For some of the professionals and lots of Entrepreneurs PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising is a practice in which we used to spend money and get clicks and that too not confirmed whether the money spent for clicks helped to get the proper conversions or not.

So what to do in that case????

To come out of this problem / situation above mentioned practitioners go for increasing the CPC – Cost Per Click until they get clicks but again the question arises that

“By implementing this practice, Are they getting the proper Conversions????”

I think the answer is “NO”.

So in regards to the above mentioned query I am trying to point out some of the points that are affecting the Campaign Performance.

There are many factors that are responsible for this kind of situation. So what are they? They might be :

i) Quality Score

Quality Score is a factor that plays major role in Ads Ranking and CPC – Cost Per Click affecting each of the keywords in the AD Group or Campaign. It is calculated using different factors of how relevant your keyword is to ad group and to user’s typed in search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and the better its ad position.

ii)    Improper AD Preparation

The other factor which is affecting the PPC Campaign performance is the way the AD is prepared. If the AD is prepared improperly then it will affect the Ads Placement. Some people prepare Ads without using the keywords and just for the sake of preparing Ads and run the campaign. This creates the adverse effect on the Campaign and lead to bad performance of the Campaign which in turn may also increase the cost / money spent.

iii) Wrong Selection of Keywords & Poor Landing Page Quality

“Content is King and Keywords are the Queen”

Most of the Internet Marketing Professional will agree on the above mentioned quote, as Content and Keywords are correlated with each other. If content is prepared by proper placement of Keywords in the whole article or the piece of content which is prepared then it will help a lot to be in rankings on SERPs.

So getting back to the PPC part, if the keywords are not selected and placed properly in the ADgroup then it can create a major impact on the Campaign Performance. I had seen in many of the cases where some of the professionals simply select the keywords to be used in that campaign blindly without any proper analysis and Keyword Research. So it is advisable to select the keywords only after proper Keyword Research, Market Analysis.

iv) CTR

CTR interpreted as Click Through Rate which is also treated as the major factor affecting in the Ads Ranking and Performance too. Basically CTR is calculated by dividing the number of impressions by the number of clicks people had clicked on the AD prepared and placed in the campaign. I will try to focus more on CTR in my other upcoming article.

I had tried to mention some of the major factors that may affect the Campaign Performance majorly if not taken into consideration before making the Campaign LIVE.

There is a huge list that can be included in this above mentioned list which I will try to update soon in my upcoming articles.

And yes lastly I would like to add is that “Ultimately everything is dependent on Research and Testing. More Research and Testing may help you to groom yourselves more and will also help your Campaign to perform well”

And I would like to request all of the readers to please add and even point me out if anything is to be added or you think is to be rectified in the above article.

Google Adwords is such a good thing; let’s move onto how to actually use Adwords in order for your business to make profit.

First of all, you should determine how much you can afford to pay for a click. Doing this is very important for biding on keywords in Adwords while still remaining profitable. And for this your conversion ratio is needed, calculate your conversion ratio by dividing your monthly unique visitors by your monthly sales, and then convert your answer into a percentage by multiplying by 100.

Just assume that in a month you get 30000 visitors and sell 750 products each with a gross profit for you of $50. Your conversion ratio simply put is (750/30000)*100 = 2.5%. This means that for every 100 people who visit your site 2.5 buy your product.

Your gross profit per 100 visitors is calculated by multiply the gross profit on your product by your conversion ratio, to continue with the previous example – $50 x 2.5 = $125. Divide your gross profit per 100 visitors figure by 100 to determine how much you can bid in Adwords.

In this case you could afford to pay up to $1.25 for a visitor and still break even. Rarely will you have to pay this much for a click, remember that the minimum CPC on Google Adwords is only 5 cent so play your cards right and you can have high profits.

I hope this article will be useful for you. I would like you have your views on this. Kindly share it as comment.

In May, 2010 Google Analytics added new reports for better tracking of Google Adwords data into Analytics account. For PPC Experts like me, it will be very helpful to measure the quality of Adwords traffic. According to blogpost on official Adwords Blog, these reports are intended to provide better understanding of what happens after visitors comes to your site:

The new AdWords reports in Google Analytics give you more insight into what happens after the click. For example, suppose you wanted to see if potential customers searching for your exact matched keywords were more engaged with your site’s content than those who were searching on broader terms. Using the new reports, you can view all the visits from clicks on exact matched ads for any keyword, ad group, or campaign in your account. You can also see how many pages that group visited and the average time spent on site. If you use the funnel reports in Google Analytics, you can even see the specific step where visitors tend to drop off when trying to make a purchase.

Here is the video which shows some amazing features of new reports that can be used to optimize you campaign:

Your Google analytics and Google Adwords account should be linked properly to see all these reports. If they are not linked properly, you will only see “not set” in all the reports. Also you need to “auto tag” your destination URLs to see this report. The Adwords reports are still in “beta”. (You know how it is with Google, Gmail was in beta for five years).

Details of the new reports

Here is a little brief of new reports:

Ad  Group – Once you are in particular campaign, you can see all the reports of different adgroups like visits, clicks, goal conversion, revenue etc.

Keyword – All the details drilled down to keywords and their performance from particular adgroup and campaign.

Ad Content – This report shows you which ad was clicked and ad related performance.

Ad Distribution Network – This report shows whether you have got clicks from Google Search, Search partner or Content Network.

Match Type – This report shows if the clicked keyword was Broad match, phrase match or exact match.

Matched Search Query – This report shows the exact keyword that was typed in by user that triggered your ad to show up.

Placement Domain and URL – This report shows what sites / pages your ads were clicked from. This report is only for content network ads.

Ad Format – It shows whether ads were text ad, image ad or video ad.

Targeting Type – It shows whether click came from keyword targeting or placement targeting.

Display & Destination URL – It shows which display / destination URL was clicked.

These reports can be really helpful for analysts who want to go deep within the data and can help them achieve better ROI.

Although it’s one of the best improvements in analytics I have seen, there are some data discrepancies amongst Google Analytics and Google Adwords. While normal users get confused with clicks data from Adwords and Visits data from Analytics, it is very important to understand the difference between clicks and visits.

Let me know your experiences with these new reports in the comments section below.

The festive season and Christmas sales always draw my attention to latest trends in ecommerce and online marketing. Ecommerce has been my favourite topic since my college days in UK. I was so amazed by amazon’s story, that I had one small dissertation written on the strategies opted by amazon and how they got so successful to become a role model for ecommerce industry. One thing I always liked about them is their ability to test and then make changes according to the analysis. Well, Today I am going to talk on the same lines, Landing Page Optimization with A/B Testing.

You must be familiar with the term “A/B Testing” or “Split Testing”. It is basically a mechanism where you can have two or more versions of the landing page with changes in the page elements and then analyse users’ reaction on each page and decide which version is performing best. Sounds too technical, isn’t it?? Let’s understand this with an example:

Tom sells customised t-shirts and accessories like key chains, coffee mugs etc. on his website. Although his products are good quality and can interest any audience, his conversion rate is not that great. He uses Pay per Click advertising to sell his products and uses particular category page as landing page for his users. E.g. someone searching for “customized photo frame” would land up on www.tomswebsite.com/custom-photo-frames/, where he would have different designs and shapes of photo frames. Users can click on particular photo frame and customize it with different options available, but that would be on www.tomswebsite.com/custom-photo-frames/frame1/. Now, he decides to do A/B Testing with product details page. He has another version of the product details page, with same color theme but with increased picture size, different “Call To Action” button text and larger heading font.

So, A/B Testing is presenting whole new different page(s) to your visitors where as in multivariate testing you only change some elements on the same page (More on multivariate testing in the later post). You can decide how much percentage of traffic should go to variations pages that you have created for better decision making at the end of the full exercise, e.g. if you have two variations and one original page, you can decide to split the total traffic between all three of them, or say 50% to two variations and 50% to original page. The image below will explain it better:

Advantages of A/B or Split Testing

• Get to know your audience better
• Improved CTR (Click Through Rate) = Lower CPC (Cost Per Click) = Higher Quality Score
• Fast Results
• Results with solid proof

Testing should be on every marketer’s list as you never know which combination will work out the best. Even if your ROI is good, it can be improved with testing.