5 Google AdWords Hacks to Improve Conversion Rate

Setting up campaigns is so much easier than optimizing them. We all will agree with that. But I would say that optimizing campaigns isn't so difficult or complicated once you are comfortable with large chunks of data and know how to identify optimization opportunities from that data in a structured way.

Having said that, I would also like to point out that often times the campaign optimization techniques are meant to be implemented at the setting-up stage.

So, here is a simple five-step process to optimize your AdWords campaign:


Step 1: Tighten-up your AdGroups:

When you make ad groups, tighten them up as much as possible based on various themes and dimensions within each theme. Use very few keywords per ad group. It is highly recommended that you use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). The main objective here is to connect keywords toad copy to bring high relevancy to your Keyword-Ad Copy combinations. Well connected Keyword-Ad Copy combinations increase click-through-rate (CTR), which increases your Quality Score, and which in turn reduces your cost-per-click (cpc).

Step 2: Use negative keywords:

Never forget to use negative keywords. For e.g., if you are selling winter jackets for adults, then you would want to avoid showing your ad to someone who is looking for "kids' jackets" or "toddlers' jackets". You don't want to waste your money by allowing someone who is "not" looking for ​adults jackets, to click on your ad! So, you should add "kids jackets" and "toddlers​ jackets" under negative keywords list.

Another example is, if you are selling books and not notebooks and notepads, then add "notepads" and "notebooks" under negative keywords list.

Step 3: Develop a variety of landing pages:

Once you have a tight segmented list of ad groups, you should also build a variety of landing pages. The idea is to have a well connected Keyword-AdCopy-Landing Page combination for highest possible relevancy. If you can, you must follow this fervently to increase your Quality Score and minimize your CPC. Make sure that landing pages have unique header, relevant content, and images for each Keyword-AdCopy-Landing page combination.

Step 4: Do A/B Testing:

This very crucial for any campaign. For AdWords campaigns, make sure that you have at least two versions of ad copies for every ad group. After your campaign has been running for a few days you need to start monitoring the data and start digging into it to find opportunities for optimization. You should be ready to perform A/B testing if you are not happy with the metrics that you see. For e.g., if you are not happy with the CTR, be ready to use other versions of your ads. If you are not happy with your conversion rate, then check the performance of your keywords and analyze landing pages.

Whatever you decide to do under A/B testing, make sure you test one element at a time. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to gauge the results.

Step 5: Bidding Strategy:

Use bidding strategy based on your budget permits. It does not necessarily pay-off to be on the top ranks. In several AdWords campaigns, ads positioned at 7 or 8 have also given high conversion rates!

So here is how you can decide on your bidding strategy. After logging into your AdWords account, go to Tools and click on Keyword Planner. Here, you need to click on "Get traffic forecasts for a list of keywords". Add your list of keywords, and click on "Forecasts". On the forecasts page you can enter a bid and a daily budget and click "Get Detailed Forecasts". In the results you will see the number of clicks that you can get daily, total impressions, total cost and average position. You can change your daily budget and bid to see it's effect on the number of clicks, impressions, and cost. The daily forecasts page shows you a graph which can help you choose the bid that maximizes clicks and impressions, without increasing the cost. In short, you can optimize your bid here to maximize your ROI.

I hope this article was helpful to you. If you have any more strategies that can help improve the AdWords campaigns, please feel free to add them in the comments section.

How to Optimize Web Presence With Google Analytics

Optimizing your web presence through your website and online campaigns is extremely crucial. While you do your best in following certain best practices to implement SEO, building great content and distributing it, you need to ensure that nothing falls through the crevices. These crevices are your opportunities to optimize your web presence.

But how do you identify these opportunities? Google Analytics (assuming all your tagging is done properly) is a great place to identify optimization opportunities.

Let's start with understanding the types of reports that you can get in Google Analytics. You can generate reports in the following four spheres:

1. Audience
2. Acquisition
3. Behavior
4. Conversions

In each of the above reporting areas, a keen observation of data will help you to identify Web optimization opportunities. You can generate several reports for identifying optimization opportunities, but here are the most crucial sets of reports which you should use:

Set 1:
Acquisition>All Traffic> Source/Medium – This data from this report will help you to understand whether the traffic is from referral/search/direct/campaign. Your target here should be to ensure that this report shows a balanced portfolio; and if it is not so, then investigate. If you don’t see any data from campaigns (i.e. from other sources like emails, social, or display) that means the campaigns are not tagged. This is obviously not good.

Acquisition>AdWords – This data will give you details about your AdWord Campaigns. More on understanding the performance of AdWords campaign, will come in a separate post.

Acquisition>Campaigns>paid Keywords or organic keywords – This data will help you understand which keywords are performing best for your site.

Set 2:
Audience>Mobile>Devices – In this report you can check which mobile device types are the highest consumers of your website information and make sure that your website is optimized for the visitors from these devices. To get better clarity, select a second dimension metric of "Landing Pages". Now check for high bounce rate pages, analyze them, and fix them.

Audience>Geo>Location – With this report you can see your visitors from different geographical locations. Select the "Goal Conversion Rate" metric to understand the geos that are bringing good traffic to your website. For further drilldown, ask some of the following key questions:

• Is your targeted geography giving you the highest conversion rate?
• Are there other locations which are giving good conversion rates, and therefore should your marketing efforts focus on those geos as well?

The answers to these questions will be an opportunity to optimize your web presence. This will lead you to change campaign strategies, content type, content format, social strategies, and your keywords for search engine optimization.

Set 3:
Behaviour>Site Content>Landing Pages AND Behavior>Site Content>Content drilldown – This data will help you understand how the visitors behave once they come to your website. Here, you need to quickly find out those pages that have high bounce rates and examine the possible causes by asking these questions:

• Is it lack of content?
• Is the strong CTA missing?
• Are there any broken links on the page?
• Is content not relevant to Ads?

These pages need to be fixed quickly for optimizing your online presence.

You can further drilldown the data by adding segments to this set of reports. For e.g. add "Mobile Traffic" or "Paid Traffic" segments, and then check the bounce rates. This will further help you to understand more clearly the causes of high bounce rates.

Behavior>Site Search>Search terms (on your website) – This report can tell you what your visitors are looking out for on your website. Now, this means that they are not able to find these things within 3 seconds! Check back if these search terms are on your SEO list and AdWords list. These terms should be on both these lists. Also, optimize the page content to ensure that the relevant information is available, it is visible and attracts the attention of the visitor. You can do this either with the help of images, bold headlines, or a strong call to action.

Set 4:
Conversions>Goals>Overview – In this report you should see how all your goals are converting. Focus on the goals with low conversions and with the help of other sets of reports here, analyze and optimize to increase those conversion rates.

Conversions>Goals>Reverse Goal Path - This report will help you identify the path that visitors are taking before converting. It is a good place to identify the paths that give you highest conversion rate and analyze those paths that are not generating good goal completions.

Conversions>Goals>Funnel Visualization – This report is especially important if you are selling products also from your website. This view will help you understand where do most visitors drop off? Once you identify that, you can investigate further for reasons why the visitors are dropping off. When do they drop off? Add the traffic segments to this report to understand the behavior of the visitors better.

Conversions>Multi-Channel Funnels>Assisted Conversions AND Conversions>Multi-Channel Funnels>Top Conversions Path – The combination of these two reports ​will help you understand the channels that are driving conversions. In general, here you will be able to understand which channels are “initiating” the conversion process (first attribution – role of first interaction). Similarly, you can understand which channels are helping “close” the conversions (last attribution – role of last interaction). This will be a huge area for optimizing your campaign efforts (social media, AdWords, and Email) because based on attributions, you can change (and optimize) your content, schedule, and channels for content distribution.

With every report, you can create further drilldown on the data captured by adding more metrics and/or segments. This way you can get insights at a granular level and optimize your web presence to a great extent.

Hope this article was helpful to you. If you have any nuggets to share on how to optimize web presence, then please feel free to put them in the comments section.

Have a great day!

Introducing Digital Marketing

It is no more only Content Management Services! You can now connect with me for complete Digital Marketing Services. Digital Marketing will include Content Marketing through SMM (Social Media Marketing through Social Media Campaigns), SEM (Search Engine Marketing through AdWord Campaigns), monitoring, optimizing, and measuring campaigns through Google Analytics, presenting comprehensive Reports to draw insights from vanity metrics, metrics from Google Analytics, and providing strategies to improve future digital marketing campaigns for your organization.

Coding - An Essential Skill for 21st Century Onwards?

“For most people on Earth, the digital revolution hasn't even started yet. Within the next 10 years, all that will change. Let's get the whole world coding!" - Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

“Software touches all of these different things you use, and tech companies are revolutionizing all different areas of the world...from how we shop to how farming works, all these things that aren't technical are being turned upside down by software. So being able to play in that universe really makes a difference." - Drew Houston, Founder & CEO, Dropbox

“One of the most important skills any entrepreneur should learn is to program a computer. This is a critical skill if you want to start a tech startup, but a basic knowledge of code is useful even in traditional fields, because software is changing everything." - Reid Hoffman, Executive Chairman & Co-founder, LinkedIn

“Whether you want to uncover the secrets of the universe, or you just want to pursue a career in the 21st century, basic computer programming is an essential skill to learn." - Stephen Hawking, Theoretical Physicist, Cosmologist, and Author

This is where the world is moving towards as very clearly indicated by these "game-changers" on Code.org.

Here's my first attempt at learning coding myself. I've started with Java, and successfully did a small exercise:

Exercise: Loop through and print out all even numbers from the numbers list in the same order they are received. Don't print any numbers that come after 237 in the sequence.

951, 402, 984, 651, 360, 69, 408, 319, 601, 485, 980, 507, 725, 547, 544, 615, 83, 165, 141, 501, 263, 617, 865, 575, 219, 390, 984, 592, 236, 105, 942, 941, 386, 462, 47, 418, 907, 344, 236, 375, 823, 566, 597, 978, 328, 615, 953, 345, 399, 162, 758, 219, 918, 237, 412, 566, 826, 248, 866, 950, 626, 949, 687, 217, 815, 67, 104, 58, 512, 24, 892, 894, 767, 553, 81, 379, 843, 831, 445, 742, 717, 958, 609, 842, 451, 688, 753, 854, 685, 93, 857, 440, 380, 126, 721, 328, 753, 470, 743, 527

Solution: And here is the AscendingOrder.java program:

public class AscendingOrder {
     public static void main(String [] args) {
       int[] numbers = {951, 402, 984, 651, 360, 69, 408, 319, 601, 485, 980, 507, 725, 547, 544, 615, 83, 165, 141, 501, 263, 617, 865, 575, 219, 390, 984, 592, 236, 105, 942, 941, 386, 462, 47, 418, 907, 344, 236, 375, 823, 566, 597, 978, 328, 615, 953, 345, 399, 162, 758, 219, 918, 237, 412, 566, 826, 248, 866, 950, 626, 949, 687, 217, 815, 67, 104, 58, 512, 24, 892, 894, 767, 553, 81, 379, 843, 831, 445, 742, 717, 958, 609, 842, 451, 688, 753, 854, 685, 93, 857, 440, 380, 126, 721, 328, 753, 470, 743, 527};
    int x = 237;
       for (int i = 0; i < x; i++) {
       int el = numbers[i];
       if (numbers[i] == 237) {
          break; }
    if (el % 2 == 0) {
    System.out.print(el + ", ");
}
}
}
}

Upon running the program, you get the following result:

402, 984, 360, 408, 980, 544, 390, 984, 592, 236, 942, 386, 462, 418, 344, 236, 566, 978, 328, 162, 758, 918, 

[Infographic]: SaaS Capabilities Meet Expectations

This post was first written and published by me for BootStrapToday.

TechRepublic’s informal online survey in February reveals that an overwhelming 91% of companies (n=105) implementing SaaS solutions are mighty pleased with their outcomes.

This survey also reveals that cloud computing will continue to grow at a healthy pace, and Gartner’s prediction supports the healthy growth of cloud. It says that by 2015, worldwide SaaS revenue is expected to reach $22.1 billion dollars.

The survey points out that mobile access is one of the reasons for companies to move to cloud. Microsoft Windows mobile operating system stands out as the ‘most wanted’ from the SaaS vendors, as this infographic shows.

Interestingly, the respondents of TechRepublic’s survey also pointed out several characteristics that they wanted in a SaaS provider, and ‘performance’ topped that list. To get the holistic picture of SaaS, it is also important to note here that the benefits of SaaS (as suggested by Forrester analyst Stephen Mann) are mostly universal.

Published for www.BootStrapToday.com

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What about Google+?

What about Google+? Google, being a big brand people love to associate with, can pose stiff competition to any market leader in any of the consumer internet services. No doubt! Similar is the case with Google+. The media is abuzz with speculations to what it will do to the social networking world. Will it replace Facebook and the users will take to it with a zoom? Maybe.

There are many points of views which I want to summarise first before trying to draw any logical conclusion.

Features:

Google+ has features which lets people have better control over their privacy with the people they network with. Google+ has circles which lets users segregate their friends depending on the type of acquaintance a person might have with each of them. The user gets to decide what content to share with which circle. At the same time Google+ lets you share content publicly too.

Then there is Hangout which lets you choose people from any circle and have a video chat with up to 10 people at a time. Circles and hangout are the two promising features of Google+ which can create the pull effect to increase the users exponentially.

Brand value and Fan following:

Another aspect for Google+ is that it is a platform from the brand Google which has trust, confidence and fan following with many internet users due to many of the Google’s earlier products such as Gmail, Search and Google Docs. That’s good enough a reason for users to consider Google+ as their social networking platform, as all their favourite services will be under one umbrella of Google brand.

Changing Social Needs of the Internet Users since Facebook was Launched:

Facebook users have come of age since it was launched. The initial users were primarily the college students who were there to network with their friends. Networking needs and styles are very different during college stage and the subsequent stages of life where people move on with their professional and personal family lives. The social networking needs change. Due to the changed needs you may not want to continue being friends with some people with whom you were friends back in college days. You may not want to be tagged in someone’s picture and not be able to untag it. It is at times annoying when you move on in your life out of college.

At the same time social networking is the thing that people need and want especially having experienced it with Facebook and LinkedIn. To all these issues that are posed by Facebook, Google+ can provide a solution. But before I draw any conclusion it also important to note that the big-wigs in the social networking world understand that privacy in social networking is not an issue for the young. It is an issue for the older generation. It must also be noted that the behaviour on the internet is perceived to be very different than from the real life for most people.

If we take the essence of all the above points of views, it will be practical to say that maybe Google+ will be more acceptable by the professional who are now working with a job. That will also include those young users of the Facebook who have now grown up and are out of college. With Google+ they might want to start afresh. For such users Google+ might be the opportunity to dump their Facebook accounts and create their profiles afresh with more carefully chosen content, pictures and friends.  Having said that, I think that Google+ has a potential market in the age group of 24 years and above which is huge. Google also has the advantage of riding on its brand value and the trust that it has built with many professionals world-wide. Hence integrating the sleek features that Google+ is offering and the not-so-obvious needs of the people, Facebook might see a drift in certain types of profiles to Google+. Facebook might still be the first choice for social networking with the majority of school/college students and with the celebrities.