I have seen Ernest’s presentation and it is excellent. If you are in sales, marketing or website development, I would highly encourage you to attend. During the seminar Ernest will be looking at the connection between a prospective buyer and your landing page after they do a search or click on a pay-per-click ad.

What I like about Ernest’s presentation is his straightforward style, great examples and practical tips. During his presentation he uses his own custom slides that are engaging, interesting, and well designed.

To find out more details and to register please go to:

www.quickinars.com/2011/03/landing-pages-that-convert-to-prospects-customers/

I’m looking forward to meeting you at these session.

You won’t be disappointed.

Jeff Nelson

I panicked, thinking I had accidentally changed the geo-target settings in Google AdWords. After assuring that this was not the case, I started looking into what could possibly be causing this.

Let me set the stage a little bit here:

Client – Lethbridge College

Geo-Target – Most of Canada

I looked at the Google Analytics reports and sure enough, just over 100 visits from the Philippines and close to 200 from the USA. Why on earth is this happening?

I dug around a little bit more but couldn’t find anything so I did the only thing I could think of: call Google! I spoke to a very friendly individual who put me on hold while he investigated. A few moments later, he came back on the phone and assured me that all the settings were fine. This is happening because Google doesn’t only use a users IP address to serve ads. WHAT? Apparently, the IP address is used but so are geo-specific terms such as ‘Calgary’ or ‘Lethbridge’. So I dug a bit deeper into the Analytics data. Sure enough, the keywords indicated searches like “Lethbridge College” or “college in Lethbridge”.

This case is a little out of the ordinary because the ‘business name’ has the city name in it. Normally, when a business name is something like, for example, Anduro, these searches would not generally result in ads showing for “internet marketing” in Europe, when we are targeting Canada.

I wanted to take it one step further. Why would they want to pay for these people to click on the ads? Interestingly enough, a lot of these clicks resulted in conversions. This tells me that someone in the Philippines is looking to come to Canada to go to college/university and found Lethbridge College as a result.

That’s good but is it worth it? Turns out it is! The cost/conversion in the Philippines is 72.5% LOWER than in Canada. That is incredible.

Granted, there are a lot less clicks and a lot less conversions but there is no need to panic over the ads showing in different countries.

The Google rep also told me that they are working on implementing a setting that allows advertisers to turn this off. Now that I have been looking into it some more, I am not sure I would. The cost/conversion is so much lower – why not advertise there? In this case, it works out but in the future, I will really need to think about whether or not it makes sense to advertise elsewhere.

For a local painting company – not so much. But a school catering to a vast number of people? Absolutely.

As a result, we had an objective (do the video) but this was one of those situations where we had no time, no media room, dysfunctional equipment, and no one to shoot the video.  Being 2 resourceful guys we improvised. We met at Mount Royal University, snagged a classroom, set up our cameras on a tripod, hammered out a script (very loose) and shot the video. Here is what we came up with. Enjoy.

This article is about Google Product extensions which are putting an end to the 70-character ad text which is incredibly restricting, the ‘one landing page per keyword’ rule and the fact that image ads are not available on the search network.

Amazing! Unfortunately, this product is only available in the U.S. for the time being but I am sure Google will roll it out world wide once all the bugs have been dealt with.

So, what exactly are Google Extensions? Simple! Instead of simply one ad being displayed for a company/product, the ad appears with a + sign inside of a box underneath it which can be expanded and displays a list of other products featured by this same company. Brilliant!

Where does this extra information come from? The company needs to enter information into Google’s Merchant Center and the information is pulled from there. If a customer then clicks on one of the products listed in the expanded product extension, they are taken to the appropriate page (specified in the Google Merchant Center).

The article goes into great detail about the strategies, costs involved, tracking and whether there will be an impact on SEO (since once all of the extensions are expanded, the first organic listing falls well below the fold) but for sake of simplicity, I have just covered the basics.

Check out the full article here (with a subscription), on Google or contact us at Anduro for more information on this. Remember though, this is only available in the U.S. for the time being.

There are many reports available to the AdWords advertiser – some helpful, some just a lot of data on a page with no real value. One of the helpful ones is called the Search Query report. This report spits back, essentially, a list of keywords users have used and have seen your ads. The reason this is helpful is if you are using different match types (which I hope you are!) there are a lot of variations of keywords that you may or may not have included making this list incredibly helpful. You can also see which words your ads showed up for that you may not want to show for and you can then add these words as negative keywords.

A big one I have been seeing a lot is a local company selling their product only in that particular city, with the geo target set to that city. So for example, if I have a jewelry store in Calgary and I am only interested in local customers, I can set the target to Calgary only. But if someone in Calgary searches for ‘jewelry store in vancouver’ my ad will show up if one of my keywords is phrase match ‘jewelry store’. This will show up in the report and I can add vancouver as a negative keyword.

On the flip side of that, maybe someone typed in ‘calgary jewelry store’ and my ad would have shown. If I have broad match terms, I could add calgary jewelry store as a phrase match term and slowly eliminate the need for broad match terms which often have high impressions and show the ads for some pretty interesting combinations of words! They are also very good at using up your budget quickly.

When you run the search query report, you can specify which campaign or adgroups you want to run the report on.

With this new feature, you can log in to your account and while you are looking at each adgroups keywords, click the “See Search Terms” link and it will show you all of the keywords used for that particular adgroup. This is so much easier than running the report every time and then having to sort by adgroup etc.

The real time saver though, is the fact that you can add keywords right there. With a click of the mouse! You can also add negative keywords just as easily.



You can either select specific keywords and see what variations users have used or you can simply click on See search terms… and then select All. This will give you a complete list.

Fantastic tool that has already saved me a ton of time! Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Here is a link for more details: Internet Marketing Conference – Calgary 2010.

Great line-up of speakers. So far 60 people have registered. Ends on St Patrick’s Day – March 17th.

Topics include Social Media, Gaming, Videos, SEO, Pay-Per-Click and Industry related news.

Anduro is offering a discount. Call our office and we will give you the promo code.

1. The importance of the tail varies tremendously
2. People search differently for different types of services/products.
3. The importance of the tail does not depend on the size of the search spend.
4. The tail is most important for SKU-based commodity retailers.
5. The tail is critically important for some advertisers.

I love the way Damon James in our company summarized the article. His conclusion is, “For bigger websites (lots of pages) and companies with lots of discretionary funds, the long-tail is a good thing. For smaller websites (limited real estate) and companies with limited dollars, (unless they want to do it themselves), not so much.”

One of our strategies is to use SEO techniques to go after keywords that are in the middle of the tail and pay-per-click campaigns to catch keywords on the long tail.

The bottom line is that most companies have to look at the value of keywords in the long tail and determine the value. More often than not setting up a pay-per-click campaign is the best way to go.

In online marketing the key is to gently coax website visitors through an evolution into website participants.  Whether we are talking about Pay Per Click platforms or ecommerce sites, visitors need to be participating – clicking – in order to increase the conversion rate and, hence, the ROI.  As evidenced by the 2 million Google Search results, this process is not a hard science with tried and tested methods – it is an art.  There are a lot of web users who are more than happy to simply be visitors – just hoping to pass GO and collect their proverbial $200.  After reviewing a few of the Google Search results and thinking of my own online experiences I have identified two key concepts that website owners should keep in mind when trying to entice visitors to take that first step toward earning the highly esteemed blue Participant ribbon.

• The need to participate:
  • In today’s fast paced world, people do not take the time to do things they do not need or want to do.   The end goal of the conversion must be valuable and secure for the visitor as well as for the website owner.  Nurture the desire to participate by clearly communicating the value of the conversion to the website visitor.  Encourage return business by adding an additional thank you page after the conversion step is completed.
• The ability to participate:
  • Expand on the concept of the Big Orange Button (BOB).  Keep the visitor on task by ensuring that the information, design and feel of the website are consistent from the landing page through to the actual conversion step.  Limit distractions, make the next step(s) obvious and encourage and enable the visitor to act quickly.

It is well recognized that higher conversion rates can translate into higher ROI and a few well executed website adjustments can help to increase conversion rates.  So, welcome to all visitors.  Now, ready… set…participate!!

- Jenn -

Guest post done by Jenn. It just so happens that Anduro Marketing offers what we call an “Increasing Conversions Session”. To find out more, contact us.

1. Relevant Content
The first factor is to have a tight connection between the ad and the landing page. We aim for similar content between the ad, the keywords and the content of the landing page. This is important not only for maintaining high Google quality scores and keeping the price per click as low as possible but also to improve conversion rates. Costs can skyrocket when we set up ads that are directed to landing pages with content that is loosely related or irrelevant and conversions can plummet when a connection is not made between the ad and the landing page.

2. Conversion Rates
The second aspect is generating conversions from the landing page which is ultimately measured by ROI. Some tricks of the trade to increase conversions include:

• Adding a big orange button (BOB) – the button doesn’t have to be “orange”.
• Having relevant buttons above the fold
• Minimizing distractions on the page
• Linking to a page with a form on it
• Listing the benefits and value
• Add micro conversion features

Solution
Every company and the products they offer are different. The solution to both problems is to design and develop landing pages that are relevant and encourage a positive  response.

Essentially, if you are looking to make changes to your account, you can click on this tab and it will give you suggestions on how you could improve the account. The tool is new so right now there are only Budget and Keyword changes ideas but there is a promise that there is more to come.

I tried this tool out on a client of ours and found that, of course, Google wants me to increase the budget and add keywords. What was surprising though, is that the increase was only $0.60/day! This really won’t make them a ton of extra money but according to the tool, will increase the traffic by an estimated 121 clicks/month.

I am always a bit skeptical of new Google tools because I am never sure if the tools are meant to help the advertiser or Google but this one seems to be not so terrible – if you always keep in mind that Google is a business and they need to make money!

Here is a link to some more information about the Opportunities tab which I have actually used a few times. There are good keyword suggestions which you may have missed. For the most part though, it is just a way to check you are on the right track.

There is also another blog post about this that I received a while ago and would like to share.