Tim Mayer, Chief Strategy Officer of Trada has an extensive background in paid search, SEO and natural search with Yahoo, lnktomi, and Overture. His experience with these companies has given him the insight to develop solutions for small businesses who want successful paid search campaigns.
What are the challenges for SMB campaigns?
- Small budget
- Small data sets
- Cannot programmatically optimize campaigns
- Hard to track ROAS
- Many conversions from phone
- Paid search is usually not a designated role
How can paid search be successful for SMB?
Best practice: Consistency
- Consistency is the biggest factor for CTR. It improves quality scores and better overall results.
- Consistent messaging, phone numbers, credibility badges and calls to action add to your site’s value.
Best practice: Ad Diversity Model
Differentiating your ads can help you stand out in search results and appeal to your target market. You need to look at competitive analysis and SERPS to determine if this strategy will work best for your company.
Best practice: Focused Ad Groups
If you utilize the same ad copy across different ad groups, you’re basically killing your PPC campaigns. Your ad groups should have targeted keywords that fit the copy. If you don’t, your CTR will be lower because they aren’t consistent with what people are searching.
Best practice: Long Tail Keywords
Smaller businesses should go after long-tail keywords because there is volume and search results are higher.
Best practice: Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Advantages:
- Improves CTR
- Improves Quality Score
- Improves Ad Relevance
Disadvantages
- Lowers control over ads
- Lowers conversion rate
Match types, dayparting, call tracking, landing page optimization and ad extensions are all features of an optimized PPC campaigns that can differentiate how people are drawn to your ads. Don’t be afraid to test, test and test your ads again for optimal results. From our own experience, this process is never complete because there are so many factors that can be changed. But that doesn’t mean positive results are never possible.
Landing page optimization tools
If you’re not completely sure how to arrange your landing page, Mayer suggests these cost-effective tools to help you discover which ads work best for your consumers.
Landing page creation
- Unbounce
- Ominiture test and target
- Ion interactive-live ball
A/B testing
- Optimzely
- Google web site optimizer
- Visual web site optimizer
Heat Maps/Eye Tracking
- Crazy Egg
Even after all of this, how do you know if your campaigns are successful? You can look at analytics but you can also tell by basic signs. Are more people coming to your storefront, calling your or making online purchases? If so, you’re making positive gains. If not, there’s much more tweaking in your future.
You can follow and tweet Tim Mayer (@timmayer) to ask him additional questions about optimized PPC campaigns and Adwords.
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