Google AdWords Metric guide that will help you measure success of your PPC Campaigns

When you log into Google AdWords, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. On almost every page you’ll find a new table full of data, along with a graph that charts your different Adwords metrics over a given date range. For more experienced advertisers, the robust reporting capabilities are great for digging into pay per click advertising and campaigns to make improvements.

If you want to increase your impression and get relevant people to your website you can focus on exact match rather than broad match. However, if you’re just getting started with Google AdWords, then it’s almost impossible to know where to look. In other words, how do you know which Adwords metrics are really important to review?

“Without the right marketing metrics, you are shooting in the dark. The only way to know if things are working for you or not is those metrics.” — Ian Brodie

To answer that question, we need to take a step back and look at why we’re reviewing all these Adwords metrics in the first place. Ultimately, the goal is to use the data to improve the performance of your advertising campaigns and to make your ad campaigns more appealing and make it the most successful ad campaigns across all your networks. To use Google AdWords more effectively, it’s important to understand the business goals you’re trying to achieve and the data that’s most relevant to those goals. Below we’ll go over different Adwords metrics to focus on based on your goals. Google Adwords Metric is  an integral part of client report.

I. Measuring Website Traffic

If your main advertising goal is to drive traffic to your website, try focusing on increasing your clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR). You’ll want to start by creating great ad text and choosing strong keywords so your ads are relevant and compelling to your customers.

When prospects search in Google, then they scan the results quickly and decide which one to click on. That means if you don’t have compelling ad copy, then your prospects are going to click on your competitors’ ads instead of your ads. Here are some important things you can measure to help you track and improve a campaign focused on traffic:

A. Clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR):

These two Adwords metrics help you understand how many people found your ad appealing enough to actually click on it and visit your website. You can use your CTR to gauge how closely your ad matches your keywords and other targeting settings.

1. Clicks – When someone clicks your ad, like on the headline of a text ad, Google AdWords counts that as a click. Typically the more ad clicks the better as this means more people are coming to your website from the ads. Clicks can help you understand how well your ad is appealing to people who see it. Relevant, highly-targeted ads are more likely to receive clicks.

2. Click Through Rate (CTR) –  Click-through rate (CTR) is one of the purest Adwords metrics and is the lifeblood of any good Google AdWords account. It is easily evaluated by dividing clicks by ad impressions. CTR can be used to help you determine the quality of your imagery, positioning, and keywords. CTR helps evaluate how well you are communicating with searchers and can help determine the relevance and effectiveness of your campaign. A high ratio of clicks to ad impressions is an indication that you are targeting the right audience with appropriate keywords and ad text, and those searchers are responding by clicking through to your site – whereas a low CTR is pointing out that there is some disconnect between you and your audience.

CTR is relative to your competition. If your competitors have a 2% CTR and your ads have a 5% CTR, then you have more compelling ads. If your competitors have a 5% CTR and you have a 2% CTR, then your ads need to be improved.
Simple enough right? Well, actually Google AdWords doesn’t tell you your competitors’ CTR. Instead, they reveal your Quality score. Every keyword in your account is assigned a Quality Score and one of the biggest factors is your CTR. Read more blogs on ADWORDS REPORTING TOOlS

3. Quality Score – Quality Score is intended to give you a general sense of the quality of your ads. The 1-10 Quality Score reported for each keyword in your account is an estimate of the quality of your ads and landing pages triggered by them. Three factors determine your Quality Score:

• Expected clickthrough rate
• Ad relevance
• Landing page experience

Even two keywords within the same Ad Group can have different Quality Scores. So, having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad and landing page are relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.

B. Keywords:

A keyword, in the context of search engine optimization, is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a Web page and something that the user searches for and sees your ads.

You’ll want to monitor your keyword performance with the following strategies:

• Pause or remove words or phrases that aren’t working well for you and add new ones. You can use columns and segments to review your keywords’ clicks, CTR, Quality Score, and more.
• Use keyword match types to control who sees your ads. With some match types, you’ll get more ad impressions, clicks, and conversions and with others you’ll get fewer ad impressions and more narrow targeting.
• Run a keyword diagnosis to get more information about your keywords’ Quality Scores and whether they’re triggering your ads.
• Identify off-topic keywords that you’ll want to add to your negative keyword list so that it doesn’t show up again.

C. Search Terms:

Use the Search terms Adwords metrics to review the list of searches that have triggered your ad, and identify the relevant terms that are driving traffic to your website and add them as new keywords. You’ll also want to add terms that are irrelevant to your business as negative keywords so they won’t trigger your ads.

D. Impression Share:

Impression share is the number of ad impressions your ads are currently getting versus the total available ad impressions for your keywords. For example, if there are 1,000 searches for one of your keywords and your ads are displayed for 900 of those searches, then your impression share would be 90%. If your impression share is lower than 95 – 99%, then there is opportunity to get even more ad impressions. Note that you’ll likely never get 100% impression share because Google is always rotating different advertisers.

E. Avg. Position:

A statistic that describes how your ad typically ranks against other ads. This rank determines in which order ads appear on the page. The highest position is “1,” and there is no “bottom” position. An average position of 1-8 is generally on the first page of search results, 9-16 is generally on the second page, and so on. Average positions can be between two whole numbers. For example, an average position of “1.7” means that your ad usually appears in positions 1 or 2.

Your ad’s rank can change, causing its position on the page to fluctuate as well, so your average position can give you an idea of how often your ad beats other ads for the position. You can see an “Avg. Pos.” column for your ads, campaigns, and other elements, but the average position is generally most useful to look at for your keywords. By seeing how your ad typically ranks when it’s triggered by one of your keywords, you can try to influence your position by changing the keyword’s bid.

II. Measuring Conversions

To measure your results, you’ll need to make sure that you’re measuring conversions. Once you set up conversion tracking, here are some of the important statistics that can help you measure whether your campaign is successful:

A. Conversions:

The total number of all conversions made within your chosen conversion window after an Google Adwords click. It is the metric most advertisers use and is one of the important ways to track the success of your ads. It gives you the full picture of how many conversions Google AdWords drives for your business. You can also customize this according to your business goals. You can choose to count “every” or “one” conversion following an ad click for each conversion action. This allows you to count conversions based on how they bring value to your business. Or, you can choose to exclude some of your conversion actions from any automated bid strategies you might have set up.

Conversions from campaigns

B. Converted Clicks:

The tally of every Google AdWords click that resulted in one or more conversions within your chosen conversion window. A conversion happens when someone clicks your ad and then takes an action that you’ve defined as valuable to your business, such as an online purchase or a call to your business from a mobile phone. Conversions help you understand how much value your online ads bring to your business. In reporting terms, the change means the Conversions (One-Per-Click) will be replaced with “Converted Clicks,” and Conversions (Many-Per-Click) will be replaced by “Conversions.”Advertisers can think of the newly named columns this way:

Converted Clicks = Unique Customers.

This is “the number of clicks that convert within your chosen conversion window (typically 30 days)”. So, if a customer makes two separate purchases after clicking on an ad, they will register as one Converted Click. Read about Effective Facebook Advertisement

Converted clicks

C. Conversion Rate:

Conversion Rate is probably the most significant metric for your business because everything else is just numbered unless you can convert ad-clicks into revenue. It is very similar to CTR. Instead of ad impressions and clicks, it focuses on how many clicks lead to conversions. CR is used to evaluate the utility of incoming PPC traffic. How many of these users that click the add will go on to complete a purchase? This avoids the pitfall of CTR in that you ultimately measure which ad brings in the highest percentage of qualified traffic. The more you turn clicks into leads, and leads into satisfied customers, the higher your conversion rate will be.

It is a great marketing performance metric for really drilling down to how your terms and ads are performing for you. You may have a great CTR, but if you aren’t converting any of those clicks, the conversion rate will help tell you that and you’ll know it’s time to optimize. Conversion rate also lets you look at the rate trend (vs. just absolute conversion number trend) which can help you compare to conversion rates from other advertising avenues – comparing to other Adwords metrics is vital in understanding how well your ppc campaigns are performing outside of just your Google Adwords silo.

Conversion rate

D. Total Conversion Value:

Total conversion value is the sum of all conversion values for all conversions. Make sure you are assigning a value to your conversions so you know the exact return you are seeing. This value should be assigned directly in your conversion tracking code. Though you can see conversion value through your analytics, it will be preferable to view cost and conversion value, and ultimately return on ad spend, directly within one place, the Google AdWords interface. To see the above statistics and other conversion data, you can add conversion-related columns to any of the statistics tables in your account.

Conversions based on keywords

III. Measuring Return On Investment (ROI)

Whether you’re using Google AdWords to increase conversions such as sales, leads, downloads, you’ll want to measure your return on investment (ROI).

A. ROI:

The ratio of your net profit to your costs. Why calculate your ROI?
You’ll learn how much money you’ve made by advertising with Google AdWords and can use that information to help you decide how to spend your budget. For example, if a certain campaign is generating a higher ROI compared to others, you can apply more of your budget to the successful campaign and less on the ones that aren’t performing as well.
Calculate your ROI
The exact method you use to calculate your ROI depends on your goals, but here’s one way to define it:
ROI = (Revenue – Cost of goods sold) / Cost of goods sold

Revenues from various campaigns

B. Conversions:

Once you’ve started to measure conversions, customer actions that you believe are valuable, you can evaluate your ROI. You can use conversion tracking or Google Analytics to determine the profitability of a keyword or ad, and track conversion rates and cost-per-conversion. Keep in mind that the value of each conversion should be greater than the amount you spend to get that conversion.

Conversion Chart

C. Sales:

If your business is web-based sales, you’ll need the revenue made from Google AdWords advertising (this is the conversion value that you set), costs related to your products sold, and your Google AdWords costs. You’ll want to calculate your net profit by subtracting your overall costs from your Google AdWords revenue for a given time period. Then divide your net profit by your overall costs to get your ROI for that time period. Here’s the formula:
Ratio to profit of overall costs = Revenue (measured by conversions) – overall costs/overall costs

D. Page Views, Leads, and more:

If you’re interested in calculating the ROI for a page view, lead, or other goal, you’ll use a different formula. First, you’ll want to estimate the value of the action that you’d like to measure. To calculate your ROI, you’ll subtract your overall costs from your overall revenue. Then divide your net profit by your overall advertising costs. Here’s the formula:
Advertising ROI % = (Total revenue – Total cost)/Advertising costs x 100

E. Cost

Are You aware of Where Your Money is Going?
Once your account is up and running (i.e. ads are showing and searchers are clicking), you’ll want to look at how well your account is performing based on the most important metric: MONEY.
A huge aspect of interpreting your Google AdWords data is determining whether or not you are taking advantage of your advertising dollars and not wasting money. You can’t expect high profits if you have high costs, so you’ll want to make sure you’re reducing the wastage throughout your account.

Spends per day

F. Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA):

Cost per click is the amount you pay for each click. This is important because it ultimately determines the financial success of your ppc campaigns. While cost per acquisition focuses more on how much your business pays in order to attain a conversion. Looking at both Adwords metrics will help you answer the questions as to whether or not you are making money in your account. Generally, your CPA will be higher than your CPC because not everyone who clicks your ad will go on to complete your desired action (or in other words, convert).

It’s always a good feeling knowing that people are interested in your ads and are showing that interest by clicking, but if each click is costing you more than you would pay for a fancy dinner, it’s probably not going to feel too great at the end of the day. Your return on investment (ROI) will be determined by how much you are paying for clicks, and by what kind of quality you are getting for that investment. It’s important to monitor your CPC so that you can determine if you are under- or overpaying for clicks. And it’s equally important to monitor CPA because it determines whether or not your conversions are being driven at a cost that is profitable.

CPC, of course, varies depending on the competitiveness of the industry among other things, but you still need to take into consideration whether or not you can still make money after you pay for the cost of your clicks. That’s where CPA comes into play; if you’re paying more for that potential customer than you can make off of them, then essentially you are paying for that person to be your customer. Lowering CPC can require some strategy as you want to maintain value while lowering the price you’re paying for each click.

Clicks segmentation

IV. Measuring Returns on Ad Spent

Similar to return on investment, you can measure your return on ad spend (ROAS) to see how much revenue you’re generating for each dollar spent on your ppc campaigns. Measuring your return on ad spend can give you insight into how your ppc campaigns are performing and optimize them based on your revenue.

Calculate your ROAS – If you’re interested in calculating your ROAS, you’ll need to know the amount of revenue generated by your ppc campaigns and your advertising costs. Here’s the formula: ROAS % = Revenue from campaigns / advertising costs x 100

If you use conversion tracking and have set up conversion values, consider using the target return on ad spend (ROAS) flexible bidding strategy we previously mentioned. This bidding strategy can help you to maximize your conversion value, while trying to achieve an average return on ad spend equal to your target (which you’ll know if you measure and monitor your ROAS).

ROAS

V. Measuring Brand Awareness

If your main goal is to raise awareness and visibility of your product, service, or cause, you’ll first choose whether you want to increase traffic to your website or encourage customers to interact with your brand. Once you establish the goals of your branding campaign, you can then measure success by monitoring ad impressions, conversions, and other statistics.Here are some important adwords metrics that can show you whether your campaign is successful:

A. Ad Impressions:

Ad impressions are the number of times your ad was displayed to a searcher audience based on matches between your campaign keywords and terms used within search queries. As a very broad statement, your ads need to be displayed in order to see any sort of performance in your account. If your ad isn’t showing, you’re not even giving searchers a chance to click anything and definitely not leading them down the road to conversions. The bottom line here is that you first need ad impressions if you’re expecting to perform well in other areas.

Ad impressions are important to track in any campaign, no matter what your goals are. But they can be especially important in branding campaigns, because they represent how many customers actually laid eyes on your ad. You might not care whether they ended up buying anything from your site, but you do want them to remember that catchy new slogan you paid big bucks to develop and share with the world. One way to really prioritize ad impressions is to create a cost-per-thousand ad impressions campaign (rather than a cost-per-click campaign). That way you’ll pay based on the number of ad impressions your ads received, rather than clicks they’ve gotten.

Ad Impressions

B. Customer Engagement:

If you’re focused on branding, you can use clickthrough rate (CTR) to measure customer engagement for Search Network ads. On the Display Network, though, user behavior is different, and CTR isn’t as helpful. That’s because customers on sites are browsing through information, not searching with keywords. The competition is high for a busy Display Network page when compared to search. It’s important to achieve a good CTR on Search Network (5% or higher) than on the Display Network. You may want to consider other measurements like conversions for Display Network ads.

Conversions can help you see whether your ads are driving branding-related visitor behavior you think is valuable, such as sign-ups or page views. After all, aren’t you curious how many people join your mailing list after watching that expensive video ad your company just created?

Understanding customer engagement

C. Reach and Frequency:

Reach is the number of visitors exposed to an ad. Increased reach means that an ad is exposed to more potential customers, which may lead to increased awareness. Frequency is the average number of times a visitor was exposed to an ad over a period of time.
You can view reach and frequency data by adding the “Unique cookies” and “Avg. impr. freq. per cookie” columns to your statistics table. Do select a specific time period in the drop down menu above those columns. These columns are available on the statistics table for “All campaigns.”

Here are the adwords metrics that can be included for your Google AdWords campaigns. These metrics will give you a thorough understanding of your ads, keywords and audience. But all these metrics might not always fit with every account. There are always exceptions and anomalies that will throw you off a bit. The most important thing to focus on is good performance based on your business goals. Even if you find that something weird is working really well in your account, don’t completely discredit that weirdness. Take advantage of any good performance. Try to dig deeper as to why something specific is working well for you.

The post Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords Metrics appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

‘Innovation’ is the only constant term in today’s digital marketing era. With the ever growing needs and demands of this industry, Ad Agencies across the globe are discovering various ways and means to make the process of delivering value to the customer easier. Ever wondered if there could be an easier way to manage & organize all the money you spend across various platforms for various brands? Yes, you’re right! An ad spent invoicing software that ad agencies are in utmost need of. Well, there is.

Apart from the social media management that ad agencies handle, setting up and running ad campaigns takes up the most amount of time and effort. We all know why! Right from setting up campaigns, deciding the budget allocation to tracking the amount spent across channels, the entire process becomes cumbersome when there are multiple brands to manage.

Say you are an ad agency expert and you manage the ad accounts of 5 brands. Your daily task list would look somewhat like – Generate Google AdWords report, check Facebook Ads Manager, track leads from Google Display Network campaign, social media spends and management, monitor Twitter analytics etc for all the five brands. Agree? Now think how much time you spend to track and organize the amounts spent in an excel sheet across the channels mentioned above. Okay, let’s not even get there.

How an ad spent invoicing software looks like

This is exactly where ad agencies need an ad spent invoicing software. The Ad Agency Billing Software will bridge this gap to be able to effectively organize ad spend data at one place.

How will a invoicing software be helpful to ad agencies?

At the end of every month, ad agencies generate reports from every channel separately to calculate the amount spent in order to process invoices to the clients. Invoicing process for each brand requires the dedicated finance or accounts team to look at multiple excel sheets maintained for multiple channels in order to calculate the total spend.

Also, there could be chances that we miss out on recording a few transactions amongst so many of them on a daily basis.

An ad spent invoicing software eases the process by accurately pulling ad spend data from multiple platforms and generates custom invoices based on the fixed monthly budget or a specified percentage of the ad spend.

Wondering how this would work if you use other software such as Zoho or Quickbook? This smart ad spent invoicing software shall send data to your respective accounts on these tools too, leaving you with no reason to not opt for this.

What all platforms or channels does the ad spent invoicing software pull data from?

The invoicing software solution makes ad campaign management easier as it tracks ad spend data from all the platforms such as Facebook Ad Manager or Optimizer, Google AdWords, Twitter Analytics and other social media channels. It’s a one-stop-solution for all you ad agencies out there!

Now, if you were to pick between manual input vs an automated tool what would you choose? We got the answer and you’re welcome!

Remember that as you are growing as a company, the number of brands coming on board will only keep increasing; thereby demanding a hassle-free and convenient way of organizing ad spends.

Ad spend invoicing challenges faced by an agency

We approached a renowned digital advertising agency based out of Miami to understand their current ad spend invoicing method. This agency is serving 30 brands which are large and small in size, and are into various verticals such as Retail, B2B, Manufacturing, Ecommerce, and more.

The agency specializes in offering services in Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Web Designing and more! It maintains an in-house team of digital marketing experts,who use technology to meet their brand’s goals. They have an in-house team of over 60 full-time marketers. Has the depth and breadth to manage complex, multi-front campaigns that deliver continuously improving results.

Bill who hold the position of Senior Account Manager is responsible for managing these 30 brands. He is handling them through his team of 5 Account Executives. 7 years at this agency has given him ample knowledge of the all the processes.

His team comprises of  Alice (handles 7 brands), Sally (5), Bret (4), Stacey (9), and Megan (5). These executives manage Facebook, Adwords, Local Listing sites, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Bing accounts for these brands.

Every month end they are generating reports of spend data through excel. This is tedious, time consuming of skilled resources, and requires manual intervention. This report is then spent to their finance department, so that brands receive their monthly invoice on time.

Cost of not having an invoicing software

Cost of skilled resources is $50/hr as per Miami employment research reports. The labour law of US restricts individuals to work only for 8 hrs per day. These above executives take around 30hrs as a whole for all the 30 brands. Therefore cost incurred is around $1500, just to generate an excel report manually.

That’s absurd(slapstick) isn’t it?

Looking into the gravity of the situation & the cost of resources , just to prepare an excel report, Bill one day came out with a eye-opening thought of why not go for ad spend invoicing software solution? Which later proved to be a lightning bolt for the agency.

Note: All the names used in this case study is hypothetical as we don’t encourage disclosure of any names.

Key take away

This software is not a must for agencies with few niche brands. But is relevant for agencies that are handling more than 10 ad spend accounts or more than 10 brands.

The post Importance Of Ad Spent Invoicing Software For Agencies appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

If you are a novice Google AdWords practitioner, you would know there are tons of metrics available to track and analyze your efforts towards the SEM, but tracking each and every metrics would be confusing and cumbersome. Since we all have limited bandwidth, it is effective to narrow down to some limited number of key metrics that would provide you with a proper insight into the results of your PPC campaigns.

These five key metrics will give you a great overview of the adwords campaign’s performance, and tracking of these over time will provide a valuable data of your success. But note that you should also keep a track on other available metrics over a period of time.

Important metrics to measure PPC campaign success

1. Quality score

Quality Score is a metric by Google to determine your Page Rank. Ad relevancy, CTR, and landing page optimization are the factors that determine your Quality Score. Google use quality scores to determine the ad rankings and the amount you pay per click for your PPC campaign. Thus it is necessary to maintain a good quality score. Low-Quality Score is an indication that your factors need some tinkering.

2. Click-through rate

Another important metric to consider in PPC campaign – Click-through rate is one of the most important factors in determining your quality scores. It also helps in knowing whether your ads are relevant to users or not. Low CTR is a sign that your ad creative or the keywords need an improvement.

3. Conversion rate

Conversion rate answers several important questions that help the businesses in understanding where there are right now. It helps in determining:

• Number of people who clicked the ad and proceeded to landing page to complete the desired action
• Number of users who made a purchase
• Number of users who signed up for a free trial
• Number of users who filled up any query form or subscription letter

4. Cost per conversion

Is the total cost paid for an ad in relation to the success in achieving the goal of that ad? This determines whether you have attained a return on your investment. It is of no use if you have to pay more to gain a new customer than that customer is actually worth to your business, then your campaign is failing. To rectify it you need to analyze and optimise your ad.

5. Wasted spend

Wasted spend is a measure of how much your marketing budget is going down the drain by paying for clicks that don’t convert. The best way to avoid unnecessary spends is by optimizing your keywords, by which you can filter out the unnecessary traffic for certain keywords that drain your money. And also by creating negative keywords, you’re preventing your ads from displaying for search queries that contain that keyword.

Tips for client success

Prepare objective based reporting

PPC campaign advertising model is primarily used with certain objectives in mind such as increased lead generation, brand expansion or more sales. It is your responsibility to ensure that your client gets an objective based report for the entire work to get a better understanding of the progress and the KPIs achieved.

Use simple and plain language

Most of the PPC campaign experts do a mistake by complicating their reports with exaggerated language and a lot of data, charts or graphs. Majority of the PPC reports contains numbers obtained from AdWords, web adcenter or web analytics. What clients and high-level manager want is a simple and plain summary of what goals have been achieved and in what way.

Offer in-depth analysis

Though most of the PPC reports contain data, graphs, impressions etc, most of them fail to include minor details like the exact time of the day or week that works best for the campaign. These details must be considered while allocating your PPC budget. You can also analyze which part of the website works best for the ads and what impact it will have if moved to another part. These small tests can turn out to be beneficial in the long run.

Customize your report

What most PPC experts do is following the same template to prepare reports every time. Though this doesn’t bother few clients, most of them expect the reports to be a little customized containing the major details highlighted. Remember that every client has different requirements and you can’t expect to put different insights in one single form of template.

Update regularly

It is always advised to keep updating the report on a regular basis for your client’s convenience and yours as well. Regularly updating the reports simplifies the entire process and you do not have to look back into the documents to analyze any of the data.

Include your further plans

This is one of the important things to keep in mind – do NOT forget to include your further plans. It is appreciable to give your client a reminder of how far you’ve come from the last report before proceeding to your projected growth. Discuss the strategies that you want to implement later, ask for their recommendations, look for new suggestions and work as a team.

At the end, it’s all about how you approach the data analysis and presentation each time.

Prove them that you matter

Lastly, prove your clients how much you are important to them. Your every single effort should be seen in your report and the overall success of your client’s business.

Make an effort to dig into your performance dashboard and get comfortable navigating between them. Try segmenting and analyzing your data in new ways  & explore the different metric columns and get familiar with them. There’s no reason to be intimidated by the data; just dig in!

The post Ways To Read PPC Campaign Reports For Client Success appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

Google totally dominates the search and paid advertising channels, guess this is the sole reason why most of us often overlook Bing. So even you choose Google to run your paid search campaigns? Well, I understand who doesn’t want higher quality paid traffic and more conversions. But wait, with BING you could actually lower your costs per acquisition (CPA) and increase the overall conversions. Yes, you heard me right, by using Bing Ads you can leverage on lower CPA’s and CPC’s than Google AdWords because of one simple reason – Less Competition.

For those who still don’t know Bing Ads, let me introduce it to you. Bing Ads is Microsoft and Yahoo’s alternative platform that is trying to compete with the well-known Google AdWords. Bing essentially provides the advertisers with one single platform to place ads on two search engine results pages (SERP) i.e. Bing and Yahoo.

Sadly, many advertisers still try to stick to the easy route with the bigger name and ignore Bing Ads. Bing PPC term has never been mention by many marketing gurus, but today this blog post will change your thoughts. This will give you enough reasons to make Bing a part of your digital strategy and allocate a portion of your clients’ budgets to compare results.

Adwords Vs Bing Ads

Irrespective of which method you choose for your campaign, there are some noteworthy differences between Bing Ads and Google AdWords you should know. Listed below are few of the major differences between the two:

• Ad Location –When you use Bing Ads to advertise, your advertising campaigns would be located on Bing, Yahoo and their respective partners. On the other hand ads in Google AdWords are placed on Google and at their partners.
• Description Text – Google AdWords allows two description lines which are limited to 35 characters each, whereas Bing text ad offers one longer line with a limit of 71 characters. Text ad in Bing gives more information to the visitor, thereby pushing him/her for a click.
• Keywords Tool – Similar to Google Adwords, Bing Ads has a tool that helps  to find keywords. The only hiccup here is the traffic volume is lower when compared to Adwords. The tools shows location wise CTR for each keyword, along with monthly impressions and spend. There is also an option to pull a particular website keywords .
• Negative Keywords – Bing does not allow broad match negative keywords but AdWords does.
• Budget – Both Bing Ads and Google AdWords allow the users to adjust and limit their ad spend on a daily basis. Bing also offers a setting for monthly ad spend limit.
• Targeting – There are significant difference in some of the targeting options for each platform (like, time, location, etc.). It is important to review the options within each platform as one setting for Bing might not work on AdWords, so you will have to adjust.
• PPC – Well Bing PPC and Adwords PPC is pretty much the same in terms of targeting. Bing Ads help you better target users based on the devices they use. If you have an android app, then through bing you could target search from android devices only. The PPC from Bing for this targeting criteria makes the campaign more efficient.

10 Reasons You Should Use Bing Ads In Addition To AdWords

According to sources, “Bing has roughly 21% of the search engine market share as compared to Google’s 64%”. Here are 10 compelling reasons why you shouldn’t ignore Bing:

1. Reach 33 Percent of U.S. Consumers

If you haven’t included Bing Ads as part of your search marketing strategy, it means you are missing out on more than 30% of the search traffic in the United States. Yes, Bing holds around 33% of the search marketplace in the United States, which includes searches from Bing, Yahoo, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Kindle, many more of such search partners. If you are passing on Bing it surely means you are passing on a lot of traffic in the US.

2. Less Competition

Like I already said, many marketers are using Google AdWords and ignoring Bing ads. This makes clear one fact that your competitors are not there. So while your competitors choose not to reap the benefits of advertising on Bing Ads you can leverage their loss for your advantage. Since competition is much lower in Bing, it becomes much easier for you to get the traffic you need. In fact, in few cases you can win on as the sole bidder for certain keywords. You will also require a lesser budget to run ppc campaigns on this search platform.

3. Better ROI

Campaigns in Bing Ads have a tendency to be more effective as they get higher click through rates (CTR) with a lower cost per click (CPC); this normally translates to better ROI. AdWords might be a good option for those who are solely looking for volume. But through Bing, you can achieve great results when it comes to getting the most out of your investments. Mobile search advertisements are more focused, and you can get into granular level of the campaign.

4. Super Simple Set Up

You need to begin by creating an account on Bing which is super simple. Once this is done, Bing offers you with the opportunity to import existing AdWords campaigns from Google. This means you will not have to recreate campaigns that you successfully run on AdWords.

5. Increased Control

Unlike AdWords, Bing permits you to assign different ad campaigns to different time zones. This makes it much easier to manage sophisticated ad scheduling strategies in Bing. In AdWords, Google lets you set your network, language, location, ad scheduling, and ad rotation settings at the campaign level, and the ad groups are constrained to their campaign-level settings. But Bing Ads opens up these options at the ad group level, letting you quickly adjust a setting for a particular ad group. Bing also has intelligent tools that will help you understand your search ads, and keywords.

6. 3 Search Engines

Bing has 3 search engines while Google has just 1, so when you advertise on the Bing platform your advertisement is seen on – Bing, Yahoo, and AOL. This connects you with millions of searchers expanding your reach to a larger set of audience. This also means that you can expect a overall higher click-through rates.

7. Automated Rules

Bing Ads automated rules let you manage your account and campaigns effectively. Automated rules, basically let you make automatic changes based on specific rules and conditions set up in your accounts. Users can change their status, bids, budget, and more. Automated rules can save you lots of management time which would otherwise go waste in launching new campaigns on new platforms.

8. Drive More For Less Money (Leads, Sales, And Traffic)

Perceptibly, lower competition means lower bids and a lower cost per click (CPC). Since less number of advertisers competes and bid on the same keywords, you would need to pay less for a click on that keyword unlike on AdWords. Ultimately, you drive much more leads, traffic and sales for much less money the difference can be as high as 50%.

9. Better Mobile Targeting

Mobile ad targeting on Google AdWords is very limited. Bing allows you to target specific devices based on their type and OS. If your target demographic favors a particular mobile OS, or if your product is focused on a particular mobile device, you can serve highly targeted ads to them.

10. Greater Transparency

Bing is a fully transparent platform when it comes to disclosing details about the performance of their search partners. Bing can provide you with detailed reports on the performance of each of the search partner in your campaigns; these reports would include details on all their metrics, starting from impressions to conversions.

Just Try It!

If you’re still skeptical about Bing Ads, just create an account and set up a few test campaigns to get a feel of what bids on Bing are like and what kind of search volume you can expect. So, if you have a budget for online advertising, it’s would be wise enough to invest some on Bing Ads. You will reach people who are not using Google for their online searches. Bing Ads is one great way to tap markets which for long has been untapped.

The post 10 Reasons To Encourage You Using Bing Ads In Addition To AdWords appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

“How do you think SEO will evolve in the coming years?“

Quality, accuracy and relevancy are gaining more importance each year that passes. I don’t think the fundamentals of SEO are going to change drastically over the next 5 years, but rather the Internet and how we use and access it will continue to evolve.

The post Being an SEO Manager:An Expert’s Approach appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

“What do you believe your strongest PPC skill is? Why?”

Marketing Segmentation. Powerful cookie cutting techniques and advanced audience management give Digital Next the competitive edge.

“The true measure of the value of any business leader and manager is performance.”

Managing and overseeing branch personnel, supervising branch operations, and ensuring efficient operation on a day-to-day basis. Improving productivity and streamlining branch activities to maximise results and achieve peak performance levels.

Effective SEO will require knowledge, understanding and interaction with different areas of a business (technical, marketing, management reporting etc) an SEO strategist will require a bigger picture understanding of business strategy and objectives.

Our interview today is with Branch Manager – Meet Nathan Elly

A passionate digital marketer specialising in business development and long-term strategy. Experience gained from a multitude of SEO disciplines combined into a role which supports and progresses online businesses. Core business values have and will always revolve around integrity, with the aim of providing genuine value to clients and staff members.

Sharing some of his SEO Strategies, it’s truly an honor to host Nathan in our Agency expert interview series:

1. We would like to know a bit about your career background, and how and when you got into SEO and Digital Marketing?

Back in my Uni days a close friend from childhood launched an SEO agency (SEONext) I was approaching my placement year and was intrigued by the possibility of manipulating Google results for marketing gains. It was a relatively new premise back then so being an early adopter was an appealing advantage to this career path.

2. What do you believe to be the most important task you do on a daily basis? Why?

Naturally Rand Fishkin from Moz would be towards the top of that list, he’s informed and engaging, continually contesting what is considered the norm in SEO. Another name from the UK is Matthew Barby, he’s been around for a short while now and progressing quickly as an authority in the space. His content  and values resonate with what we are about.

3. What resources or influencers do you follow for staying ahead in the world of SEO?

The most effective way of staying ahead of the curve in my opinion is through trial and error. There is no better way to understand what works in real time than implementing and then evaluating results. I strongly believe that SEO should be taken on a case by case basis with a loose overriding strategy.

4.What do you think is your greatest career accomplishment?

Without a doubt emigrating to Australia and starting this branch. It’s in moments like this that you realise the true value of friends, families and business networks.

5.What according to you, are the must-have tools (apart from GA) should SEOs use to accumulate data?

Webmaster has some hidden data sets that can be effective when re-aligning strategies. SEMRush is another established tool that gives and estimated.

6. In terms of keyword research, what according to you is the best strategy for local SEO?

Keyword research should be the easy part of local SEO. Identifies desired locations and services are at the core of most Map Pack results. The key to driving local results is the off page activity. Getting positive review from active account in the local area helps credibility. Referencing keywords in these reviews also elevates positioning. More importantly and often hardest to achieve is the negotiation of links from localized mediums i.e. local news publications, local service partners/suppliers, sponsorship donations to local clubs/communities, local bloggers.

7.What do you believe your strongest PPC skill is? Why?

Marketing Segmentation. Powerfull cookie cutting techniques and advanced audience management give Digital Next the competitive edge.

8. Tell us about the processes you have in place to streamline specific PPC tasks?

Reporting automation. Our reporting dashboard includes things like self writing reporting commentary. This provides a highly effective account performance snapshot whilst saving time to be put into hands on optimization work.

Today we got to know a few SEO strategies to boost up your business from the expert – Nathan. Going forward there are many more specialists that we want to chat with. We will resume our discussion with another expert in our next post.

Until then, Happy Marketing!!

The post The Best SEO Techniques to follow : An Expert’s Approach appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

“What SEO techniques do you believe are working best right now?”

Scalable email outreach of high quality content. The key is that the content has to be highly relevant to the sites you approach.

“SEO is not about building links, it’s about building relationship to earn the links.”

The mission of an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) director is to maximize the volume of inbound organic traffic from search engines to a website. This is accomplished through a combination of on-page and off-page techniques, including link-building, social media strategy, viral marketing, metadata sculpting, site speed optimization, content strategy, information architecture, and more.

Because effective SEO will require knowledge, understanding and interaction with different areas of a business (technical, marketing, management reporting etc) an SEO director will require a bigger picture understanding of business strategy and objectives.

Our interview today is with SEO Director – Meet Steve Toth

He began working in social media in 2009; He has managed accounts for everything from major label recording artists to publicly traded companies. He has now transitioned into the evolving world of content marketing. He is very excited about the fusion of great content, organic link-building and its influence on search engine results. He is also well-versed in areas of internet marketing including, but not limited to social media, SEO, PPC and analytics. He also had his writing published in major inbound marketing blogs like Moz.com

Sharing some of his SEO Strategies, it’s truly an honor to host Steve in our Agency expert interview series:

1. We would like to know a bit about your career background, and how and when you got into SEO and Digital Marketing?

I started out doing social media in the music industry and moved into copywriting and social media management in the hotel industry. I wanted to try agency life and I had a great opportunity to build the social media department at TechWyse way back in 2011. Since then, I have created another new department (content marketing) and several new services. I’m currently the SEO Director at our 150 person agency.

2.What do you believe has been your greatest career accomplishment? Why?

It’s hard to say, but my biggest highlight of the last year was getting two dofollow backlinks for a windows and doors company on Lifehacker. A 93 Domain Authority site. I maintain that this is the best link for any windows and doors company in Canada haha.

3.What SEO techniques do you believe are working best right now?

Scalable email outreach of high quality content. The key is that the content has to be highly relevant to the sites you approach.

4.How should SEO work with and coexist with other channels such as paid search/social ?

Use paid search to make sure you’re covering all the keywords you’re not ranking for. If you drive PPC traffic your website vs. a landing page, make help that convince stakeholders to beef up the site’s content. You will improve your SEO and your quality score.

Social media should definitely be used to spread your content, but I don’t believe it has any direct bearing on rankings.

5.If you could only list one thing, what would you say has been the biggest change in SEO in recent years?

Mobile’s gaining importance.

6.What do you believe to be the most important task you do on a daily basis? Why?

Communication with clients and staff. Helping build SEO knowledge and understanding creates value vs. a client that doesn’t understand the day-to-day work.

Today we got to know a few SEO techniques to boost up your business from the expert – Steve. Going forward there are many more specialists that we want to chat with. We will resume our discussion with another expert in our next post.

Until then, Happy Marketing!!

The post Being An SEO Director:An Expert’s Approach appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

Optimization: The key to Adwords Success

If you’re a business owner or marketer and you’ve run an adwords campaign in recent times, you’ll know that it’s getting tougher and tougher to achieve an ROI. You see the thing is, Adwords is still one of the best forms of Advertising out there when it comes to market relevancy. The reason is because if someone google’s the product or service you offer, it’s very likely that they are pretty low in the funnel when it comes to making a decision.

1. “Pull Marketing”

Google Adwords is “pull marketing” because someone has already decided that they need a product or service, now they are researching where they can find it. Most other forms of advertising are “push marketing” because you are trying to push your product in front of an audience that might not be aware that it exists, what it’s benefits are and the fact that they need to buy it. Because of this pull factor, many smart businesses moved a big chunk of their budgets to Google Adwords in the past decade and have seen outstanding results.

But at the start of the decade there was less people advertising on Google Adwords, as a result costs per click were low and even a relatively small budget such as a few hundred bucks could garner a massive ROI.

2. The times they are changing

Alas, as these early adapters saw great success with their Adwords campaigns, more of their competitors started to move into the PPC market, driving up the cost per click of all the industries, pretty much across the board.

The good news for the early adapters, is that they probably made such a big ROI from their early days, that they can easily absorb the rising cost per click and retain a profitable campaign. The bad news for those late to the party, is that they will now likely face a much higher cost per click than if they started advertising circa 2010.

The good news however, is that it is still possible to run a hugely profitable campaign that increases your leads, and helps you grow your business. The key to this is in the campaign set up and the ongoing optimization of the account.

3. Optimizing a campaign for success

There are many strategies you can use to improve your campaigns performance, but the fundamentals are pretty simple. Add negative keywords. Monitor your bids, increasing and decreasing them when necessary. Mine the search terms report for Gold (search terms that convert which can be added as keywords). The list goes on.

But luckily for you, you don’t have to go searching for all of the ways you can optimize your campaign. That’s because we’ve brought you this handy infographic from SMBclix. It’s jam packed with over 50 techniques you can use to optimize your Adwords campaign. It’s your mini go to guide for Adwords campaign improvement. If you implement just some of the tactics into your adwords campaigns, you can be sure you will see an improvement in ROI – quickly. Adwords Campaigns should be optimized and the same should be reflected in the client reports.

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Author Bio

Micheal Brennan

Digital Consultant, SMBclix

Mícheál Brennan is the principal consultant at SMBclix.com, a PPC agency based out of Cork, Ireland. He is obsessed with Google Adwords and loves to help businesses grow through inbound marketing campaigns. When he’s not working on improving adwords campaigns for his clients, he can be found cooking for his wife Sarah, playing with his son Shay, or sparring at the local Muay Thai gym.

The post Adwords Optimization – A Key To Success appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

Google AdWords Metric guide that will help you measure success of your PPC Campaigns

When you log into Google AdWords, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. On almost every page you’ll find a new table full of data, along with a graph that charts your different Adwords metrics over a given date range. For more experienced advertisers, the robust reporting capabilities are great for digging into pay per click advertising and campaigns to make improvements.

If you want to increase your impression and get relevant people to your website you can focus on exact match rather than broad match. However, if you’re just getting started with Google AdWords, then it’s almost impossible to know where to look. In other words, how do you know which Adwords metrics are really important to review?

“Without the right marketing metrics, you are shooting in the dark. The only way to know if things are working for you or not is those metrics.” — Ian Brodie

To answer that question, we need to take a step back and look at why we’re reviewing all these Adwords metrics in the first place. Ultimately, the goal is to use the data to improve the performance of your advertising campaigns and to make your ad campaigns more appealing and make it the most successful ad campaigns across all your networks. To use Google AdWords more effectively, it’s important to understand the business goals you’re trying to achieve and the data that’s most relevant to those goals. Below we’ll go over different Adwords metrics to focus on based on your goals. Google Adwords Metric is an integral part of client report.

I. Measuring Website Traffic

If your main advertising goal is to drive traffic to your website, try focusing on increasing your clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR). You’ll want to start by creating great ad text and choosing strong keywords so your ads are relevant and compelling to your customers.

When prospects search on Google, then they scan the results quickly and decide which one to click on. That means if you don’t have compelling ad copy, then your prospects are going to click on your competitors’ ads instead of your ads. Here are some important things you can measure to help you track and improve a campaign focused on traffic:

A. Clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR):

These two Adwords metrics help you understand how many people found your ad appealing enough to actually click on it and visit your website. You can use your CTR to gauge how closely your ad matches your keywords and other targeting settings.

1. Clicks – When someone clicks your ad, like on the headline of a text ad, Google AdWords counts that as a click. Typically the more ad clicks the better as this means more people are coming to your website from the ads. Clicks can help you understand how well your ad is appealing to people who see it. Relevant, highly-targeted ads are more likely to receive clicks.

 

2. Click Through Rate (CTR) –  Click-through rate (CTR) is one of the purest Adwords metrics and is the lifeblood of any good Google AdWords account. It is easily evaluated by dividing clicks by ad impressions. CTR can be used to help you determine the quality of your imagery, positioning, and keywords. CTR helps evaluate how well you are communicating with searchers and can help determine the relevance and effectiveness of your campaign. A high ratio of clicks to ad impressions is an indication that you are targeting the right audience with appropriate keywords and ad text, and those searchers are responding by clicking through to your site – whereas a low CTR is pointing out that there is some disconnect between you and your audience.

CTR is relative to your competition. If your competitors have a 2% CTR and your ads have a 5% CTR, then you have more compelling ads. If your competitors have a 5% CTR and you have a 2% CTR, then your ads need to be improved.
Simple enough right? Well, actually Google AdWords doesn’t tell you your competitors’ CTR. Instead, they reveal your Quality score. Every keyword in your account is assigned a Quality Score and one of the biggest factors is your CTR. Read more blogs on ADWORDS REPORTING TOOlS

 

3. Quality Score – Quality Score is intended to give you a general sense of the quality of your ads. The 1-10 Quality Score reported for each keyword in your account is an estimate of the quality of your ads and landing pages triggered by them. Three factors determine your Quality Score:

• Expected clickthrough rate
• Ad relevance
• Landing page experience

Even two keywords within the same Ad Group can have different Quality Scores. So, having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad and landing page are relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.

Read Which Email Marketing Metrics You Should Be Sharing With Your Clients

B. Keywords:

A keyword, in the context of search engine optimization, is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a Web page and something that the user searches for and sees your ads.

You’ll want to monitor your keyword performance with the following strategies:

• Pause or remove words or phrases that aren’t working well for you and add new ones. You can use columns and segments to review your keywords’ clicks, CTR, Quality Score, and more.
• Use keyword match types to control who sees your ads. With some match types, you’ll get more ad impressions, clicks, and conversions and with others you’ll get fewer ad impressions and more narrow targeting.
• Run a keyword diagnosis to get more information about your keywords’ Quality Scores and whether they’re triggering your ads.
• Identify off-topic keywords that you’ll want to add to your negative keyword list so that it doesn’t show up again.

 

C. Search Terms:

Use the Search terms Adwords metrics to review the list of searches that have triggered your ad, and identify the relevant terms that are driving traffic to your website and add them as new keywords. You’ll also want to add terms that are irrelevant to your business as negative keywords so they won’t trigger your ads.

 

D. Impression Share:

Impression share is the number of ad impressions your ads are currently getting versus the total available ad impressions for your keywords. For example, if there are 1,000 searches for one of your keywords and your ads are displayed for 900 of those searches, then your impression share would be 90%. If your impression share is lower than 95 – 99%, then there is opportunity to get even more ad impressions. Note that you’ll likely never get 100% impression share because Google is always rotating different advertisers.

 

E. Avg. Position:

A statistic that describes how your ad typically ranks against other ads. This rank determines in which order ads appear on the page. The highest position is “1,” and there is no “bottom” position. An average position of 1-8 is generally on the first page of search results, 9-16 is generally on the second page, and so on. Average positions can be between two whole numbers. For example, an average position of “1.7” means that your ad usually appears in positions 1 or 2.

Your ad’s rank can change, causing its position on the page to fluctuate as well, so your average position can give you an idea of how often your ad beats other ads for the position. You can see an “Avg. Pos.” column for your ads, campaigns, and other elements, but the average position is generally most useful to look at for your keywords. By seeing how your ad typically ranks when it’s triggered by one of your keywords, you can try to influence your position by changing the keyword’s bid.

II. Measuring Conversions

To measure your results, you’ll need to make sure that you’re measuring conversions. Once you set up conversion tracking, here are some of the important statistics that can help you measure whether your campaign is successful:

A. Conversions:

The total number of all conversions made within your chosen conversion window after a Google Adwords click. It is the metric most advertisers use and is one of the important ways to track the success of your ads. It gives you the full picture of how many conversions Google AdWords drives for your business. You can also customize this according to your business goals. You can choose to count “every” or “one” conversion following an ad click for each conversion action. This allows you to count conversions based on how they bring value to your business. Or, you can choose to exclude some of your conversion actions from any automated bid strategies you might have set up.

Conversions from campaigns

 

B. Converted Clicks:

The tally of every Google AdWords click that resulted in one or more conversions within your chosen conversion window. A conversion happens when someone clicks your ad and then takes an action that you’ve defined as valuable to your business, such as an online purchase or a call to your business from a mobile phone. Conversions help you understand how much value your online ads bring to your business. In reporting terms, the change means the Conversions (One-Per-Click) will be replaced with “Converted Clicks,” and Conversions (Many-Per-Click) will be replaced by “Conversions.”Advertisers can think of the newly named columns this way:

Converted Clicks = Unique Customers.

This is “the number of clicks that convert within your chosen conversion window (typically 30 days)”. So, if a customer makes two separate purchases after clicking on an ad, they will register as one Converted Click. Read about Effective Facebook Advertisement

Converted clicks

 

C. Conversion Rate:

Conversion Rate is probably the most significant metric for your business because everything else is just numbered unless you can convert ad-clicks into revenue. It is very similar to CTR. Instead of ad impressions and clicks, it focuses on how many clicks lead to conversions. CR is used to evaluate the utility of incoming PPC traffic. How many of these users that click the add will go on to complete a purchase? This avoids the pitfall of CTR in that you ultimately measure which ad brings in the highest percentage of qualified traffic. The more you turn clicks into leads, and leads into satisfied customers, the higher your conversion rate will be.

It is a great marketing performance metric for really drilling down to how your terms and ads are performing for you. You may have a great CTR, but if you aren’t converting any of those clicks, the conversion rate will help tell you that and you’ll know it’s time to optimize. Conversion rate also lets you look at the rate trend (vs. just absolute conversion number trend) which can help you compare to conversion rates from other advertising avenues – comparing to other Adwords metrics is vital in understanding how well your ppc campaigns are performing outside of just your Google Adwords silo.

Conversion rate

 

D. Total Conversion Value:

Total conversion value is the sum of all conversion values for all conversions. Make sure you are assigning a value to your conversions so you know the exact return you are seeing. This value should be assigned directly in your conversion tracking code. Though you can see conversion value through your analytics, it will be preferable to view cost and conversion value, and ultimately return on ad spend, directly within one place, the Google AdWords interface. To see the above statistics and other conversion data, you can add conversion-related columns to any of the statistics tables in your account.

Conversions based on keywords

 

III. Measuring Return On Investment (ROI)

Whether you’re using Google AdWords to increase conversions such as sales, leads, downloads, you’ll want to measure your return on investment (ROI).

A. ROI:

The ratio of your net profit to your costs. Why calculate your ROI?
You’ll learn how much money you’ve made by advertising with Google AdWords and can use that information to help you decide how to spend your budget. For example, if a certain campaign is generating a higher ROI compared to others, you can apply more of your budget to the successful campaign and less on the ones that aren’t performing as well.
Calculate your ROI
The exact method you use to calculate your ROI depends on your goals, but here’s one way to define it:
ROI = (Revenue – Cost of goods sold) / Cost of goods sold

Revenues from various campaigns

 

B. Conversions:

Once you’ve started to measure conversions, customer actions that you believe are valuable, you can evaluate your ROI. You can use conversion tracking or Google Analytics to determine the profitability of a keyword or ad, and track conversion rates and cost-per-conversion. Keep in mind that the value of each conversion should be greater than the amount you spend to get that conversion.

Conversion Chart

 

C. Sales:

If your business is web-based sales, you’ll need the revenue made from Google AdWords advertising (this is the conversion value that you set), costs related to your products sold, and your Google AdWords costs. You’ll want to calculate your net profit by subtracting your overall costs from your Google AdWords revenue for a given time period. Then divide your net profit by your overall costs to get your ROI for that time period. Here’s the formula:
Ratio to profit of overall costs = Revenue (measured by conversions) – overall costs/overall costs

D. Page Views, Leads, and more:

If you’re interested in calculating the ROI for a page view, lead, or other goal, you’ll use a different formula. First, you’ll want to estimate the value of the action that you’d like to measure. To calculate your ROI, you’ll subtract your overall costs from your overall revenue. Then divide your net profit by your overall advertising costs. Here’s the formula:
Advertising ROI % = (Total revenue – Total cost)/Advertising costs x 100

E. Cost

Are You aware of Where Your Money is Going?
Once your account is up and running (i.e. ads are showing and searchers are clicking), you’ll want to look at how well your account is performing based on the most important metric: MONEY.
A huge aspect of interpreting your Google AdWords data is determining whether or not you are taking advantage of your advertising dollars and not wasting money. You can’t expect high profits if you have high costs, so you’ll want to make sure you’re reducing the wastage throughout your account.

Spends per day

 

F. Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA):

Cost per click is the amount you pay for each click. This is important because it ultimately determines the financial success of your ppc campaigns. While cost per acquisition focuses more on how much your business pays in order to attain a conversion. Looking at both Adwords metrics will help you answer the questions as to whether or not you are making money in your account. Generally, your CPA will be higher than your CPC because not everyone who clicks your ad will go on to complete your desired action (or in other words, convert).

It’s always a good feeling knowing that people are interested in your ads and are showing that interest by clicking, but if each click is costing you more than you would pay for a fancy dinner, it’s probably not going to feel too great at the end of the day. Your return on investment (ROI) will be determined by how much you are paying for clicks, and by what kind of quality you are getting for that investment. It’s important to monitor your CPC so that you can determine if you are under- or overpaying for clicks. And it’s equally important to monitor CPA because it determines whether or not your conversions are being driven at a cost that is profitable.

CPC, of course, varies depending on the competitiveness of the industry among other things, but you still need to take into consideration whether or not you can still make money after you pay for the cost of your clicks. That’s where CPA comes into play; if you’re paying more for that potential customer than you can make off of them, then essentially you are paying for that person to be your customer. Lowering CPC can require some strategy as you want to maintain value while lowering the price you’re paying for each click.

Clicks segmentation

 

IV. Measuring Returns on Ad Spent

Similar to return on investment, you can measure your return on ad spend (ROAS) to see how much revenue you’re generating for each dollar spent on your ppc campaigns. Measuring your return on ad spend can give you insight into how your ppc campaigns are performing and optimize them based on your revenue.

Calculate your ROAS – If you’re interested in calculating your ROAS, you’ll need to know the amount of revenue generated by your ppc campaigns and your advertising costs. Here’s the formula: ROAS % = Revenue from campaigns / advertising costs x 100

If you use conversion tracking and have set up conversion values, consider using the target return on ad spend (ROAS) flexible bidding strategy we previously mentioned. This bidding strategy can help you to maximize your conversion value, while trying to achieve an average return on ad spend equal to your target (which you’ll know if you measure and monitor your ROAS).

ROAS

 

V. Measuring Brand Awareness

If your main goal is to raise awareness and visibility of your product, service, or cause, you’ll first choose whether you want to increase traffic to your website or encourage customers to interact with your brand. Once you establish the goals of your branding campaign, you can then measure success by monitoring ad impressions, conversions, and other statistics.Here are some important adwords metrics that can show you whether your campaign is successful:

A. Ad Impressions:

Ad impressions are the number of times your ad was displayed to a searcher audience based on matches between your campaign keywords and terms used within search queries. As a very broad statement, your ads need to be displayed in order to see any sort of performance in your account. If your ad isn’t showing, you’re not even giving searchers a chance to click anything and definitely not leading them down the road to conversions. The bottom line here is that you first need ad impressions if you’re expecting to perform well in other areas.

Ad impressions are important to track in any campaign, no matter what your goals are. But they can be especially important in branding campaigns, because they represent how many customers actually laid eyes on your ad. You might not care whether they ended up buying anything from your site, but you do want them to remember that catchy new slogan you paid big bucks to develop and share with the world. One way to really prioritize ad impressions is to create a cost-per-thousand ad impressions campaign (rather than a cost-per-click campaign). That way you’ll pay based on the number of ad impressions your ads received, rather than clicks they’ve gotten.

Ad Impressions

 

B. Customer Engagement:

If you’re focused on branding, you can use clickthrough rate (CTR) to measure customer engagement for Search Network ads. On the Display Network, though, user behavior is different, and CTR isn’t as helpful. That’s because customers on sites are browsing through information, not searching with keywords. The competition is high for a busy Display Network page when compared to search. It’s important to achieve a good CTR on Search Network (5% or higher) than on the Display Network. You may want to consider other measurements like conversions for Display Network ads.

Conversions can help you see whether your ads are driving branding-related visitor behavior you think is valuable, such as sign-ups or page views. After all, aren’t you curious how many people join your mailing list after watching that expensive video ad your company just created?

Understanding customer engagement

 

C. Reach and Frequency:

Reach is the number of visitors exposed to an ad. Increased reach means that an ad is exposed to more potential customers, which may lead to increased awareness. Frequency is the average number of times a visitor was exposed to an ad over a period of time.
You can view reach and frequency data by adding the “Unique cookies” and “Avg. impr. freq. per cookie” columns to your statistics table. Do select a specific time period in the drop-down menu above those columns. These columns are available on the statistics table for “All campaigns.”

 

Here are the AdWords metrics that can be included in your Google AdWords campaigns. These metrics will give you a thorough understanding of your ads, keywords and audience. But all these metrics might not always fit with every account. There are always exceptions and anomalies that will throw you off a bit. The most important thing to focus on is good performance based on your business goals. Even if you find that something weird is working really well in your account, don’t completely discredit that weirdness. Take advantage of any good performance. Try to dig deeper as to why something specific is working well for you.

 

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‘Innovation’ is the only constant term in today’s digital marketing era. With the ever growing needs and demands of this industry, Ad Agencies across the globe are discovering various ways and means to make the process of delivering value to the customer easier. Ever wondered if there could be an easier way to manage & organize all the money you spend across various platforms for various brands? Yes, you’re right! An ad spent invoicing software that ad agencies are in utmost need of. Well, there is.

Apart from the social media management that ad agencies handle, setting up and running ad campaigns takes up the most amount of time and effort. We all know why! Right from setting up campaigns, deciding the budget allocation to tracking the amount spent across channels, the entire process becomes cumbersome when there are multiple brands to manage.

Say you are an ad agency expert and you manage the ad accounts of 5 brands. Your daily task list would look somewhat like – Generate Google AdWords report, check Facebook Ads Manager, track leads from Google Display Network campaign, social media spends and management, monitor Twitter analytics etc for all the five brands. Agree? Now think how much time you spend to track and organize the amounts spent in an excel sheet across the channels mentioned above. Okay, let’s not even get there.

How an ad spent invoicing software looks like

This is exactly where ad agencies need an ad spent invoicing software. The Ad Agency Billing Software will bridge this gap to be able to effectively organize ad spend data at one place.

How will a invoicing software be helpful to ad agencies?

At the end of every month, ad agencies generate reports from every channel separately to calculate the amount spent in order to process invoices to the clients. Invoicing process for each brand requires the dedicated finance or accounts team to look at multiple excel sheets maintained for multiple channels in order to calculate the total spend.

Also, there could be chances that we miss out on recording a few transactions amongst so many of them on a daily basis.

An ad spent invoicing software eases the process by accurately pulling ad spend data from multiple platforms and generates custom invoices based on the fixed monthly budget or a specified percentage of the ad spend.

Wondering how this would work if you use other software such as Zoho or Quickbook? This smart ad spent invoicing software shall send data to your respective accounts on these tools too, leaving you with no reason to not opt for this.

What all platforms or channels does the ad spent invoicing software pull data from?

The invoicing software solution makes ad campaign management easier as it tracks ad spend data from all the platforms such as Facebook Ad Manager or Optimizer, Google AdWords, Twitter Analytics and other social media channels. It’s a one-stop-solution for all you ad agencies out there!

Now, if you were to pick between manual input vs an automated tool what would you choose? We got the answer and you’re welcome!

Remember that as you are growing as a company, the number of brands coming on board will only keep increasing; thereby demanding a hassle-free and convenient way of organizing ad spends.

Ad spend invoicing challenges faced by an agency

We approached a renowned digital advertising agency based out of Miami to understand their current ad spend invoicing method. This agency is serving 30 brands which are large and small in size, and are into various verticals such as Retail, B2B, Manufacturing, Ecommerce, and more.

The agency specializes in offering services in Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Web Designing and more! It maintains an in-house team of digital marketing experts,who use technology to meet their brand’s goals. They have an in-house team of over 60 full-time marketers. Has the depth and breadth to manage complex, multi-front campaigns that deliver continuously improving results.

Bill who hold the position of Senior Account Manager is responsible for managing these 30 brands. He is handling them through his team of 5 Account Executives. 7 years at this agency has given him ample knowledge of the all the processes.

His team comprises of  Alice (handles 7 brands), Sally (5), Bret (4), Stacey (9), and Megan (5). These executives manage Facebook, Adwords, Local Listing sites, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Bing accounts for these brands.

Every month end they are generating reports of spend data through excel. This is tedious, time consuming of skilled resources, and requires manual intervention. This report is then spent to their finance department, so that brands receive their monthly invoice on time.

Cost of not having an invoicing software

Cost of skilled resources is $50/hr as per Miami employment research reports. The labour law of US restricts individuals to work only for 8 hrs per day. These above executives take around 30hrs as a whole for all the 30 brands. Therefore cost incurred is around $1500, just to generate an excel report manually.

That’s absurd(slapstick) isn’t it?

Looking into the gravity of the situation & the cost of resources , just to prepare an excel report, Bill one day came out with a eye-opening thought of why not go for ad spend invoicing software solution? Which later proved to be a lightning bolt for the agency.

Note: All the names used in this case study is hypothetical as we don’t encourage disclosure of any names.

Key take away

This software is not a must for agencies with few niche brands. But is relevant for agencies that are handling more than 10 ad spend accounts or more than 10 brands.

The post Importance Of Ad Spent Invoicing Software For Agencies appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

If you are a novice Google AdWords practitioner, you would know there are tons of metrics available to track and analyze your efforts towards the SEM, but tracking each and every metrics would be confusing and cumbersome. Since we all have limited bandwidth, it is effective to narrow down to some limited number of key metrics that would provide you with a proper insight into the results of your PPC campaigns.

These five key metrics will give you a great overview of the adwords campaign’s performance, and tracking of these over time will provide a valuable data of your success. But note that you should also keep a track on other available metrics over a period of time.

Important metrics to measure PPC campaign success

1. Quality score

Quality Score is a metric by Google to determine your Page Rank. Ad relevancy, CTR, and landing page optimization are the factors that determine your Quality Score. Google use quality scores to determine the ad rankings and the amount you pay per click for your PPC campaign. Thus it is necessary to maintain a good quality score. Low-Quality Score is an indication that your factors need some tinkering.

2. Click-through rate

Another important metric to consider in PPC campaign – Click-through rate is one of the most important factors in determining your quality scores. It also helps in knowing whether your ads are relevant to users or not. Low CTR is a sign that your ad creative or the keywords need an improvement.

3. Conversion rate

Conversion rate answers several important questions that help the businesses in understanding where there are right now. It helps in determining:

• Number of people who clicked the ad and proceeded to landing page to complete the desired action
• Number of users who made a purchase
• Number of users who signed up for a free trial
• Number of users who filled up any query form or subscription letter

4. Cost per conversion

Is the total cost paid for an ad in relation to the success in achieving the goal of that ad? This determines whether you have attained a return on your investment. It is of no use if you have to pay more to gain a new customer than that customer is actually worth to your business, then your campaign is failing. To rectify it you need to analyze and optimise your ad.

5. Wasted spend

Wasted spend is a measure of how much your marketing budget is going down the drain by paying for clicks that don’t convert. The best way to avoid unnecessary spends is by optimizing your keywords, by which you can filter out the unnecessary traffic for certain keywords that drain your money. And also by creating negative keywords, you’re preventing your ads from displaying for search queries that contain that keyword.

Tips for client success

Prepare objective based reporting

PPC campaign advertising model is primarily used with certain objectives in mind such as increased lead generation, brand expansion or more sales. It is your responsibility to ensure that your client gets an objective based report for the entire work to get a better understanding of the progress and the KPIs achieved.

Use simple and plain language

Most of the PPC campaign experts do a mistake by complicating their reports with exaggerated language and a lot of data, charts or graphs. Majority of the PPC reports contains numbers obtained from AdWords, web adcenter or web analytics. What clients and high-level manager want is a simple and plain summary of what goals have been achieved and in what way.

Offer in-depth analysis

Though most of the PPC reports contain data, graphs, impressions etc, most of them fail to include minor details like the exact time of the day or week that works best for the campaign. These details must be considered while allocating your PPC budget. You can also analyze which part of the website works best for the ads and what impact it will have if moved to another part. These small tests can turn out to be beneficial in the long run.

Customize your report

What most PPC experts do is following the same template to prepare reports every time. Though this doesn’t bother few clients, most of them expect the reports to be a little customized containing the major details highlighted. Remember that every client has different requirements and you can’t expect to put different insights in one single form of template.

Update regularly

It is always advised to keep updating the report on a regular basis for your client’s convenience and yours as well. Regularly updating the reports simplifies the entire process and you do not have to look back into the documents to analyze any of the data.

Include your further plans

This is one of the important things to keep in mind – do NOT forget to include your further plans. It is appreciable to give your client a reminder of how far you’ve come from the last report before proceeding to your projected growth. Discuss the strategies that you want to implement later, ask for their recommendations, look for new suggestions and work as a team.

At the end, it’s all about how you approach the data analysis and presentation each time.

Prove them that you matter

Lastly, prove your clients how much you are important to them. Your every single effort should be seen in your report and the overall success of your client’s business.

Make an effort to dig into your performance dashboard and get comfortable navigating between them. Try segmenting and analyzing your data in new ways  & explore the different metric columns and get familiar with them. There’s no reason to be intimidated by the data; just dig in!

The post Ways To Read PPC Campaign Reports For Client Success appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

Google totally dominates the search and paid advertising channels, guess this is the sole reason why most of us often overlook Bing. So even you choose Google to run your paid search campaigns? Well, I understand who doesn’t want higher quality paid traffic and more conversions. But wait, with BING you could actually lower your costs per acquisition (CPA) and increase the overall conversions. Yes, you heard me right, by using Bing Ads you can leverage on lower CPA’s and CPC’s than Google AdWords because of one simple reason – Less Competition.

For those who still don’t know Bing Ads, let me introduce it to you. Bing Ads is Microsoft and Yahoo’s alternative platform that is trying to compete with the well-known Google AdWords. They essentially provides the advertisers with one single platform to place ads on two search engine results pages (SERP) i.e. Bing and Yahoo.

Sadly, many advertisers still try to stick to the easy route with the bigger name and ignore Bing Ads. Bing PPC term has never been mention by many marketing gurus, but today this blog post will change your thoughts. This will give you enough reasons to make Bing a part of your digital strategy and allocate a portion of your clients’ budgets to compare results.

Adwords Vs Bing Ads

Irrespective of which method you choose for your campaign, there are some noteworthy differences between Bing Ads and Google AdWords you should know. Listed below are few of the major differences between the two:

• Ad Location –When you use Bing Ads to advertise, your advertising campaigns would be located on Bing, Yahoo and their respective partners. On the other hand ads in Google AdWords are placed on Google and at their partners.
• Description Text – Google AdWords allows two description lines which are limited to 35 characters each, whereas Bing text ad offers one longer line with a limit of 71 characters. Text ad in Bing gives more information to the visitor, thereby pushing him/her for a click.
• Keywords Tool – Similar to Google Adwords, Bing Ads has a tool that helps  to find keywords. The only hiccup here is the traffic volume is lower when compared to Adwords. The tools shows location wise CTR for each keyword, along with monthly impressions and spend. There is also an option to pull a particular website keywords .
• Negative Keywords – Bing does not allow broad match negative keywords but AdWords does.
• Budget – Both Bing Ads and Google AdWords allow the users to adjust and limit their ad spend on a daily basis. Bing also offers a setting for monthly ad spend limit.
• Targeting – There are significant difference in some of the targeting options for each platform (like, time, location, etc.). It is important to review the options within each platform as one setting for Bing might not work on AdWords, so you will have to adjust.
• PPC – Well Bing PPC and Adwords PPC is pretty much the same in terms of targeting. Bing Ads help you better target users based on the devices they use. If you have an android app, then through bing you could target search from android devices only. The PPC from Bing for this targeting criteria makes the campaign more efficient.

10 Reasons You Should Use Bing Ads In Addition To AdWords

According to sources, “Bing has roughly 21% of the search engine market share as compared to Google’s 64%”. Here are 10 compelling reasons why you shouldn’t ignore Bing:

1. Reach 33 Percent of U.S. Consumers

If you haven’t included Bing Ads as part of your search marketing strategy, it means you are missing out on more than 30% of the search traffic in the United States. Yes, Bing holds around 33% of the search marketplace in the United States, which includes searches from Bing, Yahoo, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Kindle, many more of such search partners. If you are passing on Bing it surely means you are passing on a lot of traffic in the US.

2. Less Competition

Like I already said, many marketers are using Google AdWords and ignoring Bing ads. This makes clear one fact that your competitors are not there. So while your competitors choose not to reap the benefits of advertising on Bing Ads you can leverage their loss for your advantage. Since competition is much lower in Bing, it becomes much easier for you to get the traffic you need. In fact, in few cases you can win on as the sole bidder for certain keywords. You will also require a lesser budget to run ppc campaigns on this search platform.

3. Better ROI

Campaigns in Bing Ads have a tendency to be more effective as they get higher click through rates (CTR) with a lower cost per click (CPC); this normally translates to better ROI. AdWords might be a good option for those who are solely looking for volume. But through Bing, you can achieve great results when it comes to getting the most out of your investments. Mobile search advertisements are more focused, and you can get into granular level of the campaign.

4. Super Simple Set Up

You need to begin by creating an account on Bing which is super simple. Once this is done, Bing offers you with the opportunity to import existing AdWords campaigns from Google. This means you will not have to recreate campaigns that you successfully run on AdWords.

5. Increased Control

Unlike AdWords, Bing permits you to assign different ad campaigns to different time zones. This makes it much easier to manage sophisticated ad scheduling strategies in Bing. In AdWords, Google lets you set your network, language, location, ad scheduling, and ad rotation settings at the campaign level, and the ad groups are constrained to their campaign-level settings. But Bing Ads opens up these options at the ad group level, letting you quickly adjust a setting for a particular ad group. Bing also has intelligent tools that will help you understand your search ads, and keywords.

6. 3 Search Engines

Bing has 3 search engines while Google has just 1, so when you advertise on the Bing platform your advertisement is seen on – Bing, Yahoo, and AOL. This connects you with millions of searchers expanding your reach to a larger set of audience. This also means that you can expect a overall higher click-through rates.

7. Automated Rules

Bing Ads automated rules let you manage your account and campaigns effectively. Automated rules, basically let you make automatic changes based on specific rules and conditions set up in your accounts. Users can change their status, bids, budget, and more. Automated rules can save you lots of management time which would otherwise go waste in launching new campaigns on new platforms.

8. Drive More For Less Money (Leads, Sales, And Traffic)

Perceptibly, lower competition means lower bids and a lower cost per click (CPC). Since less number of advertisers competes and bid on the same keywords, you would need to pay less for a click on that keyword unlike on AdWords. Ultimately, you drive much more leads, traffic and sales for much less money the difference can be as high as 50%.

9. Better Mobile Targeting

Mobile ad targeting on Google AdWords is very limited. Bing allows you to target specific devices based on their type and OS. If your target demographic favors a particular mobile OS, or if your product is focused on a particular mobile device, you can serve highly targeted ads to them.

10. Greater Transparency

Bing is a fully transparent platform when it comes to disclosing details about the performance of their search partners. Bing can provide you with detailed reports on the performance of each of the search partner in your campaigns; these reports would include details on all their metrics, starting from impressions to conversions.

Just Try It!

If you’re still skeptical about Bing Ads, just create an account and set up a few test campaigns to get a feel of what bids on Bing are like and what kind of search volume you can expect. So, if you have a budget for online advertising, it’s would be wise enough to invest some on Bing Ads. You will reach people who are not using Google for their online searches. Bing Ads is one great way to tap markets which for long has been untapped.

The post 10 Reasons To Encourage You Using Bing Ads In Addition To AdWords appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

Joe Putnam owns the performance marketing agency ConversionEngine where his team helps eCommerce stores use Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) to 2X-10X their sales. He’s helped businesses grow their SEO traffic 17X, rank top 3 for highly competitive short-tail SEO terms, and grow year-over-year sales 70%.

When we decided to put together a high level overview of Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads, Joe was kind enough to sit down with us and explain his perspective on the two platforms from both the 10,000 feet view and the ground level.

In this article we’ll share his insights about the essential considerations that anyone getting started with the two platforms should understand. We’ll discuss Joe’s thoughts on how the two platforms compare on:

• Audience Intent
• Audience Targeting
• Optimizing for Clicks vs. Impressions
• Ad Placement
• Basic Marketing Strategy

We’ll also share about the mistakes he commonly sees so you can avoid them, and other considerations such as affordability, ROI, and key performance indicators.

To set the stage, we asked Joe to tell us about the key differences businesses should understand when it comes to the two advertising platforms.

Note: Need to track and report your paid ad KPI’s for clients? ReportGarden’s beautiful dashboards can help you communicate results to clients with ease. Try it today with our 7 day free trial (no credit card required).

Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads: The 10,000 Feet View

At a base level, Facebook is stronger for getting your brand in front of people when they’re not already searching for you, and Google works great for getting in front of people who are presently searching for you or what you sell.

If you understand how to approach using them, both platforms can yield results even in the early stages of your digital marketing. And with data collected in real time, you can see what’s working and not working every step of the way. Both platforms work best when you monitor and iterate your ads to improve their performance.

When your advertising budget allows, using the platforms together can work really well to reach your target audience at various stages of your funnel. Whether you have the budget for launching them together or not, there are fundamental differences to understand.

Audience Intent Comparison

Image: Source

The key thing to understand about audience intent is the difference between a prospect’s intent while using a search engine versus their intent while using social media. While using a search engine is active, scrolling on a social network is often passive.

Consider your last Google search. Your intent for finding what you were looking for was probably pretty strong right? That’s why you went to the effort to pull out your phone, open your browser, and search for it. Whereas the last time you were on Facebook it’s more likely you were scrolling mindlessly, passing time while waiting in line somewhere.

This difference in intent warrants different approaches. With Facebook advertising you want to create content and messaging that captures the attention of passive scrollers. Usually this will include compelling visuals that appeal to your target audience.

With Google you usually start with targeting prospects on Google search network who are actively looking for you or what you sell (more on this below). You can see how your strategy needs to take these differences into account.

Audience Targeting Options

Facebook Ads (left) lets you target demographics, behaviors, and interests. Google Ads (right) lets you target what people have been actively searching for.

The differences in targeting for Facebook Ads and Google Ads are significant. With Facebook you can target an audience with very specific interests. So if you have a well developed persona of your ideal customer with things they’re interested in (brands, products, activities, etc.), you can direct Facebook to show your ads to those people.

For example, if you’ve determined that people who would be attracted to your product or service are interested in the brand North Face, shop at Nordstrom, and wear Nike’s, you have the ability to target customers based on these exact criteria.

With Google, targeting revolves around what people are searching for. It’s similar in the sense that people generally search for things they’re interested in, but your options to define an audience based on really specific combinations of interests the way that you can with Facebook is slightly more limited.

However, you can use in-market segments to show your ads to people that Google has determined are currently in the market searching for what you’re selling. And if you want, you can use custom-intent segments to show your ads to people who have taken a set of specific actions that you have determined indicate they are in your market and ready to make a buying decision.

Both platforms, while different, allow you a level of accuracy in your targeting that has revolutionized advertising.

Optimizing for Clicks vs. Impressions

When you set up your ads, you can choose to pay for either clicks or impressions, and these general guidelines apply for both platforms.

When you choose to optimize your ad for clicks, this is known as pay per click (PPC), where you bid to pay up to a specified amount for each click on your ad.

With the alternative of optimizing your ad for impressions, you bid to pay a specified amount for a set of one thousand views of your ad (known as CPM or cost per mille), regardless of the number of clicks you receive.

From a high level, optimizing for clicks is best suited if your goal is traffic or conversions, and optimizing for impressions often matches with a goal of building brand awareness.

There are nuances to consider when you make this decision. For example, if you go the cost per click route (CPC) and your ad receives a high click-through rate, you’re on the hook to pay for all of those clicks. With high performing ads, at some point it might be more economical to bid on impressions instead.

This is just one scenario to underscore how a dynamic, iterative approach works best when advertising on these platforms.

Ad Placement Breakdown

When you set up digital ad campaigns you can make choices about where to place your ads or you can allow the platforms to decide for you. Let’s look at some of the different places that your ads can be displayed for target users.

Facebook Ads Placement Options

Note: With Facebook Ads come Instagram ads (Facebook owns Instagram).

Feeds

You can choose to show your ads in both Facebook and Instagram news feeds. You can place them in Facebook “marketplace” or “video feeds.” And you can also place ads in Facebook’s right side column (in the desktop version), Instagram “explore” or the Messenger inbox.

Stories

If you want your ads to show in “stories” you have the options of Facebook stories, Instagram stories, or Messenger stories.

In-Stream

Source: Wordstream

If you’re using video ads, you can also choose to have your ads placed in Facebook in-stream videos. And the list of ad placement options for Facebook goes on to include:

• Messenger sponsored messages
• Facebook instant articles
• Facebook apps and sites

At ConversionEngine, Joe and his team tend to let Facebook choose where their ads are placed.

Google Ads Placement Options

Most commonly when you think of Google Ads you think of the ads at the top and bottom of search results. These are ads that have been placed using Google Search Network and they are set up by selecting keyword phrases that you want your ad to show up for.

The other ad placement option is Google Display Network. The Display Network allows you to show ads to people on other non-search Google sites like Gmail and YouTube, as well as other websites that your potential customers visit.

Something like more than 90% of all websites on the internet are a part of this network. The basic sidebar ads you see on your average website are examples of this type of Google ad placement.

So now that we’ve covered some of the basics of Facebook and Google Ads, let’s learn about Joe’s basic strategy and approach to each.

Basic Strategy and Approach to Getting Started

Taking all of the above into account, there are nuances to achieving results with paid social and search ads. Here’s how ConversionEngine approaches each of these platforms.

Approach to Get Started with Facebook Ads

When Joe and his team set up a campaign, they’re already thinking about retargeting. They begin by developing a set of ads for people in the top of the funnel, and a set for people in the bottom of the funnel that they’ll remarket to. The key to developing these two ad sets is to think about what ad copy and visuals will resonate with people in these different stages of the funnel.

The other important element to their strategy is that they usually assign about 70% of their Facebook ad budget to reaching new prospects, and 30% for remarketing to audience members who have already engaged with an ad, visited the website, or began adding items to a cart.

They follow this 70/30 rule for two reasons:

1. Remarketing will usually yield a higher return on ad spend and thus it requires less budget.
2. Facebook is a particularly effective channel to target new customers high in the funnel.

Now let’s look at how the approach differs with Google Ads.

Approach to Get Started with Google Ads

ConversionEngine’s first step with Google Ads is almost always to run ads targeting the low hanging fruit: search terms with high buying intent. This is because these bottom of the funnel terms typically have the highest conversion rates.

Then, after these initial campaigns are set up to target people who are actively searching for the product or service on offer, they’ll set up two other BOTF campaigns:

• A competitor campaign to show ads to people searching for direct competitors of the brand they’re working with.
• A brand campaign to show ads to people searching for their client’s brand.

From there, they’ll start working on campaigns for related keywords that are higher in the funnel. An example of this is targeting terms that indicate someone is in research phase trying to learn about the general topic.

Once this base has been built out, they’ll begin remarketing with a Display campaign to show banner ads to people who have already visited their client’s website.

And when the budget permits, options for next steps include running general Google Display campaigns and YouTube ads to further the reach and gain brand awareness with new customers.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Figuring out what not to do is one of the best places you can start with any new endeavor. What follows are some of the common mistakes that Joe sees people making when they get started with Facebook and Google Ads.

Mistakes to Avoid with Facebook Ads

1. Not allocating enough budget to reaching new prospects. Very often Joe sees people use too much of their spend on remarketing and not enough on general prospecting. Because remarketing yields better conversion rates and will more effectively use the budget that you allocate to it, your campaigns to reach new customers should receive a greater share.
2. Optimizing campaigns for clicks. The problem with optimizing for clicks is that you end up paying for people to click on your ad who don’t stick around for the page to load. To avoid this, ConversionEngine optimizes campaigns for conversions instead. And as a bonus they have found Facebook’s algorithm has gotten stronger at identifying customers who are likely to buy.

Mistakes to Avoid with Google Ads

1. Bidding on too many keywords. When you allocate your budget to a high volume of keywords (which is tempting to do), it’s usually only a small percentage of those keywords that are going to be converting at an adequate rate. So rather than run campaigns targeting many keywords, you want to focus on allocating your budget specifically to the keywords that are converting well.
2. Targeting broad keywords without modifiers. If you target “women’s running shoes” without a modifier, Google can show that ad to anyone searching for terms in the broad category of shoes (in many cases wasting your budget). By adding a “+” sign in front of each word (“+womens +running +shoes”), you dictate to Google to only show your ads to people who search terms that are an exact match with that phrase.

Other Considerations For Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads

Before we finished up our conversation, we asked Joe about some of the additional considerations you should think about when getting started with the two platforms.

Affordability and ROI

Both platforms can be affordable and provide a positive ROI, so it really comes down to your particular business and what you’re trying to accomplish. You’ll want to make sure to continue optimizing, allocating your budget to the areas that are working and away from the ones that aren’t.

KPI’s

ConversionEngine focuses primarily on three metrics:

1. Cost per lead (CPL)
2. Cost per acquisition (CPA)
3. Return on ad spend (ROAS)

The metrics you choose to measure depend on the context of your business goals, but these three are generally the most important to them.

Conclusion

In an ideal situation when there is enough budget, the best case scenario is for companies to use both of these platforms to run paid ads. By using them together, you can guide your prospects through the different stages of the buyer’s journey in the places so many of us spend our time (on Google and Facebook).

We hope this introduction to Facebook and Google Ads will set you on the right path to achieving the results you seek. And we’d like to thank Joe Putnam from ConversionEngine for sharing his insight. Thanks Joe!

Need to track and report your paid ad KPI’s for clients? ReportGarden’s beautiful dashboards can help you communicate results to clients with ease. Try it today with our 7 day free trial (no credit card required).

The post Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads: Strategic Insights from the Founder of ConversionEngine appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.

By keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Google (or Bing, Yahoo, etc.), SERP tracking allows you to monitor keyword rankings, shows you what your client’s competitors are doing, and helps you pinpoint opportunities for increasing their revenue (and ultimately your own) through paid and organic search.

But in our experience, there are overlooked features of SERP tracking tools that can be used to strategically drive more revenue-generating traffic.

The three most underutilized features of SERP tracking tools are:

• Grouping keywords into buckets (based on how they impact SEM strategies for your clients).
• Analyzing keyword impact through the lens of local SEO.
• Differentiating between mobile and desktop users.

In this article, we look at the most commonly used SERP tracking features — rank tracking and competitive analysis — to cover the basics and offer our best practices. Then we look at three often overlooked features, and show you how your agency can use these features to deliver better results.

ReportGarden’s end-to-end agency management software offers a SERP tracking tool that allows you to integrate your SEM efforts with the rest of your digital marketing activities, and handle them all in one place. Try it free for 7 days.

The Commonly Used Features of SERP Tracking Tools

The most commonly used feature of SERP tracking is monitoring tracked keywords that relate to your client’s overall SEM strategy. Keyword tracking lets you see how they’re ranking organically for those terms, as well as how much organic traffic they’re receiving from them.

But there is more to using a SERP tracker than just monitoring keyword positions. There are several other ways to use your ranking data to improve SEM results (which we go over below).

This brings us to the second most commonly used feature of SERP tracking tools: performing a competitive SERP analysis. You can use SERP tracking to take a deeper look at the keywords relevant to your business, and see where your competition is outranking you. To go a step further, we recommend looking below the surface to figure out the reasons behind ranking movement.

For example, losing your dominance in Google rankings because of an algorithm change requires a different response than losing ground because you’re producing sub-standard content. In order to respond correctly in these situations, understanding the why behind movements in search engine rankings is essential.

On the flip side of the coin, you can’t always look at your wins as a clear indicator that what you’re doing is immune to improvement. It’s possible you’re only ranking well for specific keywords because your competition isn’t keeping up with the trends and continually updating their content. It isn’t necessarily enough to bet your wins on someone else’s mistakes — knowing why your competition isn’t ranking can also help you improve your content and stay on top in the search engine results.

With ReportGarden’s rank tracking tool, you can set up the basic systems of keyword tracking and do competitive analysis for all of your clients, but the following additional features allow you to dig in even further to improve SEM efforts.

3 Underutilized Features of SERP Tracking Tools

1. Keyword Grouping

The first underutilized feature of SERP tracking tools is keyword grouping.

Let’s say you’re working with a business that sells toilet partitions. After conducting keyword research, your strategist comes up with a long list of keywords (sorted by search volume and keyword difficulty) for which to rank.

Perhaps you’re planning blog posts on the cost of toilet paper or a buyer’s guide on toilet partitions for concert venues. For their home page, you’re seeking to help them rank for “toilet partition supplier”. And you also have different keywords selected for their product pages like “toilet partitions for restaurants” and “toilet partitions for office buildings”.

Especially for larger clients, if you’re looking at all of these keywords across their site in one giant spreadsheet, it’s more difficult to understand the data and see opportunities for optimization. For example, some topics will have higher search volume and less purchase intent, while others will have lower search volume and higher buying intent.

If your objective is to increase revenue, it’s helpful to decipher between higher funnel and lower funnel keywords. This is where keyword grouping comes into play to organize and track keywords more efficiently.

Consider creating buckets such as:

• Core website pages: keep all the keywords for home pages (and other core website pages) in one bucket.
• Blog pages: keep the keywords that you’re trying to rank for through blog pages in another bucket.
• Product and service pages: keep all the keywords for individual product and service pages in a separate bucket.

ReportGarden’s keyword labeling feature allows you to do this easily so you can keep all of your client’s keywords organized within the context of their SEM strategy. For example, you can make a label for blog pages, a label for product pages, etc.

Next up, you also want to get granular with your data by factoring in localization.

2. Localization

The reality of localization with Google search is that your client’s product might be in a featured snippet in Chicago, but on page 3 in Miami. Depending on your client’s business, that can make or break their SEM efforts.

Fortunately, most rank trackers offer localization features. With ReportGarden’s ranking tool, you can keep tabs on how your SEO and PPC campaigns are performing in the different cities where your clients want to reach customers.

3. Differentiating Between Mobile and Desktop Users

Where your clients’ customers are querying is important, but so is how they’re querying. Depending on their business model, differentiating between their mobile results and desktop results can be significant.

For example, if you were to look at Google Analytics and see that more of their customers are converting on desktop than on mobile, and at the same time see their keywords are ranking better on mobile, that would indicate a disconnect worth rectifying.

This data offers insights into the mindsets of your client’s customers. Often the intentionality of people doing mobile searches is much higher, whereas desktop queries tend to be catered more towards deeper research.

Our SERP tracking tool allows you to see how results for keywords differ between desktop and mobile, so that you can find more opportunities to increase revenue for your clients.

Integrating Your SEM Strategy With the Rest of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Between services like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz, there are great options on the market today for SERP tracking tools. These services function well as keyword research tools, help you aggregate and analyze keyword data, and perform backlink audits and competitive analysis. They can all be leveraged to improve Google SERP results for your clients.

What separates ReportGarden’s SEO tool is that you get most of the features that these other search engine analysis tools provide, but you get to manage them alongside the rest of your digital marketing activities, from your PPC and SEO campaigns, to your client communication.

And right from within our platform, you can also use our white label reporting templates to send ranking reports to clients and communicate the value of your service to them.

ReportGarden’s end-to-end agency management software offers a SERP tracking tool that allows you to integrate your SEM efforts with the rest of your digital marketing activities, and handle them all in one place. Try our 7 day trial FREE (no credit card required).

The post How to Use SERP Tracking Tools to Increase Revenue: 3 Underutilized Features Worth Your Attention appeared first on Marketing Agency Software | Reportgarden.