Archive for the ‘Pay Per Click PPC’ Category

Client told me recently they have been having some hard sell from a Adwords reseller that holds the lofty title of Premier Partner, the information they received from that partner is misleading and incorrect and is repeated in full here (with comments by delicious webdesign). After investigating their figures I found that in the last year the website has received less visits than claimed.

[message from Google Adwords Premier Partner] Please see attached the stats for your Google programme. Views are how many times the advert has appeared [Delicious Webdesign - shown as over 48,000] and CLICKS are visits to your website.[Delicious Webdesign - shown as 199 these figures are given over a 1 month period]

The only thing that maybe is stopping the user calling is that you only have MOBILE number on the website and NO ADDRESS so they cannot see where you are based ?????? [Delicious Webdesign - Address is on the site and its very shortsighted to say that they know the only thing that stops people calling is the lack of a landline number]

Maybe an idea to get a landline added and then divert it to your mobile. I know a builder who had the exact same issue and this definitely helped.

I have asked Yell to sort out the refund our end for the over payment. [Delicious Webdesign - no idea whats this is about]

Sorry about that. Let me know what you think about the landline ????

[Delicious Webdesign - message to client after he requested help ] Just checked your ‘real Google Analytics  Statistics’. The claim that the ‘clicks’ are visits to your website is incorrect as in the last 3 months your ‘real website stats report you have only had 18 visitors from Yell (you had the same amount from ebay!) .

My advice is as soon as you can stop paying for this advertising and will use your free £50 google adwords voucher and start your ads going on your own Google account.

People typically think that changing / updating the look of a website by making it look ‘jazzier’ will improve visitor numbers and conversions, even though there is a slight possibility that one design may appeal to one person more than another its unlikely once a design has been professionally created and coded that it will turn potential clients or customers away. If your business has noticed a downturn then there are many things to address before the site gets ‘redesigned’. Here is an example list of suggestions that we could give to a typical website, our recommendations:

1, Create permanent content for all pages so even when there are no content in terms of job vacancies there is something for the search engines and people to read.
Recommend – 10 pages relating to your job types / 3000 words- 300 words per page, all text will be search friendly / unique / relevant and rank highly using the flesch reading index.

2, Upgrade your contact form to included more relevant and appropriate fields, to show similar fields to your main competitor
Options
a) Just upgrading current form to include extra fields.
b) Upgrading form type to remove ‘captcha text’ and replace it with security question and add fields as above.
c) Updating form to allow a document upload function.

3 Begin a Google PPC Campaign
Costs – 10% of advertising costs – free £50 voucher added to your account when created
Need your Google Account details and you to Create a Google Adwords account then pass us the admin details

4 Facebook Advertising campaign
Costs – 10% of advertising costs

5 Downloadable forms
Create a PDF optimised form from your application form and create a ‘downloads / application form’ button. As your website hasn’t got a natural place to put these links (like a column down one side of the page) I propose to create a new page under ‘Contact’ Called ‘Downloads’ and then put this on there

6 Marketing the site – This can be done by yourself or by one of our SEO / Admin girls, you could add yourself to lots of business directories / forums / review sites / Google+ / Twitter etc etc and contribute to their online discussions or add content to your ‘account’ also we can do a mini SEO project on the site that will include a lot of offsite marketing and 1-2 press releases.

7 Create a news page / Blog where you can control the content and add pages / photos to your site when required – this is a very cost effective measure to improve the content to your site.

2 After an initial review of their PPC / Google Adwords account. I’ve looked at your AdWords account and it’s not running (as I’m sure you know!) because it’s incomplete. It’s useful in terms of giving me an indication of the keywords you’re interested in, but these would need to be modified to increase the likelihood of success (and keep costs down).I would probably make the main category pages into the main landing pages (the pages that ads point to) – with slight content modifications.

I would provide recommended changes for you to make (with the help of our website designer and possibly a copywriter if you need them).

So, depending on how many categories you want to start with we will be talking about around 5 or 6 landing pages. Or you could easily start with just one (the home page with modifications) and see how that goes.

Summary of service for our PPC campaigns

Delicious Webdesign guarantees to create online advertisements based around your agreed major key phrases. For the purposes of this contract Delicious Webdesign will generate no less than five first page adverts on www.google.co.uk every
day for one calendar month. The adverts will then appear on the first page of Google for each of the selected key phrases agreed at point of sale. You will be able to see your adverts by going to www.google.co.uk or www.google.co.uk/adpreview and typing any of your chosen key phrases into the Google search bar and clicking on ‘search’ (do not click on your own adverts).

The buyer’s adverts will be activated on www.google.co.uk within 48 hours, unless otherwise specified by the Buyer at the point of sale. Upon receipt of payment, the Buyer agrees to this contract.

Duration
This contract will automatically renew for one further calendar month, every calendar month from the date of commencement.

Cancellation of contract
You can cancel this agreement with immediate effect within your first months trial. After your first month’s trial, a notice period of thirty days is required in writing to cancel your Google advertising campaign.
You can cancel your contract by writing to Delicious Webdesign or emailing / phoning us

Recently took on a few clients that want to promote their website via PPC advertising, here is the details I sent them:

We are pleased to welcome you as a customer of Delicious Webdesign and thank you for choosing us to launch your advertising campaign on Google. We can confirm that your advert is now live and can be seen by your potential customers when they search for any of your key phrases, as detailed in your Google Adwords PPC project document pack. We are confident that your business prospects will be enhanced by this advertising campaign and look forward to you renewing your contract in the months to come.

We have a range of products focused upon increasing your business exposure and improving your conversion rates. You will find details of our current offers by visiting our website. In the meantime, if we can be of any assistance or you wish to discuss your campaign, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Recently spoke to someone that got the two confused, for a basic business website you can do a few things for affiliate marketing and the same for PPC Marketing, I will explain them both briefly.

Affiliate Marketing describes the relationship between businesses (websites) when one business rewards another for each visitor or more commonly each sale it supplies or brings or provides via a link, example would be an Amazon product for sale on one site that when clicked on goes to the Amazon site and if a purchase occurs the originating website gets financially rewarded.
PPC Advertising In Google this is referred to as ‘Adsense’ and occurs when one website agrees to ‘rent’ out some screen space to an advertising agency (like Google) so it can run ‘related’ ads on the page. Once these adverts are ‘clicked on’ then that is enough to generate a commission payment from the advertising network / agency (Google) to the originating website.

Here is some thoughts I gave to a SEO workshop recently about someone that talked about having a way to earn money from their site, we were acting as an expert witness to attempt to rectify a situation so excuse the detailed semi-official text:

[Delicious] You stated that you initially wanted affiliate marketing and ppc adverts on your site and the website design company explained that a site has to have a huge amount of traffic to even generate a small income from PPC and Affiliate Marketing. They gave an example of a website that has nearly 7000 visitors a month and that is using PPC adverting and only produces £13 to £20 per month in income from PPC adverts, despite this you requested that your website company put adverts on the site after they explained that Google adverts would be the best way forward for you giving the most targeted adverts with the most commission.

The website design company requested your adsense codes to put on the website for your PPC adverts, you replied with a Google account login details and they attempted to create these codes only to find that you hadn’t created an adsense account, they tried to do this for you but then discovered that Google will not allow you to create an account for your website as there are not enough ‘relevant and unique’ pages they found that sites with 300 pages are approved within a few days but as your site has no unique content it wont be approved.

You also suggested your SEO / Website Design company look at affiliate website to ‘get a link’, which they did and investigated their Affiliated page for you and stated that this is their affilate network where you can join, which entails having code embedded in your site inviting users to visit their site and sign-up and pay for expert advice, but the links they were showing were for two companies and you were informed that they are there above the other 4000 affiliate member websites due to being the most visited sites (thats was an educated guess).

The SEO / Website Designers, by your own admission, spent a lot of time talking to you and attempting to put PPC code on your site and they stated through this process that their opinion has not changed in that affiliate code and PPC Adverting is the last thing your brand new website needs at the moment as it will earn you nothing for at least 2 years, will take people away from your site and the site is totally lacking relevant text and ‘real’ members.

The above dialogue demonstrates a website owner that likes the idea of earning money from a website but has no real idea how this is achieved. In general new business websites should be created to attract new clients / members with valuable content or valuable services then in the ‘unlikely’ event of having a popular website then you can consider the ways to ‘monetise’ it via PPC advertising and Affiliate marketing. These are nice decisions to make but not before you even have one bit of unique text on your site.

Client’s and website owners are always getting hassled by ‘SEO companies’ trying to frighten them and informing them that their adverts are not effective or not working, here is a typical exchange between a website client and a reputable website company (like us )

[Distressed Website Owner / Client] I’m still getting loads of people ringing me saying they can do a better job promoting the site, and that I am getting a lot of irrelevant clicks, that put me on searches that aren’t relevant to us is this right? I’ve told them I’m not interested and that I trust you to look after it for me. Am I getting irrelevant clicks?

[Reassuring Website Design company] Hi, how would another company know what keywords are in your adwords advert and what keywords you are incorrectly targetting? I would advise you are wasting your time talking to other people, that phone you up out of the blue, about this. I get at least one email per week from a client saying they keep getting pestered by these companies wanting your advertising spend. On previous occassions I have found them typically charging way over the correct price for their services (sometimes treble the ‘real’ cost per click) and if they need to phone you to get business then don’t you think they are probably not very good at their job?

We sent you the complete list of ‘exact match’ PPC / Adwords keywords for your adverts and they don’t contain the terms that you quoted, especially the ones that are not relevant for your campaign / business.

The competition is quite tough for your advertising in your sector, we have increased your daily budget to £10 per day but your cost per click is normally under the first page bid so it doesn’t get shown much, We intend increasing your CPC (cost per click) shortly after analysing your results. With the aim to get you on the front page in positions 1-3 with the smallest daily spend. But invariably our changes to move you up will increase the advertising cost per day but will bring you a good ROI.