Mobile Searchers Are 443% More Likely To Convert Than Desktop Searchers

I’ve been testing the performance differences between the various search networks (Google Search, Mobile, Search Partners, etc…) for some time now, and have been able to pull out all sorts of interesting stats. There are stats that I simply can’t ignore, like the conversion rates between desktop searches and mobile searches. What I’ve found is that people searching on mobile devices are on average four+ times more likely to convert into a customer than those searching on desktops.

In my research, I compared several different paid search accounts in various verticals. I used their volume of clicks and conversions as the metrics for this particular test, and I noticed across all 4 accounts had very similar conversion rates for mobile vs desktop.

Paid search from desktop users accounted for 94.4% of the click volume, where as paid search from mobile users accounted for only 5.6% of the click volume. In these particular examples, the amount of paid search clicks that came through via desktop was 261,644 vs. mobile at 15,649.

When we go beyond the click and look at actual conversions, the desktop campaigns drove 7,157 transactions, good for a 2.74% conversion rate. Not too shabby considering the competitiveness of these particular categories. When we took a look at mobile campaigns, we saw that of the 15,649 clicks we drove, 1,899 of them converted into a customer, good for a 12.13% conversion rate. The mobile conversion rate is more than 4 times better than the desktop conversion rate.

Furthermore, none of the clients used in this research have mobile versions of their sites. I wanted to keep these tests are similar as possible using desktop and mobile, so I’m not including things like click-to-call volume, which would likely skew the conversion rates even more towards mobile.

In my opinion, had there been optimized mobile experiences, we would likely have seen an even higher conversion rate than the 12.13% from the non-mobile sites.

When you get some time, check out the conversion metrics for your desktop campaigns vs mobile campaigns. If you see what I see, you might want to reconsider your search network budget split.

Thanks,

Joseph McConellogue

@DigitalMrktr

The Importance of the Bounce Rate

A bounce rate is the number of visitors that arrive on your site, and only view the one page that they land on. First, the user is referred to a site by either typing in the domain name, or clicking through from a linking site, or finding a site via search engines, etc, then, never going past the page that they landed on. Essentially they’ve landed and “bounced” off.

A bounce rate is one of the most important stats in web analytics. It can act as an immediate red flag to let you know if your landing page is effective or not. If you have a high bounce rate (50%+), chances are your landing page isn’t as effective as it could be. A lot of times, webmasters have spent so much time optimizing their websites for search engines, that they’ve lost focus on what’s happening when people arrive at their site. Sure they’re driving more traffic to their site, but without knowing what percentage of people are visiting more than one page, it’s hard to determine if you’re driving quality traffic.

Bounce rate can be measured by just about every analytics platform available. Our preference is Google Analytics (free). After logging in to Google Analytics, one of the first things you’ll see on the dashboard is your bounce rate. The reason that Google has positioned it so front and center is because they recognize its importance. They want to help webmasters build content that allows people to find exactly what they’re looking for. When someone lands on a page and leaves right away, that usually means that the content on the site is not what they’re looking for, or it isn’t laid out in a way that shows them that this is indeed what they are looking for.

So, how can you fix a high bounce rate? I recommend identifying the pages on your site that have a high bounce rate (start with 75%+), and determine how these people are getting to your site. Once you’ve found all the sources of traffic to that page, see if there are common themes in the information they’re looking for. Once you know what these users are looking for, you can begin tweaking the content/layout on your page to be more in line with what they’re looking for. Don’t stop tweaking until you’ve seen your bounce rate decrease to an acceptable level. Acceptable levels for bounce rates are below 50%, if you have a bounce rate below 30%, you’re doing exceptionally well.

Thanks,

Joseph McConellogue

Stop Reporting Numbers, and Start Reporting Stories!

Every action has a reaction.

Too often in web analytics, we see simple reporting, rather than story telling. If your reports are simply telling you numbers, then you’re leaving a lot of valuable information behind. Anyone over the age of 2 can tell you numbers. What you really need to know is what action was taken to cause those numbers? What is the full story behind them?

When you get reports, they shouldn’t just include graphs and charts about decreased or increased performance, you should also be getting insight as to why there was an increase or a decrease. What changes were made to drive the performance difference? A lot of times, changes will be made to a paid search campaign, but no one will ever know because it wasn’t included in the story of the reporting. This work goes unnoticed, and will hurt everyone in the long run.

I love to see reports with pretty charts and graphs, but only if accompanied by a story that tells me what actions were taken to drive the numbers. Instead of being told the same information in a chart, then a graph, then a summary, what we need to be told is what happened that caused those numbers? Were there any bid optimizations done on our paid search campaign? Did we add/delete keywords from our campaigns? Did we pause underperforming campaigns for pacing that could have impacted our ROI?

There is always a reason for performance changes. It’s up to the people managing your accounts to tell you exactly what was changed to drive that performance increase/decrease.

Next time you get a report that says “Click Through Rate increased by 0.25%”, without an explanation of why it increased by 0.25%, ask for it. You’ll learn from it, and your team will learn from it.

Thanks,

Joseph McConellogue

Why Microsoft Should Buy RIM

Interesting development in the world of Google this morning. Google has announced that it is purchasing Motorola Mobility for a whopping $12.5 billion. That’s about one third of Google’s reported cash reserves and represents a huge step in Google finally getting into the hardware market. So what does this mean for RIM? Will we see consolidation in the marketplace, like we have in the past? Last time Google made a monster purchase (DoubleClick), we saw close to a dozen acquisitions of other ad serving companies. I think RIM is a great buy for a company like Microsoft, or Apple (more likely Microsoft), here’s why:

1. RIM knows the enterprise business. They’ve built their business on just that. Companies like Microsoft or Apple have been chomping at the bit to break into this space, and RIM could provide an easy in.

2. For Microsoft, Windows Phone 7 is just not doing it. It was a great idea, but it does not (and looks like it will never) have the mass market appeal that the iPhone, Android, or Blackberry phones have.

3. RIM is still very profitable. You can’t tell me that the shareholders of a Microsoft or Apple wouldn’t want to snatch up a company that is still as profitable as BlackBerry.

4. More so for Microsoft, RIM has a tablet. Right now, Microsoft does not build hardware or software for the tablet market. It’s very strange that a company like Microsoft has sat back and watched this happen. Acquiring RIM would provide Microsoft with an instant in with the tablet market. The BlackBerry Playbook sales have been sluggish at best, but it’s a way for Microsoft to enter the marketplace protect itself from the Apple’s and Google’s of the world.

The next few weeks/months should be interesting, to say the least.

Thanks,

Joseph McConellogue

Golden Rules for Creating Effective SEM Ad Copy

From my experiences with writing and testing thousands of versions of paid search ad copy, I’ve come up with a list of golden rules to follow in order to make sure your paid search creative’s are as effective as they can possible be. When building out your paid search creative, be sure to follow these rules.

Include your keyword as much as possible

Let’s face it, with paid search ad copy, space is extremely limited. We only have 130 characters available to get our message across to our audience. If you haven’t already noticed, the major search engines will bold the keywords in your ad copy, if the keyword being searched is in your ad. This is a great way to help your ad POP out compared to competing ads. If you had your keyword 2-3 times in your ad, you are increasing your relevancy, and helping your at stand out. Here is an example:

Set up Ad Groups to contain tightly themed groups of keywords

When developing your account structure, be sure to complete a thorough breakout of keywords into their respective ad groups. It’s better to have many ad groups with small amounts of keywords, than having many keywords in a small amount of ad groups. This may seem daunting and will be somewhat tedious, but the payoff is well worth it.

You’ll be able to create extremely relevant ad copy for each one of the ad groups, including the ad group theme in the ad copy several times to increase your relevancy. Remember, increased relevancy means decreased costs.

Test several versions of ads

When creating ads, be sure to create several different versions of ads in each ad group. People respond differently to various messaging, so it’s important to have different messaging to evaluate which ads are better performers. Once you have enough data compiled for each ad, you can begin pausing/deleting underperforming ads. This also gives you a great opportunity to create new ads that possess all the top performing features of your best ads. Remember, if you’re testing new ads, you always want to try and make new ads that will perform better than your current best performing ads.

Be creative with your creative

Take a look at what your competition is doing. Many times the ads on the results page will not differ much from ad to ad. This becomes a great opportunity to try something that your competitors aren’t doing. Try something different. What can you do to make your ad stand out? I recommend that you try at least one ad in each ad group that is completely different from the rest, and see how it works out. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Utilize your display URL

Because we have such a limited number characters to use, we need to use as much of the space as we possibly can. Utilizing the display or vanity URL gives us another opportunity to include our keyword in our ad. As long as the root domain is the same as your landing page, you can put basically whatever you want after the “/”. Because this piece of the ad is only a display url, the landing page won’t actually be what’s displayed, so feel free to add in your keyword after the domain. This will also increase your relevancy. Here is an example:

Include “Official Site”, ©, ™

I’ve found that a great way to increase the CTR’s on your paid search ads is by including “Official Site” in your headline. This helps add credibility to your ad. This is especially effective if run on your branded terms. Also, often times if someone is looking for a product, and you have a well recognized brand, using © ™ and Official Site will help increase the CTR of your ad. Here is an example:

Test Dynamic Keyword Insertion

A great way to increase CTR’s is by including dynamic keyword insertion in your ad copy. DKI will take the keyword that the user is searching, and actually place it in the ads, and bold them so your ad becomes more relevant, ands stands out. It’s important to test 1 or 2 ads your ad groups and measure the difference in DKA vs. non DKI ads. Be careful where you place your DKI ads, because you don’t want a use misspelling a keyword and then having the misspelled keyword included in your ad. Also, don’t use DKI on your branded or competitive terms. Try and keep those ad groups DKI free.

CAPITALIZE the first letter of each word in your ad

Another tried, tested and true way to increase CTR’s on your ad is to ensure that the first letter of each word is Capitalized. This is a best practice technique that typically helps your ad stand out amongst other companies. You can typically expect a slight increase in CTR’s, and you should ensure that every single ad you run always has this applied to them.

That’s essentially it for my golden rules for writing paid search ad copy. If you have any comments/questions, regarding the golden rules for writing paid search ad copy, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line @ jmacpd@gmail.com

Thanks,

Joseph McConellogue

What is Social Media? A Quick Social Media 101

Recently, I was lucky enough to sit down personally with the CEO of one of the world’s top advertising enterprises to chat about his view on the role of search engine marketing. It was made very clear to me that search engine marketing although great in many ways, will not be the elephant in the room forever. Instead of focusing all of my skills on converting a customer from a search engine, or learning how to generate awareness via broadcast, I was empowered to look laterally from where I currently am as a digital marketer and explore all the areas of marketing online. I was influenced to treat online marketing not only as a combination of display and search campaigns, but as social media opportunities as well. After our chat, I began to research social media, and this is what I’ve found out (so far).

Social media is a support for the human desire to interact with others. It has enabled people to transform and blossom from content consumers into content creators. The internet is giving people the opportunity to voice their thoughts, and giving brands the opportunity to connect with those people to address those thoughts.

Companies are using mediums like blogs, forums, twitter, etc to find and listen to their customers. They’re mining for conversations around their brands and products so they can understand their customers, measure interest in their products, evaluate satisfaction levels, and the list goes on. When companies tap into these conversations, they can be proactive with customer service, learn more about the behavior of their customer base, and continuously retarget their brand to the customer.

Social media is also a great way to gather competitive intelligence. Companies can use blogs, forums, Twitter, etc to mine for conversations around other brands, just as they do for their own brand. They’re using this data to further understand their target markets views on the competition. Think about the value of knowing exactly what users like or dislike about a competitor’s product, then applying it to your product. Or imagine being able to tap directly into your competitors client base. It’s free data; all you need to do is find it.

This all boils down to expanding our minds to not only generating intent, and capturing that intent, but also continually interacting with our target market before, during, and after they’ve interacted with our brand, all without being intrusive or irrelevant.

Thanks,

Joseph McConellogue

Don’t be a Tool, Just use them! The Search Engine Query Report

In the edition of Don’t be a Tool, Just use them! we’ll be discussing the Search Engine Query Report.

It’s often difficult for search engine marketers to find time to be proactive when optimizing campaigns. Like any marketing job, it’s important to ensure that our clients’ needs are addressed and that their campaigns continue to improve. Because search is still relatively new, and most digital marketers are green to setting up search, it’s hard to find experienced staff, thus leading to more clients, campaigns, reporting, etc for each campaign manager. In this blog, I’m going to discuss a tool that allows you to be proactive in optimization, that won’t take up much of your time.

This tool is the Search Engine Query Report tool in Google AdWords. This tools primary purpose is to identify and display actual keywords that triggered your ad. This is particularly handy if you’re running a campaign with lots of broad matched keywords. Not only does this tool allow you to expand your current list of keywords, but it also allows you to build a list of negative keywords that you don’t want your ads appearing for.

The benefit of this tool is that instead of having to go into AdWords Editor, and uploading new keywords, you can simply click into the campaign of choice, select the “keywords” tab,click the  “see search terms” button, and add the keyword instantly to your ad group. You typically should select the start/end date for as long as possible to you can see as many actual queried keywords as possible.

You also can build out a strong list of negative keywords by using this tool. Because you can see actual queries that triggered your ad, you may notice that there are keywords that are irrelevant to your campaign, and a waste of your budget. You can use this tool to identify those terms and add them to your negative keyword list. Some examples could be the broad matched keywords “Shell”, or “Dell”, or “Bell”. Because this keyword is on broad match, it could be displayed if someone typed in “Sell”, or “Buy and Sell”. You can see how this would become a problem. The term “sell” is searched so often, and is so irrelevant, that it would be a complete waste to have Shell’s, Dell’s, or Bell’s ad appear. Building your list of negative keywords will increase quality score, click through rates, decrease CPC’s, and ensure your ad is only appearing for relevant searches.

Thanks for reading,

Joseph McConellogue

How to optimize a search campaign for lower CPC’s

When planning a CPC optimization strategy for a paid search campaign, what is the most effective tactic that you can implement today that will yield instant results? When I ask search engine marketers that question, I often get responses like; “I’d look at the landing page, and see if there is anything I can recommend that the client do to make it more relevant”, or “I’d take another look at the ad copy and see if there any changes I can make to make the ad more relevant”, and sometimes (but not very often) I’ll get “I would take our current list of keywords and look for missing links and holes to plug”. Out of those 3 answers, I’d say the third answer is likely the best. However, it still is NOT the most effective tactic.

Imagine approaching a client and asking them to come up with new content for their landing pages, and launch the changes today, so they can see results instantly, or imagine going through dozens if not hundreds of ad groups and making changes to all the ad copy in one day. It’s just not going to happen. It would take too much time, and likely wouldn’t yield enough of a drop in CPC, it could even increase your CPC.

Search engine marketers are often reading too much into the different types of optimizations, and are forgetting about the most important element, the max bid! The Max bid price allows you to control what you are willing to pay for a keyword in order for it to be listed on the search engine results page. If you want to lower your average CPC for your campaigns instantly, simply lower your max bid price! You won’t rank as high, and your CTR will likely decrease, but you’re able to push more traffic to your clients site, without increasing their spend.

One of my past clients had been running a paid search campaign with us for a couple of months. During one of our reporting meetings, the client expressed their concern that their average CPC for the account was too high, and he would like us to something ASAP in order drop CPC’s and drive more traffic with the budget. We started to dig around the account, pull reports, analyze the data, and noticed that the campaign was reaching its daily budget before 5pm every day. Right away I knew that we were spending too much on our keywords. We could stretch the amount of time the campaign is running throughout the day, simply by lowering our max cpc’s. So instead of paying $2.00 CPC as was initially set up, I dropped max bids campaign wide to $1.00. After that drop, we saw a decrease in CPC’s (and CTR’s), but we ended up driving more than double the clicks with the exact same budget.

This update was simple and only took about 10 minutes in AdWords Editor. Compare this optimization strategy to updating ad copy and landing page content, and you’ll see how you’ll save time and your credibility.

Thanks for reading,

Joseph McConellogue

Why do I keep hearing about Search Engine Marketing?

If you’re in the world of advertising, you’ve probably been hearing more and more about search engine marketing. It seems to be the hot topic of any conversation related to advertising or marketing, as it should be. In this post I’m going to give you a top line description of what search engine marketing is, and how it can be a beneficial and an essential piece of every marketing plan.

You obviously know by now what a search engine is. Most of us use them every day to find answers to our questions, interact with brands we are interested in, find out info on a product we want to buy, and much, much more. We use search engines as a tool to get us what we’re looking for, right when we’re looking for it. So, how can we as marketers use search engines to get our clients listed so they too can be found?

First we need to understand how a search engine results page is structured. Search engine results will be displayed in 2 main areas; Organic results (typically on the left hand side of the search engine results page, usually to the left of and/or below any sponsored links), and paid search results (typically on the right hand side of the search results page, and can sometimes appear above the organic listings on the left hand side). These 2 areas may look similar, but actually differ quite a bit.

Organic search results vs. paid search results

In the Organic listings portion of the page, web pages are awarded top spots based on the content of their page, and the relevance of the page to the keyword searched. An organic search strategy will typically focus on developing content for a site, structuring the site so its content is fully readable by the search engine software (spiders), and linking that site to other relevant sites and vice versa.

The Paid Listings are ads that are purchased at auction in the search engines. You can pick and choose which keywords you want to bid on, and tell the search engines how much you want to bid for your ad to display. The more you bid for your keywords, the higher up in the listings you’ll appear (usually). The search engines do take into account the relevance of the landing page to the keywords being searched, and do reward you for having more relevant landing pages, but the major factors in play for where your ad ranks is your maximum bid, and your click through rate. Typically if you bid more, your ad will display higher in the sponsored link results, and your ad will get clicked on more often.

The real advantage of search engine marketing compared to other forms of marketing, is that the only people that see your ad are the people that are actively searching for what you’re selling. They’re people that are putting their hands up and saying, “Hey you, I want to buy you’re selling”. You’re showing your ads to people that are looking for your product/service, rather than pushing your ad out to people that may or may never purchase a product/service related to what you’re selling. Also, the organic listings cost nothing when they’re viewed or clicked on, and the Paid listings are only paid for when your ad is clicked on.

Hopefully now you can see why search engine marketing is creeping into more conversations and more marketing plans. Please feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions at all about search engine marketing at jmacpd@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading,

Joseph McConellogue

Don’t be a Tool, Just use them! The Google Keyword Tool Edition

When planning out a paid search campaign, there are a plethora of tools available to make our jobs easier and our campaigns more successful. In this, my very first edition of Don’t be a Tool, Just use them!, I’m going to talk about the Google Keyword Tool. I’ll be touching on the various features, options, and how to use it most effectively to generate your campaigns list of keywords.

Let’s begin with a really simple explanation of what the Google Keyword Tool does. This tools primary purpose is to recommend keywords for your campaign. All you need to do is enter one or more of your keyword ideas, and VOILA! it generates a comprehensive list of a few hundred related keywords. Typically you’re going to want to test more than just a few hundred keywords, so you’ll need to repeat the process several times until you are comfortable with your list. Other than just generating keywords, there are several other uses for the keyword tool. It will provide you with a keywords traffic volume, estimated CPC’s, monthly trending, and will allow you to add those keywords directly into your ad groups on the fly, or download them in excel format. The Google Keyword Tool is usually one of the first tools you use when creating a campaign structure.

Think about how long it would take as individuals to manually brainstorm ideas for tens of thousands of keywords. It would take more than a while (trust me). Often people are unaware that such keyword tools exist. Many clients think that we as search marketers just make up our own list of keywords, without the use of tools. Lucky for us, that is not the case. The process involved in generating a great keyword list can be tedious, and this tool can shave tens of hours off building keyword lists, if used properly. Just like most things in life, if you don’t fully understand the tool, its many options can be daunting, so it’s important that you know how to use it properly.

If you take a look at the screen shot below, you’ll see the Google Keyword Tool in action. I’ve outlined six highly important areas that every search marketer should understand so that they too can build out the best possible keyword lists. Let’s use a Los Angeles car dealership as the example client. The client wants target English speaking people in California that are actively searching for Los Angeles car dealerships.

search engine marketing, paid sem, google keyword tool

In order to generate an effective keyword list, we must use the following:

Section 1 – Language and Country Selector

This section is pretty straight forward. If you know what countries and languages you’d like to target, select them here. For our example client, the LA car dealer, we know they’re interested in targeting English speaking people in California. So I’ve highlighted “English” under language, and “United States” under country. We select United States because we can’t target down to city/region in the keyword tool)

Section 2 – The 2 methods for generating keywords

There are 2 ways to search for keywords using this tool. The first way (which is selected by default) is by entering your own keyword ideas into the search box and having Google supply you with a list of keywords that it believes are related to the ones you entered. The second way is by selecting the “website content” option. This option will scan the web page that you type in and establish a list of keywords based on the content of the page, the meta data, common themes, etc.

Section 3 – Where you enter your keyword ideas or website address

This section is where you supply the tool with your initial set of keywords that you would like to target. You can input anywhere from 1 to 49 keywords (1 keyword per line). In the case of our car dealer I’ve used “los angeles car dealer” and “car dealers in los angeles” as my initial set of keywords. Once you feel comfortable with your own initial set of keywords, click “Get keyword ideas”, and VOILA!, a list of a few hundred keywords (there might be less than a few hundred depending on how many variations of the keyword actually get searched).

Section 4 – Recommended keyword additions

This section is where Google lists the keywords it believes are most relevant to the initial set of keywords you supplied to the tool. For every keyword it recommends, it will provide you with estimated average CPC, a graph of how competitive the keyword is (a solid green bar indicates high competitiveness, which typically results in higher CPC’s), local search volume (typically available for the last calendar month), global monthly search volume (calculated by global search queries over the last 12 months divided by 12), search volume trends (illustrates the monthly trending for the given keywords searches), and finally “add” or “remove” keyword.

Section 5 – Add or Remove keywords

This section allows you to add the keyword to the column on the right hand side. Once you’ve clicked “add” the option changes to “remove”.

Section 6 – Selected keywords

Once you’ve filtered through the suggested keywords, and have added the ones you find relevant, the column on the right hand side of the tool will allow you to do several different tasks. You can scroll down and select the campaign and ad group that you would like to add the keywords to, so you don’t need to download and organize them into a bulksheet. You can also export the list into a .csv or .txt file for further manipulation. Usually When starting a campaign from scratch, you’ll export the csv and begin breaking your keywords into ad groups, campaigns etc.

Because the Google Keyword Tool will only give you a list of a few hundred keywords at a time, it’s important to export your list to a .csv file, copy keywords in rows 1 through 49 (as you can only input 49 keyword phrases at a time), paste them back into the keyword tool, and add the additional keywords that Google recommends. This process should be repeated for keywords in rows 50-99, then 100-149, then 150-199, and so on. Once you’ve re-entered all of the keywords from the csv file back into the tool, export the new list to csv, and repeat the process. You’ll see your keyword list grow from 2 keywords to thousands in a matter of an hour or two.

Here is the url for the Google Keyword Tool. Give it a try, I’m happy to answer any questions via email.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Remember, these tools are available to save us time, make our jobs easier and our campaigns more successful.

Thanks for reading the first edition of “Don’t be a Tool, just use them!”

Joseph McConellogue