InternetMarketingClub.org Presents The Digital Marketer's Roadmap - The Top 3 Tactics for Internet Marketing Right Now

In this Wednesday Webinar, provided by Jay Berkowitz, CEO of TenGoldenRules.com and Founder of the InternetMarketingClub.org, Jay will share the top 3 tactics that are working right now in internet marketing.

This webinar will help you learn a new tactic that generates leads for 3 times less than Google Pay Per Click (PPC), a critical element your website needs to succeed in internet marketing, and another tactic that brings customers back to your site to make a sale.

This free webinar will take place Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 from 12:30pm EDT - 1:30pm EDT. To register and for more information please visit: Digital Marketer's Roadmap - The Top 3 Tactics for Internet Marketing Right Now

Google’s High-Priced Keywords

We all have certain keywords that we bid on but feel are overpriced. We get that sour puckered face every time we are forced to bid a little higher. For the sake of making all of us feel a little bit better for this Labor Day weekend I did research on some of Google’s most expensive keywords. Keep in mind that these big amounts can change quickly and you might see a different amount than what I’m going to show you below. Are you ready to feel better about your keyword bid amounts?

• $223.07 no win no fee accident claims
• $197.98 national accident helpline
• $157.01 swiftcover car insurance
• $113.14 mesothelioma attorney utah
• $92.55 secured loans
• $88.57 direct insurance
• $65.33 online schools
• $53.95 accident injury lawyers
• $53.45 mortgage refinance
• $43.11 asbestos cancer

Can you believe somebody’s willing to pay $223.07 per click for a keyword? For their sake, I hope they’re getting a decent cost per conversion. I told you it was going to work friends, you’re already feeling better about your bids. If you know of any keywords that are more expensive than $223.07, let me know in the comments below.

New Keyword Matching Options

Google has long supported keyword matching options in Adwords pay per click campaigns. For those of you who are unfamiliar with keyword matching, the standard options include:

Broad Match
Ads will be displayed when any combination of the words in your broad match phrase (or synonyms or related phrases) appear in a search query, regardless of the order.
Context: keyword phrase
Example: search engine optimization
Ads will show up for search queries including: search engine optimization, search engine optimization company, optimization for a search engine, seo company

Phrase Match
Ads will be displayed when any combination of the words in your broad match phrase appear in a search query, in the exact order you specify.
Context: "keyword phrase"
Example: "search engine optimization"
Ads will show up for search queries including: search engine optimization, search engine optimization company, google search engine optimization

Exact Match
Ads will be displayed only when the exact phrase you specify is searched. The words must be in the exact order you specify and no other words can be included in the query.
Context: [keyword phrase]
Example: [search engine optimization]
Ads will only show up for the search query: search engine optimization

Google's new keyword matching option, called broad modifier, gives slightly more control over what search queries your ads show up for than with traditional broad match. The modifier will limit the synonyms and related searches that your ads will show for when using broad match. To use the modifier, insert a + symbol before one or more of the words in a broad match phrase. For any word with a + symbol preceding it, a search query must include that word or a very similar variation in order for an ad to be displayed. Below are some examples:

If your broad match phrase is red diamonds then your ad may show up for phrases including:
red jewelry, colored jewelry, cheap fake red diamonds

If your broad match phrase is +red diamonds then your ad may show up for phrases including:
red diamond, red jewelry, red necklace

If your broad match phrase is +red +diamonds then your ad may show up for phrases including:
red diamond, cheap diamonds in red, red elegant diamonds

Basically, using broad match modifiers will give you more reach than using phrase match, but more control than using traditional broad match.

PPC Tip - Remove the Spaces

To any pay per click advertising veteran, it is well-known that bidding on misspellings of keywords is a good way to cut down on the cost per click of your campaigns. In competitive industries, however, your competitors are also aware and even commonly misspelled keywords can become very expensive to bid on.

A misspelling that is often overlooked, but common in virtually any industry is leaving out a space between words in a phrase.

People are busy. They type fast. Look at a document you recently wrote quickly. It's very likely that there is a space missing somewhere. The same holds true for your market.

Let's say for example you are in online marketing. Bidding on the phrase "online marketing" will cost you about $5.72/click while bidding on "onlinemarketing" will only cost about $2.26/click.

If you decide to bid on misspellings like these, you should set up an ad group specifically for that and not use keyword insertion in your ads. Using keyword insertion when bidding on misspellings will cause your ad copy to contain misspellings and look unprofessional.

Click-To-Call Mobile Advertising

Google recently introduced click-to-call phone numbers in local pay per click ads on mobile devices. Now, if you have Adwords pay per click ads targeted on mobile devices with full internet browsers, you can include a phone number which people can call with a simple click. Included in this update is new tracking data that allows you to track the number of people who called you from clicking on an ad.

It is often the case in pay per click advertising that including a phone number in the ad copy can increase click through rates. This also holds true for click-to-call mobile advertising as seen in data gathered from beta testing that shows an increase in both website visits and phone calls as a result of adding a click-to-call number.

Make the Most Out of Contextual Advertising

A common mistake people make when setting up a pay per click campaign in Google Adwords is to run the same campaign on both the search and content networks. Content network campaigns are quite different than search network campaigns in how they're set up, optimized, and tracked. The messaging that works best on a content network campaign may not work best in a search network campaign and vice versa. For this reason, it is best to run each campaign on only one network and optimize each campaign individually. You can even duplicate a campaign and run one version on search and a mirror of it on content to see which performs better.

If you are new to advertising on a content network, Google has a step by step tutorial on getting a content network campaign started.

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Ten Steps for Setting Up A Successful Pay Per Click Campaign

Join Marc Purtell, Pay Per Click Advertising Specialist at Ten Golden Rules, for this week's webinar on how to set up a pay-per-click campaign:

- Setting up a campaign in Google, Yahoo and BING
- Defining Target Consumer Personas
- Determining budgets, regional targets and day parts
- Keyword selection, ad copy development
- Advanced tricks and tips

The event will take place on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register please visit: Ten Steps for Setting Up A Successful Pay Per Click Campaign.

Test Different Messaging on a Single Search Engine Results Page

It is a long standing debate on whether or not to bid on phrases in pay per click that your website already ranks for organically. One school of thought would ask why someone would pay for clicks on a search engine results page in which their website is already ranking for organically. There are actually several answers to that question, one being that it gives a website the opportunity to use different messaging variations.

Various messaging may be attractive to some people but not others. The messaging/offer included in your organic search listing may attract clicks from some users, but not others. Additionally, you do not have complete control over the messaging that is displayed in your organic listing. Adding a paid listing with a different message or a specific offer can appeal to an additional cross-section of searchers. You also have much more control over what is displayed in a pay per click listing than what is displayed in an organic listing.

Let PPC Dictate Your Meta Descriptions

When your website is included in the organic listings of a search engine result page, there are two important factors that will cause people to click on your listing: rank and messaging. Of course the search engine has the ultimate say in where you rank, and even what your messaging is, but you do have some control over the messaging. Often times in an organic search listing, a snippet of your meta description is included. If your meta description is what shows, it better be inviting if you want a click.

One of the beautiful things about PPC is the ability to test different messaging in ad variations. Once you find the right ad copy to generate a high click through rate, by testing different ads, you can use that copy in the meta descriptions of your webpages. By knowing what messaging causes people to click, you can increase your click through rate in organic search as well.

Resurrecting Old Keywords

Through the evolution of a pay per click campaign, many keywords and ads will be removed for various reasons, including poor click through rate, poor conversion rate, etc. Of course, I hope you paused these keywords and ads rather than deleting or editing them so they retain their historical data (click through rate, conversion rate, etc). Paused keywords and ads are often forgotten and new variations are more likely added to campaigns over the course of time. Some of those ads and keywords that did not work out well in the past, however, may work out now.

Lets say at some point you found your ad copy to convert poorly. Therefore, you paused the ad and replaced it with a new one. Later down the road, you have found that a new landing page is causing your campaign to convert much better. You may have some old paused ads that are actually very good, but rather than going through your old ads, you forget about them. For this reason, it is beneficial to go through paused ads and keywords from time to time and see if they are worth resurrecting.

It may not only be the case that a new landing page gives new opportunity to old phrases and ads. Changes in the market can also have an effect on performance. So before you decide to add a bunch of new keywords and ads to your campaign, go through your paused ones and see if there may be some that are now more relevant.

AdWords Trick - Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Many pay per click advertisers are now using dynamic keyword insertion in their ad copy. Many, however are no getting the most out of this trick because they do not understand the capitalization techniques. The way you use capitalization in your keyword insertion command will directly affect the capitalization in the ad that appears. Here are some ways to control capitalization in your keyword insertion ads.

Lets say a user is searching "ten golden rules". Here is how it will look using different keyword insertion capitalization variations:

If your ad uses this command: {keyword:Internet Marketing}, the ad will read "ten golden rules". (no capitalization)

If your ad uses this command: {Keyword:Internet Marketing}, the ad will read "Ten golden rules". (only the first letter of the first word is capitalized)

If your ad uses this command: {KeyWord:Internet Marketing}, the ad will read "Ten Golden Rules". (the first letter of each word is capitalized)

If your ad uses this command: {KEYWORD:Internet Marketing}, the ad will read "TEN GOLDEN RULES". (all letters are capitalized)

In most cases, it is best to capitalize the first letter of each word (KeyWord:). Play around with some different variations and see how they work for your campaign.

Improve Your Quality Score

When advertising in Google AdWords, quality score can mean the difference between profitable and break-even campaigns. Small tweaks to your campaign can be enough to improve your quality score enough to lower your cost per click. Especially if you are in a field with growing competition, you may see the cost per click of your keywords rising to the point that you just can't make any money. By raising that quality score, you may just be able to get the cost back down and start making money again.

The simplest way to improve your quality score is to take the time to break your campaigns down to highly specific ad groups. Instead of a single ad group with 20 somewhat similar keyword phrases, break it into four or five ad groups with four or five keyword phrases in each. For the ads in a specific ad group, include the keyword phrases in the ad copy. On the landing page for that ad group, include the wording you used in the ads. By simply separating keywords into ad groups, you will improve the relevancy of your ads and landing pages and effectively lower your cost per click.

AdWords Tip: Identify Negative Keywords

A useful PPC optimization strategy that is often overlooked is including negative keywords in your campaign. Negative keywords are used in AdWords to prevent your ads from being served for irrelevant searches. To paint a clearer picture, assume you are bidding on the term “bass” because you sell bass guitars. If you are bidding on “bass” with broad match, your ad could be served in searches for “bass fishing”. Anyone searching for “bass fishing” is unlikely to purchase a bass guitar from your site. If you included the term “bass fishing” in your negative keywords, you would not be wasting the impression and possible click. In addition, by adding negative keywords, your cost per click is likely to decrease as your click through rate increases.

Understanding negative keywords is only half the battle. Many advertisers know about negative keywords but do not utilize them because they have trouble identifying them. Common sense can certainly get you a starter list of negative keywords, but to really be effective, you will need to constantly be adding negative keywords to your campaigns.

The first way to identify negative keywords is to look for them in your current campaigns. Run a keyword performance report to see which keywords convert poorly over time. Add those phrases to your negative keywords.

There is also a very simple way to identify negative keywords you may not have thought of. Just run your broad keywords through any keyword suggestion tool, like the one provided in AdWords. Look through the list and identify any phrases that include your keywords but are irrelevant to your business. For example, you may have never considered that when bidding on “packaged food”, your ad will be showing up on searches for “packaged food poisoning”. However, if you ran “packaged food” through a keyword suggestion tool, “packaged food poisoning” would be right there for you to see.

But What About Your Website?

As usual, Mitch Joel has inspired me to write a blog post. The man never ceases to amaze me with his simple yet profound gems. Yesterday he talked about being inspired to remember that it all begins and ends with the website after listening to Bryan Eisenberg's keynote presentation at Search Engine Strategies in Toronto.

Internet marketers are very busy trying to stay abreast of the latest trends, new ideas and just plain doing our jobs – and we can tend to lose focus on the destination. As Mitch points out, it isn't going to matter how great your PPC campaign, blog post or social media idea is if when the visitor is delivered to the website, they have no idea what to do or can't do what they want to do.

So, remember, focus on the website first. Ask yourself these questions: can visitors easily understand and navigate my website? Are they enabled, and even persuaded to take action? Have I made my website performance based, transactional, trackable and usable? And is my website search engine friendly so visitors can find it?

If you answered no to any of these questions, it's definitely time to review your website. After all, as Mitch notes, it's not only the destination for your online marketing – it's often the first point of contact for your customers.

Using Google Trends for PPC and Penetrating Foreign Markets

Last week, Michael reported how Google Trends is now tracking not only searches but also compares traffic between websites. However, this is only the start of what you can use Google Trends for.

Local PPC Advertising - marketers can find out which regions are searching for a broad keyword phrase. It can drill down from region (Countries) to sub-region (State) to City. For national companies looking to focus their local advertising efforts, Google Trends is an essential PPC advertising tool.

Penetrating Foreign Markets - Google Trends tracks search trends for the global marketplace. US-based companies that are looking to expand into foreign markets can search and find what countries / sub-regions are looking for their products and services.

Additionally, Google Trends advises what language your target audience speaks and popular news stories related to that keyword phrase / website.

Yahoo! Google and MSN Search Wars

Today, Tech Crunch posted a follow up to their "scoop" about Google purchasing Yahoo! Search. After their original post, Yahoo's stock plunged and there was a mass of speculation.

The post today features the full text of the agreement itself - very detailed and with much commentary.

I think this is all extraordinary. And I am concerned on many levels. I am not sure this will benefit the consumer - and marketers will be perturbed as well. Competition is good, and this will have a severe impact on the two companies being seen as competitive websites for advertising.

I am sure that Google and Yahoo! will do what they can to address the potential confusion, but I'm still concerned for what the deal will mean to marketers and consumers.