meant as a comprehensive list. This is a “if you’re going to do a few things to get ready, these are the things to make sure you do” list:

1) Make sure you analyze last year’s numbers.

AdWords, Analytics and sales figures. You need to know what worked and what didn’t, specifically during the holiday season. Use that information to create your AdWords campaigns for this year.

It may seem like an obvious step, but some companies review month over month figures. More than any other time, it’s important to review year over year numbers, because the holidays are such an aberration for most ecommerce companies.

2) Get up to speed with your competition.

Read industry trades. Check your competitors’ sites. Have their websites changed? Understanding where they are right now and what the industry buzz is, can help you understand how robust your competition will be in the coming months.
 
3) Get your email-marketing schedule set now.

Even if all year long you’re able to work a day, a week, or a month ahead, the holidays move so quickly. You have to have a preliminary email-marketing schedule laid out, and get started on the graphics and messaging for these campaigns. The coming days will get busy. You should leave as little to the last minute as possible.

4) Create landing pages that complement your holiday AdWords campaigns.

Landing pages can help improve conversion rates, and are a critical part of the SEM process. Once again, if possible, look back to last year. Learn from what worked and what didn’t. Using the data available should help performance every year, regardless of the economy.

Online marketing is a fast moving industry, even in slow times. During the holiday season, every hour counts. Get in front of the process now, so you can have a successful, profitable, holiday season.

For example, if you sell children’s clothing and outerwear, keywords you might have for an ad for scarves are “scarf” or “scarves.” You may also have keywords with additional adjectives, like “colorful scarves” or “pink scarves.”

Based on these assumptions, Google may display your ads when users query such terms as “lacey scarves,” “sexy scarves,” or even “elegant scarves,” since you have the word “scarves” as a keyword in your campaign. Users who query these terms are not the right potential customer for a site that sells cute children’s scarves. Users on a mission to find a specific item will often click on ads, check out the site, click back and go on to the next site.

Add keywords that drive the “wrong” traffic to your site as negative keywords, so when they are included in the query string, your ad will not appear. “Wrong” traffic means users who are looking for a product or service you do not provide and who, based on their query, would definitely not be interested in what you do provide.

Use Google’s new reporting feature to find these terms. There will likely be words or phrases that are completely unrelated to your business, and these keywords have cost you money unnecessarily. Turn them into negative keywords so you can focus your budget on the terms that are likely to convert.