In a world where 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine, marketers cannot afford to miss out on the treasure trove of conversion opportunities that search engine marketing provides.

However, like most marketing channels, SEM is an umbrella term that contains different factions.

SEO, the first sub-specification of SEM, is concerned with organic methods of generating traffic. PPC advertising, the second sub-specification of SEM, is SEO’s paid counterpart.

The above remark may seem like an oversimplification of two broad marketing areas, but the focal point of our discussion has little to do with definitions.

We’re here to question the validity of treating SEO and PPC advertising as opposing forces.

Let’s start with two foundational statements:-

• SEO and PPC deliver proven results
• SEO doesn’t negatively affect PPC and vice-versa

Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable to infer that the most effective SEM practices should leverage both, SEO, as well as PPC, in a combined fashion.

But, we don’t expect to throw seemingly far-fetched principles in your face and expect you to play ball. So, let’s dive deeper into the two statements mentioned above.

SEO and PPC deliver proven results

If you have doubts regarding the efficacy of SEM practices, a change of opinion is only a google search away.

Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find:-

• A 2017 study suggests that 87% of marketers believe SEO to be a profitable endeavour.
• In the US alone, 1.3 million businesses were able to generate $335 billion of economic activity using Google’s search and advertising tools.
• A 2016 study by Formstack dictates that PPC ads are among the three biggest reasons for on-page conversions.

We can go on and on, but you get the idea.

Furthermore, given the myriad of analytical tools out there, it isn’t difficult to track the results that your business’ SEM initiatives create.

Even if you use nothing but Google Analytics, you’ll still end up with more insights than you’d know what to do with.

All in all, the individual effectiveness of SEO and PPC strategies has been heavily demonstrated over the years.

The takeaway is that they just work!

SEO doesn’t negatively affect PPC and vice-versa

Upon careful evaluation, you’ll recognise that the two clauses in this statement share a reciprocal relationship.

The first clause asserts that effective PPC advertising has no malicious bearing on the intended results of SEO practices.

The second clause states that the inverse is also true.

Now, before we tread into the realm of redundancy, let’s talk about some insights from around 400 studies conducted by Google.

Researchers found that even if you completely remove paid ads from the equation, only an abysmally low percentage of lost clicks is recovered in the form of organic traffic.

More precisely, about 89% of incremental clicks lost by eliminating the influence of PPC advertising are lost permanently.

This clearly shows that PPC-generated traffic doesn’t share any major overlaps with SEO-generated traffic.

But, what about the impact that SEO has on PPC advertising?

Consider the situation in which a user searches for “best bedside tables”, and a product from your website pops up among various paid ads.

However, the caveat in this hypothetical example is that we’re assuming your website also occupies one of the top organic positions.

The point that we’re trying to drive home is that when effective SEO practices work in synergy with effective PPC strategies, your website ends up with the maximum SERP coverage.

The decreasing visual differences between both these channels further reinforce the above argument.

The math beyond this point is fairly simple. The more your website shows up in search results, the higher are your chances of conversion.

As Rand Fishkin from moz.com explains, simultaneous exposure to PPC ads and organic results is more powerful than individual exposure to each marketing channel.

How SEO and PPC can work hand-in-hand

The most prominent intersection between SEO and PPC occurs at the time of keyword research.

Since both marketing channels depend heavily on keyword optimisation, insights gathered by working on one channel can be subsequently used to propel growth in the other.

But, before getting into the nitty-gritty of how SEO and PPC can synergistically boost conversions, one thing needs to be made clear.

Working on SEO is like running a marathon whereas investing in PPC advertising is analogous to executing a sprint. The former takes a lot longer than the latter to yield results.

However, SEO-generated results are also more permanent in nature.

So, if you’re starting from scratch, you can leverage the immediate results generated by PPC advertising to discover a few effective keywords.

Consequently, you can use this information to kickstart your SEO initiatives.

Thereafter, when your SEO efforts gain some traction, you can use the keyword data from your success to re-energise your PPC campaigns.

And the cycle goes on …

The Take-Away  

Generating organic traffic ceased to be free a long time ago.

Given the cutthroat competition that plagues the top spots on organic results, you cannot hope to drive conversions without the help of a seasoned SEO analyst.

Also, given how long it takes for SEO strategies to kick-off, it would be foolish to discount the power of PPC advertising.

Simply put, irrespective of how you approach SEM, you cannot drive conversions without investing time and resources.

However, by viewing SEO and PPC as birds of the same feather, you:-

• Increase brand awareness
• Maximise SERP coverage
• Bolster your keyword research
• Generate quantifiable results
• Maximise your long-term as well as short-term ROI

So, by all means, let them flock together!

The post SEO and PPC — The Rivalry That Never Should Have Existed appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

While online business, creating a big enough ripple in the steady waves of internet users, people is getting aware of the terms online marketing, online advertisement, PPC(Pay-per-click), ROAS(Return on advertisement spending), etc.

When a business plan is a base and a website is a structure, a proper marketing policy is the glue to make the business running and earn good revenue, and advertisement for any business automatically tag along with the entire package. It’s simple. More the exposure of the business, the more the traffic gain and greater the possibility of conversion rate, thus a higher profit.

Let’s skirt through the surface of the whole PPC 101 theory and have a quick look to understand what PPC is. In simple words, PPC is an internet marketing model, where the advertisers pay for clicking on their Ads to the publishers. It is a way to buy the traffic instead of bothering to earn it organically.

Advertisers bid for keywords as well as space. One must choose relevant and high quality keywords to catch the targeted market. The keywords should match with the search done by the users for the products or services you are offering, and with the contents of the websites, they will visit through the Ads.

It’s a potent manner to exhibit your business to the promising clients at the same time they are looking for what you are selling.

Check out some reports to make PPC marketing strategy more simplified.

Keywords Performance Report

Keywords are what that can control when the Ads will appear on publisher’s page. So keeping an eye on what is the performance of the keywords you are bidding for will give you a clear prospective in your business. Sign into your account and hit on the keywords tab and a statistic will appear presenting each row for one keyword. The data can be sorted through by column by clicking on the column header. In this report the columns that will be helpful to deduce the keywords performance are mentioned below.

• Converted click represents which keyword gives how much conversion. So if the data are sorted by this column, then the first row will show the most conversion keyword and so on.
• CTR or click-through rate represents a percentage value of the columns clicks and impression, that is,how much clicks you get out of how frequent the visitors are. Simply CTR = (Clicks/Impression) %. It is determined that higher CTR value means the corresponding keyword is highly relevant and users find your Ad more favorable and that’s why they click on it.
• And then there is average CPC or cost per click column. From the name of it, this is clear that the column represents how much you have to pay for each click.
• Conversion column shows you which keyword is more successful in converting clicks into leads on your website.

So by judging the efficiency of the keywords you can decrease or increase the bid rate to get the best outcome within your budget. Generally, keywords that are generating CTR value lower than 1% can be removed or refined and/or a more targeted keyword could be added.

Ad Performance Report

Monitoring how your Ads are doing is another way of ensuring the performance of your campaign. In case you are using Adwords, log in to your account and click on the campaign tab followed by the Ads tab to get a look on the scenario at that time. The columns, which need to be watched are listed below.

• The status column notifies the condition of the Ad. Such as if it is running or paused or removed, etc. After creating an Ad it is verified by the publisher to check if it is following their advertisement policy or not. During and after verifying the Ad it could have a different status like-
• Under review, Eligible, Not yet serving (video ads) when the review is in progress.
• Approved, Approved (non-family/adult/limited/video ads) when the review is completed and the ad can run.
• Disapproved, Site suspended, Not serving (video ads), With issues (video ads) when the ad or the advertiser’s site doesn’t follow the publisher’s ad policy and so can’t run.
• Again CTR column shows the health of your ad. According to the rules a lower value CTR indicates poor Ad health. It means the Ad is not efficient of attracting users to click. Notice what make users tick by reviewing the ads with higher CTR value so you can improve the quality of other Ads. Use the following tips –
• Focus on why people will choose you.
• Add different offers, prices.
• Include minimum one keyword.
• Make certain your ad matches your landing page.
• The average CPC result also requires to be noted which is defined by (Cost of all clicks/ No. of clicks).

Top Movers Report

To check on this report you need to move to the dimension tab after log into your account interface and clicking on the campaign tab. This report actually shows any changes in conversions, clicks, costs, and converted clicks taken place among two adjacent time periods. Suppose you have chosen a 7-day view report and given Jan 14 as a comparison ending date, then two respective time spans will be Jan 1-7 and Jan 8-14, particularly in this order.

Analyzing the data you can easily point out which campaign or ad group is more profitable, which one causes any cost-effective changes, why your account metrics take a leap, etc.. If the questionable account got less than 100 clicks in the past 7 days, then this report will not be shown. Each day’s report will be produced in the next day at 6pm pacific time.

Search Query Report

Find this report using the steps – Campaign tab > Keywords tab >Details > All.
This report exhibits what customers search for into search network when your Ads show up and how it performs. Scanning through the presented data you can come across different types of search terms which could be relevant to your campaign and which you may haven’t thought of till then.

Adding these high potential terms in your keyword list you can soar up the performance of your campaign. Similarly, you can add those negative words to avoid the customers who are not interested in your services or products. Some key points to remember-

• Keywords column shows which one of them matches to the customers’ search terms and triggers the To enable this column don’t forget to follow the steps-

1. Find Columns drop-down and go for ’ Modify columns’.
2. Click on Attributes in ‘Select metrics’ section.
3. Choose Add next to ‘keyword’.
4. Lastly hit Apply.

• ‘Match Type’ column for this report depicts how closely a keyword matches the phrases or the search terms used by the customers and by doing so triggered the Ad. By verifying the status of this column,you can take necessary action for the keywords.

Campaign Performance Report

The most easy way to get an overall view of your advertisement campaign is campaign performance report under the campaign tab. For a new advertiser, it’s a basic and a spartan way to monitor performance through clicks, impressions and CTR columns. It’s customize view helps to determine if you are achieving your targeted expectation through your campaign or not.

These five reports are not the end of it, though its highly useful to achieve your goal and a reasonable enough ROI from your business. With a proper insight on PPC marketing and advertisement campaign you can dig out the most from your investment.

The post Top 5 PPC Reports to Simplify Your PPC Marketing Strategy appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

With the arrival of fourth quarter of 2014, winter has already knocked the lanes of our towns with holiday decorations popping up in homes and shops. It’s time for you to prepare optimized pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns that can help in enhancing your revenue and profit gigantically in this holiday season. Holidays are busiest period of the year for the e-commerce advertisers and online retailers as the target customers become very active in this season, thereby increasing the chances of e-commerce store owners to earn maximum profit through their online business.

To help you in gearing up for this holiday season, I am going to list the 7 important tips for creating well-optimized PPC ads that will help in improving your e-commerce sales drastically.

1.Review Your Last Year PPC Ad Campaign’s Performance

Don’t just put your thoughts for devising new ways of creating optimized PPC ad campaigns. Reviewing what you have achieved with your techniques last year plays a significant role in letting you discover your ups and downs. According to a famous quote, “the only source of knowledge is experience”, your past experience always lends you true knowledge. Similarly, your past data collected after analyzing your previous PPC ad campaigns’ performance gives you a clear insight of what you have to do next and what to avoid while creating powerful and effective PPC ad campaigns in this holiday season.

While reviewing the performance of your PPC ad campaigns in last year, it is equally important to concentrate on certain areas, which are mentioned as follows:

• Check out your promotion efforts
• Analyze the crucial days when the traffic was maximum
• Check out the performance of the ad extensions
• Evaluate the maximum sales and leads occurred on particular dates

You must recognize the mistakes committed by you in last holiday season to figure out how you could create more effective and successful PPC ad campaigns for this new holiday season. It is also important that you must know which days of last holiday season have contributed the maximum sales to your business.

Here is the graph, which has been prepared based on the stats from GA analysis for understanding the huge hike in transaction rate during holiday season of last year (2013):

From this graph, you can see that every day up to the first 20 days in the month of December has seen a spectacularly high rise in transaction volume life over the average. You can use this data for creating and promoting your PPC campaigns in this particular time period of this holiday season.

2. Check out the Major Online Shopping Events

Holiday season is meant to fetch a flood of customers to your online store, but there are some specific time periods in a year, when you must concentrate on your PPC Ad campaign efforts to keep your sales up and high for gaining maximum sales. However, you can gain maximum sales for your online store only in holiday season of the year, which includes the most important online shopping events listed as follows:

• Thanksgiving Day
• Black Friday
• Cyber Monday
• Green Monday
• First Night of Hanukkah
• Christmas Day

If you know the exact date of these key online shopping events, you can easily implement and modify your online marketing strategies for boosting your sales to a significantly higher level. For example, you can build a PPC Ad campaign especially for targeting events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Green Monday, which will help you in maximizing your sales due to the flood of online shoppers during these shopping events.

3. Build an Effective and Powerful Mobile PPC Strategy

How can we forget talking about mobile phones when it comes to enhancing online sales through PPC ad campaigns? Mobile phones have already taken over the desktops and laptops in terms of internet usage and majority of people prefer to shop from their mobile phones, due to their easy accessibility from anywhere and anytime. The previous holiday season of 2013 has already seen a major boost in mobile shopping and we are expecting that mobile shopping will set new records this holiday season.

Therefore, it is mandatory that you should have effective and powerful Mobile PPC Ad campaigns for improving your potential in this holiday season.

To do so, you must ensure to invest in Mobile Adwords tools also to know and reach the target mobile audience through your efficient mobile PPC ad campaign strategy.

Some key tips for doubling your chances of sales through mobile traffic are:

• Create your PPC ad campaigns for the most important ad locations on the mobile devices.
• You can also customize your mobile advertising experience by using the sitelink and mobile ad preferences.
• Your website’s landing page should be optimized according to the varied screens of the mobile devices for offering enhanced user experience to the mobile device owners.

4. Set up Your Budget for Your Holiday PPC Ads

Budget is of course one of the most important part of any campaigning process. Similar to other PPC campaigns or any other advertising campaigns, it is important to estimate the budget for your holiday PPC ads. It will help you in developing your campaigns accordingly and also help you from falling short of budget at the crucial time of promoting your PPC ads.

For estimating your budget for holiday PPC ads in this season, you can take reference of your last year’s ad investment and performance to know how much you will be required to invest this year. It is also vital that you should keep some money aside for days when you are expected to see a surge in your website’s traffic. Also, make sure to keep your days parting to slash down at times when your ads receive minimum traffic because it will help in maintaining a balance in your budget and expenditure.

5.Use Influencing Ad Extensions to Stand Unique

Your target audiences are surrounded by many of competitors across the globe. Hence, it is important for you to make yourself unique so that you can stand out from the crowd in front of your customers. Try to use a target message with the correct offer to help in making your PPC ad campaigns better. You can do so by analyzing and modifying your existing PPC ad extensions.

Here is an example of using influential ad extension in your PPC ads:

These are some points that you can use while creating your target messages:

• Always use boasting language to explain your advantages so that your customers can easily notice you among your competitors.
• Always keep competitive spirit live in yourself to make your listing unique in the swarming search list.
• Use of review extensions and call outs is important for dominating the SERPs.
• You can also use the local extensions for influencing in-store conversions.

6. Make use of Holiday-Specific PLAs

One of the most important tips for running your holiday PPC ad campaigns successfully in this holiday season is that you must make use of the holiday-specific PLAs (Product Listing Ads), which are considered as unique as compared to other ads. These ads appear different from the standard text ads in search results. You can include information in the form of graphics, images, or texts to make your ads look inimitable from others.

Here is an example of a holiday specific PLA:

PLAs are considered more effective for generating leads and sales for the ecommerce stores. Hence, if you can set up holiday shopping campaign by including these holiday exclusive PLAs, your online sales will drastically improve.

7.Add on Your Holiday Spirit

All your efforts for creating well-optimized holiday PPC ad campaigns will go in vain if you don’t know how to spice up the entire process with holiday spirit. Once, you have set your budget along with the steps required for developing an effective PPC ad campaign, you can start introducing changes in your ad campaigns into the holiday spirit. For example, you can engross holiday greetings in your ads or you can also push your products that are more related with the concern online shopping event.

Unquestionably, holiday season is one of the most demanding periods for all customers, businesses and advertisers. Experts can do this job better. If you really want to compete for grabbing the attention of your target audience, let Google adwords certified professionals manage the campaigns for your business

The post Don’t Run Your Holiday PPC Ads Until You Read This appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

PPC advertising, in recent years, has gained immense popularity as one of the most profitable strategies to cash online opportunities and climb the ladder to heightened ROI. According to the statistics collected from an infographic put forth by Wordstream, when web surfers are actually looking to purchase, 64% of the people clearly intending to buy click on sponsored results (paid results) as compared to the rest 35% who rely on organic links.

However, to most of the PPC professionals, launching a well structured PPC campaign that turns up successful in achieving outstanding results is a daunting task. Since paid advertising campaigns eat up almost the entire online marketing budget, the pressure on PPC experts to pull greater returns on investment is always high. So, here in this post I’ve compiled a pretty good list of 11 PPC strategies that will turn your PPC marketing campaign into a successful one.

1.Make your ad copies “clickable” – The better your ad copies, greater your click-through rates and lower your costs.

Did you ever wonder why most of your target audience walks past your ad without clicking? This is because of a poor ad copy that fails to show its worth by not including “critical” information that your target customers are seeking. A good ad copy is the one that includes critical information that attracts eyeballs and pulls high quality traffic to the landing page. 

Let’s take an example of Tourmyindia.com, an online platform that sells India touring packages across the globe. Below is a screenshot of the ad copy that shows up when “holiday package to goa” is searched on Google

Note the critical things that Tour My India included in its ad copy to make it clickworthy

• An attractive title that is self-explanatory – 4D/3N Holidays in Goa, the title itself tells complete information about the deal.
• Eye-catchy “call to action” text to grab attention– “Get upto 50% off on Goa Holiday Packages. Book Now Offer Limited” – This text indicates 50% discount that is likely to lure customers while prompting lookers to take instant action by using “Book Now Offer Limited” phrase.

2.Your Homepage is not your Landing Page – Focus on creating a separate, highly optimized, conversion-friendly Landing Page

Most of the online businesses use their website’s homepage as landing page in their PPC campaigns. Due to this, paid marketing campaigns fail terribly and often business owners end up incurring huge losses. To avoid this, always create dedicated landing pages and optimize them for conversions so as to ensure maximum returns. It is extremely important to keep your landing pages as simple as possible by putting a check on your PPC efforts and coming up with something that can influence customers purchasing decision

Example – Below is a screenshot (only the part above the fold), again from Tourmyindia.com depicting a highly optimized landing page specifically designed for the PPC campaign – “holiday tours to Goa”.

To create highly targeted Landing pages, you can go through some Effective Landing Page Secrets that helped me increase sales by over 200%.

3.Save money in your PPC wallet – Use Geotargeting to limit your ads to specific locations

Geotargeting allows one to target ads to a very specific location. This benefits product based companies to sell their items to a geographically targeted niche while stopping ads to trigger for the locations that the campaign doesn’t wish to target.

A good example of this can be an ecommerce store (let’s say XYZ) that ships its products only to one state, say California only. Now obviously, if your PPC ads show up even when somebody sitting in London searches to buy something online, it’s likely that the person would click on it only to find that you ship only to California and leave frustrated. There you lose your dollars – your ad spend, despite gaining a genuinely interested visitor.

Hence, while setting up the campaign, it’s wise to fill fields/options like “Search”, “Browse by Country”, “Bundles“, “Excluding” and custom Geotargeting via entering multiple zip codes or drawing out a map.

4.Google recommendation – Adding Negative Keywords to your PPC Campaign helps improve ROI.

As per Google, adding negative keywords is the best thing that you can do to your PPC campaign to reach out to the most interested customers that are looking for your product/service while reducing costs at the same time. Now, many of you might be wondering what a negative keyword is. A negative keyword is the one that you enter into an ad campaign so as to stop your ad from showing up when that particular search term is used. This minimizes wasted spend by eliminating irrelevant searches. To create negative keywords, you can simply put a minus (-) sign in front of your keyword phrases.

The outcomes of inserting negative keywords in your PPC campaign include – more targeted traffic, increased CTR, higher Google Quality Score, less wasted ad spend(reduced average CPC) and more conversions.  

5.Good Formatting Matters – Create ads with text that is easily “understandable” to even an 8 yr old kid.

Format your ad properly before going live. Don’t include any semi colons and write the ad text that is easier enough to read & understand by anyone.

6.Try Dayparting –  Choose the best display time for your PPC ad to optimize your campaign for “convertible” traffic

Dayparting is basically a technique that allows one to choose timeframes when their ads should be displayed. With Google adwords, you can select the exact hour while with adcenter; you can also select blocks of timeframes like 12 p.m to 4 a.m or any other duration within which you won’t like to display your ad.

Benefits of using this technique are as follows

a)     It increases web traffic on “slow days”

b)    Maximizes ads for prime sales time

c)     Pulls optimized traffic that actually converts into leads

7.Connect Adwords to Google Analytics– Installing Conversion Tarcking mechanism is important

For every PPC campaign that you plan, connect your adwords account with Google Analytics and track conversions real-time by inserting the analytic code into your targeted PPC landing page(inside your HTML coding). This will show you the gap between your CTR and actual conversions, which is very important to measure the performance of your campaign.

8.Split Test different variations of your PPC campaigns for best results & Measure your Quality Score

From landing pages to ad formats, ad titles and ad copies; you should split test everything to see which combination gives you best results. If you’re confused between two variations of a landing page, perform A/B testing procedure to pre-measure the impact and fix flaws.

Don’t forget testing the below three things in your PPC campaign to determine what will resonate best with your audience- 

1.Test landing page call to actions for higher conversions

Wording, size, color and placement of your CTA matters a lot in converting traffic through a landing page.

2.Test your landing page text for “lengthiness”
Text heavy landing page don’t convert. Test the text of your landing page before going live. Remove excessive text as customers may find it boring or irrelevant. Keep it short and crisp if possible.

3.Test your Ad headline for more Clicks  

Headline is the first thing that grabs eyeballs & that’s why it leaves the biggest impact on CTR. Before you carry out the above two tests, consider testing a headline first. Again, construct an attractive headline that covers useful information and prompts people to click through your ad. Missed impressions will lead to a lower Quality Score.

Here’s how you can determine your Quality Score using ad rank and CPC bid metrics.

9.Manage your PPC account twice a week

Optimizing your PPC campaign at least two days a week is important especially if you have a marketing budget > $3000 per month. However, depending on the size of your Google Adwords account, you can yourself decide how often your campaigns need optimization.

Below, I’ve shared the PPC Account Management Process via an image that shows some important aspects involved in managing a campaign effectively.

10.Use  PPC Management Tools & Intelligent algorithms to reduce overall costs

Employing bid management strategies reduce overall costs to a great extent by adjusting bids in sync with the calculated metrics. Some of the PPC tools that you can use to plan an effective strategy are – SEMRush, Ubersuggest, classic Google Keyword Planner, PPC Campaign Builder, Visual Thesaurus etc to save your time.

11.Shift your marketing budget to branded keywords and avoid bidding on generic keywords

For those businesses that’ve a limited budget, maximize your PPC efforts on branded keywords rather than general keywords. It is important to bid only on those keywords which are likely to generate maximum conversions for you.

For example – If your display campaigns don’t perform well and fail to generate conversions despite spending $25-$30 per day, add this budget to a campaign that is losing impressions due to “limited budget”.

The Final Verdict

If you pay $20 for a click and the click in turn closes a sale > $20, only then you can be sure that your PPC campaign is well-structured and running smooth enough to expect that you’ll end up with greater ROI than what you invested. So, don’t just read these PPC strategies, take action and turn your paid marketing campaign into a huge success. If you need help, hire our Google Adwords certified PPC experts who have 10+ yrs of experience in putting up an effective PPC campaign.

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