Internet Marketing Blog

One way to ensure that traffic comes straight to your site is to take advantage of the numerous Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising programmes that are offered by the search engines and their partners.

All four major search engines – Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask – offer PPC advertising which appears either above, to the side of, or below the natural, non-paid search results.

There are three PPC providers which serve the four major search engines – Google Adwords for Google and Ask.com, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) for Yahoo!, and MSN adCenter for MSN.

There are variations in the way each of the PPC programmes works but there are aspects of setting up a PPC campaign that are common to all three. We will focus on these factors, giving you an idea of how all three work and how to set up your own PPC campaign.

Goal Definition

It is important to know what you wish to gain from the PPC campaign – what search terms do you wish to appear for? How much can you afford to spend per sale/lead? Remember, you will be paying for each click that comes through to your website from the PPC ad, so it is important to know what you hope to achieve from the campaign. Knowing this will allow you to better analyse the traffic you receive from the campaign and make adjustments as needed to improve the performance.

Keyword Research

Once you have defined your goals for the campaign, the next step is to undertake keyword research to determine the best terms to advertise for. There are a number of tools available to help with task. They include Google’s own Keyword Research Tool, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

When choosing keywords, it can be tempting to pick terms that are broadly focused on your product or service range. Be aware that these terms may cost more per click than more specific terms and may have less chance of producing a sale due to the traffic generated not being as pre-qualified.

Similarly, when choosing keywords, consider whether the term you choose might have a dual meaning. Terms that have multiple contextual meanings can result in poor quality traffic and reduce the cost-effectiveness of your campaign.

The best keywords to choose are those that are the most specific and relevant to your products and services.

Campaign Set-up

Once you have your list of keywords, you will need to register with your chosen PPC Provider and set-up your campaign via the PPC Provider’s user interface. As mentioned before, the three main PPC Providers have their individual qualities but generally the process for setting up the campaign involves the following:

• Define Campaign settings – this involves choosing the geographic targeting – do you wish to your ads show in a specific country or region, setting the daily/monthly budgets, define whether the ads are to be shown on the search engine’s results specifically, or across the broader network of partner sites.
• Create Ad Groups – Divide your keywords into groups that have specific themes. Each group of themed keywords is known as an Ad Group due to the fact that they will trigger the same Ads. It is better to have more Ad Groups with few keywords than few Ad groups with a lot of keywords. The fewer the keywords in an Ad Group, the more relevant they will be to the Ad Group’s respective Ad. Within the Ad Group level of a PPC Campaign, you will also be able to set the maximum cost per click you wish to bid. This, in part, will determine your ranking in the PPC search results.
• Create Ads – The Ads in the campaign will be shown when the keywords in the respective Ad Group are searched for in the search engines. With this in mind, the Ads should be as relevant to their respective keywords as possible. Generally, the anatomy of a PPC Ad involves Title, Description, Display URL and Landing Page URL.
  
  The Ads should also be concise, include a call to action of sorts and deliver the user to a page that is as relevant to the searched keyword term and Ad content as possible. It is important to add a tracking code of some sort (depending on what tracking/web analytics software you use) to the Landing Page URL in order to track the performance of your campaigns through to conversion.
• Payment details - Once the Campaign, Ad Groups and Ads have been set up, the next step is to add the payment details. Depending on the PPC Provider, you will have the option of choosing either pre-paid payment – you add funds to the account – or post-pay – you will be invoiced at the end of each month or when you reach a pre-determined credit limit.

Once all of this has been carried out, you can switch on the PPC Campaign.

Monitoring the Campaign

Be sure to check the campaign’s progress once it is running. Be sure to check the cost per conversion – how much each sale or lead is costing you – and adjust either the settings of the campaign as needed. You can adjust all aspects of the campaign while it is running – the geographical targeting, the daily budgets if applicable, the ad content, the cost per click, the add content and the keywords that are live in the account.

All PPC Programmes provide reporting of campaign stats so that you can quickly compare results of different ad groups, keywords and ads.

Statistical Analysis

Once your campaign is running and sales/leads are coming through, you can further tweak the account by taking advantage of the function of tracking code that you should have added to Landing Page URLs of your Ads.

Using your webstats software, you will be able to track traffic from your PPC Campaigns through your website right up to the post conversion page i.e. the “Thanks” page. This data will enable you to see what keywords work best for your website and see if there are any changes that can be made on site to improve the conversion rate.

These last two points are probably the most important factors in a successful campaign – monitoring and analysis. So long as you regularly manage your campaigns and respond to poor performance quickly, your campaign will continue to prove you with high quality leads and business at an affordable rate.

What is bounce rate? It’s the percentage of people who enter your site and leave straight away. You can save thousands of pounds by looking at your Pay per Click bounce rates and pausing the under-performing keywords that have a high bounce rate.

If your Pay per Click ads are driving highly relevant traffic to your site you should have an average bounce rate of around 25%, if your bounce rate is higher than 40% you are driving the wrong traffic to your website and wasting your money and marketing budget.

Checking your bounce rate is very easy; your site will need Google Analytics in place with your Pay per Clicks tracked. It would be good to have goals setup with Google Analytics too to double check conversion rates with borderline performing keywords. Hopefully you will have been running Google Analytics for a few months so you can take a large date range to view a full set of results, which will give you the stats that you need to make a more informed decision.

Go to Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Search Engines > Google > Paid (the Paid filter is in the main content area, just under the main traffic graph).

You will now see all the search terms listed by most visited. Take a look at the end column “Bounce Rate”; now sort the data by bounce rate, and there you have it - a list of keywords with high bounce rates. You can export this data into an excel spreadsheet and play around with it, removing all the low bounce rate term. You will soon be left with a detailed report on underperforming pay per click keywords with a high bounce rate.

Example of a bad bounce rate

We have taken a screenshot from Google Analytics of a Pay per Click campaign with a few bad performing keywords in. The 3 keywords highlighted shows that over 1,200 clicks have been paid for (that’s £600 at 50p a click). These keywords have a much higher bounce rate than the rest of the campaign; the highest being 72.32%. In addition the average page visits and time on site is much lower than the other keywords.

These 3 keywords are obviously worth pausing and looking into. There could be a combination of factors that are causing it; such as poorly targeted keyword, badly worded adverts or poor landing pages.

The average bounce rate of the campaign is 39.35%, page views per visit is 4.98, with the highest being 7.73 and time on site is 2.03 minutes. If we remove the 3 bad keywords it would have a positive impact on the campaign.

Example of a good bounce rate

Here is an example of a well tuned Pay per Click Campaign. The average bounce rate is 23.71%, page view per visit is 7.13 and time on site is 4.03 minutes. There are no underperforming keywords;

We’d recommend you pause all the high bounce rate keywords from your Pay per Click campaigns straight away, especially if they are driving a lot of traffic with few conversions. You can do a quick calculation on how much money you will save by multiplying the monthly visits by the average cost per click. If you stop 2,000 high bounce rate clicks per month at 50p each this will equate to a saving of £12,000 a year.

Every aspect of your internet marketing campaign and budget can be tracked for return on investment giving you clear understanding where your money is best spent and what campaigns are the most effective.

Each internet marketing campaign and traffic source such as Pay per Click Campaigns, Email Marketing and Natural search traffic can be broken down into minute detail.

Lead Generating ROI Reports

For a lead generation site, where the campaign purpose is to get people to fill in an enquiry form or apply online for a service, a return on investment report needs to produce the following information:

• Source - where the traffic came from – such as Google Pay per Click
• Campaign – which campaign generated the traffic – such as a Campaign within Google Pay per Click
• Traffic – the number of unique users the campaign has generated
• Campaign Cost – total cost of running each campaign
• Cost per click – the amount it has cost to get each user to the site
• Conversion Rate – the percentage of users that have reached the desired goal
• Conversions – total number of leads the campaign has generated
• Cost per Acquisition – the cost of each lead generated.
• Value of Conversion – this is the value of a lead to you. You need to set this to the average value a lead generates. I.E The amount of money it makes you. If you make 1 deal out of every 10 leads and the average deal value is £200 then the value of conversion will be £20.
• Return on Investment - the amount of money you make on your campaigns compared to the amount of money you spend on your campaigns.

Example Lead Generation ROI Report

We have produced the above report by collecting the following data:

• Source
• Campaign
• Traffic
• Campaign Cost
• Conversions
• Value of Conversion

Our spreadsheet works out the rest – (download the spreadsheet here).

eCommerce ROI Reports

For an eCommerce site you can track internet marketing ROI on orders produced. The data produced for an eCommerce ROI report will include

• Traffic – the number of unique users the campaign has generated
• Cost per click – the amount it has cost to get each user to the site
• Conversion Rate – the percentage of users that have reached the desired goal
• Orders – total number of orders the campaign has generated
• Cost per Acquisition – the cost of each order generated.
• Total Cost of Campaign – total cost of running each campaign
• Average Order Value – the average value order value produced by each campaign
• Total Sales – total value of sales generated by a campaign
• Return on Investment - the amount of money you make on your campaigns compared to the amount of money you spend on your campaigns.

Example eCommerce RIO Report

We have produced the above report by only collecting the following data:

• Source
• Campaign
• Traffic
• Campaign Cost
• Orders
• Total Sales

Our spreadsheet works out the rest – (download the spreadsheet here)- see sheet “Ecommerce ROI Report” in the spreadsheet - there are two sheets!!  Simply amend the info the columns listed above and the spreadsheet will work out the rest for you. How easy it that : )

What next?

You are now in complete control of your internet marketing budget - down to the last penny.  I’d suggest producing a new sheet each month and building up an archive of your activities. You will soon be able to see trends for each  internet marketing activity.

So you now know how to put a simple Internet Marketing ROI report together. All you need now is to collect the data for your report. In Part 2 of our Internet Marketing Return on Investment Tracking, we will put together a guide on how to collect the data  needed in the report and track your campaigns.