PPC vs. Organic SEO

Are you engaged in any active Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? What about Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising? The fact is you should be working on both.

Both channels should work in conjunction with the other, sharing information between each to further enhance the overall sales return. That is what it is all about, getting the biggest bang for your buck at the lowest risk.

I can’t count the number of times I hear others say that PPC doesn’t work and costs too much. They tend to opt for SEO over PPC because they feel SEO will drive traffic at a less costly rate — but that is a mistake in judgment … more on that below.

PPC when run properly is a very valuable asset to all businesses. If you are losing money on pay per click you are likely not operating it correctly. SEO is also a very important component to business needs, but it should not be the only method you rely on for traffic generation either.

Consider the following example scenario.

You decide not to run any PPC advertising and in place of it put all your traffic generation eggs into the Organic SEO basket. Your efforts have you enjoying a nice ride at the top of the engines, your sales are high and life is good. You wake up one day and for some unknown reason your sales have not only dipped, but have come to an almost screeching halt. Doing some research you find out that the search engines unleashed some new update to their algorithms and with that update, your previous high flying rankings are now non-existent — and your sales are paying the price.

The risk is real. If you were running PPC in conjunction with Organic SEO this hit would not be as significant, and furthermore, you could quickly “buy” your way back into the search results and pick up pretty much where you left off until your natural rankings recover.

You shouldn’t wait to run PPC. As with SEO, many factors in pay per click rely on time and performance. For example, Quality Scores are affected by performance of ads / keywords and the more historical data you have the more opportunity you have to better those scores. Higher Quality Scores mean you can pay less for higher positions in the search engines — even when your competitor is bidding more than you for that same keyword.

Now if you are one of those who think you can wait for the organic SEO to fail and then at that time buy your way back into the engines with PPC, you’re slightly mistaken. Yes, you can have traffic up and running within a few hours at the most. But the price you will pay for that traffic is going to be higher and the learning curve of what works to convert and what doesn’t will still be something that can only be determined with time.

Here are some pros and cons regarding PPC and SEO:

Pros of PPC Advertising

1. You have more control over paid search traffic.
2. Targeting your ideal customer is easier.
3. You can have quality traffic running to your site in just a few hours.
4. Your traffic will continue to flow as long as your budget allows.
5. Changes you make to your campaigns are active within hours and thus testing creative, landing pages, etc… is easier.
6. Taking advantage of limited time opportunities to drive traffic (like holiday sales, back to school, etc…) is easier.

Cons of PPC Advertising

1. Can get out of hand quickly and bust your budget if not setup and monitored properly.
2. Can be a challenge to work with if not versed managing PPC campaigns to some degree.
3. Depending on the type of system you use to set it up / run it, can be difficult with larger numbers of keywords, ads, and ad groups.

Pros of SEO:

1. Can be more cost effective than PPC (but not always!)
2. Can help you increase rankings for keywords that might otherwise be out of budget in the PPC channel.
3. Indexed pages of your site stay in the search engines forever (providing they are not “dropped”).

Cons of SEO:

1. Testing creative, landing pages, etc… is harder. Changes you make to your campaigns take time to work their way through the system (weeks, months, etc…) and by the time they are active, it’s likely too late to take advantage of any “would be” opportunities.
2. Here today, gone the next. You could be #1 in Google (or any other engine) one day, and be non-existent the next.
3. Traffic slows (or stops) as your search rankings drop and it can take time to recover those ranks.
4. Harder to target and qualify your ideal customer.
5. Time is your friend here (but that’s not always a good thing.) Things in the SEO world just take time.
6. No guaranteed placement.

PPC and SEO are both effective means of delivering traffic to your website and arguments can be made for each as to their effectiveness. The fact is if you’re not running both, you’re limiting your potential for growth and increasing your risk. SEO should be seen as an ongoing marketing objective with “long term” results. PPC should also be an ongoing marketing objective with “short term” results. Combine them both, and the two traffic generation methods can work as a well oiled unit, delivering not only a continual flow of visitors to your site, but increased sales as well.

Got anymore insights? I’d love to hear them. Voice your opinion below.

Improving Paid Search Quality Scores

If you are managing any form of advertising, getting the biggest bang for your buck should be at the top of your mind. Spend less, make more.

When it comes to paid search advertising, there is any number of ways to get more for less. One of them is by paying attention to your quality scores. In short, a higher quality score can mean you actually pay less for the same — or even higher — placement.

In effect you could actually be paying less (i.e. cpc) than a competitor bidding on the same keyword(s) yet have a higher placement in the search results.

So what can you do to better you quality scores? Well the real key is keep things relevant. Keywords should be relevant to the ad and to the landing page the user ends up on. This can often be achieved by developing tightly focused groups of keywords (sometimes only 2 or 3 per group) based around a single ad group. Do not try to lump everything you are bidding on into one giant campaign / ad group — our ability to focus will be quickly lost, and that won’t only hurt your quality scores, it will hurt your sales conversion.

Yes, developing a large number of tightly focused groups can be time consuming (but there are some tools out there that can help make it easier). In the end, it is worth the effort. I have campaigns I manage consisting of over 17,000 keywords broken into several hundred ad groups containing several thousand ads. Then others I manage consist of just a handful of keywords. The process of developing a paid search campaign that delivers high ROI is the same in all instances — focus on relevancy and tight groups of highly targeted keywords.

You can read any number of article relating to paid search quality scores. Rather than write another that re-iterates what is already out there, I thought I would list links to several below that I found interesting.

• Ultimate Quality Score Guide. 15 Experts Comment on how to increase quality scores.
• 10 Ways to Increase Adwords Quality Score
• The Quality Score Handbook
• 5 Steps to Optimizing a PPC Account
  

Enjoy!

New Google Keyword Tool Gives More Relevant Traffic Estimates

Anyone familiar with keyword research for paid search knows that estimating traffic is one element that can influence what keywords or keyword phrases to target (budget, bid price also play a factor of course as well as a host of other information.)

There are any number of tools that can be used to research keywords. Wordtracker and Google’s Keyword Tool are just two of them.

In September of 2009 Google released a BETA version of their updated Keyword Tool. The updated keyword tool essentially combines the current keyword tool with the search based keyword tool to provide capabilities which enable you to search by words or phrases, websites, and categories (where available) all under one interface.

A full transition to the updated Keyword Tool is being made but for the next several months at least, you will be able to switch back and forth between the updated and old versions. Eventually the updated version will take full effect (so get familiar with it while you can.) Together the two tools aim combined to provide more relevant traffic estimates.

More information can be found in the article More Relevant Traffic Estimates Now in the Updated Keyword Tool at the Google Adwords blog.

How to Track MSN Paid Search in Google Analytics

In my last article I introduced you to Google’s URL Builder and showed you how to track Yahoo paid search data from within Google Analytics. You should go back and read that article to understand what we are trying to do in this one (there is no need to repeat the entire thing here again.)

In this article I’ll show you how to do that same thing with MSN.

Quick Refresher

When fed the right data, Google Analytics can extract query string variables and then insert that into your analytics to provide better reporting capabilities—in this case relating specifically to paid search. Better reporting capabilities help you make more informed decisions about what marketing channels are working best for you.

Without this data, your MSN paid search traffic is grouped in Google Analytics with organic traffic, and that is not good. In short, not differentiating paid search from organic traffic does you absolutely no good what-so-ever.

Google’s URL Builder let’s you build a unique url that consists of data relating to your marketing efforts. You can then use this url, copy and pasting it into your MSN paid search ads as a destination url, to track varying amounts of information you could not get before. Here’s the example we used in that article:

• Landing page: www.ecommerceamplifier.com/
• Variables: Source = ‘MSN’ (or could be ‘Yahoo’), medium = ‘CPC’, term = ‘Ecommerce Coaching’, campaign = ‘Coaching Program’ and content = ‘Ecommerce Coaching National Ad’.
• Custom Tracking URL: http://www.ecommerceamplifier.com/?utm_source=MSN&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=ecommerce%2Bcoaching&utm_content=National%2BEcommerce%20Coaching%20Ad&utm_campaign=Ecommerce%2BAmplifier

Tracking MSN PPC With Google Analytics

Unlike both Google and Yahoo which require you to “flip a switch” to turn on (or off) url tagging, MSN requires you to do nothing—it’s automatically sent with each visitor.

Here’s what MSN sends:

• Query String {QueryString} – This is the raw search query that the user typed into the search box but it’s as close as you’re gonna get to automating the process of bringing your adCenter keywords into your Google Analytics reports.
• Match Type {MatchType} – Represents basic information that will tell you if the triggered keyword was broad, phrase or exact matched (can help you narrow the exact keyword down.)
• OrderItemID {OrderItemID} – Represents the keyword that triggered the display of your ad.
• AdID {AdID} – Represents the numeric id that MSN assigns to your ad variations.

The items listed in brackets ‘{ }’ above represent the variable data that MSN sends your way with each visitor. It is this information that we will plug back into our URL to track performance.

The two parameters that represent keywords are {OrderItemID} and {QueryString}. Depending on your preference, you may use either in the location of utm_term in your Google Analytics built url. The difference is that the first one {OrderItemID} represents the actual keyword you bid on and the second {QueryString} represents the actual raw search terms the visitor entered to get to your site.

Now, if opting for {QueryString} as your parameter of choice, understand that the search terms might not exactly match the keyword(s) you are bidding on—thus, in this case, you may want to consider adding the {MatchType} to the url string as well. This can help distinguish in Google Analytics if the search string is actually the keyword itself (i.e. exact match) or a variation of it (in the case or broad match). I do not use this method myself but wanted to point out what you need to consider if you are going one way or the other. We’re looking for data that provides valuable information remember.

I prefer to know the exact keywords that triggered the ad and use the {OrderItemID} as my ‘Campaign Term’.

The screenshot below shows what MSN (as of this writing) has listed for what each variable represents:

Now, when we use these in conjunction with Google’s URL Builder we get something that looks like this screenshot below:

This is the best way to get data at the keyword level, ad level and campaign level (although you’ll have to compare the AD ID with that in MSN Adcenter to determine which ad actually triggered the visit.)

Now, another method you might want to consider (although not one I’ve personally used yet) is to replace the ‘Campaign Name’ data with something like {QueryString} to gather even more information on your visitors actual search habits who use MSN.

When would this be a viable option? Well, if you only have one campaign setup within MSN Adcenter then you may not really feel you need that information again in analytics (after all, if you have only one campaign setup then all traffic must originate from that.) In this case it might be beneficial to determine the search habits of your visitors in relation to the actual keyword that triggered the ad to find out more opportunities you might be missing.

Either way, you now have access to tracking paid search traffic from MSN within Google Analytics and because of it, have opened up new doors that will help you make more informed decisions about your marketing efforts.

How to Track Yahoo Paid Search in Google Analytics

If you want to really take your business to the next level you must have an analytics system in place that provides you with data which can help you make informed decisions. By informed decisions I don’t mean “oh, my visitors use ‘xxx’ browser” or “the screen resolution of most visitors is ‘xxx’”. Sure, these elements might be useful to a very small degree if, and only if, you are looking at ensuring your site is designed to meet the right audience.

But, if you did your homework, your site should already be designed to fit any visitor that arrives, no matter the platform, browser type, screen resolution, or what ever it is you come up with relating to design.

Now there are many flavors of analytics that may work for your needs. In this article I am going to focus on Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s powerful, and it flat out can get the job done.

So, we’re talking Google Analytics setup to provide us with valuable decision making data. To get this type of information, just installing Google Analytics alone is not going to be enough. You need to take advantage of the full tracking capabilities to provide you with data from all your advertising channels. This will help you understand where to invest your time and resources to optimize a given channel—ideally that which provides a positive ROI.

I’ve written about Google Analytics in a number of past articles and discussed the ecommerce tracking, goal / funnel tracking, etc… so I won’t go into that in this article (although in future articles I will revisit these areas as much has changed in GA since the writing of those.)

In this article I am going to talk about tracking paid search traffic channels, specifically from Yahoo (Search Marketing).

As anyone running paid search campaigns might have already gathered, it’s fairly easy to track Adwords traffic in Google Analytics when you link the two and flip the proper auto-tagging switches, but it’s not so easy to track paid search traffic from Yahoo (or MSN for that matter but that topic is for my next article.)

Yes, Yahoo offers its own ppc tracking tools—including its own form of analytics. However, anyone that wants to find out from within Google Analytics how their paid search traffic from Yahoo is performing, has to do a little work.

In fact, currently—for those of you not already separating this out within your analytics—your paid search traffic from Yahoo (and again, MSN) comes over mixed with the organic traffic and is listed as such within Analytics. This isn’t good.

This is a problem. How can you make informed decisions about which channel of traffic provides the biggest bang for your buck when it’s mixed with organic. You can’t—at least not real easily.

So to track paid search traffic from MSN and Yahoo we need to separate them using the link itself and the variables we can pass to native Google Analytics. In short we need to develop a proper URL structure that we can use from within our MSN and Yahoo paid search ads themselves. These links must contain information which passes data to Google Analytics about the origin of that traffic.

The official term is called URL Tagging. Sounds complicated yes, and it could be, if it weren’t for this handy little tool that Google provides.

It’s called the URL Builder.

The URL Builder gives us the power to fill in a few fields click a button, and return a pre-built URL that we can use within our ppc campaigns. These would represent what are known as the Destination URL’s for a given keyword (you do break your destination URL’s down to the keyword level right? Doing so gives you more control and if you’re not, you should be.)

Let’s dive in and show you how you can gather keyword level data from Yahoo paid search, but one last thing you may be wondering before we do.

If you are wondering whether you need to provide a unique URL for each keyword the answer is no. Yahoo by default passes variable information to you with each visitor. All you need to know is what they pass and what to grab to insert into your analytics. That’s what I’m going to show you here.

Google’s URL Builder

Here’s is a crash course in Google’s URL Builder:

The URL Builder let’s you enter your landing page (website URL) and associated variables including source (search engine), medium (cpc vs. email, organic, etc…), term (your keyword), content (ad version), and name (your campaign). After completing the form, the URL Builder provides you with a full tracking URL that you can copy/paste into your Yahoo or MSN ads. Here’s an example:

• Landing page: www.ecommerceamplifier.com/
• Variables: Source = ‘Yahoo’ (or could be ‘MSN’), medium = ‘CPC’, term = ‘Ecommerce Coaching’, campaign = ‘Coaching Program’ and content = ‘Ecommerce Coaching National Ad’.
• Custom Tracking URL: http://www.ecommerceamplifier.com/?utm_source=Yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=ecommerce%2Bcoaching&utm_content=National%2BEcommerce%20Coaching%20Ad&utm_campaign=Ecommerce%2BAmplifier

Tracking Yahoo PPC With Google Analytics

First thing we need to do to get Yahoo to send us the data we are after is to turn on auto-tagging from within your Yahoo Search Marketing account or you’ll get nothing but the keyword coming over (and that doesn’t help a whole lot on its own.)

To do this you’ll need to login to your YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) account and go to:

Administration > Tracking URLs

Once that is complete Yahoo will begin to pass a lot more data than just the keyword over in the query string and we’ll be able to retrieve that data from within Google Analytics.

The parameters identifiers that Yahoo uses to pass various paid search data in the query string are:

• {OVKEY} representing the keyword
• {OVADID} representing the ad itself
• {OVCAMPGID} representing the campaign itself

Inserting these parameters into the utm_term, utm_content, and utm_campaign sections of your URL, you’ll be able to successfully pull the keyword you bid on, the ad it came from, and the campaign that held the ad into Google Analytics.

So going back to the above example (bullet points) the url for Yahoo would look like this after we inserted the parameters:

http://www.ecommerceamplifier.com/?utm_source=Yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}

Notice in place of the term, content, and campaign level data we entered earlier there are now Yahoo specific parameters that fill the string with dynamic data.

That’s all you need to do to begin to track the information on Yahoo paid search in Google Analytics. In the next article I’ll show you how to do the same thing using MSN Adcenter and after that one show you how to drill down on this data from within Google Analytics to find out what it’s all telling you.

Don’t be afraid to use this same strategy to track all kinds of marketing activity. Using this technique you can track email campaigns, banner advertising, or just about anything else you can imagine.

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