At the end of 2010, I decided I was going to make a big effort to improve the click-through rate (CTR) on the PPC accounts that I manage. My thinking was that this was a key metric that I could have the most control over. CTR has A LOT to do with how Google determines quality score. While they do not tell us the exact quality score formula, many PPC’ers agree that CTR is probably the most important factor. And we all know that high quality scores result in lower cost per clicks, which lead to lower cost per leads which can lead to you swimming in more money than Scrooge McDuck.
When we started focusing on click-through rate, 35% of our campaigns had a CTR above our goal. Now, after months of optimization, 81% of our campaigns are above our CTR goal.
Here are some things we did to optimize for click through rate.
1. Pause keywords with high amounts of impressions and not many clicks or change the match type. Many times we have keywords we think are important to our campaigns, but do not drive much in the way of traffic. If you have keywords that are getting a ton of searches, but are not leading to clicks, you need to make a change. Either the keywords are not as important as we thought or the ads are not resonating with the target audience. Changing the match type will make your keywords more targeted and lower the search volume.
2. Run regular search query reports. This keeps out search queries that could be causing some of your keywords to have a high amount of impressions or unwanted clicks. If you see irrelevant searches queries being trigger, add them as negative keywords to improve CTR.
3. Test out new ad copy. Evaluate your current ad copy and keep the best performing ad. Write a new ad and let it run against the old ad for a week or two. At the end of your time period, keep the winning ad and rotate in another one.
4. Take a look at the Search Partners Network. We noticed in some of our campaigns that Google’s Search Partners network contributed a number of impressions without clicks. In other cases the Search Partner CTR was almost half of what it was on just Google Search. If there are not conversions coming from the Search Partners, then pausing this is a no lose situation. Here is an example: in one campaign, our CTR was 0.88%. But, looking at it further, we noticed that our CTR on Google Search was actually 1.19% and 0% on the Search Partners. This was dropping our overall campaign CTR under 1%.
What do you do to optimize for click-through rate. These are just some of our ideas. Feel free to share your ideas with us!
Contact us today if you would like to learn more regarding our PPC management services.
1 Comment »Many websites face the challenge of improving their online conversions. If you do research on improving conversion rates, you will see that “specificity” is mentioned quite frequently.
You see it everywhere in Online Marketing best practices:
- Have specific PPC ad copy
- Don’t target broad keywords
- Don’t send visitors to your home page
- Have content on the landing page specific to the PPC ad and keyword search
- Search engines like targeted, specific keywords on a page
- And the list goes on…
Visitors like feeling secure – knowing that the information they are providing is for a specific product. Then they have clear expectations when completing a form and don’t get confused, bailing in the conversion process. Why not apply specificity to your lead form pages across your entire site? Try creating unique form pages for your major products/services.
On the form page, make sure you have:
- Specific, persuasive copy about the advantages of your product/service
- Images pertinent to the item
- Have your “convert” button include a specific call to action (e.g. “Get Your Managed Hosting Quote Now”)
- Eliminate “Check all that apply” boxes and any unnecessary fields
Once these forms are in place, you have to make sure to cover all of these bases:
- All existing pages regarding the product/service should link to the product-specific form
- When your email notification is sent, make sure you personalize the title to reflect what form was completed (a really nice touch if the requester receives a confirmation email)
- Set up unique goals in Google Analytics and assign specific lead values (this allows you to measure what products/services are generating the most money, present the biggest opportunities, or are slowing you down)
- Leverage the thank you page by recommending other products/services; telling your requester what information they should begin collecting if you are following-up with them, etc.
I have seen this strategy work very well. Granted, it is a bit more time consuming to manage multiple forms, links and thank you pages. In the end, however, the more detailed data you collect will allow you to make better strategic decisions for your business.
All of this while servicing your prospect’s needs to a tee. What could be better?
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »This week’s episode of “Fathom That?!” features Kurt Krejny, who explains how to respond to bad press with reputation monitoring. He shares five great tips on how to control your company’s reputation online.
Keep checking back for more episodes every Friday, and leave us a comment if you have something about online marketing you would like us to cover!
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »In the online marketing industry, one thing that can be guaranteed is change. Google has made recent changes to the user interface that has appeared to directly affect organic rankings.
By now you’ve seen the addition of local Place Page rankings, expanded sitelinks, and a variety of other enhancements related to Google’s support of Rich Snippets and ever-advancing code recognition.
Google now appears to be merging universal results with video results, serving the most relevant page on a site for a given keyword that includes a video element. The new video result resembles a Rich Snippet listing in the SERPs. Results link directly to the actual page’s URL (instead of just the YouTube version) and populates relevant content from the page rather than video title and description. Previously, video results were largely populated from YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sharing sites and served as a separate element in the Universal Search Results (meaning the results didn’t “count” as one of the top 1-10, for example).
Video Results Before
New Integrated Video Results
Over the past week, Fathom has seen improvement in organic rankings for established pages that have added video. With higher rankings, comes higher traffic. Our cursory research shows a 33% increase in click through rate on organic rankings with a video thumbnail.
Google Webmaster Support states they recognize two forms of video markup: Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa as well as video sitemaps.
“When video information is marked up in the body of a web page, Google can identify it and may use that information to improve our search results.”
The sites we’ve tested this on do not have videos marked up in Facebook Share or Yahoo SearchMonkey. Is this new integration a Beta test or will it be a permanent ranking factor? Only time will tell; but this development definitely reinforces the importance of online video.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »This probably doesn’t surprise you, but here at Fathom we spend a considerable amount of time having really nerdy/awesome discussions about online marketing. Maybe it’s partially because most of us go home to family and friends that don’t have the slightest clue what we’re talking about, but it seems that most of us can’t get enough of “talking shop” with each other.
So whether it’s analyzing the latest news, or getting into heated arguments about the effectiveness/ethics of common industry tactics, these discussions are happening here every day. And since we’re talking about it anyway, we figured we might as well have our fantastic online video team film it so we can share these discussions with all of you.
Lately, a hot topic around here has been the recent session tracking changes made within Google Analytics. I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about it, as evidenced by last week’s Fathom That, and my blog post from a couple weeks ago. So for our first discussion, we decided to dive a little deeper into that change, as well as discuss how the data was further muddled by the rollout of the Panda 2.4 update the next day.
We’re hoping to release one of these discussions every couple of weeks, with a variety of friendly faces contributing to them.
Of course, with all of the thought that went into launching this new series, we still never bothered to come up with a name for it. So if you have any suggestions for a title, or topics you’d like to hear us discuss, leave a comment or tweet us @FathomOnline.
Without further ado, Fathom is proud to present @CliffyKOnline and @MattKeough in Episode 1 of “Segment to be Named Later”
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »
