There are a lot of myths, fables and just plain wrong facts about PPC out there. This week’s blog post looks at my favourite top 5 myths and what the actual truth is.

1. Use as many keywords as possible in your PPC account.

Whilst in theory the more keywords you have in your account the more traffic you’ll get, it won’t all be targeted traffic. As your paying for every visit, you want any traffic you generate from PPC to be as qualified as possible which is achieved by being selective with your keywords. If you dump a lot of keywords in your account, the most likely result is you’ll burn your budget quickly and generate very little ROI.

2. You Should Always Run The Display Network.

Running ads on the display network can be an excellent source of traffic. However, you should be careful to operate within certain parameters on the display network rather than just turning it on and letting it run as this will almost certainly end up costing you a lot of money for very little return.

If you only have a limited budget or don’t want to heavily manage ad placements on the display network, you may be best off simply running your ads on the search network.

3. Quality score is calculated on click through rates only.

I don’t deny quality scores are certainly affected by click through rates but they are not solely based on this. Quality scores are also affected by the relevance of your ad copy and landing page to your keywords and other factors Google doesn’t like to talk too much about. So if your CTR is good but your quality score isn’t improving, it may also be worth looking at your account relevancy.

4. PPC visits are mainly competitors clicking on your ads.

All of the search engines are very good at keeping track of fraudulent traffic and have departments specifically set up to monitor and stop people clicking on the same adverts multiple times. The search engines will actually refund your click cost if they feel a click has being invalid or fraudulent.

5. You don’t need PPC if you’re ranking well organically.

Ranking well organically is great but PPC can always help increase the amount of traffic to your site and brand exposure. If you think about it, organic results service about 65-70% of traffic on search engines whilst PPC services the other 30-35%. If you made cloths, you wouldn’t only make sizes that fit 65-70% of the population so why would you only want to be available to a percentage of search traffic?!

With PPC you can also target many more keywords than SEO, meaning you can increase your brand exposure and target keywords you haven’t got in your organic campaign.

All of us that have being dabbling with Adwords of recent times will be aware of sitelinks and how they are great for increasing ad visibility and improving CTR (up to 30% CTR increase with sitelinks according to Google).

The reason sitelinks has been so successful in improving click through rates is due to the increased real estate/exposure to be gained on the SERPs, from the advert becoming larger with extra links under your text advert. As a result, your adverts stand out from your competitors and also give you an opportunity to cross sell and advertise other products/services you offer.

Well good news all round as Google has today announced a new format called enhanced sitelinks. The difference between normal sitelinks is best demonstrated in pictures as such:

Normal Sitelinks:

Enhanced Sitelinks:

What is basically happening with the enhanced version is Google will amalgamate the existing sitelinks and active ads in your account to make your ads bigger. This will in turn increase your visibility to the searcher and undoubtedly improve your average CTR.

This new feature isn’t a reinvention of the wheel so if you’re already using sitelinks, changing to enhanced sitelinks isn’t going to revolutionise the performance of your campaign massively, but when combined with a few other well selected new features it could provide that refresh all campaigns need every few months.

For more information on new Adwords products or PPC management please contact the PPC team at Creare on 01788 551591.

As a PPC account manager, one of the questions I am often asked by clients is “why can’t I find my adverts on Google”. Quite understandably, you’ve paid money for a PPC account to be set up and are paying Google for every click to your site and are anxious for a positive sign to reinforce your decision of investing in PPC.

So why can’t you see your adverts? The vast majority of the time your adverts are displaying just as intended, you just can’t see them. Here is why:

Google is spreading out your budget.

Dependant on which settings you have selected in your account, Google may be spreading your budget across the day. To ensure your account sticks to its daily budget, the Adwords algorithm will only show your adverts on a limited percentage of available searches. For keywords with large search volumes and high competition this is particularly noticeable. Your adverts might only show on a small fraction of searches across the day to ensure your budget isn’t all used in the first hour and to provide coverage across the day. This is all normal and to be expected considering the number of searches there are per day. 10% of 100,000 searches in a day is still 10,000 impressions!

Even large scale advertisers have trouble capturing 100% of the search impressions for a given keyword. If you can’t see your advert, you may have just been unlucky and on this occasion the system is choosing not to show you the page your advert is on.

You can gain more information about how often your ads are showing by asking your PPC consultant to run an impression share report which will detail what percentage of impressions your adverts are showing for and whether this is restricted by budget or rank.

Your budget has run out.

It sounds like a no brainer for why your adverts are not showing and that’s because it is. As with all PPC systems, budget is the main restricting factor. As mentioned above, the system will distribute your adverts across the day to ensure an even spread, but if your budget is only £10 a day or something similar, your adverts may have stopped showing before midday. If you think about it, if you have a daily budget of £10 and each click is £2, your adverts only need to gain 5 clicks for your budget to be spent and your adverts stop for the day. It’s always a possibility you can’t see your adverts because your budget has run out for the day.

Repeated Searches For Your keywords

Chances are you’ve searched on Google for your adverts before. Possibly lots of times in the last few days and weeks (don’t worry we all do it). The reason you can’t see your adverts is Google is hiding them!

The Google system saves the searches you’ve made recently in a cookie placed in your browser. If you search for the same keywords over and over again and don’t click on any of the adverts or listings, Google determines the adverts it has being showing you (ie. your adverts) as irrelevant to your search query and begins to show you other adverts that may help answer your query.

The Google system doesn’t know you are a business owner or employee checking up on your adverts appearing, the system just thinks you’re a normal searcher who can’t find what they are looking for, so shows you increasingly irrelevant ads in an attempt to show you something you may want to click on.

This problem can be solved by deleting all cookies on your browser before you check up on your adverts. This way you will see search results on Google the way they were meant to be and not filtered by your previous search patterns.

If you require help with your PPC, contact Creare on 0800 01 999 06 and we’ll help you get to the bottom of your problem.

Towards the end of 2011, Google provided me with an early Christmas present; a present that as a PPC consultant has made a massive difference in reporting back to clients on the true value PPC was bringing to their business.

The present Google provided me with was the multi channel funnels tab in analytics. This new tab provides me with accurate, real time information on the part PPC plays in a websites overall online marketing strategy.

Previously in analytics, the data I could gather about PPC traffic drawn to the site was solely focussed on the last click. By this I mean I could only see what conversions/actions had being achieved directly by PPC. Now don’t get me wrong, this information is great and absolutely necessary because the bottom line is this data will tell you how much of a return the PPC traffic is bringing.

However, I always knew that a PPC campaign provides much more value to a website than simply just the conversions that can be directly attributed to it. The problem was I couldn’t prove it with solid, tangible figures. The new data available within the multi channels funnel now allows me to demonstrate in cold hard facts what additional value PPC is bringing.

With features such as assisted conversions and top conversion paths, I can now see what part PPC has played in the overall performance of the campaign. For example if someone clicks on a PPC ad and comes to my site and then leaves to research prices elsewhere before coming back to the site via an organic listing and purchasing then PPC is then attributed with an assisted conversion as it has played a part in the process. Previously, no information regarding PPC being involved in this process was available and the organic listing would take all the credit.

Now my reports have doubled in size and my clients are twice as informed as to the value PPC is bringing to their website. So, if you haven’t yet examined the figures in the multi channels funnel section of your analytics account I urge you to soon….your clients won’t regret it.

If you’re a fan of Alanis Morissette, you might be interested to know that not that many things she actually sang about in that song were ironic, which is kind of annoying. But late last week I came across something that’s a little bit close to ironic; Google announcing that a recent algorithm change is designed to target and penalise ad heavy websites.

According to their blog, Google are targeting sites which have an extreme number of ads on their site – specifically though they’re talking about sites with too many ads above the fold. Their argument is that sites with lots of adverts above the fold make it difficult for users to find the useful content which Google has directed them too, thus affecting the all important user experience.

So will your site be affected? What type of sites will suffer a hit to their rankings?

Well, to get an idea of the kind of site this algorithm change might affect, imagine a site that places heavy prominence on ads above the fold. A site that optimises hundreds of pages so that each one presents ads before the more natural, useful content, and which does this to monetize and bring in as much revenue as possible. In fact, imagine Google.co.uk.

Any one of Google’s own millions of search results pages could be considered offenders under this new algorithm change, simply because of the number of ads in place. I’ve just run a general search and the resulting page has 7 ads above the fold and three organic listings.

My point is that although Google’s search results pages have lots of ads above the fold, (for now) these ads are relevant and useful, and don’t detract from helping me find what I’m looking for.

This brings us to the crux of this new change – how much is too much? Google might argue that their 7 ads above the fold are acceptable – but then how many is too many in terms of other sites?

It’s also ironic that Google have announced this algorithm change when they own and operate one of the web’s most popular ad display networks. Does this change mean that Google will begin to penalise organically those sites which use its own ad display network too religiously? Perhaps Google haven’t noticed this irony yet, or perhaps there’s provision in the algorithm which effectively ignores Google’s own display network but penalises others. In theory, this would certain help to solidify the display network’s dominance as the choice of the masses, but there are issues there in terms of fair competition.

We’re unlikely to get an answer to any of this in the short term, but it’s worth bearing in mind next time you’re placing ads. Ominously, Google suggested that this change isn’t limited to ads above the fold either. In the blog in question they seem to suggest that if a site has only a small amount of content above the fold then it could be penalised in search, regardless of whether the rest of the above fold space is taken up by ads, flash, video or anything else.

Bear this in mind if your site’s take a hit in the coming weeks.