OrangeSoda Internet Marketing Blog

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I interviewed one of our PPC account managers, Ryan, about what makes a paid search campaign successful. Here are his answers.

What are the most common misconceptions new PPC clients have?

If a business has never done PPC before, than they may have ROI expectations that are not line for their competitive landscape. It’s important to work with a new client to set realistic goals and timelines for a PPC new campaign.

How long do you need to run a PPC campaign to optimize it effectively?

To optimize a campaign, you need enough conversion data to see trends. Usually, the size of a monthly budget will determine how fast we can gather enough data for optimization purposes. A $20,000 budget generates many more clicks in one month vs. a $500 monthly budget.

What are the main factors that affect the success of a new PPC campaign?

The main factor is clear communication and expectations between client and agency. If both parties are aware of the challenges and work involved to obtain results, than a solid workflow is created that generates results quickly. The remaining factors include linking existing accounts (if available), creating compelling ads, and implementing tracking codes on the website.

What advantages does the OrangeSoda PPC team have over managing a campaign yourself? How about compared to other companies?

Our years of experience. Our core management group has been working with PPC campaigns since 1999, which is a long time with regards to the internet. Also, the OrangeSoda technology enables us to manage both large and small advertisers, and give both groups competitive results.

Describe your ideal PPC client.

I aim for all my clients to be ideal. The most important piece of work I do is making sure they are clear on what results they want to achieve with their advertising. I then give them realistic expectations as to the work involved to reach these results.

How does a larger spend account differ from a smaller spend account?

A larger spend account requires more attention vs. a smaller spend. The amount a client spends, can affect results. This is especially true for competitive verticals like Travel and Retail.

This is a common question - how do you reconcile the differences in web stats. It seems like every analytics program comes up with a different number, which can be frustrating for businesses of all sizes. It’s also a problem with paid search because the numbers you see from your PPC analytics may not match up with the numbers in Google.

OrangeSoda recently hired Clint Eagar who worked for web analytics firm Omniture. I asked him to write a post to try to demystify the discrepancies that are common between different web analytics tools.

I get a lot of questions about why there is a variance between how different web analytics packages report traffic results.

It’s All About Cookies
This has to do with how an analytics vendor uniquely identifies a visitor. Most analytics providers uniquely identify a visitor by a persistent browser cookie. When a visitor comes to a website the analytics code checks to see if the cookie exists. If the cookie does not exist it attempts to place it.

If it cannot place the cookie many analytics providers will ignore the entire visit. A large portion of the discrepancy between analytics providers comes into play when a web site cannot place this cookie. Some vendors will build a unique visitor cookie by combining user-agent and IP address. Some analytics vendors use third party cookies to uniquely identify visitors while others set a first party cookie and some visitors have their browsers configured to not accept third party cookies.

Establish Analytic Metric Definitions
The next thing you need to understand is how each analytics vendor defines a page views, visits and other metrics. One vendor may define a visit as a user session that lasts for at least one minute. Others will count an additional visit if the visitor views a page and then leaves the page idle for more than thirty minutes.

So, for example, say you’re reading a news story at CNN.com and get about half way through the article then you head out to lunch for thirty minutes and then come back to your open browser, finish the article and then click to read a new article. This will count as two visits – not one. Some analytics vendors will count this as only one visit. How does your provider track a visit?

How is a unique visitor defined? Is it a daily unique visitor (a visitor that is unique to the site today)? Is it weekly (a visitor that is unique to the site this week)? Is it monthly, etc? I think you get my point.

Tracking Code Execution
Other obstacles to having perfect harmony between analytics vendors could be loading time of site and the location of the tracking code JavaScript, does it load before page content or after. Did the visitor close the browser or click back button before the JavaScript had time to execute?

Web Analytics Is About Trends
Trend is king when analyzing web analytics data. More important than squabbling over a ten percent difference in how Google Analytics or Omniture reports a visitor you should instead be questioning: How many visits to do I have this week compared to last? How are different referring domains driving conversions over time?

Ultimately the differences between analytics vendors is just noise and you should never (did I say never?) attempt reconciliation.

OrangeSoda has a new partner. DoodleKit, is a free website builder that offers small businesses quality web sites that don’t require high tech skills like programming. The free sites are great for hobbies or people who just need a web site. If you want to be found in search engines, their business packages are optimized for online marketing.

Once a web site is built, the next question a business owner usually asks is how to market their web site so they’re found in search engines. I spoke with Heath Huffman, DoodleKit’s Co-founder, about search engine optimization. This is the number one request from their customers - where can they get help with SEO.

Here are some SEO features that DoodleKit offers their business customers to help optimize sites for search engines:

• Image alt tags - which are words that describe an image and therefore can be indexed by a search engine. It’s also valuable for search engine optimization when you can use keyword phrases to describe a graphic.
• Google Sitemap - DoodleKit has made it simpler to create a Google Sitemap according to Google’s specs.
• Search Engine Friendly URLS - rather than long or generic URLs, DoodleKit has made the URLs reflect the title of each page. Another chance to use keyword phrases you want to rank for.
• Built in analytics - so you can see what online marketing efforts are working and where your traffic is coming from.
• Meta tags - right now you can create unique meta data for your site. By next month you’ll be able to change the meta information for each page.

DoodleKit is just a few months old and will continue to integrate good SEO practices into their product.

Most of DoodleKit’s clients ask for additional expertise. That’s where OrangeSoda comes in. We can find the keywords that people are searching for and help your businesses rank higher for those words in search engines.

OrangeSoda also manages paid search campaigns priced for the small business. Google ads help you get immediate traffic to your web site (we also run ads on Yahoo and MSN). Here’s a helpful article on the difference between SEO and PPC.

Here’s the OrangeSoda press release.

Google has started running paid search ads that have videos. The ads were announced last month but are now popping up in search results. I’ve looked for some examples but today I’m not finding any. I wonder if that has something to do with all the news about this and how advertisers pay whenever someone views an ad.

As of yesterday, Search Engine Land reported that you could see the ads by typing in search queries like: BlackBerry, AT&T, cell phone or laptop. Today I can’t find a single video ad. The ads show up on the top sponsored listings (the paid ads on search engines that show up in the box before natural results start). There’s a small box that says, “watch commercial” or a similar pitch and if you click it, you can see a video.

Advertisers pay if someone watches the ad or clicks on the ad to go to their web site, but won’t be charged for both. Since I can’t find a live example, here’s a screenshot from Search Engine Land:

If you have tried a Google AdWords video ad I’d love to get your feedback. I assume for now, that not many people have tried it. Where I see it being ideal is for movie trailers or even “how to” videos for very specific products. In other Google news, Google now has demographic bidding options for AdWords - so you can show your ads to specific age groups (over the age of 17) or gender.

As I write this I’m reminded of something one of our trainers says: paid advertising - easy to start, complex to manage. That’s especially true for small retailers, which are OrangeSoda’s forte. We manage Google, MSN, and Yahoo PPC advertising through one tool and our clients can log in to get stats on clicks, conversions, and see how their campaign is performing.