Search engine advertising is a critical piece of the marketing puzzle for all businesses, but can be especially useful in an industry that is as competitive as Law or other professional services. This post looks at some of the specific opportunities and pitfalls for professional services firms, focusing on Law, but there are plenty of lessons to draw for any business that’s in a competitive space.

PPC marketing gives professional services firms, especially law firms an opportunity to get in front of potential customers at the exact right moment like no other channel can. You need to be highly visible at the precise moment that a need for your specific service arises. And because you’re ostensibly focusing your spending on only the critical moments, it’s possible to be successful with any type of budget.

A well-managed PPC account can be the difference between a growing law firm and just waiting around for the phone to ring.

Despite all the possible benefits, law firms face many unique challenges in PPC that make it more difficult to advertise profitably than in other industries. Keywords (the building blocks for user searches and ad targeting on Google) in the law industry rank amongst the most expensive, with “attorney” and “lawyer” costing over $40 per click!

There is also incredibly high competition by geography, by practice type, and by the event that has people looking in the first place, making it even more challenging to get your ads in front of the right audience at a cost that you can sustain.

These challenges could make PPC look intimidating or risky, but there are some tips and strategies that’ll help you run a successful PPC campaign for your law firm without breaking the bank.

1: Use Narrow Match Keywords

Let’s say you wanted your ad to show up for the search “defense attorney”.

Would you be willing pay $50 to show your ad to someone who just searched the phrase “the U.S. attorney general visited the defense department”? I doubt it.

But as obvious as this seems, that’s exactly what could and often does happen if you don’t use “narrow match” keywords.

When starting an account, the default option for keywords (picking the searches you’ll show up for) is called “broad match.” Broad match can be useful for huge volume, but it also allows any search that includes your keywords in any order to see the ad (see above example).

With keywords as expensive and competitive as you find in the law industry, using broad match is just asking to lose money. There’s simply too much out of your control, with costs per click that can tank your entire advertising budget before you catch the problem. Our goal is to get the ads in front of the people most likely to click, and to convert, and as a rule using broad match simply shows your ads in too many irrelevant places.

To improve the quality of traffic and use your budget at the right moments, you want to use narrow match keywords in general. This is so important for targeting in search engine marketing that Google gives you a couple of flavors: Phrase Match, and Exact Match. We’ll skim both.

Phrase Match only allows searches that have your keywords present in the specific order. “Yada Yada Defense Attorney Yada Yada.” Alternatively, “Seattle defense attorney” or “defense attorney Seattle”. You get the idea.
Exact Match targeting will tighten your criteria to the absolute max so that only exactly matching searches will see your ad (hence the name). Now “Yada Yada Defense Attorney” gives us nothing. It’s “defense attorney” only in this case.

By setting your target keywords to Phrase or Exact Match, you can narrow down to only the users who are searching for legal help, and for a practice like yours. This leads to more qualified clicks, and saves a bunch of money in the process.

2: Use Long Tail Keywords

So now that we’ve tightened up our targeting, we’re done, right? Not at all. Now we need to focus on potential clients that seem highly motivated from what they’re searching on Google.

If you’re looking to get the most bang for your buck, it’s not good enough to bid on keywords like “defense attorney”, even if that’s exactly what you are. By competing directly with every other defense attorney in the world, you’re still going to show up for irrelevant searches. More importantly, it’s going to cost you a lot of money.

The solution? Long-tail keywords.

Say you’re a Seattle-based attorney who specializes in workman’s compensation in the energy sector. Would you rather pay money to show your ad to two people who searched “workman’s compensation” or “attorney”, or one person who searched “workman’s compensation attorney seattle”?

Instead of targeting more general keywords, try thinking about what else someone could add to a search that would make your firm the best option.

Even something as simple as adding the location, like “Seattle workman’s comp attorney” can lead to much higher engagement from potential customers at a much more affordable price. When on a tight budget, long tail keywords are one of your greatest weapons to compete with bigger, less focused firms.

3: Negative Keywords

But again, long-tail or narrow match keywords alone are still not enough. Let’s stay with our workman’s compensation attorney. You want your ads in front of people who need a workman’s comp attorney, not people who want to become a workman’s comp attorney.

Even when using narrow match keywords such as “workman’s comp attorney”, your ads can still show for people searching things like “workman’s comp attorney salary”. Few things are more frustrating than seeing your advertising budget blown on searches that obviously aren’t relevant to your business or the right kind of intent. This happens to the best of us, and can be avoided by using negative keywords.

Workman’s comp attorney salary

For many of the firms that we work with, our negative keyword lists consist of other types of attorneys, searches that indicate low buying intent or even frivolous claims.

This often includes words such as “salary” or “Glassdoor”, city names that you do not serve, and other attorney’s names.

Bottom line you save your advertising budget for high-quality searches that have the best chance of becoming leads for your firm. You don’t have to add every city and competitor right away if you’re strapped for time, but make sure to check your search terms often to catch any irrelevant keywords that show up.

4: Specific Geotargeting

Say every click you receive on your ad costs $10. Now, what if you found out that people within ten miles of your business are twice as likely to turn into leads than people more than 20 miles away?

Would you still want to pay the same amount for those people? I didn’t think so. If you are a local business, and many law firms are just that, it’s incredibly valuable to set up specific geotargeting.

Not only will geotargeting allow you to bid less for searches outside of your market, but you can choose to bid more aggressively for searches in close proximity. Just one more opportunity to get your ads in front of the right people without spending more money overall.

Without geotargeting, you would be bidding the same amount to advertise your firm to someone searching 100 miles away as someone standing 100 feet away from your front door.

5: Utilize Bid Modifiers

I make this point further down the page, not because it’s less important, but because it’s the one tip that you can’t implement right out of the gate.

Like geotargeting, if you found out that people on their phone were twice as likely to convert as people on desktops, would you still pay the same price to show them an ad? For many workman’s comp or employee injury searches that happen quickly and away from home, this is exactly the behavior we see.

Under the settings tab in Google AdWords, there is a “Devices” page where you can see performance metrics for every device where your ad has shown in the past. This includes desktops, mobile with or without full browsers, and tablets with or without full browsers.

Once you get enough data from running your PPC ads, you can look at this Devices page and see what device has the best performance metrics. Make sure that you can see which ads are turning into good leads, and not just clicks. If for instance your mobile site isn’t effective, or mobile searches just don’t convert for other reasons, there’s no reason to increase your budget or bids here until you know what’s going on with clear conversion tracking.

Just like geotargeting, you can bid depending on performance and get your ads in front of the most relevant people on the most relevant platform.

If you’d like to learn more about PPC bid modifiers in general we’ve written and spoken about this over the past few years.

6. Track Conversions Religiously – Call-Only Ads

Legal questions are complicated. People want to talk with someone that understands and can answer their questions. They also trust people more when they can talk.

If you’re “stealing leads” from your website by putting up your general phone number and not tracking how many people call that because of your PPC ads, you’ll never understand how your marketing spend was working to drive new business. That’s why we use Call-Only ads.

Call-Only ads look similar to regular AdWords ads, but they display your phone number instead of a standard headline.

Not my actual number, and not my actual job.

If a phone call is your primary conversion, Call-Only Ads gives you the simplest way of tracking them. In these ads, clicks don’t take the user to the website. Instead, a click calls your phone directly. This removes many steps of the conversions funnel, taking users right from Google to your phone line.

Naturally, this only works on mobile. But for firms that rely on phone calls, Call-Only ads make it far easier to track and generate leads.

Summary

In the law and professional services industry, PPC can be a game-changer when it comes to lead generation. But despite its appeal, there are many factors that can make it extremely easy to waste money if you’re not careful. Expensive keywords and high competition make it challenging to maximize effectiveness. But if you narrow down your keyword selections, target your location, optimize for the device and utilize Call-Only ads, you’ll be well on your way to driving traffic and leads for your business.

The post How to Use PPC For Law Firm Lead Generation – SEM Lessons for Professional Services Firms appeared first on Portent.

Remarketing is an essential strategy for just about every AdWords account imaginable. Targeting ads to users who are already familiar with your site and your brand tends to increase your conversion rates and help retain existing customers.

Thankfully, remarketing capabilities have also advanced quite a bit in the past few years. Advertisers now have more control and more flexibility than ever to run the right strategies for their business. If you’re an advertiser sticking with a single All Users audience and calling it a day, you’re likely leaving money on the table and stunting your ability to grow your business.

There are a lot of options you can pursue to fix this. Here are nine remarketing audience types to help jumpstart your strategic planning.

Engagement-Based Audiences

Engagement-based audiences are defined by on-site behavioral metrics such as session duration or pages per session. They help filter out lower-quality users (e.g. users who bounced) who are unlikely to engage with your site again.

Demographic-Based Audiences

Demographic-based audiences are defined by criteria such as location, age, or gender. These audiences help you reach your target demographics more effectively. Also, by using these definitions in creating an audience, you eliminate the need to use the same targeting criteria in the Google AdWords UI.

Intent-Based Audiences

Intent-based audiences are defined by where a user is in the marketing funnel (e.g. awareness, interest, desire). For example, a user who spent time on the About Us page may signal s/he is higher up the funnel than a user who added something to their cart before leaving.

The important part about using intent-based audiences after defining them is to make sure your ad content is tailored to that part of the funnel. Speaking to a user’s needs based on where they are in their journey is key to moving them further along.

Sequence-Based Audiences

Sequence-based audiences are defined by a specific series of steps a user must take in order to qualify. For example, if you wanted to run ads promoting a discount for a specific product, you may want to limit these ads to show only to users who hit that product page, added it to their cart, and then proceeded to checkout process before abandoning.

These audiences can take a bit longer to adequately populate, but they can significantly improve conversion rates when applied and used appropriately.

Customer Segment Audiences

Customer segment audiences are defined by behavioral trends among your existing customers. For example, a customer who’s purchased from you multiple times in the past year may be considered a loyal user while someone who purchased something a year ago and hasn’t since may be considered a lapsed user.

You can set up these categories of users in Google Analytics using custom dimensions. Once they’re registering in your reports, you can use them to define your remarketing audiences.

Customer Match Audiences

Customer match audiences are defined by the email addresses of your known leads and/or customers. These audiences are great for promoting customer retention and use in RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads).

You can upload an un-hashed list of email addresses directly into Google AdWords and it will encrypt the file for you. Any list uploaded must have a minimum of 1,000 email addresses as many will inevitably be excluded due to them not being connected to Gmail.

Similar Audiences for Search

Similar audiences are created automatically by Google AdWords. They’re look-alike audiences based on the remarketing lists you create. While they’re sometimes riskier to use in display campaigns, they can work wonders in your search campaigns; they allow you to be more visible to users similar to any of your qualified audiences without blowing your search budget on all potential search impressions.

YouTube-Based Audiences

YouTube-based audiences are defined by your YouTube account. Once you link your AdWords and YouTube accounts together, you’ll be able to port over audience lists such as users who’ve watched one of your videos or users who’ve visited your YouTube channel page.

Negative Audiences

Last but certainly not least, negative audiences allow you to exclude sets of users from seeing a given set of ads. You add these to any campaign or ad group just as you would an audience that you want to target (just as an exclusion instead). These allow you to filter out certain audiences who don’t meet your criteria for a given campaign’s goals without the need for creating a custom combination or a separate audience with that same exclusion built into its definition.

Not <em>that</em> kind of negative audiences. But you get the point.

Do you see some opportunities that would make sense for your business? Go forth and execute!

This is only a baseline of what you can and should be doing to take advantage of remarketing. From here it’s all about what you do with the audience types that will make the real difference for your campaigns and your company. If you have any other audience types you like but didn’t see on this list, feel free to share them below in the comments.

The post 9 Remarketing Audiences Every Marketer Should Use for Holiday 2017 appeared first on Portent.

Websites allowing display advertising often show 3 – 5 different ads per page. Throw in sponsored stories, and that figure can comfortably rise into the double digits. That’s a hefty supply of content for which visitors did not directly search.

In a sad illustration of this reality, Google keeps display ad benchmark stats that periodically get updated. During the period from August 2016 to April 2017 the average Click Through Rate was a paltry 0.11% in the United States for all display ad types. Only 1/10^th of a visitor per 100 visits. Absolutely terrible.

Yet, I’m here to tell you it’s not all display doom and gloom. By utilizing a few basic principles you can create simple and effective banner ads.

An abundance of great examples exist, but in order to avoid any potential legal headaches I’ll stick to Portent-themed ads. I’m also going to focus on Google and Bing display formats in order to target my message.

In no particular order here are some best practices:

Imagery is Important

This is the “Don’t use horrible stock imagery” section. People process images WAY faster than words. If you opt for stale, generic, and boring stock images in your ads site visitors are guaranteed to ignore them.

Images should entice potential customers to view the ad’s message – not scare them away.

Here’s a current Portent example (lower res than actual). Nothing says small business like a dude working on bicycle, right? But seriously, select imagery that strikes a chord with your target audience. An image of someone working on a tangible product (e.g. a bike) makes this ad far more relatable for small businesses looking for marketing support than a boring stock image of an office worker on a computer.

Don’t waste time. Be direct.

If you want someone to download an asset: say so. If a free trial is the conversion you’re working towards make that obvious. Are you interested in demo views? Tell people that.

People are inundated with information when they’re online. When you make potential customers guess how you can help them, few will take that step.

A better approach is to select clear wording on the incentive you’re offering. Read: why someone needs your product or service.

Here’s another Portent example:

In the absence of a great image to represent an ebook we went with a neutral background that’s simply on-theme with some of the underlying elements of our brand. There are few words, by design. This ad is heavily geared towards people interested in technical SEO. To sweeten the deal the call-to-action notes that the ebook is free, so there’s a very low barrier for people to click on the button and continue through the conversion funnel.

Flowery and creative language is great when you can pull it off. Unfortunately, when targeting a broad spectrum of potential customers one person’s crafty and cunning message is another person’s head-shaking moment. Simple works, so stick to it!

Call-to-action

Website visitors are very accustomed to banner ads. They show up repeatedly on every size and shape of site you can imagine. Still, in the absence an obvious, direct, call-to-action people often won’t register you want them to click on your ad. That you’re actually offering something beyond a brand reminder.

Don’t make people struggle to find your ad’s purpose. Include a nice, visible, button or arrow that clearly offers people a place to click through to your website or landing page.

It’s specifically important to be direct with the CTA button. Have the message align well with the rest of the ad’s wording. For example, the Portent ad in the last section has a bright button with “GET THE (FREE) EBOOK” text. That wording is very hard to miss, and it’s a clear offer of value.

3 Winning Features

If your banner ads can contain these 3 features you stand a far better chance of using display advertising as an effective marketing tool, especially in the initial awareness building phase of your marketing funnel.

Using clear imagery, a simple and direct message, and a call-to-action that ties in the entire ad, display can become an integral part of your digital marketing efforts.

Please feel free to comment with questions or additional best practice recs you would like mentioned!

The post 3 Tips to Create Effective Banner Ads Every Time appeared first on Portent.

Taking the concept beyond gaming to digital marketing can be incredibly useful. A whale can be a person that subscribes for a long period of time, purchases numerous products, frequently uses a service, etc. It varies business to business, but whales are simply the most valuable customers. Sounds good right? If customers of disproportionate value exist in your business, you want to capitalize on them.

If you’re new to the concept of “Closed Loop” analytics, Portent’s head of analytics Michael Wiegand did a great talk on this last year at SMX, and this companion blog post does a good job of setting up the basics, the opportunity, and the mechanics.

How to Identify Whales – They’re Big

To maximize whale acquisition, you need to know what you’re looking for. There are lots of ways to go about this but my personal favorite and the method I recommend to most businesses is cohort analysis of retention.

Ideally, you’d have a data analyst on-staff that’s already all over retention who’s created a PowerPivot for you. Otherwise, Andrew Chen has an awesome cohort analysis spreadsheet for the non-nitty gritty data diver. Another great method is segmentation in Google Analytics.

Through either method, your goal is simply to find the characteristics most commonly shared by whales.

Use Amazon’s Fire Phone for example. Customers that purchased Fire Phones make up 1% of the Amazon shoppers population. However, they are 4 times more valuable than a Normal Amazon shopper. Imagine if whales were 10% of the customer base.

Credit:
https://stratechery.com/2014/amazons-whale-strategy/

Alternatively, you can take a general approach. Step 1 is identifying key metrics that measure customer’s value. Common examples are LTD, LTV, ROAS, and Gross Profit. Step 2 is splitting customers into cohorts and juxtaposing the cohorts by the previously defined metrics. For example, you might choose to create cohorts based on the way in which customers initially converted like conversion median time, incentivized vs non-incentivized, or simply their demographics.

If once you’ve split them out each cohort’s metrics are the same, you may have been too inclusive with the selection criteria, or inadvertently identified metrics that have absolutely no impact on customer. (Hard to do, but it happens occasionally.) Otherwise the cohorts should look different and you can begin to pick out those most valuable customers.

Whale targeting – Not as evil as it sounds

So now you know who the whales are, how do you get more of them? From the paid acquisition side, it’s all about pinpoint targeting.

Two popular channels with considerable targeting specificity and scale are AdWords and Facebook. With AdWords, you can take advantage of Google’s algorithmic approach by uploading a list of known whales and allowing Google to make inferences about their shared characteristics to target similar audiences. Google won’t always tell you how they’re making those connections, but they absolutely work. Facebook Business Manager, by contrast, has awesome, yet creepily specific demographics targeting that you can control yourself, as well as a similar lookalike audience targeting feature.

But don’t stop with the obvious platforms. This approach is so valuable that if you’ve done the work of segmenting your absolute best leads, you can and should look for every opportunity to leverage it in your paid advertising. There’s Apple Search Ads for iOS customers, Millennial Media has direct advertising inventory for AOL customers, Unity Ads is a mobile ad network with both incentivized and non-incentivized video interstitials.

Don’t forget about your “owned” channels either. If you’ve driven an initial conversion from a prospective customer showing strong indications of being a whale, why not use owned communications such as email and on-site interstitials to help them along the path? Optimize these with personalization, special offers or loyalty incentives.

And you can absolutely extend this to “earned” media. Focus SEO efforts and keywords to draw whales to you. Build content that’s proven to engage and retain your best customers. A/B test that content to maximize engagement, and make sure that you’re continuing to test for effectiveness with new cohorts.

Bonus – Improve whale acquisition without getting arrested

You’ve identified your whale cohorts, and you’re about to ratchet up your acquisition advertising spend. Before you drive all that new, incredibly valuable traffic, I recommend building something out like Amplitudes’ pathfinder and fixing points of funnel resistance. These could and should be some of the best prospects possible, so getting a clear picture of what’s working to convert them (and what’s not) will have a positive impact across your entire marketing program.

The post Whale Acquisition the Gaming Industry Way appeared first on Portent.

A good strategic plan will map out your campaign and ad group structure so you can apply the right assets (keywords, ads, etc.) that target the right audience. As a result, you’ll be able to achieve your goals in the most efficient ways possible.

So, how do we do this?

Using the Marketing Funnel in PPC

In order to create a strategic plan which will allow you to be successful, we need to understand your audience in terms of where they are in their journey to conversion. The marketing funnel can help us visualize this journey from awareness to action.

The top of the funnel represents an audience unaware of your business and the bottom of the funnel represents an audience who has converted and become a customer or a client. Hence, a high funnel audience is less likely to convert than a mid or low funnel audience. This is important to understand as you’ll need to use different campaigns for different audiences, each with assets tailored to move a given user further along in their own journey through the funnel.

Think about it: how often do you go from being completely unaware of a given company or product to being ready to buy in one step? Not very often, right?

You usually need a bit more information before taking that action. So, if you’re targeting mid funnel audiences with a given paid search campaign, does it make sense to use content focused on, say, the price and a call to action of “buy now”? Maybe not. Perhaps you should utilize content which informs this audience further, moving them along from being aware they have a problem (mid funnel) to aware that you are their solution (low funnel).

Your strategic plan needs to be in lock-step with this kind of funnel, or user journey. Let’s take a look at each part of the funnel in detail to see what campaign types and strategies you need to take advantage of and optimize for.

High Funnel PPC

User’s Location in the Funnel: Awareness

A high funnel user is either unaware or just becoming aware of your business and isn’t necessarily interested in your offering(s). This audience likely isn’t searching for anything relevant to your business.

Campaign Type: Display

A vast majority of the time, a high funnel user needs an initial point of contact outside of search to go from being unaware of your business to aware. This audience is usually acquired through banner ad or video ad display campaigns (non-remarketing).

Focus: On-Site Usage Metrics

This audience is highly unlikely to convert right away. If your account’s average cost per acquisition (avg. CPA) is $50, you should expect to see an avg. CPA 20 or 30 times higher for these campaigns specifically. You want this audience to engage with the content on your website so they become interested in what you have to offer.

High Funnel Key Performance Indicators

Because these audiences likely won’t convert by their nature, you should rely on on-site usage/engagement metrics to determine the success of these campaigns:

• Bounce Rate
• Avg. Session Duration
• Pages per Session

Remember, the goal of these campaigns is to move a high funnel user down the funnel to become a mid funnel user.

Mid Funnel PPC

User’s Location in the Funnel: Interest

A mid funnel audience is aware of your business and is becoming more interested in your offer(s). These users may be actively searching for related topics to learn more and see what offers your competitors have.

Campaign Type: Non-Branded Search (Including Shopping), Soft Remarketing

This audience is typically acquired through non-branded search queries – terms that indicate this audience is problem-aware and/or solution-aware. They also tend to convert well with soft remarketing campaigns which offer additional content to assist them down the funnel instead of a hard sell.

Focus: New User Conversion Metrics, Assisted Conversion Metrics

These audiences do convert but do so typically at lower rates than the account or site average. These campaigns can best be judged by new user conversion metrics; these more accurately reflect a mid funnel audience. Furthermore, since these campaigns are designed to get a mid funnel user to return to your site later and convert as a low funnel user, assisted conversion metrics will be among the most important KPIs at this stage.

Mid Funnel Key Performance Indicators

• New User Conversion Volume
• New User Conversion Rate
• New User Avg. CPA
• New User ROAS (if e-commerce)
• Assisted Conversion Volume
• Assisted Conversion : Last-Click Conversion Ratio

Low Funnel PPC

Users’ Location in the Funnel: Desire

A low funnel audience is well aware of your business, possibly searching for it specifically, and is ready to make a purchase. These users are ready for the hard sell.

Campaign Type: Branded Search (Including Shopping), Hard Remarketing

This audience is typically acquired through branded search queries – terms that indicate this audience is looking for a specific brand and ready to convert. Likewise, they may convert well from a remarketing ad which is offering them the specific product or service they’ve become familiar with through your preceding marketing efforts.

Focus: Returning User Conversion Metrics

This audience will convert at higher rates than any other type of user. Focus on returning user conversion metrics, particularly on a last click model, to measure the success of these campaigns.

Low Funnel Key Performance Indicators

• Returning User Conversion Volume
• Returning User Conversion Rate
• Returning User Avg. CPA
• Returning User ROAS (if e-commerce)

Develop Your Account Strategy

Now that you know which campaign types correspond with which audience types, you’re ready to begin developing a robust and sophisticated strategic plan which will set you up for success.

Remember where we started, “Channel Contribution 101.” Taking the time to build out a strategic account plan will naturally cause you to create accounts and campaigns that hit the big goal: moving any given user to the next step of the marketing funnel. From structure to creative, knowing where your audiences are in the funnel and what to show them next will lead to planning campaigns with appropriate assets, messaging, and context.

Commit to building out this plan before you start advertising. It will pay huge dividends in the long run. Your end result after executing this plan will be better conversion rates and more revenue than you could otherwise hope to achieve from paid search.

The post Funnel-Based PPC Account Strategy – An Overview appeared first on Portent.

Does your brand have any registered, copyrighted or trademarked terms? If so, you should absolutely include the symbol in your text ads for improved performance.

Yes! These little guys: ® ©

This is not a new tactic in PPC ads by any means, but so many businesses aren’t taking advantage of it. The expected immediate impact from making this change is improved clickthrough rate (CTR). And who doesn’t want that? In the long run, the benefit of an improved CTR is a better return on your paid search investment.

Let’s look at how it impacts the search experience.

• A stamped text ad shows credibility to the searcher because the ® can only be used legally by the registered entity.
• It can visually break up the space in an all-text SERP and draw your eye to the ad.
• The symbols can help you introduce newly branded products or services in instances where Organic results are not yet ranking.
• Your competitors may be deterred from attempting to illegally use your trademarked terms in their ads if you’ve placed your stamp on them.

Sure, that all sounds intuitive. But what does the actual data tell us?

When a new retail client came to us recently, one of the first changes we made was to put a ® symbol on their registered brand name across the account. Within 30 days, the average CTR on Google increased from 3.5% to over 10%. That’s a 185% increase in just a month.

But what we saw in the months that followed is also impressive — Improved overall Quality Score, which is based partially on expected CTR, lower CPCs, and lower Cost per conversion. If those two factors aren’t reason enough to take the time for a little copyright protection on your own ads, I’m not sure what is.

Want to give it a try?

Your trademark stamp can be used in ad headlines or in the description text. Even better, you can use these symbols in many Ad Extensions – the most impactful in this case are Sitelink Extensions, Price Extensions, and Callouts.

As with all things: use your stamp strategically, measure results often, and make decisions accordingly.

The post Stamp Your PPC Ad Copy – Improve CTR the Old-Fashioned Way appeared first on Portent.

Ahh, the time-honored mantra of “A _____’s work is never done.” It turns out if you search for “job is never done” and pull up images, everyone is apparently busier than everyone else. A curious paradox, but we’ll leave that alone. The obvious ones include “woman, mother, man, marketer, and teacher” just to name a few. But, did you know that “The Emperor’s” work is never done? Ditto for a “diva.” Oh, and apparently you can lump a “cat” and a “wizard” into that lot.

I can’t solve the cat’s problem, but we know a little about digital marketing, and a little more about paid search, so let’s start there.

In helping new clients with AdWords audits, or when we’re kicking off longer-term PPC management, we run into AdWords accounts that are flat out over-optimized. Although that’s often a relatively straightforward fix, it’s a shame because of the opportunity cost of the time that went into tweaking that paid search account to the N^th degree. Take that time and go produce killer content, work on your SEO, or experiment with a new channel.

But in other cases, the scramble to do all the things means we pop the proverbial hood only to find that the most basic, effective PPC tools are going unused.

So here are my suggested must-do items in AdWords for better PPC results without over-extending yourself. Disclaimer: this list might change a bit depending on the size of your business, and your unique audience.

Ad Extensions

Let’s go with simple first. If you’re not utilizing ad extensions within your account it’s time to start ASAP.

Ad Extensions provide marketers with an avenue for drawing more attention to ads within search results. Well-constructed ad extensions help to improve click volume and click-through rates.

So, which ad extensions are the most important ones to have? Well, definitely sitelink extensions. Not only do they take up a nice amount of ad real estate on search engine results pages, but they also serve the purpose of sending people to a targeted page of their choosing – likely not the same default landing page attached to a given ad.

And for extra credit try getting into the “Visual Sitelinks Beta.” With this Beta, advertisers can have thumbnail images also show up with an ad’s sitelinks for mobile position #1 results. If you have beautiful product images this Beta is a must!

Callout Extensions are another must-have. Advertisers can create 2 – 6 callouts highlighting business features such as “free shipping” or “24/7 phone support.” They allow businesses to promote their biggest selling points, especially relative to competitors, giving potential customers a better feel for why a given product or service is right for them.

Similar Audiences

One of the most challenging aspects of marketing is bringing in new, qualified, customers. Creating visibility and trust among folks that have never heard of you. Figuring out how, where, and when to target people you want to attract to your product or service is not an easy task.

So, why not use pre-existing resources to help you out? Chances are you have audiences you’re using for remarketing. With Similar Audiences (either search or display) you can target people identified by Google as having “similar search behavior” to those within your audience on Google’s network of sites (shopping included).

The beauty of this audience is that, due to their similarities with your existing audience, they should naturally be more inclined to click on your ads, leading to improved CTR and ultimately conversion figures. Sounds good, right?

The only big grain of salt for Similar Audiences is that you do need to think understand how Google can and can’t flag an audience as similar, and have someone monitor your campaigns closely to make sure you’re getting the ROI and click-thru you expect.

Customer Match

I loved the book Permission Marketing from Seth Godin. It’s so widely accepted at this point that it seems silly to say, but people on your house email list have already shown some sort of positive feeling for your business by signing up. Why on earth would we not use that to gently surface a message to those folks, in the places they visit outside their inboxes?

With Customer Match, you can upload an email list as an audience. Once the list has been uploaded, Google will do its best to match emails up with corresponding Google accounts. All of a sudden, you can tailor a message to warm prospects with Google based accounts (Gmail, or Google Office for instance). And you can serve that across Google’s giant network of sites, as well as the search engine itself.

Even better, remember the similar audience lists we talked about earlier? You can create similar audience lists stemming from your customer match lists and target those folks as well.

Bing Ads Import

Wait, what? I thought we were talking about AdWords opportunities? Well, slight change of plans because Bing Ads gets overlooked a lot, which is an opportunity for you the savvy marketer.

Bing Ads accounts for roughly 20% of the paid search market. No matter how you slice it, and regardless of Google’s larger share, that is a lot of search activity. It’s also worth noting that some searchers use Bing exclusively, so those individuals receive 0 exposure to AdWords-based efforts.

Given the prospect of missing up to 20% of your addressable market, having a solid presence on Bing is a wise decision for most advertisers.

The best part, though? In an effort to drive share of digital ad dollars, Bing makes it REALLY easy for marketers to port over campaigns from AdWords.

After clicking that link and signing in you can choose which campaign to transport to Bing. Some customization for the Bing Ads platform will be required, but with a pretty modest effort getting started on Bing is feasible for anyone.

That said, deciding which campaigns to run and setting starting budgets may be more of a challenge. The simplest campaign strategy to get started is intuitively to just carry over the top performing campaigns in AdWords and build from there. As for spend, a safe rule is to start with 1/4^th of the current spend on AdWords and scale based on results.

Remember, Bing has its own audience, with its own unique, behavioral quirks. You wouldn’t set-it-and-forget-it on AdWords because you’re a smart marketer. The same rule applies everywhere.

In Summary

If you were missing any of these tools and tactics, or haven’t touched them in too long, consider your paid search to-do list “set”. If you don’t have sitelink and callout extensions running in AdWords, make getting both in place a priority. Assuming you’ve checked that off the list, more advanced targeting options like similar audiences and customer match within AdWords are great next steps.

And, of course, don’t forget about expanding on AdWords success with Bing Ads. By starting from your top performing AdWords campaigns and a limited budget you’ll be setting up the account with low risk and solid upside.

Ready for more? Take a look at this guide on auditing an AdWords account for additional strategic suggestions.

The post Stop Neglecting These 4 AdWords Features appeared first on Portent.

As I contemplate the world of dedicated PPC landing pages, and who doesn’t enjoy a good PPC daydream, I can’t help but think they’re a lot like beer. A million varieties but very few really good ones exist. But here’s the thing, if you simply know and do the things that create a great beer every time, you can’t help but put out a great product. The same is 100% true of a great landing page.

In the world of brewing the basic beer ingredients are grain, hops, yeast, and water. It’s the faulty combination of those ingredients as well as the wayward additions of other ingredients that often throws off the taste.

PPC landing pages are similarly simple at their core. It’s a page created to get your target audience take take an action by hitting the right triggers. That’s it.

Now, I’m no expert when it comes to brewing beer, but it turns out I do know a bit about landing pages. In this post I’ll cover the basic recipe for a great dedicated PPC landing page. And we’ll hone in on scenarios where a singular call-to-action makes sense.

Keep the focus on One product or service

Henry David Thoreau once said “ Our lives are frittered away by detail…simplify, simplify.” I didn’t pick that quote because my last name sounds similar to “frittered”… really, I swear.

Too many companies try and throw approximately 27 calls-to-action onto each of their dedicated landing pages. A lot of times this comes from selecting CTAs by committee with different interests, or trying to offer every path because you don’t know where the user is in their relationship with your company. Ends up looking like a strobe-light Bat Signal on a high speed disco ball. Plenty going on to catch the eye, but may cause seizures and certainly won’t cause conversions.

In seriousness, not directly showing a possible customer what specific action you want them to take is a bad move. Complicating the process will only equate to confused people dropping off the page in droves.

Only use 1 call-to-action per page. Don’t link elsewhere or mention other products or services. It’s a simple formula, really – the easier the conversion process the lower the bounce rate.

Be direct

Most people don’t want to spend time being wooed by the deepest nuances of your product or service. They want to know what you’re going to do to help them out. How are you going to save that person time, money, or even make them look good in the eyes of their bosses?

In short, what’s the value proposition? Don’t waste time trying to prove yourself. Be up front and crystal clear about how you’re going to make life a little bit better for that person.

If you have any relevant statistics (% time saved, revenue increase averages, etc.) supporting your call-to-action is a great idea. Clearly highlight impressive figures towards the top of the landing page, which will almost always help with your conversion rate. If the proof-is-in-the-pudding, why wouldn’t you give a little taste?

Here’s a great example from LastPass: “Bank Level Security”

Source: https://lastpass.com/getlastpasscg.php

Use visuals and images wisely

Let’s go back to the beer example. You know what a lot of bad landing pages and bad beers have in common? They settle for generic and boring ingredients.

A ridiculous number of landing pages out there make liberal use of stock images holding little to no significance towards the product or service being offered. That’s a great strategy if you want to have the same vanilla look the competition is utilizing.

A great landing page should feature a unique image, video or graphic, that actually complements or reinforces the message and call-to-action. Taking the time to do a quality job of image selection and treatment will help solidify a potential customer’s experience, and make you that much more likely to win them over with a conversion.

The following is a great example of what not to do:

Hi! We do work with computers. Do you do work with computers? Neat!

Keep your sign-up form short but not too short

Asking for an abundance of information up front? I get it. Sales teams love to have detailed prospect info before going into sales discussions. We’d all be thrilled if every prospect was so enamored with our business that they’d write out their hopes, dreams, and last three performance reviews in the comments section.

The problem on the customer side is that the more form fields you add the more daunting the conversion process looks to a prospect. Facing a lengthy form just to gain information about whether your product or service might be the right fit will invariably result in people bouncing from the page at a higher-than-comfortable rate.

Disclaimer, there’s absolutely such a thing as asking for too little info. If you only ask for an email address, don’t bother to us a captcha form, and throw an offer up on a high traffic page, you’ll be sifting through a small mountain of spam, with no way to sort the good from the bad.

So, what’s the happy medium? As a rule: include only fields that are necessary for a potential lead to advance to the next step in your funnel. No more, no less. In some cases, that’ll be as little as a name and a valid email. Depending on the context, you might have to get a company name and a phone number as well. Again, ask people for what’s essential and nothing more.

As much as we hate to generalize: when in doubt, limit the form to just name and email fields:

And yes, this SEO ebook is still available.

Don’t bore your prospects

For short-form landing pages brevity is essential. People are busy, so be succinct with your sentences and use bulleted lists wherever it makes sense, rather than writing out paragraphs.

For long-form landing pages make sure you’re telling a very engaging story that a user will easily be able to follow at skimming speed. If your copy is mundane or the story lacks cohesion people will get bored and drop off.

Add some proof of your awesomeness

It’s sadly hard to take a business at their word these days. Some businesses are more than willing to bend the truth to attract customers, which frankly ruins legitimate prospecting efforts for the rest of us. (Sorry, side rant over.)

So, to help bypass a prospect’s initial concerns and skepticism, why not highlight your service or product through the words of your current customers? Adding customer quotes (ideally from a well-known brand, or a representative cross-section of your market) can speak louder than even the most brilliantly crafted marketing copy. This builds a level of trust in a potential client’s mind, that’s hard to come by any other way before a sale.

If getting full customer quotes or testimonials is a major challenge, don’t give up on this. You can still throw in customer logos for the proof-in-the-pudding effect. For extra credit you can even do both. DocuSign does a great job of this.

Source: https://go.docusign.com/trial/productshot/

If you have a dedicated landing page that keeps the call-to-action simple, is direct, proves your product or service to be useful, and is credible, you’ve put your company in a great position to drive quality leads.

And remember, it’s never set-it-and-forget-it with landing pages. A master brewer would never mass produce their first draft (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk) without gauging reactions. And of course neither will you, right?

Happy landing page creation! Now, who’s thirsty?

The post 6 Little Steps to Create a Killer PPC Landing Page appeared first on Portent.

Last Friday, Google announced that it is “expanding close variant matching to include additional rewording and reordering for exact match keywords.” In other words: “exact match” will not exactly be exact match.

If you’re not a PPC nerd, exact match types are used for keywords that the advertiser only wants triggered if a user’s search query matches it exactly. For example: if you bid on the exact match keyword [mens red running shoes], then an ad impression will only be triggered if the user’s query is “mens red running shoes” exactly. This allows advertisers to maximize quality scores and optimize for better conversion rates and/or costs.

At least, that was the original intent of exact match. But times, they are a changin’.

This isn’t a new trend. Close variants were introduced a few years ago to exact match keywords. This allowed exact match to trigger ads for queries which included plurals or misspellings of terms. Hence, the exact match keyword [mens red running shoe] could generate an ad impression for the search query “mens red running shoes”.

Now, Google is taking this one step further. Function terms within a query, such as articles, conjunctions, and prepositions, will also be included in close variants so long as they don’t change the intention of the query. Furthermore, the word order of a query can be ignored so long as that doesn’t change its intention.

Confused? Allow me to expand on the example provided by Google:

The search query “hotels in new york” will be able to trigger an ad impression for the exact match keyword [new york hotels] because the word order and the term “in” can be ignored and not change the intent of the query.

The search query “flights from new york” will not be able to trigger an ad impression for the exact match keyword [flights to new york] because the term “from” defines the intention of the query and is opposite of the term “to”.

Google also provided a couple of tables to further explain when a close variant may be used. First, regarding function terms:

Second, regarding word order:

This development will make it easier for advertisers to generate more impressions without having to create extensive exact match keyword lists. However, there is plenty of uncertainty about its effects.

Will conversion rates for exact match keywords decrease with the additional flexibility of close variants?

Will impressions for phrase and/or broad match keywords decrease as a result?

What unintended consequences will this change have on things like campaign or ad group structure?

Why is my NCAA bracket completely busted already?

Over the next few months, advertisers will find out the answers to these questions and more. Be sure to keep an eye on click and conversion metrics for exact match keywords in bulk for each of your accounts to see if any trends change as a result of close variants.

What are your thoughts on this development? Got any concerns we didn’t address? Be sure to comment below.

The post AdWords is Changing Exact Match…Again appeared first on Portent.

I’m going to tell you something that’s a little counterintuitive: you may be hurting your AdWords or general PPC performance by trying to do too much, too fast.

This idea doesn’t get a lot of air time because a lot of under-performing AdWords accounts or campaigns trace back to under-optimization or “set it and forget it”, which we all know is the devil.

Requisite PSA: Getting the most out of your Google AdWords account takes time, expertise and diligence. One of the most common mistakes marketers make, especially those new to managing AdWords accounts, is not paying enough attention.

This post gets into problems caused at the opposite end of the spectrum. Here are some common over optimization mistakes that we see even experienced PPC managers make.

Common Optimization Mistakes

Over optimization can mean a variety of different things. Some are small and easy to correct. Others are more foundational and require larger strategy changes.

Making Adjustments Based On Small Sample Sizes

This is the most obvious and common mistake we typically see. It is very easy to see results pouring in, either positive or negative, and make quick optimization decisions before considering whether you have enough data.

Actionable? Not with this few clicks.

Small amounts of data often do not represent long-term trends and therefore do not warrant snap adjustments. Allow your click data to reach a point of statistical significance before you make changes. It’s not based on feelings, it’s science.

Deleting or Pausing Keywords That Aren’t Performing Well

If a keyword is underperforming, it may seem like a no brainer to throw it out. Why continue to invest budget if you aren’t seeing return? You may be right in thinking this. Or you might be looking at things with too narrow a lens.

Before you give up on a keyword ask yourself why it is struggling. Here are some things to consider:

• Check the search term reports.
• Is the match type pulling in irrelevant queries?
• Is the campaign out of budget restricting reach?
• Does the ad copy and landing page match up with the keyword?

There may be a reason the keyword isn’t doing well that you could easily fix and improve your overall account strength.

Increasing Bids To Raise Ad Position

When keywords have low average ad position, the first instinct is usually to increase your max CPC bids.

Before you go driving up your CPC, check to make sure there isn’t another reason your keyword is getting pushed down in the rankings. Is the quality score low? Is the campaign ‘limited by budget’? There may be things you can to help improve your ad rank without paying more. Do some research first.

Over Utilizing Bid Modifiers

Bid modifiers for ad scheduling, location targeting, and device targeting are a fantastic optimization tool. However, incorrectly using bid modifiers is a great way to throw off an entire campaign.

It’s important to look at performance holistically before making changes. Increasing or decreasing bid modifiers too aggressively or making decisions off already optimized data can have a wide-ranging effect on campaigns.

Never allow a narrow view to dictate optimization or you can risk cutting out entire aspects of your targeting, and revenue, in the name of improved conversion rate or cost per conversion.

Also, making significant bid modifier adjustments at the same time you are changing max CPC bids is not a clean way to make measurable changes. Changing too many variables at once will make it hard to understand the results of the data and know if your optimizations are working.

Bidding Down to a Specific ROAS

Having a solid Return On Ad Spend KPI and goal is a very good idea. But optimizing your campaign budget and CPC bids down to reach that goal can affect your entire marketing mix.

If you aren’t reaching your ROAS goal it makes sense to cut spending for that campaign. Right? Not necessarily. Cutting those clicks and impressions can seriously throttle revenue, lead volume, or traffic. Paid search often contributes/drives a lot more than last click conversions, so cutting back may hurt other channels.

Cutting AdWords Budget When Performance Is Down

Again, “performance” is down. It only makes sense to cut budget. Right? Wrong again. PPC does not work in a vacuum. There are many things that could be causing a downturn that aren’t a result of poor AdWords management or potential. Seasonal trends, increased competition, and change in organic rankings may be to blame.

Additionally, your keywords, ads, and account optimization are only as strong as the landing page and offering they are promoting. A generally poor landing experience or a need for specific conversion rate optimization may be a good place to look before you give up on an ad group or campaign altogether.

Poor Optimization Strategy Can Hurt You Too

The general theme here so far is that there is often more to the story if you just look a little deeper. Making quick decisions or over-correcting your account is bad. With that said, you still need to make sure you’re not driving blind or under-correcting.

All of your optimization decision-making stems from the data. Take a moment to ask:

• Are you looking at the right metrics?
• Is your data accurate?
• Are you tracking goals/conversions?
• Have you tested your conversion tracking?
• Are you using an attribution model that fits your business?

Your optimizations are only as powerful as the data that inform them, so be sure you are tracking correctly.

These are all questions worth asking early on in your PPC strategy. And if you’re already well down the road, it’s never too late.

Be Diligent, Yet Patient in PPC Optimization

We’ve talked a lot in this post about “not doing too much”. Do not take this as an excuse to be passive, lazy, or reactive in managing your AdWords account.

Do not set it and forget it. PPC is a goldmine of actionable. ROI producing data. Use it!

But as you actively work to optimize your paid search results, be patient enough to ask the right questions and understand what’s really happening. Or not happening.

The post Are You Over Optimizing Your AdWords Account? appeared first on Portent.