Stay in the know: Search Marketing Blog

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We wrote a similar article a few years ago on Why Aren’t My Ads Showing, and most recently we were asked to write a similar article for agencyside to help other agencies set client expectations for paid search. We’ve tweaked the original article a bit for our customers to provide a bit of insight and understanding into the workings of paid search from our perspective.

We often are asked “Why Aren’t My Ads Showing?”, so we are here today to provide a bit of insight into that question. There are several main factors that influence ad delivery. This list is not exhaustive, but it will provide you with knowledge to understanding the answer to the question.

1) Campaign structure – Remember you are paying per click, and generally have some sort of budget limitation. For example, let’s say you have a keyword with an average cost per click of $1 and a daily account budget of $100. This means you will receive 100 clicks per day on average. Because the paid search venues must stay within a narrow range of your budget your ad frequency will be directly related to your click through rate. If you have an average click through rate of 10% it will take 1,000 impressions to exhaust your budget. So if there is search volume of 5,000 per day for your keyword, your ad will show 20% of the time. Now consider if you have 50 to 100 keywords in your campaign all sharing the same $100 budget.

2) Quality Score is technically Google nomenclature, but all search venues have a method for determining something similar. Intended to be the great equalizer this determines what position your ad will show and at what cost relative to the other advertisers. This is what prevents us from buying our way into top placement for more competitive terms. Higher Quality Score means higher positioning, lower cost per click, and often greater frequency – all good things. The factors that affect Quality Score are well documented, but basically if you aren’t relevant, have poor ad copy or have some technical issues with your landing page you aren’t showing.

3) Age of Campaign – New campaigns can start off slow while the search venue is getting an understanding of the click through and user behavior relative to the account. This generally takes a few days depending on the size of the account. Larger accounts will take longer since there are more variables to assess. If you have a large account with a small budget, good luck. Better to start small and expand from there as the campaign picks up steam. See #1 for reasoning on this.

If you have a mature account that is losing visibility it may be time to reconfigure, redesign, or reassess to find another approach. Hopefully, you have some sort of ongoing optimization involving testing of campaigns elements in place so this won’t happen. Always watch for loss in visibility after a miscalculated major change in landing page design, site redesign or if you see your average cost per click increase substantially. Even with an unlimited budget your ads still wouldn’t show for every search. That is just the way it is. Google offers a tool to help diagnose certain problems related to ad visibility in the impression share component of its reports. This can tell you how much visibility your campaign is missing based on budget limitations or quality score.

Every impression (every time your ad shows) that doesn’t get clicked is detrimental to the account in some way. “Googling” keywords every day to see if your ads are showing is costing money, even if you never click on a single one.

If you are interested in understanding if your campaigns are performing to their potential, let us know. We can provide an audit and consultation to help you maximize on every dollar spent. Contact us today.

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In an era when people spend more than half of their waking hours consuming media, the content on your website has never been more important. And likewise, with the vast amount of redundant or otherwise useless information that populates much of the Internet, having a well maintained and well-sourced website has never been more valuable.

Is your site findable?

Content is the key for findable and authoritative websites. It also helps build your brand by injecting both a manageable personality and a point of view into your business.

Regardless of how many keywords you upload to your Adwords account or how much time and money you spend on delivering your ads to prospective customer’s eyes, you’re missing a significant segment of the market if you don’t have keyword-rich, focused and fresh content on your website. Also consider that your “best” ads may not even be showing due to a perceived lack of relevancy to what’s on the destination web page.

What the newspaper industry’s woes have shown us is that the democratization of information is expanding daily. In order to capitalize on this fact, everyone from non-profit organizations to publicly owned companies should be turning their websites into information sources, not simply glorified advertisements or electronic storefronts.

The benefits of content

The first benefit to turning your website into an information source includes increased organic traffic. The more quality information you have on your site, the more there is for browsers to connect with in web searches. One of the best parts of organic traffic is that it’s free, while online advertising can cost a significant amount of money to produce a beneficial ROI. Also, good quality content can produce targeted organic traffic and ROI long after its creation, unlike paid mediums.

Coinciding with your content creation should be an intensive marketing effort to increase your content’s visibility. This includes link building, networking with industry related blogs and news sites, actively participating in social media websites and posting to message boards and forums. Still, first and foremost, regular content production is the key.

Second, you’ll establish your business as a reputable source for the latest news and information about the product or service you provide – preferably before someone else does.

Finally, you’ll show search engines that your site is worthwhile to Internet surfers, which will ultimately increase your website’s credibility and search ranking.

While written content is arguably the most important part of your overall content strategy, multi-media content including videos, graphics, polls and the like, all combine to create a complete content package.

Once you have a content strategy nailed down – maybe you’ve even created an editorial calendar – you need to identify your audience. Who are you writing for? As tempting as it may be, you’re not just writing about your company, product or service. You’re writing for the people you hope to turn into customers. What do they want to know?

With all that in mind, go forth and start producing that content! And remember, the existing information on your site continuously needs to be optimized with updated keyword research and competitive analysis. Keeping your website on the cutting edge of web searches is a never ending process.

We can help you create a viable content and online strategy, give us a buzz.

Image via all-sorts.biz

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Link building can get a bad rap sometimes. Often people think it’s just spam, but really link building is a very beneficial component of a successful SEO campaign. Some companies buy links or hire companies to post automated links (which is heavily frowned upon by search engines and degrades the Internet experience, in my opinion). Why would you want a computer to do your work, when you can get better results by posting legitimate quality links?

Here are four pieces of advice to getting your comments and links approved:

1. Be real. I find the most successful way to get your back links approved is to be your authentic self. Go ahead, state your opinion on the topic, as long as you can tie it to the topic of your link or keyword. This way you’re posting a real comment as if there was no link there. Saying “Great Post, I will bookmark your site and read more.” is not a real comment, it’s spam.

2. Be relevant and respectful. Always make sure that the blog or article you’re posting a comment to is related to the link you’re posting. Once you find a relevant site, read the article and leave comments that reference something that was mentioned in the article.

3. Be a social non-spammer. If you think of link building as providing the author and readers with helpful information or added value in your commenting versus trying to get a link, you will likely see an increase in the number of approved comments. In my experience, being myself has worked to my advantage when link building. Occasionally my efforts are misinterpreted as spam since I’m including a link. On the other hand, there are occasions when people comment back and a conversation begins, which to me is very valuable because you are building a trust with the individual whose blog or news source you are leaving a comment on. They know you are leaving a legitimate comment and the fact that there is a link there is fine by them because they either like that your comment was real and related to their post or know that you may be working an angle by link building, but they are okay with that since you are adding value.

4. Don’t take it personally. It will get frustrating at times when your comments and links are not approved. Experiences like these can teach you about your link building approach and technique. For instance, you may find that you need to shorten your comment or try another approach, or maybe the topics don’t relate like you thought they did. There are so many factors that can determine if your link gets approved or not, but the bottom line is to not get discouraged and to keep it real.

photo love to: seattleclouds.com