I recently came across an article talking about the new Wordstream PPC Grader. Of course my curious self had to go try it out and I’m happy to report this tool offers a lot of insight into your Adwords Campaigns.

(Not to bad of a score if I do say so myself)

Here is some of the great info you can learn from this tool:

1. Wasted Spending on Negative Keywords – Luckily my wasted spend wasn’t to high but knowing there still was some tells me I need to go in and add some more negative keywords so I can get the number closer to $0.

2. Quality Score – Here is let’s you know if you scores are below average, average or above average. It also give you an estimate of how much money can be saved by improving your score a point. Example from my report: “By improving your Quality Score by 1.1, you can save $112.28, or get 35more clicks / month.”

3. Click Through Rate (CTR) – This section of the report shows you the average CTR curve and where you lie on it. It also gives you an estimate of how many clicks you can expect to get by increasing your CTR. Example pulled from report: “If you increased your CTR to 4.41%, you could expect 11 more clicks or 1more conversions a month.”

4. Activity Time – This part of the report doesn’t offer much insight although it is nice to see how where you rank among others when it comes to time spent updating campaigns. I ranked in the 87th percentile for this client and got this message “You’re actively devoting time to working on your account — this is good news for your campaigns!”

5. Long Tail Keyword Optimization - We all know long tail keywords are great because they are more specific and most of the time offer high conversion rates. This section of the report let’s you know where you stand with your targeted keywords and how you rank among competitors. As you can see from the image, my campaigns use a lot of 3+ words and I rank pretty well. 

6. Ad Text Optimization – This section I found very helpful because of the visual it gives for your worst text ad and your best. Here I can compare the two in order to figure out why the worst one is performing so bad. As you can see from the image below, I’m doing pretty well with my text ads.

7. Landing Page Optimization – Here you can see how you compare to your competitors when it comes to the amount of landing pages you are sending traffic too. It’s best practice to have targeted landing pages for each ad group so that you’re sending people directly to the information they want to see rather than just sending them to any page on your site. Here I learned that my competitors have double the amount of landing pages I do and I need to step up my game in order to match them.

8. PPC Best Practices – This is the last part to the report and it gives you a Pass (thumbs up) or Fail (thumbs down) grade on each of the best practices experts have defined in order to have a successful PPC campaign.

I was really impressed with this tool and it’s ease of use as well as the great information it has given me. There’s no reason you shouldn’t give it a try considering it’s Free! So go here and check it out!

Make sure you’re following us on Twitter and Facebook! We’ve always got fresh new finds posted for you!

We talk a lot about individual aspects of SEO and PPC, i.e. tactics.  We focus on best practices and offer some tips that we have learned through our own experiences/expertise.  However, to the best of my knowledge, this blog has never discussed the differences in overall strategy that should be taken in using PPC vs. SEO.  That they would be different may make inherent sense, but you will find that many marketers apply the same strategy to these two formats viewing them simply as different channels under the internet umbrella.

While there are exceptions, I typically recommend campaigns for both PPC and SEO to all of my clients.  There are benefits to be found exclusively in each to help the client reach almost any web-based goals.  However, that does not mean that I take the same strategy with both methodologies.  There are some fundamental differences that need to be observed with how each works and who is being targeted that affect how I go about tackling those systems.

For search engine optimization, the over-simplified strategy is to optimize the on-site content so that Google & Bing (and other engines to a lesser degree) will rank the site for terms that customers may be searching.  This includes specific product, service, and category pages – as well as peripheral terms that may be related to that content.  I am often willing to take a “shotgun” approach to SEO by tackling as many phrases that will rank as possible.  Even if this brings in some irrelevant traffic with a lower conversion rate, the raw number of conversions should increase as some users are searching along these lines.  There is no added cost per user beyond the time spent to create the ranking content.  For example, if I want to bring in users who are searching for steel containment tanks, I would like to rank high for the phrase “steel tanks.”  Now, this might also bring many users who are searching for army tanks, but so long as some of the users are searching for holding tanks, I would likely see a positive return on investment.  The tactics taken to achieve good organic results are discussed extensively in a number of SEO related articles on this blog.

For PPC, the strategy needs to be much more targeted.  Each visitor who arrives via PPC costs the provider just a little bit extra.  If PPC ads bring in large quantities of irrelevant/low converting users, this will likely result in a poor return on investment.  Using the previous example, I do not want to target the broad phrase “steel tanks” for PPC ads as they are expensive and a bit of a crapshoot as to how relevant the incoming traffic will be.  Compared to the shotgun for SEO, I want to use more of a sniper rival for PPC.  ROI on PPC can be terrific, but it will always be highest for the most relevant users.  I will want to use phrase (e.g. “steel storage tanks”), exact (e.g. [steel containment tanks]), and negative match (e.g. steel tanks –army) terms to best filter where my ads are shown.  That is not to say that you need to limit volume, only focus on that which is most likely to convert and work from there.  The Beacon blog contains a number of posts to discuss best practices in creating ads and the types of phrases that are most worthy of focus.

While I hate the word “synergy” (it is often used in situations where it is completely unachievable – i.e. business mergers), there is something to be said for PPC and SEO feeding off of each other.  They help create exposure and enhance the user experience to the point where they produce better results together than the sums of what either could achieve alone.  Just take heed to ensure that you are using a strategy specifically tailored for that aspect of web marketing as opposed to just sectioning out the same strategy across different channels.

I want to use this first entry to give you a quick introduction of myself. I want you to feel like you’ve known me for a while when you read my postings. I also want to develop what I like to call a “web relationship” with you. What I mean by “web relationship” is that I want you to enjoy reading what I have to say and hopefully continue to come back! I also hope not only will you just read what I’m posting but share it with others too and especially comment and give me your thoughts!

Career Past: Before coming on board at Beacon, I worked for a Top 100 Internet Retailer as a web marketing specialist. While there I was responsible for social media, email content, banner ads, certain IT responsibilities related to the Oracle software we were using (i.e. SQL, Product Data, Server Management), Sales for Categories/Affiliate Stores, Managed a few Paid Advertising Accounts (i.e. Working with the client to get banners onto the homepage, posting hot deals, getting them into emails, etc.), and the list could go on but I will just sum it up by saying Marketing on the web portal of this company. Now I know you’re wondering what made me leave this big company. Well let’s just leave it at personal reasons and a determination to find a company that would foster growth and continual learning.

Career Present: Obviously, I am now a Web Marketing Analyst for Beacon and thoroughly look forward to all the great things I will learn and accomplish here. I’ve been here for a week now and solely focused on becoming well acclimated to GA as well as starting to get to know the clients I will be managing. While I had basic knowledge of GA and what you could learn from it, I had no idea how much information could be gained and the depth of it. There is an overabundance of information that can be gained if you just spend the time to look into the different reports. Not to mention, I love that you can set up “goals” and have them tracked to see if people are accomplishing what you want them to on your site. Coming in I had basic knowledge of SEO but now I’m seeing it’s a world within itself and can be a little overwhelming. I feel like this is an area I need to spend a little time on so I can have a better grasp of it. I know a lot goes into getting websites ranked higher but I had no idea there were so many ways to do it. With all that said, I am looking forward to this new chapter in my career and hoping it’s a long standing one with Beacon!

Personal Background: While I don’t want to give away too much information here I do want to share with you who Ashley is. I was born and raised in from Oldsmar, FL but moved to Greensboro, NC at the start of high school. I graduated from UNCG with a Business Degree and concentration in Marketing. I’ve spent most of my working years in the furniture industry but after graduating switched career paths and began doing Web Marketing. Apart from working, I am the mother to a wonderful 9 year old boy whom I spend most of my time with. We live in the country on a horse farm and spend a lot of time just doing farm chores. I have 3 of my own personal horses, I board a friend’s horse, and I also train horses when time allows. Along with horseback riding, I also love traveling, riding 4 wheelers, wakeboarding, spending time with family, and hanging out with friends.

So there is a little bit of information on myself. I’m very excited about beginning a career here at Beacon and look forward to everything it has in store for me! TTYS

Lots of <3,

Ashley

Week 9 was good.  I spent this week really diving into marketing Beacon.  The bulk of what I did this week involved making sure things were up to date or set up correctly.  I ensured that the local listings for Beacon were correct in directories like Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local.  Once I was done with that, I worked on setting on some goal funnels in GA to track conversions for Beacon’s contact form.  I set up the funnel to track if the contact form was filled out from a specific page.  The other updating I did was related to the special offer page for the current promotion Beacon will be running.  This didn’t involve creating anything on the page, but rather making sure links worked correctly on the page and that links from other pages pointed to the correct special offer page.

Along with that work, I spent a large amount of time working on a PPC campaign for the special offer.  This was really fun.  I got to manipulate the keywords for ad groups within the campaign to try to ensure that the ads were associated with the right keywords to improve the quality score of the keywords.  The better the quality score, the more likely the ad will appear in related searches.  There were close to 20 ad groups that I focused on for this campaign.  After looking over the previous statistics, I tweaked the copy of the ads for each ad group to hopefully be more effective.  I also wrote one or two new ads for each ad group.  If you don’t know already, the ads have a limited number of characters for each line.  There are four lines in each ad.  The headline, line 1, line 2, and the display URL.  The headline and the limits you to 25 characters and the other three lines limit you to 35 characters each.  Here is an example to help visualize what I had to work with.

This equals 25 characters

This is the length of 35 characters

Here is a new set of 35 characters.

www.displayurl.com/35morecharacters

It seems like it would be easy to get your point across in that amount of space since you have 70 characters for the “meat” of the “sandwich”, but considering my second line was a predetermined mentioning of the special offer, I really only had 35 characters to deliver the message.  I was able to make the headline whatever I wanted to help get the message out there.  Also, the display URL can more or less be whatever you want.  It doesn’t have to be a valid URL.  It is meant to help convince people to click on the ad.  The ad is pointing to a real URL of your choosing in the background.

In addition to writing and editing ads, I was given the freedom to determine the best geographical area to target with the ads, I was able to give input on the daily budget of the campaign, and I got to learn about and set up some A/B testing within the campaign.  A/B testing is where you run two almost identical ads or websites or etc. and see which outperforms the other.  Once you get enough data you stop the less effective one and move on to testing the winner versus another small change.  Hopefully I’ll be able to see some results before the end of my internship.  If not I’ll have to check back in to find out how it’s going.

Eight weeks down, two more to go.  The past two months have really gone by quickly.  I spent some time today reflecting back and what all I have done and learned so far here at Beacon.  I’ve learned a lot, but I realize that there is still a lot I don’t know.  Since this week was the start of a new month, I spent a lot of time this week working on transitioning the accounts I was working on to other members of the WMS team.  This involved some meeting time and talking about what I had been doing, what I planned to do, and what steps could come next.  The other major thing I did this week was to compile monthly reports for the clients I had been covering.  Like I mentioned a few weeks back, that’s not the most glamorous task but it’s really not so bad.  I found it very rewarding to see growth in the clients I covered and to see things I had done start to show results.

The other big thing I did this week was to sit down and map out a final two week plan to help market Beacon itself.  I’m excited to be getting into this since my background from undergrad is marketing.  Some of the things I am going to be doing involve PPC campaigns, setting up various tracking measures, creating possible promotions, and a few other ideas.  This will be fun.

On a side note, I have been doing a lot of work with social media for several clients as well as for Beacon, and the more involved I get, the more I learn.  I’ve always been comfortable with Facebook, but I never really have had much exposure to outlets such as blogs, Twitter, and Foursquare.  That has changed during my time at Beacon.  I’ve learned how to utilize various outlets to accomplish different tasks.  For instance, I’ve learned that using Twitter can be very valuable for interacting with customers and is a great tool for promotional contests.  Another thing I learned is that Foursquare, which is a location based check-in service, is great for driving foot traffic into a business.  The way that is done is by first setting a location for the business within Foursquare.  Then you can set up options where special offers will pop up on someone’s cell phone if they are running the Foursquare app and they are within a specified geographical area of your business’s location.

The final thing I want to talk about relates to social media as well.  The “new kid on the block” is Google+.  I was able to get an invite to join Google+ today.  For those who are unfamiliar with Google+, it basically is a social media outlet similar to Facebook.  There are subtle differences between the two that I have observed, but overall it seems to be more or less the same.  The concept is almost the same as Facebook, and the only real differences at the moment are that Google+ calls features by different names than they are called within Facebook.  I’m not entirely sure if it’s something I’ll stay with but I’m willing to give it the “old college try.”

I remember back in the day, stumbling upon a neat little tool called “Adwords Editor“.  And it was like the sky broke open, angels sang, and the gods smiled down on me. Once I used it, all I could say was: WHAT. A. FIND. Unfortunately I made this find after having a co-worker do a tremendous and tedious account overhaul manually is Adwords, but let’s not talk about that.

Anyway… we all know how Adwords Editor saves us time creating, managing, and editing PPC accounts. But there are even more features once you get into the nitty-gritty of Editor that are worth being aware of. And today I’d like to talk about the most simple of these: copy & paste.

The Copy and Paste in Adwords Editor

Yup. Good ol’ copy and paste. So, we all know you can export all or parts of an account using the “Export” feature under “File”. But what if you want to manipulate something super specific, like ad copy and keyword destination URLs? Exporting this is difficult and even impossible in some circumstances. Well,  copy and paste to the rescue!

How to Use Copy and Paste in Adwords Editor

Simply Control + C or Shift + C (depending on whether you’re selecting choice data or all data in a group) and Control + V into Excel. All data, including headings, will be pasted. Now do your thing with edits. Save as CSV, making sure your headings match, and import into Editor. Review and approve edits. Done! Now wasn’t that easy?

This method has served me particularly well in making large, sweeping changes to ad copy. Give it a try and check back again for more tips on our beloved Adwords Editor!

~Andrea

Well this post marks the half-way point of my experience with Beacon.  Looking back at the past 5 weeks, I can tell that I have learned a lot from the people here.  I’ve done a variety of tasks from compiling monthly reports to writing ad copy for PPC campaigns.  I know that I have a lot to learn still, and that even the things I do know how to do are only on a basic level.  Looking forward to the next 5 weeks, I am excited to be getting involved in some of the projects and tasks to come.  There is still a lot that I will be learning.  A quick look ahead to what I will be doing includes marketing Beacon, writing a pseudo case study on social media, and a few other things.

To recap this week, it was another successful week.  I was able to accomplish more than I did last week.  Thankfully the Google Guitar was gone and nothing similar took its place.  One of the main things I did this week was a web health analysis for a client.  I got a list of a few competitors from the client and then compared them all on a range of metrics such as page rank, number of links to the page from outside sources, average number of monthly visitors, keyword rankings, and other SEO related areas.  This took me a little longer to finish up than I thought it would.  I think the main reason for that was that I was not entirely sure if all the information I was putting into the report was correct at first.  I also learned the lesson that it is better to wait for the client to give you a list of whom they want to compare against than to assume what companies are on that list.  Fortunately I hadn’t really started on the report when I got confirmation of the competitors for the client.

The other main task of the week was to keep monitoring various metrics for my clients.  I spend much of my time looking at GA and AdWords to see where things may need to be tweaked to improve results.  I also had the standard weekly meeting.  There were a handful of other meetings that I was able to participate in as well this week.  I got to sit-in on a few conference calls with clients I am working on and ones that I will be helping out with for a handful of hours.  I met with the president of Beacon and another member of the WMS team to brainstorm some marketing strategies for Beacon.  This was fun for me.  That is an area that I enjoy and feel very comfortable with what I am doing and saying.  I may not have a great deal of work experience in the marketing field, but I have a large amount of experience through coursework in undergrad and as part of the MBA program at the Bryan School of Business and Economics at UNC-Greensboro.  The final task of the week was a client meeting.  One of the main focuses of the meeting was Social Media.  This is a topic that I feel confident with as I have been a part of the growth and development of Social Media for the better part of seven or eight years.

This week has been a little bit of a “more-of-the-same” situation for me.  I spent a good amount of my 20 hours this week looking over the tools I was learning last week.  The twist in the story was that I looked at the information in relation to specific companies rather than just in general.  Throughout the week, I sifted through historical data and current data to determine what type of information I needed to be observing and how that information relates to the goals at hand.

One of the more interesting things I did this week was to learn more about Google AdWords and the way it works.  Adwords, much like GA, provides a depth of insight that is very useful for companies running Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad campaigns.  AdWords allows users to set up PPC campaigns and provides those users with a plethora of options.  Also like in GA, AdWords can be as simple or complex as you desire.  You can set basic campaigns and ads with very general guidelines for when they appear.  However, if a user really takes the time to set it up, they can create groups of ads to target specific keywords, run during set hours of the day, target certain geographical areas, and so on and so forth.

Another task I spent time on this week was researching social media (SM) and how various companies use SM to reach potential customers.  SM is an area in which I feel very confident.  Having spent the better part of the past seven years or so as a member of Facebook, I have seen the growth of SM and the impact it has made on how businesses reach customers.  One particular area I focused my research on is in the education sector.  Universities are beginning to increase their use of SM in order to attract potential students.  Some universities have embraced SM more openly than others.  I have noticed that the more successful ones are using multiple SM tools such as Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and Blogs.  My overall conclusion of this is that SM, if maintained and used properly, seems to be a great way of reaching today’s youth.

On a side note, one thing I learned this week that I think is pretty cool is that I apparently am learning from a bunch of ninjas.  I for one am stoked by this fact.  Ninjas are pretty much awesome!  To get a better understanding of what I mean you should read my coworker’s recent post on how Beacon Has Ninjas.

I had the opportunity to attend a Google Business webinar last week hosted by Avinash Kaushik. The topic was outcome driven digital marketing. Avinash divided web marketing skill sets into three stages.

Cute Toddler: When web marketers are in this stage they are focused on cost; tracking things like clicks and impressions to figure out the cost per conversion/acquisition. At this level, tracking is implemented like Google Analytics but is only used to see the basics like traffic volume, most visited pages, bounce rates, and conversions.

Rockin’ Teenager: As your web marketing skills grow and develop, you start to focus on revenue instead of just cost. If your site has e-Commerce, this is especially important. At this stage you’re also probably using Pay-Per-Click advertising. Creating advanced segments in Google Analytics will start painting a clearer picture of how your visitors interact with the conversion path. Also, linking your analytics with you Adwords (or other PPC) account allows you to start looking at not only cost-per-click, but revenue-per-click. You can now factor in cost of goods sold to find net profit.

Ninja: After mastering the skills above, you are now in the ninja stage. You understand analytics and know how to calculate revenue but now you’re onto something much bigger…value. Ninjas hunt for what’s beyond the basics and try to unite web marketing with total marketing efforts. In addition to major conversion points like purchases, ninjas track customer value by tracking minor conversions like email submissions, catalog requests, loyalty programs, and social media. Using data gathered from the web and from traditional marketing, ninjas can estimate not only cost and revenue per acquisition/conversion but total value to the company.

______________________________________________________

My Thoughts: I was extremely pleased to learn that our Web Marketing team here at Beacon is packed with skilled ninjas. We become partners with each and every client in order to reach the most sophisticated level of understanding and achieve powerful results. If you want the best in Web Marketing, hire the ninjas! 

Coming into this first week, I was not very familiar with web marketing or search engine optimization (SEO).  I had heard of both terms and I could describe what they were on a very basic level.  Basically, if I were asked what they meant, I would have simply defined them as the following:

*Web Marketing – Marketing online through use of websites and social media sites

*SEO – Making your website appear higher in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other searches

Over the past two and a half days, I have spent the better part of my 20 hours a week here at Beacon Technologies (Beacon) reading blog after blog on what SEO really is and how it is done.  I had heard of Google Analytics (GA) through a friend of mine, but I had never had any exposure to it nor a reason to research it further than the few discussions we shared.  All I can say about GA is that I am amazed at the simplistic complexity of it.  On the surface, it seems very intuitive.  You can track information regarding visitors to your websites such as if it was their first time visiting or if they were a return visitor.  At the same time, GA allows you to dive much deeper into statistics.  The complexity of GA comes from designing filters and goals to determine exactly what information you are after.  From what I can tell, almost anything you wish to know about visits to your websites is obtainable in GA.  All you have to do is think it and visualize how to find it.

This week, I have also been able to sit in on meetings and brainstorming sessions.  I feel like this is the best part of the week so far.  Coming in with little knowledge of the services Beacon provides is a little unnerving.  However, all the people here have really made an effort to take time to explain things to me as well as treat me as an equal part of the web marketing team.  It’s a comforting feeling to go into something new and know that the people there are ready and willing to help you and guide you along the way.  Also, before I even started, Beacon had already set up everything I needed to integrate with the team.  There was a cube with a computer, phone, and the other essentials already in place for me.  In addition to that, Beacon had already set up all of my internal accounts such as email, network access, and etcetera.

As I am wrapping up week one, I feel confident in what is expected of me as well as how to accomplish the tasks at hand.  Thanks to the large amount of reading and videos I’ve watched on GA, Google AdWords and other resources, I am ready to hit the ground running next week.  It doesn’t hurt that I know that I have several people that I can go to for advice if I get stumped either.