Non performing keywords – how to identify them?

Everyone using Adwords or YSM will know some keywords convert well some keywords thought they get good CTR still those keywords don’t perform well. So how do we judge non performing keywords. Based on my experience I can suggest few ideas

1. Check the number of clicks a keyword is getting if you get a lot of click yet no conversions then I am sure you can deem it as a non performing keyword. Make sure conversion tracking is enabled or you cannot get proper information.

2. Compare your ads with the keyword you are advertising if you think your keyword is not properly related to your ad try changing your ad or target a different keyword for that particular ad

3. Active monitoring of your campaign can also help with identifying non-performing keywords. Professional PPC management companies can help you on this. Some companies have good expertise in managing PPC campaigns.

4. If you suspect a keyword is not performing try lowering the bid for that keyword if you feel still you get lot of clicks and some conversions then compare the profit margin with the amount spent on that keyword? If you are making money from that keyword then I am sure you can continue using that.

5. If I was you though I’d also take a look at your matching – run a keyword report – separate out your broad, exact, and phrase matches in a spreadsheet – then look at the ROI on each of them. You may well find that your broad matches are dragging your entire account down and may just have to pause the broad matches, whilst exact math may well still be profitable

Disadvantages of Quality score:

1. Quality score in Google Adwords works under a weird algorithm, some times great content sites, no rhyme or reason get slapped. Thinner sites get extremely low bids. So why does this happen fact only Google knows 1000% what’s the reason behind this.

2. In quality score you need to make sure you have the ad very much relevant to the landing page, landing page should be highly relevant to the Ads that you have. Even a small difference can make sure you have bad quality score. This is a definite disadvantage with Google Adwords quality score.

3. Bad ads can also result in lower quality score. Lower quality score will result in higher bid value since its all automated you need to be very sensitive when creating ads. This is not the case before few years in Adwords and you don’t have such a thing in Yahoo search marketing or MSN ad center.

4. Bad landing pages of a bad website can also affect quality score, you need to have contact pages, perfect privacy policy , good outgoing links to relevant or quality websites etc. There are lots of factors like this that will affect your quality score. I am sure not everyone will be aware of this so I feel this is a disadvantage.

do .gov links helps in better ranking of your site

There is always an misconception that .gov sites or .ac.uk sites have more than link from normal domain.

People often tend to think that .gov sites or .edu sites gets the page rank automatically. So even if you get that .edu or .gov link and people don’t click to that link then you are not going to get any page rank at all. All the links are treated in the same the manner, whether it is .gov or .edu or .info sites. In short gov sites do not carry any more weight other than raw page rank scores being higher.

So in order to have better page rank is to look for other good quality and relevant sites to cultivate link regardless of being .gov or just a normal domain.

Top Pay Per Click Search Engines

Google Adwords:

Google Adwords is the best pay per click search engine that provide you everything you want in pat per click advertising. You can run your campaign within 5 mins you sign in. Google Adwords provides you number of tools to make your ad more effective.

Yahoo search marketing:

Yahoo search marketing is again another highly professional pay per click search engine. In 1997, it was introduced in the name GoTo.com but later in 2005 it was rebranded as Yahoo search marketing.
Yahoo offers $25 free credit when you sign up.

MIVA:

MIVA is a network of partner sites powering over 2 billion queries per month. When you open an a/c in MIVA your ad appear across MIVA network.

MIVA provide you an effective management tool to help to improve ROI.

7Search:

This pay per click search engine serves low profit margin websites owners. This search engine is specially made for those who cannot afford to pay more.
It provides over 1.5 billion searches a month.

ABCSearch:

This search engine was introduced in the year 2001. it is the world’s largest privately held meta search engine which provides over 3 billion searches per month. It is also one of the most affordable pay per click search engine.
ABCSearch is offering $100 free search traffic to payperclicksearchengine.com visitors.

Microsoft adCenter:

This Microsoft adCenter is new in this field but still its doing great and offering great range of features with the additional ability target your ad to live Search users. Signing up fee is $5 but if you pay $30 for a day you can take help of Microsoft Media Specialists to plan, create, execute and analyze your first adCenter campaign.

Findology:

Findology interactive media is an pay per click search engine introduced in the year 2000 and is serving 3 billion searches per month. It offers $50 free click when they sign up using this link -www.payperclicksearchengines.com/findology-promo

Marchex AdHere:

Marchex AdHere provides consumer the local experiences on the internet and also to provide local businesses of the best product for acquiring more and more customer. This search engine provides exclusive access to more than 200 premium publishers.

SearchFeed:

This pay per click search engine is very cost effective and easy method of tracking the sales lead.

The unique feature or benefit available I this search engine is that it support advertiser listings for countries in various world markets. All keyword and listing submissions are generally processed within 2 business days.

Which parts of your landing page you should test regularly?

Testing landing pages is an ongoing process. Testing is very important. For all your pay per click advertising testing of landing page and pay per click ad has to be done regularly. Every time when you do testing you need to know what changes would be more effective to attract more and more customer to buy the product.

Some important areas on your landing page that require regular testing are:

• Headlines

• Call to action

• Images

• Sales content

• The offer

You never know what customer would like as there taste and preferences changes according to the trends. To keep a track on customer taste and preferences you need to do regular testing that is important to closing the sale.

Your testing involve the test on images as which images will work best and where on the page that image will have more impact. Just like that which headline is more persuasive to attract customer to buy the product and also what should be the font size and color of the headline to have more impact.

You will never be completely satisfied with your landing page though you make changes each time you do testing. There is probably something you think you can always improve. If you are not doing regular testing that mean you are sitting still and that wont make you money.

Impression Share Reports

Have you heard about Impression Share? Impression share is a new AdWords metric that represents the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting. This metric is available at the campaign and account level for search.

Impression share is available as a column option under ‘Level of Detail’ when you run an Account or Campaign Performance report. Data is available for search campaigns. To run a Campaign Performance report with this metric, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.

2. Click on the Reports tab and then on the Create a New Report link.

3. For ‘Report Type,’ select the radio button next to Campaign Performance or Account Performance.

4. For ‘View,’ choose Summary (for an overview report) or Hourly (by date) (if you want to see hourly data associated with specific calendar dates) or Hourly (regardless of date)*, Daily, Day of Week (for data associated with each day of the week), Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly from the pull-down menu. *Note that although Impression Share is available down to the hourly level, the data is only available from February 15, 2007 onwards.

5. Select the ‘Date Range’ for your report by clicking on the pull-down menu and choosing the time span (i.e. ‘Last seven days,’ ‘ Last thirty days,’ etc.). You can also use clickable calendars to choose specific date ranges for Summary, Daily, and Weekly views. Select the campaign or campaigns to include in this report by choosing the radio button for All campaigns, or Manually select from a list and then clicking Add next to the campaign names on the list provided.

6. Within ‘Advanced Settings,’ select Add or Remove Columns. Check the box next to ‘Impression Share.’ You can further customize your Campaign Performance report by clicking on Add or Remove Columns to refine your report based on preferred column topics such as ‘Impressions,’ ‘Clicks,’ ‘Avg CTR,’ ‘Avg CPM,’ ‘Invalid Clicks,’ etc. *Note that impression share reporting data is available from February 15, 2007, onward, and that these reports can not be run with hourly views. Additional column sets will be visible if you have Conversion Tracking enabled.

7. Also in ‘Advanced Settings,’ you can apply filters to restrict the display of report rows based on specific criteria. Click Filter Your Results to customize your filters; up to four filters may be created by clicking the Add another restriction link.

8. Enter a unique Report Name for your report and check the box to save your settings as a template if you want to re-use them in the future.
9. For ‘Templates, Scheduling and Email,’ schedule your report (if you want it to run again automatically at another time), and, if you want it delivered via email, provide an email address and choose your preferred report format (.csv, .csv for Excel, .tsv, .xml, or .html)

10. Click Create Report.

To export and download your report when it is finished running:

1. Log in to your AdWords account.
2. Click on the Reports tab.
3. Click into the Report Center
4. Click the name of the report you would like to view.
5. Select the format in which you’d like to export your report: .csv, .csv (for Excel), .tsv, .xml, or .html.

Importance of Keyword Research

Keyword research is simply the selection of best performing keywords which can bring visitors to your website. You may have wasted thousands of dollars on page ranking and conversions if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. Keywords are the back bone of both PPC and SEO. Even if you attain high search engine rankings, you may not get appropriate traffic if the selected keywords are not right.

So, the key steps in any PPC or SEO campaign are as follows

1) Identify your target audience
2) Imagine yourself as a visitor and think what keyword phrases you might be searching and list them.
3) Identify the site focus
4) Now implement your keywords effectively.

4 Important steps of keyword research process

1) Discovering Keywords

2) Analyzing Keywords

3) Selecting Keywords

4) Set up Keywords

In discovering phase, we have to focus on identifying as many keywords as possible that are related to your website and target audience. In analysis phase, add information about existing competition and limitations. In selection phase, we have to choose the most relevant keywords (keep target audience and site focus in mind). In set up phase, make maximum use of your selected keywords on your Adcopy, website content, HTML code and tags.

Alexa screws up its ranking algorithm – makes ranking change

Recently we saw alexa make a major change to the way the rank their sites. In my opinion their current ranking system doesn’t work and its worse than before. The new ranking is not something that takes the whole world as a picture it mostly sees users from US to judge the traffic to a site. We compare the current results with few of the sites we own / monitor and all sites that rank for US and getting lot of US traffic are pushed higher while sites that gets ton of Global traffic and lesser US traffic are pushed down.

So what even alexa did or tried to do has screwed up their total index IMO. Either they need to go back to their old results or they need to fix a lot of things before the new results work better.

Though Alexa results are skewed lot of new webmasters or site owners gauge that as a important way of judging the important of a website so if alexa is going to reward US sites over other country sites then I fear it will never be any more a place to visit.
alexa.com/site/company/announcement

contactthem.ws offers 4800$ to add links – Is it true

We get offers all the time from this site contactthem.ws asking for us to place a ad link and they are willing to pay 4800$ for it. Is it true or is it a scam we just dont want to comment on it without any experience with them. I have seen various forums discuss this to be MLM scam and we don’t have to fall for it.
Does anyone have any experience with this guys. Anyone got a pay check from them for placing the ad if yes please post your experience in our comment section.

Keywords Inactive for search but still getting clicks?

We had some client PPC campaigns have inactive keywords but still they get impressions and clicks so what causes this, Most of the time this is caused when the keyword is inactive in search but still active in partner networks. Google has a range of partner sites which serve google results for their clients. Google’s adwords campaign also serves sponsored results to these sites most probably keywords show impressions and clicks because of this. Though keywords are inactive in google search they are served in Google partner sites.
Other possible reason according to a Google Adwords support guy is that Due to various changes in bidding keywords jump between inactive and active status. Say suppose a advertise run out of funds then if our bid is low and the keyword is inactive it might get activated since the Competitor ads stop showing up. Similarly if some high bidders reduce their Maximum bid or stop their keywords / campaign then the keywords even if they are low bidding and inactive will start showing up. A keyword will jump from Active to inactive and inactive to active if any of the above happens. This is an other reason keywords still has impressions / clicks even if they show inactive status

PPC Management TEAM ( Search Engine Genie )