Writing the Best Possible PPC Ad - Focus on Benefits

If you want to get the highest possible CTR from your pay per click ads (and who doesn’t?), you should be applying a lesson that copywriters use in virtually every other field.  They write ads that focus on benefits.

There’s a distinction between benefits and features.  Features are aspects of the product you’re selling.  A feature of a cordless screwdriver, for instance, may be the fact that it can hold a charge for up to three solid hours.  That’s a great fact about the product, but it isn’t the kind of thing you should be writing about.  Instead, you want to look for the benefits of owning that screwdriver–what it could really mean for potential customers.  Instead of extolling the virtues of it’s long battery life, you’d want to hammer home the fact that it makes household repairs and assembly fast, fun and easy.  Instead of talking about the fact that it can use either straight or Phillips heads (another feature), you should be talking about the way it saves the user from bloody knuckles, offering a comfortable solution.

Focusing on benefits has been a hallmark of successful marketing for as long as people have been putting pen to paper.  However, many in the SEM world aren’t necessarily experienced copywriters.  Thus, they apply a sort of logical approach to ad writing.  They emphasize, naturally, what the product has instead of painting a picture of how its use will positively change the life of the buyer.  That’s a mistake.

Are your PPC ads focusing on benefits?  If they aren’t (or if you’re not sure), it’s time to revisit them.  Adjust them to fall into line with this time-tested approach to successful copywriting.  You’ll undoubtedly start to see a differenece as your CTR increases.

What’s Your Number?

Ouch! If you don’t know how your website ranks with the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, then how do you know what you need to do to improve your ranking? And how do you know that you even need to do anything if you don’t know your number!

Before you expend your time and effort on making changes, make sure you take advantage of the RankChecker.net tool. This is a prototype tool that helps you determine how to best optimize your website. It does it by helping you determine where you rank on the major search engines with your current design, layout, and content. Since it is a prototype, feedback is always appreciated on their website.

Most people search for a site by specific words, and hopefully those words are YOUR keywords! They probably don’t know your website URL or company name if they haven’t visited your site once, twice, or more in the past. That’s why RankChecker is helpful.

When you use RankChecker, you’ll Read more

Remember the Meta-tags

When you’re seeking to optimize your SEM efforts, don’t forget the importance of meta-descriptions tags. These tags are helpful in describing the content of the web pages so you attract your targeted audience and increase your rate of conversions.  Many of the search engines still utilize these tags to describe your website when they position your website in their search results with organic listings. They also use them to better assess your website content.

There’s a lot of talk about whether or not search engines are using the meta-tags Read more

gov.palin@yahoo.com

You may have read or heard about link baiting before, this is a fine art and is very lucrative when carried out correctly, another similar form is Bot baiting, yes it exists - gov.palin@yahoo.com - is an example of a Bot bait attempt and post - hence the title of this post.

Before I delve into the details, I will give a few more examples of link baiting, you may have read the Miley Cyrus is dead type news and hoaxes, these are your typical link baiting attempts, it works simple - you create a site or page based on the hoax, this creates a jump on the competition, then you attempt to spread the news via popular sites like Digg, Yahoo answers and so on - in the hope that the gossip gets around quickly - shortly after this hoax is played out the word may spread and this results in a surge of people searching for Miley Cyrus is Dead …. then hopefully your link is within the top results in Google - resulting in lots of traffic, if you use a long tail key search / hoax phrase your success can be multiplied, for example you may use “Miley Cyrus Car Accident” instead of Miley Cyrus dead.

OK, now Bot baiting is similar in approach and marketing, but doesn’t require as much effort as link baiting and the traffic can be just as rewarding, some popular sites are typical targets and these include Youtube, Digg and Google Trends - which is less saturated.

Some examples of bot baiting are the Youtube keyword stuffers, these are those spammy Youtube videos that include 500 random (key) words within the description - which are un-related to the videos content. The simple idea is to get bots/sites to grab the videos and embed them into a web site - like auto video galleries, then the video will also have a link within the description which is also included into the bot / video grabbers web site.

Bots are very popular in grabbing content from popular web sites, also known as scrapers, even RSS feeds, then they include the gathered data within a web site, the web site is normally on automatic and gathers the content with little interaction from the web master.

This post is typical of a Google Trends bot bait post - I will go into depth with a new post.

Enhance Your SEM Vocabulary

Search engine marketing campaigns are an exciting venture for many. But as with anything new, it is easy to get lost in the jargon. Below is a list of some of the most important and most commonly used terms in SEM.

1. Auto bidding: A system that allows Pay-per-Click advertisers to automatically raise their bids one cent higher than the highest bid allowing them to always be at the top.

2. Back links: Links from other websites that link to your website or web page. This is often used as an indication of your website’s popularity. That is, the more back links you have, the higher your website may rank in search engine results pages.

3. CTR: The acronym for “Click-Through Rate.” This is the ratio between the number of times an advertisement was displayed and the number of times it was clicked.

4. CPC: The acronym for “Cost per Click.” This is the amount paid each time the advertisement is clicked.

5. Conversion Rate: The ratio between the number of times an advertisement is clicked and how often a purchase is made by the visitors who clicked on the ads.

6. CPM: The acronym for “Cost per Impression.” Although the terms states is, this is actually not tracked for single impressions but often for every 1,000 advertisement views.

7. Hits: The number of times a web page is viewed.

8. Impression: Advertising views or the number of times an advertisement was displayed and viewed by internet users.

9. Keywords: Words (or phrases) typed by internet users into the search boxes of various search engines to find specific information.

10. Link Building: The practice of linking similar websites with each other in an effort to increase the number of search engine results.

11. Link Farming: Similar to link building, this is also a practice of linking websites to increase the number of search engine results. However, this practice is considered unaccepted because it involves link building with unrelated sites.

12. PR: The acronym for “Page Rank.” This is the position of the website in search engine results.

13. ROI: The acronym for “Return on Investment.” As with any other marketing campaign, this refers to the amount of sales generated versus the investment made.

14. SEO: The acronym for “Search Engine Optimization.” This is the online marketing strategy of building traffic to a website according to page rankings in search engines.

15. Unique visitor: How many users visit a web page. As opposed to just knowing how many hits there are on a web page, this can be very important as it tells you how many individuals visit your page no matter how many times they visit it.

These are only the most commonly used terms in search engine marketing. Although there are many more out there, others even more technical, the fifteen listed about are enough to get you on the right track to effectively using Pay-per-Click advertising and search engine marketing as part of your overall online campaign. Chances are, you’ll learn more about the rest as you gain further experience.