Marketing Strategy, Logos, Websites, SEO, & Copywriting
We talk to many business people who already have Adwords management, but unfortunately, not all Adwords managers know how to get you the results you need.
Not Hitting the Front Page of Google?
83% of searchers do not even open the second page of Google, so if you are not hitting the front page for the keywords that matter to your business, then you’ve got a problem – you’re missing out on sales! [Read more…]
Back in the old days (you know, three or four years ago) it was still true that placing an ad in the Yellow Pages was the single most important marketing move your business could do. It was the fundamental. If people couldn’t find you in the Yellow Pages then you were in trouble.
Not so anymore. Now, Google is the new Yellow Pages.
Now if people can’t find you on the Web – mostly Google but also Yahoo, Bing (MSN) and others – then you are in trouble because that’s where the majority of people are looking for what it is you sell or do.
The Internet Marketing Revolution is NOW
Times have changed. No longer is marketing your business about throwing some money at a few unmeasurable ads and hoping that this will work to attract the new business enquiries and sales that you need.
This change has been in the air for some time, and now as we head into the second decade of the new millennium, the Internet has solidified itself not only as the way of the future but as the primary battlefield where the majority of the marketing stakes are at play.
Basically if you don’t know how to effectively market (including advertise) your business online then you are in real danger of getting overlooked by your potential customers and going belly-up. At the very least you are missing out on a lot of genuine new-business (sales) opportunities.
Getting Found On The Internet Is Not As Simple As Placing An Ad – But It Is Relatively Inexpensive And Highly Effective
Whereas placing an ad in the Yellow Pages, magazines or similar was a fairly straightforward task, getting found on the Web is a little more complicated (but arguably much more effective).
Here’s are the main ways to get found online:
A) Via Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – Organic (Free) Results:
Good organic search engine results are the holy grail of Internet marketing because it is so effective and can be very low-cost.
B) Via SERPs – Paid advertising:
Usually either banner advertising or, Pay-Per-Click, which is more useful and cost-effective for small-to-medium sized businesses.
C) Via links from other websites, including social media hubs like Facebook or Twitter.
D) Via direct entry of your URL into the browsers address bar.
Methods C and D have a lot to do with word-of-mouth recommendations and brand awareness, and this can certainly be influenced with the right online marketing strategies.
Points A and B are highly configurable. You can greatly improve your Organic Search Engine Results by investing in expert Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can achieve great results out of PPC advertising by investing in the space itself and – importantly – expert PPC management. (However, how many experts can you afford to hire? Keep reading for the solution to this conundrum.)
But How Do You Get Started?
If this is all new to you, or if you have been thinking about it already, you may have some burning questions. Questions like:
How much new business can your website generate?
And can you do it all in-house?
Or do you need to hire experts?
And are these experts expensive?
Is it all just a waste of time?
Or are you selling your business short by failing to properly market your business online?
The trouble is the whole thing is just so damn confusing and time consuming right? All these different areas of specialization, most complete with their own acronym: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay Per Click (PPC).
And then there’s Landing Page and Website Optimization, Copywriting, Shopping Cart Optimization, Mailing List Marketing, Social Media Strategy and the list goes on!
How’s a small-to-medium business manager supposed to find the time to get their head around all that? Let alone find the time to actually execute it all!
And who can afford to hire experts in all of these areas to do all this for them? And do we really need all the different fields of expertise? All these micro-systems of niche specialization?
Relax – we are here to help.
Call us now on 1300 975 224 from anywhere in australia for the price of a local call
or email us – info@SquareEyes.com.au – and one of us – Steve or Seamus – will get back to you to see how we can be of assistance to get your online marketing mix right.
Are you using a big Google Adwords management firm to look after your search engine advertising?
If so – are they doing the right thing by you? Or could you be getting better results using another, more caring Pay-Per-Click (PPC) manager?
Don’t you deserve a PPC manager who doesn’t just treat you and your business as another number?
Good Adwords Management Needs Care and Attention To Detail
One problem we come across when talking to business owners and managers who are already using a bigger Adwords management company is explaining that whether you know it or not, these companies often don’t do a very good job for you.
The way some of these companies work is by preying on your lack of knowledge about how PPC advertising like Google Adwords actually works.
Rather than educating you and explaining to you what they are doing to get you better results for your advertising dollar, these companies just basically slap up a few ads for you at top dollar and then start sending you your monthly bill.
In our opinion – that’s not right.
When we explain this to business owners they are often keen for us to go in and have a look at their Adwords account and show them how we could get them better for results for cheaper costs per click.
Unfortunately some of the bigger PPC management firms don’t allow their clients to access their own Adwords accounts so we can’t even get in there and have a look.
However we have dealt with enough of these corporate firm’s clients to explain to you how we could do a better job than they are.
In our experience:
This is all very well, but it is lazy and just doesn’t bring the same results as what we do.
We to take the obvious keywords that describe your business and expand them via special software which then reveals all of the different variations that people are typing into Google to find the service that you provide.
This takes time and effort – but it’s worth it because it shows us cheaper keywords you could target so that you pay less per click to get better results.
That’s where we are different. We care. To us you are not a number.
We spend time going over your AdWords account with a fine tooth comb to eliminate factors that are increasing your costs and lowering your ad positioning while testing new elements that bring you the results you want (more traffic and more sales enquiries).
Your Adwords ads are only half of the equation, the other half (equally important) is a well designed (but not unnecessarily flashy or expensive) website that combines the right proven methods for getting you the results that you need – which is for your website visitors to either buy from you online or contact you with their sales enquiries.
Here at Square Eyes – we do your Adwords management better.
We are a small firm and we only look after a select amount of businesses to help them with their Adwords campaigns and website design needs.
We do not overcharge but we are the cheapest because we take the time and care needed to do a really good job for our clients.
We can do you a highly effective Adwords account set up for as little as $400 and then we can manage your Adwords on an ongoing basis for a monthly fee starting from $210 a month.
These prices depend on how big and complicated your Adwords campaign is and much time you want us to spend on your Adwords each month, but we promise you – no hidden costs or nasty surprises.
Don’t let some faceless corporation steal your money, contact us on the details below to discuss how we can do a better job of getting you More Traffic and More Sales.
Email – info@squareeyes.com.au
It’s official – traditional advertising in magazines, Yellow Pages and newspapers is too expensive and ineffective.
Why spend all that precious cash on these tired, old “scatter-gun” methods when you could spend less money to show your ads only to those people who are looking for EXACTLY what you do or sell IN YOUR AREA.
A New, Better Way to Advertise Your Business
My Dad runs a small business making stained-glass windows. When the last Yellow Pages came out he got all excited because he noticed that his biggest competitor had obviously forgotten to run their Yellow Pages ad. Being on good terms with the other business owner, Dad called them up to gloat BUT it turns out that his (more successful) competitor had deliberately dropped his Yellow Pages advert because he’s getting such fantastic results out of Pay Per Click advertising. This had my non-computer savvy Dad stumped – so he called me to ask what Pay Per Click is.
“Dad,” I said “I told you about this – Pay Per Click advertising is advertising on Google, Yahoo and other search engines. You should be doing this as part of an Optimized Search Engine Campaign.”
“Err … Can you put that in plain English for me?” Dad said.
“It’s the most effective way to advertise and it’s also the cheapest!” I said.
“I like the sound of that!” Dad said, “Now send me a plain English explanation.”
WHY:
I’ll tell you what it is in a second but first here’s why you should care:
Because if you’re not running an inexpensive, well-managed Optimized Search Engine Marketing campaign today, then there’s a strong chance you’re missing out on much needed new business opportunities – i.e. SALES (i.e. MONEY).
WHAT:
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that works by increasing your visibility in search engine result pages (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.) using contextual Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
PPC is the best way to advertise because it is contextual – you are only targeting people who you know are looking for what you sell (so you don’t waste money advertising to people who couldn’t care less about your business).
Oh and by the way, you only pay for the advertising when people click on your ads.
What is “Optimized” SEM?
Optimized SEM means that instead of throwing up one advertisement that leads to one webpage (your homepage for example), we split-test many different pay per click advertisements and many webpages to see which get you the best results.
After running these tests repeatedly, we end up with an “optimized” marketing campaign for your business, i.e. advertising that is proven to work really, really well for the cheapest price (way cheaper than advertising in magazines or newspapers).
Here’s what we do to help your business grow using PPC advertising.
• We look at what service you provide or products you sell
• We determine where your customers are and “geo-target” your campaigns to only service those areas (saves you money)
• We research “keywords” that your potential customers might be typing into search engines to search for your product/service (i.e. “plumber in St Kilda”)
• We set up professional-standard PPC campaigns up for you, ensuring you only pay the lowest prices possible.
• We write different ads that are relevant to the keywords targeted (because this works best)
• We write and design different “landing pages” within your website, relevant to the keywords you are targeting (again because this works best to save you money and get the best results)
• The above ads and web pages are split-tested against other versions of ads and landing pages so we can see which work the best.
• We determine what you want your clients to do (i.e. buy a product, call you on the phone, fill in a contact form) and how we will measure this
• We install analytics so that we can track and measure what your website visitor’s do while they are looking at your website
• We analyze the results of all of your ads and of your web pages, to see what is working and what isn’t
• We drop what isn’t working and tweak what is, to see if we can get these successful ads and webpages to work even better
• And we introduce new ads and web pages as well – to see if they do even better than the existing versions
• repeat until we get you great results – more website traffic and more sales!
Here at SquareEyes (it’s just the two of us) we are passionate about your marketing results.
We don’t take on too much work, preferring to concentrate on doing a great job for a small client base. With our help you can be spending less on advertising (than in traditional media OR on poorly managed PPC campaigns) and getting more sales or enquiries.
All you’ll need to do is quickly educate us as to what your business is about, then we will go to work running your PPC campaigns for you, always making sure not to spend more than you have authorized.
At the end of each month you will get a report from us, explaining what we have done, how much you have spent (no nasty surprises there) and what results you have been getting. There are no lock-in contracts and you are free to contact us anytime to ask questions or just check up on progress.
Don’t delay – our mission is to bring you more traffic and more sales – call us now!
You probably know already that using Google Adwords to advertise online is one of the best marketing techniques around. It can certainly be a much cheaper method of advertising than traditonal media like magazines and radio.
BUT running Adwords campaigns successfully can be a VERY complicated and time consuming process and making mistakes can cost you real money.
Here are 4 common Adwords mistakes that could be costing you money:
1. Only one AdGroup in your campaign:
This lack of differentiation means Google can’t understand the context – i.e. what your Adwords ads are about. This means that all search queries are being shown the same ads. A better approach would be to have highly relevant ads targeted to specific search queries.
2. Keywords Not Optimized:
Keywords that are known to produce conversions have not been expanded and optimised to increase sales. To get the best results out of your Google Adwords you need to be monitoring results and then “optimizing” your ads. Optimizing means improving the range of ads that you are running so that they are more targeted and providing higher conversion rates (i.e. getting you the results you need, like sales or phone calls).
3. Google Analytics Not Set Up or Set Up Poorly
In order to get the best results out of your Adwords campaigns and your website, you really should be using Google’s Analytics tool. It is free and probably the best way to manage your online marketing as it provides a detailed and clear picture of what your website visitors are actually doing while visiting your website.
There are many things you can do with Analytics to improve results, but generally speaking what Analytics does is it allows you to see the factors that directly result in enquiries and sales. This means you know what works so you can replicate, and what doesn’t work so you can eliminate it.
4. Website Not Optimized
There is no point running an efficient Adwords campaign if you are not backing this up with an excellent website that gets those sales or gets the phone ringing off the hook.
Just having a normal website that you thought was pretty good when you had it made is not enough. For starters, just because you think that your website copy (the words) is up to scratch doesn’t mean that it is necessarily resulting in the best results.
Further to this you really should be running keyword specific Adwords campaigns into landing pages (pages within your website) that are highly relevant to the keywords used in the ad (and the terms your prospect typed into Google to end up seeing your ad in the first place).
The best way to do this efficiently is to “split test” several landing pages for each different Adwords ad, which as you can probably guess, can mean running many different landing pages at any one time. Thankfully, Google’s Website Optimizer tool makes this automatic once you’ve done the initial set up.
Split testing is a continual process of experimentation and elimination to see which factors (Landing Page design, copy, headlines, etc) give you the best results. Assuming that any given factor will work is not as effective as split-testing several different strategies to discover what works in reality.
If you are running Adwords campaigns for your business right now then you should check to see if you are making any of these 4 mistakes. There are plenty of other factors to consider, but these four are certainly very important.
Of course, doing all of this can be very time consuming and complicated, so if you are busy running your business and would like some help with your Adwords ads, landing page optimization or advertising copywriting (the words you use in your ads or web pages) then please do contact us using the contact details below.
We offer a FREE no-obligation Adwords account review which will show you how you could be getting a higher return on your Adwords advertising investment.
Contact us now to find out more:
I have been focusing a lot over the last few weeks on the creation and optimisation of Google AdWords placement campaigns on the content network. Before I go into the tactics and a few fresh ideas that I am currently playing with, those of you new to the blog may be asking the question…
A Google AdWords placement campaign allows you find pick which websites that participate in the AdSense program you want your advertisements to show on. Instead of relying on Googles contextual matching of keywords that you specify to the content of sites, the placement campaign bypasses this, and allows you to use your intelligence to find sites that you believe will provide visitors to click on your ad, and more importantly convert into sales or actions.
TEXT PLACEMENT AD
STANDARD CONTENT NETWORK AD
One of the main advantages of placement campaign ads is that they take over the whole ad block. Instead of showing your ad with four other competitors inside the ad block, the placement ads take over the WHOLE ad block. It doesn’t matter if you are using text ads or image ads, the whole bit of valuable site real estate is yours. BUT, it does come at a price (doesn’t everything).
To take out the placement ad block, you must bid higher than the top content bidder for that ad block on the site. But this can be more than compensated for by thinking laterally, and placing your ads on sites that have a similar demographic to your target market. These sites are running ads from a different but demographically related niche, so you can bid against cheaper keywords, and get a lot of content traffic without going head to head with your competition.
For example, you may know from market research that the people that buy your widgets also listen to heavy metal. Sure you can run content network ads, and then pick the winners by running an AdWords Placement performance report. This is a good initial strategy to find out if these heavy metal music keywords ads are being shown, and what the average cost per click is. Once you determine where the ads are being shown, and the type of sites that are converting then you can transfer these winning domains into a placement campaign, and optimise the advertising spend on each of these sites individually. Placement campaigns allow you to change individual bids on each url, instead of bidding on keywords. This allows you to fine tune each and every site that you know converts well, making sure that you pay the maximum needed to get your ads shown on that domain.
Placement campaigns are also excellent for targeting large blocks of related content within large news and social media sites. I will give a few examples here of some ninja style tactics for finding placements. There are many more …..
1. Set up a Google alert to search for all news stories that feature your niches or product areas. Most news sites, at least here in Australia show content network ads on story pages, and these make excellent placements. Remember, that these articles can get massive surges of traffic, but they are timely, so some form of alert system is needed to make sure you maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.
2. Buy up blocks of related niche content within social media. Say for instance that there was a popular social video site that showed Adsense content ads. You could do an internal search on that site for all of your keywords, record the url’s of the results and then run placement ads on all of those URL’s within the site. These pages get thousands of visitors per day.
Here are a few other tips that are fresh on my mind:
Call us now to discuss your Adwords campaigns
New users to AdWords often find the system very challenging, or the return on investment simply does not add up because they make a number of common mistakes.
The problem that most new starters get into when setting up their AdWords campaign is that they don’t approach the subject with an analytical mind. Once people get a basic understanding how PPC advertising works, and sign up for an AdWords account, they hastily throw together a campaign with ill defined goals and no actual strategy behind it.
A lot of people have been burnt by PPC advertising because they have failed to take the time to set up an easy to manage and optimise campaign. Failure to manage a campaign through a number of critical stages, and poor initial campaign design leads to a drop in quality score for your campaigns over time. When this happens, the cost per click for all of your keywords goes through the roof, and it leads to a lot people becoming disgruntled with AdWords in general, and feeling like Google is greedy and grabbing at cash.
This is the furhest thing from the truth in my opinion. A well thought out AdWords campaign is one of the best ways to draw traffic to your product or service.
If you currently are running AdWords, a simple way you can get some control over the direction of your PPC marketing is to review the way your campaigns are organised.
Don’t think about campaigns and AdGroups as just simply a place to put keywords that have similar themes. The structure of campaign and AdGroups should be thought of as individual experiment. This is the place where combinations of keywords and advertising copy are being tested against each other. It is very easy to make comparisons of results between individual AdGroups, or advertisements and keywords within AdGroups. You can find clear trends and winners by testing like keywords and ads with only small variations. This makes it easy to see which factor is in play and has increased CTR, conversions or Quality Score.
This separation of data is important to think about when setting up AdGroups. Try as hard as possible to keep your data ‘clean’, and not muddy the results by having unrelated areas and types of keywords in the same AdGroup, or even the same campaign. For instance, i always have brand related keywords in a separate campaign, as these then to have a higher CTR and skew the results of the other campaigns.
This should be taken into consideration for the life of the campaign. If a keyword is dominating a campaign or AdGroup, you should consider isolating it and creating an expanded AdGroup for it.
This makes it easier to test variations on this proven winner and further increase its performance. There is a fine line to walk here, as Google likes to see a high CTR for campaigns, and if you drastically reduce the CTR by removing all of the high performing keywords, the quality score will lower and the average CPC for the campaign will increase.
As for everything, testing and measuring is the key to success.
Contact us to discuss your Adwords campaigns