25 Nov 2009

Have You Seen Sitelinks in Google AdWords Premium Ad Positions?

9 Comments search engine marketing
We were doing a PPC audit for a home security reseller and noticed that the #1 paid spot has 4 sitelinks below the ad.

adt_premium_ad

We’ve always known that you can get up to 8 sitelinks if you’re the #1 search result and have sufficient authority.  But to see these in paid search?  Note that the 4 links under the paid ad don’t seem to correlate with the organic links.  Does anyone have experience with this?
Do the urls have to be the same– such that if adt.com is the #1 organic result, then their paid ad gets extra links if it’s also #1?  If so, that would create a significant incentive to bid to the first position, which would already increase the frenzy for folks who just want to be in the first spot, regardless of ROI.
Have you seen this in other ads?  Please let me know and I’ll be happy to post your experience here.
Overall, seems like Google is allocating more and more space to paid search results and less on organic.  For those folks who have relied only on SEO– whether enterprise clients or local businesses that have counted on traffic from their local 10 pack listings– watch out!
20 Oct 2009

Creating the Perfect Storm- A guest post by Leigh Hanney

1 Comment Guest Posts, social media
This is a guest post by Leigh Hanney, Head of Marketing at RetailMeNot.com and Blogger at semsamurai.com
I talk to a lot of people about online marketing, some are super experienced and others are really only just starting out. But so often I hear the same story from both ends of the Perfect-Storm-in-Social-Network-acceptanceexperience spectrum… and I can’t help but feeling that too many people in the online marketing space have their blinkers on.
Rather than assessing many opportunities at once, they choose one channel and are running full steam ahead, without even a glance to the side…
A prefect example of this is someone who devotes their entire marketing budget and man-hours to PPC ‘because the ROI is so good’. Awesome, but there is something missing here.
PPC is great, and when it makes you money consistently all the more power to you. But as a channel PPC is something you have to invest in time and time again to ensure that same return continues. Don’t get me wrong, I love PPC and will continue to love PPC, but to be truly successful marketing online you have to broaden your horizons. You need to create the Perfect Storm.
There are so many other channels out there that can work fantastically well, but if you’re not trying them out, then you are missing out on capturing a larger potential audience. Facefrombloggertoinfluencerbook, Twitter, YouTube, email marketing, article marketing, SEO… this list goes on!
I like to think of executing a truly awesome online marketing strategy in terms of creating the perfect storm. Sure you can be super successful by managing an awesome PPC presence and delivering return on your spend every month, but imagine if you were also able to harness the power of Twitter followers, the social interactions of Facebook and the viral elements of Youtube…  Just imagine the potential.
Internet marketing is not just about kicking goals with one channel, it’s about connecting with your audience via as many channels as is possible. This then creates the perfect storm. And sitting right there in the middle where all these storms interconnect is you, reaping the rewards.
09 Sep 2009

Check your landing pages for this

1 Comment internet marketing training

AlertSignRecently seen and heard again, starting anything with the words: “Do you need” or “Do you want” are big spam flags.  It’s mostly applicable to email, but also on web pages.  This will affect you in organic search and possibly paid search Quality Scores.

A lot of the rules that trigger spam flags in email will work for web, too.  Think about it.

24 Jul 2009

The 3 types of Facebook traffic– what is best?

2 Comments facebook marketing and advertising, internet marketing training, local advertising, search engine marketing conferences

My apologies in advance for the math here– I’ll keep it to a minimum to explain the points.

Below is a Google Analytics screenshot from a funeral planning site.  Facebook traffic represents sources 4, 5, and 8.

All Traffic Sources - Google Analytics

4) apps.facebook.com: This is self-serve PPC traffic from ads that show up on apps.  Most plentiful but has a bounce rate of 90.13%– about as bad as you can get.
5) facebook.com/referral: These are from people click on our links and posts– organic traffic.  66% bounce rate, which is high, especially compared to the site overall bounce rate of 40%.
8 ) facebook.com/cpc: Facebook PPC ads that show up other than on the apps.  Bounce rate of 81%.

We’re probably paying 15 cents a click for Facebook traffic, but the 80%+ bounce rate means we’re losing 4 out of every 5 folks on the landing page.  With Google AdWords, we’re paying 50 cents a click, but bouncing only 42%– in other words, losing 2 out of every 5 visitors.

logo_facebook

So with Google, we’re paying 3 times as much per click, but keeping twice as many folks past the landing page.  On a per kept visitor basis, Facebook is still a better deal.

For the analytics smart-alecs out there, let me respond to your points:

  • landing pages are the same: True, you’ll get different bounce rates if you send to different pages. Plus, you can’t compare a homepage bounce rate against a landing page bounce rate– they have different goals.  Well, we sent everyone to the homepage, as silly as that is– but it’s still an apples-to-apples comparison.
  • not all clicks are the same: A higher bounce rate is likely to be a lower conversion rate, even if you adjust for the bounce.  Maybe– although it is true that EPC (Earnings Per Click) is what matters at the end of the day, not cost per click or bounce rate.
  • data is not statistically significant: Okay, so the 80% and 90% bounce rates might actually vary 5-6% should we run a few thousand more clicks.  But given that we’re spending real money, there’s no need to blow a thousand dollars to find out that our estimated 80% bounce is more truly 77%– it’s still bad.

Were I Facebook, one thing I’d do is allow separate bids for application traffic versus non-application traffic.

Remember a few years ago when Google allowed advertisers to set separate content and search bids?  This is the same thing.

Dennis Yu


Learn more about Dennis Yu.

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