The Trada Blog

Recovering From a Failed PPC Campaign

May 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

You shouldn’t be disheartened, even if your paid search advertising campaign is a dismal failure. There is much to learn. It’s not really any different than anything else in life – you have to start somewhere and learn as you go. PPC can give you a big boost, but it’s also an intricate process.

Not unlike any other aspect of managing your business, it takes time and effort to learn about PPC itself and also about your customers, in order to achieve success.

What can go wrong.

High bounce rates or clicks that don’t lead to conversions are a sure sign your PPC campaign’s not working. Causes could include:

  • Failure to use or test all keyword match types.
  • Overly-general keywords or competitive terms.
  • Overly-broad geotargeting.
  • No ad-specific landing pages, wasting clicks by merely dumping then onto your home page.
  • Mis-directed targeting.

Even if you have a well-thought-out campaign, good landing pages, great ad copy and a well-optimized website, if you don’t know your potential customers well enough you can make some dreadful – and potentially costly – mistakes. You need to examine all aspects of your failed campaign to understand where you went wrong. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Paid Search, PPC Tips, Uncategorized

Ad Copy: 10 Tips for Maximizing Your 70 Characters

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When it comes to PPC advertising, there are many important components. One of these is Ad Copy. Ad copy is what faces users searching for your product or service, so it’s vital you write compelling ad that they will click.

There are some variations for how these ads appear on different search networks:

Yahoo/Bing    
Title: 40 Characters
Description: 70 characters 
 
Google
Title: 25 Characters
Description Line 1: 35 Characters
Description Line 2: 35 Characters [Read more...]
Filed Under: Ad Copy, PPC Tips

Trada’s Weekly Roundup

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s Friday, finally! With a busy weekend of graduations and Mother’s Day, we’ll keep today’s post short and jump right into some of the awesome blog posts and articles we read this week.

1. Search Engine Watch is talking about Optimizing to lifetime value of customers to maximize SEM performance. We could not agree more! As they state in the article, “Wouldn’t you pay a higher CPA to acquire a customer who buys three times a month with no coupons over a customer who comes in once for a great deal?”

2. Unbounce has a great article with 3 tiny tweaks to shoot your conversion rate up (a little).  Read this blog post for how to build a better headline, experiment with design, and moving around elements on your landing pages.

3. Our friends at Gnip wrote this great post about Social Data: A Beacon in Natural Disasters. It’s amazing to see how social media has played into natural disasters- making it possible in many instances to prevent more deaths, report accurate news and numbers, and more.

4. Search News Central wrote about SEO Excuse #143: The other guy is doing it, so it must work.  If you’re a marketer, you better believe SEO is important, but you must do it the smart way.

5. Finally, we have this infographic from Tasty Placement.


Infographic: Testing Social Signals

Infographic authored by
TastyPlacement, a web design and SEO company,

Happy Friday and Happy Mothers Day to all moms out there!

Filed Under: SMB Marketing, Social Media

The Four Horsemen of PPC

May 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Four elements comprise a paid search strategy: keywords, ad groups, landing pages, and ads. In order to excel at PPC (and to take advantage of the leveled playing field of paid search to beat your competitors) you must make sure that these four elements are relevant to each other. This can be time-consuming, and requires thoughtfulness.

Keywords

In order for the ad to relevant to the search query (the search query is what a searcher types in to the search engine- it’s important to note that this is different from a keyword, which you have created), it should contain the actual search phrase in some form.

This is the single easiest way to bolster your quality score, which will ensure that the ad is ‘healthy’ and will be served on Google and Yahoo/Bing. But that’s not the on ly reason to insist upon relevance: a great benefit of using paid search is the ability to capitalize on people’s actual interests, desires, and needs. A searcher has indicated that she wants something- and as an advertiser, you are helping her find it! The clearer and more direct the search ad is- especially if it includes the actual search term- the more likely you are to see clicks.

Ad Groups

Remember that ad groups are for organizing ads, not keywords. An ad group is a group of keywords who will share a set of ads. Again, relevancy is cardinally important. Each ad group should be small (20 keywords or less), focused, and driven to its own landing page. Establishing ad groups is a key part of paid marketing. When you’re making ad groups, you also set the price you’re willing to pay each time your ad is clicked on – your cost per click, or CPC. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Ad Groups, Keywords, Landing Pages, PPC Tips

How to Create Effective Landing Pages for PPC Campaigns

May 7, 2012 By 3 Comments

Guest post by Degree Jungle

In 2011, Google made $37.9 billion in revenue. A staggering 96% of that revenue came from their advertising spend. Top spenders with the search engine giant were home improvement company Lowes and global retailer Amazon, spending $59.1 and $55.2 million respectively on extensive PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. Estimates vary as to how many clicks these figures represent, but what is clear is that the average cost per click to advertisers is steadily increasing.

Whether advertising on Google or other ad networks like Microsoft AdCenter, PPC campaigns have been known to generate significant return on investment when conducted correctly. Although there are many factors to creating a successful PPC campaign, one way to facilitate a positive outcome and convert clicks into customers is to devote some time to perfecting your PPC landing page.

Five Essential Tips to Maximize Success Using PPC Landing Pages

1. Don’t drive your PPC traffic to your homepage: While your homepage may boast a delightful design, it will typically display more information that you need to convey at this point. Creating a focused PPC landing page with a targeted call to action will boost your conversion rates. It will also make your PPC efforts easier to analyze since you won’t have to track visitors interactions with more than one part of your site. Although it should be clear who you are, the best PPC landing page will not display your regular site navigation links. The goal is to encourage visitors to convert there and then. Directing them to another part of the site won’t help you achieve this primary goal. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Landing Pages

Trada’s Weekly Roundup

May 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Friends, welcome back to Trada’s Weekly Roundup. While the news of changes to AdWords’ “rotate” setting were especially hot around here and #ppcchat, we DID read about some other great topics including LinkedIn, keywords, landing pages, and more. Check out some of the articles that caught our attention.

1. Search Engine Land posted about 6 Targeting Methods to Reach Your Business Audience via LinkedIn. The post includes how to build out your LinkedIn campaigns and target them effectively. If you’re interested in advertising on LinkIn, it’s a good place to start.

2. Venture Beat has a 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program (a guest post by our friend Oli Gardner of Unbounce!). Learn how to create landing pages, test them, and use them to improve your conversion rates. As Oli states, this is the intervention your landing pages have been crying for!

3. Okay so we already covered this, but with the recent changes to AdWords, we wanted to know how people were feeling about these changes. Overall, many seem unpleased- there’s even a petition. PPC Associates has even posted “AdWords Improvements and Lessons in How to Service Customers,” a sarcastic response to the changes. Paid search enthusiasts, be prepared to LOL.

4. {Grow} asks “Is there a formula for viral content?“ Their post has lots of great information, but the truest part of it all couldn’t be said better: You can’t manufacture authenticity.

5. Mashable wrote 7 Rules for Responding to Customers Online.  Some great guidelines for interaction with your customers. It’s very important to represent your brand as best as you can, especially when dealing with customers online.

Photo courtesy of PPC Memes

Have a fun and safe weekend!

Filed Under: SMB Marketing, Social Media, Trada News

Google AdWords to Make Changes to Ad Rotation

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Released on the AdWords blog Monday, Google announced the “rotate” setting for ad rotation will change. But what is ad rotation in the first place?

Google AdWords currently offers three settings for ad rotation:

  1.  Optimize for Clicks
  2.  Optimize for Conversions
  3.  Rotate Evenly

As the blog states, the “rotate” setting can be useful for testing, but can also lead to less relevant ads being delivered to searchers. Google’s solution is to prevent yours ads from rotating after 30 days. Here’s what Google said:

“Starting next week, the “rotate” setting for ad rotation will change.  Instead of rotating creatives for an indefinite period of time, this setting will only rotate for a period of 30 days.  After that, the setting will then optimize to show the ads expected to generate the most clicks.  Every time a creative is enabled or edited, the ads in that ad group will rotate more evenly for a new period of 30 days.”

AdWords will roll out this change next week, and if your ad groups haven’t been added or modified in the past thirty days, the new rotation will go into effect.

So far we’ve seen a lot of negative feedback from this change. How do you feel about this change? Leave your comments below!

Filed Under: Ad Groups, Paid Search, PPC Tips

Boost Your Paid Search ROI with Bing and Yahoo! Search

April 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Evidenced by double-digit growth of the market last year, search has become an indispensable tool for connecting people to their sought after resources. Mirroring consumers’ increased reliance on search as a means of acquiring product and service information, advertisers have shifted their attention –and budgets– to digital channels as well.  For the first time last year, internet ad spend surpassed that of cable television, and paid search was the leading digital advertising format, accounting for nearly half of the U.S.’s record breaking $31 billion of ad spend.

So we know that paid search works. It’s an effective way to build brand awareness and drive sales. But data also shows that all search engines are not created equal. Though Google remains the market leader with a more than 2:1 advantage, Bing’s positive growth trajectory in 2011 landed the Microsoft-powered search engine in the #2 position for the first time in its history. While Google’s search query volume grew 10% last year, Bing’s search volume rose 40%, propelled by sizable gains in both unique searchers and searches per searcher, and Bing’s market share is expected to continue growing throughout 2012. Bing’s rising popularity is due in part to the feature rich platform of this “decision engine,” which learns from the user over time and customizes results for each person browsing the web. [Read more...]
Filed Under: Paid Search

Trada’s Weekly Roundup

April 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Is it already Friday? This week flew by and we read some great articles about Twitter, SEO, search, and more. Check out what we were reading below, including a cool infographic!

1. Branded3 has come out with a study proving Tweets DO affect rankings.  Some awesome stats they came up with?

  • Study shows that URLs receive a significant boost in Google rankings when they are shared on Twitter
  • The effects of this boost seem to level out at around 50 tweets, and the subsequent benefit of gaining additional tweets is minimal until around 5,000 tweets
  • After 5,000 tweets, the average ranking of URLs improves considerably
  • URLs receiving over 7,500 tweets almost always rank inside the top 5 results

2. Branding Personality posts “Why Page Load Times Matter So Much and How You Can Reduce Them.” Why is load time important you might ask?  It is one of the first impressions you can give site visitors and potential customers. Make sure you’re putting your best foot forward because “A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.”

3. Search Engine Watch blogged “7 Ways Links Cause Search Rank Changes.”  If your site ranking took a hit recently, it could be caused by  links. Reasons include: A trusted site linking to you shut down, or you got caught using spammy linking tactics. Let’s hope you’re not faced with that last one!

4. SEO Book has a great infographic: Goldilocks SEO. Where do your SEO efforts fit? Just right?

5. Lastly, today is the LAST DAY to apply for a free flight to Boulder for Boulder Startup Week! If you’re interested in the tech scene and looking for a job in Boulder, they will fly you out to attend all of the  fantastic events (including Trada’s Opening Party!) and meet all of the awesome companies that are hiring. Apply now!

Happy Friday! Enjoy the weekend :)

Filed Under: Paid Search, Social Media, Trada News

The WordStream 150: Trada made it!

April 25, 2012 By 4 Comments

Our friends at WordStream have come out with a list of 150 Top Internet Marketing providers doing business in 10 major business categories, including content marketing and blogging, conversion rate optimization, crowdsourcing, email marketing, marketing automation, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, search engine optimization, social media management, video hosting and management, and web analytics.

“The companies featured in the WordStream Internet Marketing 150 are known for providing proven, innovative solutions to the various marketing challenges that businesses today face,” said WordStream founder and chief technology officer Larry Kim. “You can’t run a business in 2012 without engaging in web marketing, and this list serves as a map to help you navigate those waters and develop a strategy to conquer the web.”

Trada is very pleased to be part of this group of internet marketers. Thanks to WordStream for putting together this cool infographic!
Top Internet Marketing Software Vendor Map [Infographic]

Trada is more than a crowdsourcing company. It’s a PPC solution powered by real people with real expertise. See how Trada can help you and your business!

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, Trada News
« Older Posts