How to IMPROVE click through rate

The headline of your ad is critical to the click through rate (CTR) that it receives. For Google AdWords ads you will ALWAYS receive more clicks if the headline matches the text that the user is searching for. Google has a special feature called dynamic keyword insertion that you can use to make sure the searchers exact keywords show in the headline of your ad.

It works like this:

In both of these ads the text that the user searches for will be displayed as the headline of the ad if and only if their search term is less than 25 characters. If you look at the sample ads above you’ll notice that in the first ad “Keyword” only has one capital letter – the “K”. In the second ad there are two: “KeyWord” – The “K” and “W”. This is used to tell Google how to capitalize the words in the headline. Ads with “Keyword” will only capitalize the first letter of the first word in the headline. Ads with “KeyWord” will capitalize the first letter of each word in the headline.

So if the user searches for “windows vista screenshots”, in the first ad the headline would be “Windows vista screenshots”. In the second ad the headline would be “Windows Vista Screenshots”.

Finally, you’ll notice the text after “Keyword:” in the brackets. This is called the “backup headline”. If the users search text is too long then this text will be displayed instead. What should you use for your backup headline? Generally it should be the most popular search term that you found after reading part 1 of this series.

To recap, the formula for dynamic keyword insertion is:

{ Key[word|Word]: [Backup Headline] }

A few examples:

• {Keyword: Chocolate Cake}
• {KeyWord: Funny TShirts}
• {Keyword: PHP Web Hosting}

Writing the Body of Your Ad

OK, now that’s we’ve got the headline out of the way let’s create the body copy of the ad. You get two lines of text, 35 characters per line. The first line of your ad should be a strong benefit the person can expect to receive after using your product/service. The second line should contain one or more features of your product/service.

Successful copywriters have one thing in common: they can differentiate between the benefits and features of a product. A benefit will appeal to the emotions of a person, such as “Lose 30 pounds in 4 weeks”, or “Reduce the time it takes to close a sale”. Most people buy for benefits.

Let’s write the first line of our ad – a benefit. Using our Windows Vista example, let’s pretend we run a site called MyWindowsVistaReviews.com where we provide user-submitted reviews on Windows Vista. Our ad will target people simply searching Windows Vista in the hope of converting them to buyers over time:

See the benefit? “Honest reviews to save you time”. Come up with the number one benefit of your product/service and put it as the first line of your ad.

The second line is for features. In our example its “Sort reviews by important criteria”. People looking for Windows Vista reviews might only want to see negative reviews, or reviews by people who upgraded from XP, and my fictional site would let them sort reviews based on criteria they find important.

Finally there’s the URL you show at the bottom of your ad. By simply changing the way you display the URL you can dramatically increase the click thru rate of your ad. You’ll have to experiment with how you display the URL. Here are the ways you can display it, shown from best converting to worst converting (in my experience):

• www.YourSite.com
• YourSite.com
• www.yoursite.com
• yoursite.com
• YourSite.com/Something
• www.YourSite.com/Something

The “Beat Your Own Ad” Theory

Using the information in this article you should create just two ads for your campaign. Make the ads identical but give them a different benefit or feature. After receiving about 30 clicks for each ad, use SplitTester.com to workout which ad performed better then delete the other ad.

Create a new ad and this time change the benefit AND the way you display the URL. Keep repeating this until you can get your CTR up to at least 5%. It may take a few weeks but it will be worth it.

Things You Must Test

As well as constantly tweaking the text in  your ads, tiny changes can result in massive increases in your CTR. Try changing the things listed below if you want a 0.5%-1% increase in the click thru rate of your best ad (after completing the “beat your own ad” theory above):

• Finish each line with a full stop or remove the full stop from each line
• Separate features with a comma or a full stop
• Use an apostrophe where needed or remove an existing apostrophe
• Use a dash where needed or remove an existing dash
• Capitalize the first letter of every word in your ad
• Use a normal headline, such as “Windows Vista Reviews” instead of using dynamic keyword insertion
• Register a few different domain names and use them as the URL in your ad. Sometimes this can increase your CTR by 3%-5%.

Conclusion

You should now be able to confidently create your own Google AdWords ad’s. Try using everything I’ve taught you in this article and leave me a comment below with your results. If you’re running an existing AdWords campaign I guarantee that if you implement the steps in this article you’ll at least double your click thru rate.

 

Optimizing PPC Campaign

Pay-per-click (PPC) remains a leading online marketing strategy despite ever-increasing competition and rising click costs. Why? Paid search works extremely well when you’ve established an accurate estimate of your cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on investment (ROI). However, not everyone is properly measuring their CPA and maximizing their ROI. To get optimal results from your paid search campaign, you need to consider a number of different factors, carefully weighing the pros and cons of spending time and money on each, with the result being a carefully crafted campaign that maximizes results. Here are some important factors to consider in this process:

Saturation as a strategy: Obvious benefits, hidden dangersWhen your client commits to providing whatever budget is necessary to maximize visibility in the paid and organic search engine listings, it is tempting to saturate the entire PPC keyword inventory with budget and optimize organic listings across the board. There’s no doubt traffic stats would rise. On the other hand, site conversion rates will likely drop. Once you reach budget saturation for your top-converting keywords, you start spending budget buying traffic that is progressively worse in quality. If you have achieved top organic rankings for your client, PPC saturation can also cause lift and/or cannibalization, which tends to skew estimations of the average CPA. Consequently, saturating your keyword inventory without careful measurement and optimization can result in unnecessary inefficiencies, leaving client profits on the table.

Optimization: Ad copy, landing page testing, keyword management. The best way to combat slipping conversion rates is to optimize the PPC campaign beyond bid management. Tactics like ad copy optimization and landing page optimization allow you to increase your average conversion rate; in some cases, even during steep budget increases. As a nice side benefit, your quality scores should improve and your average cost-per-click should decrease.

Careful scrutiny of your keyword list is also important. Manually managing the bids for your most important terms will ensure that you’re not reducing your bids on important brand visibility terms (brand name and generic, but relevant, non-brand keywords that drive a lot of traffic). Another best practice is to look at your search query performance report in AdWords. You can generate useful keyword reports from your analytics software as well. Using this information, an analyst can extract any terms that are irrelevant and add them to the negative keywords list. You should also cross-reference the top converting terms from your organic and paid campaigns. Make sure to optimize for top-ranking paid keywords that have poor organic rankings and bid on top-converting organic keywords that aren’t currently being purchased. Beware though, because PPC can cannibalize your organic efforts.

For More information Log on to: http://searchengineland.com/071002-115721.php

 

Optimizing Meta Tags for Search Engines

Meta Tag Optimization is one of the most important aspects of your site optimization process. It helps your web site get better ranking in search engines. A Meta tag is an HTML tag that provides information about webpage’s content. Meta tag is used to communicate information to the search engine crawlers that a human visitor is not concerned with. There are different types of Meta tags

1. Title Meta Tag: Title tag is not a meta tag. Title tags are displayed in the top of a browser window, and are often used as a link from search engine result listings. Title tag should be between 5 to 12 words.
2. Description Meta Tag: The description meta tag is a HTML code that allows you to give a short and concise summary of your webpage content. A description tag should generally be kept under 150 – 200 characters and it is important to ensure the tag describes the page accurately.
3. Keyword Meta Tag: Keyword tag is used to list keywords for your page. These are words that you think relevant to your page – words that if entered into a search engine, you site will be returned on the result page. You can enter as many as 50 keywords for the keyword tag.
4. Meta Robot Tag: The meta robot tag gives you the ability to specify whether search engines should index that page or follow the links appear on that page.

Now the question arise  Why optimize meta tags ?

Two reasons:

1)   It will help to obtain a good ranking in search engines that use meta tags to determine relevancy.
2)   It will encourage people to click the link to your webpage.

Follow the above instructions and optimize meta tag to achieve better rankings of your website with search engines. If you need any further assistance for meta tags optimization,