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Archive for July, 2010

How to advertise on Facebook – a Beginner’s Guide

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

According to recent stats, 1 in every 5 display ad is served within Facebook. That’s an incredible achievement for the social networking platform, which now boasts over 500m users.

There must be a reason why there’s so much advertising money pouring into Facebook, so if you want to find out what all the fuss is about, and would like to try it out, read on.

Set your expectations

Before you get going with Facebook, you need to set yourself some realistic expectations about the environment. If you’re from a search background, you need to radically downgrade your opinion of what a good Click Through Rate or Conversion Rate is.

With search, you’re giving people a product they’re actually looking for. Within Facebook, you’re catching them whilst they’re doing something else. They might fit your target market – and be potential buyers of your product – but they’re busy speaking to friends, looking at photos, spending some leisure time. So they’re much less receptive to your ad, and are less likely to be impressed by it. And they’re not in the environment to be ‘warmed up’ to your message.

So whilst your PPC search campaign may well achieve a CTR of 5% and a conversion rate of 5%, Facebook Ads are more likely to have a CTR of 0.05% and a conversion rate of nearer 1%.

Set some goals

There are plenty of ads within Facebook that have traditional goals. These ads lead to traditional websites, with a message and a call to action.

But some of the more successful Facebook advertising drives traffic towards a brand’s social media, be that another Facebook page, a group, or even an application.

Here the goal is more long term: the creation of a relationship between the brand and the individual, and the hope of some longer term sales. Marketers may well set their goal as a specific increase in the number of Fans or Follows.

For either method, you need to set your goal and relate it back to some financials. That’s easy for the traditional ad linking to a website – you should set a CPA and ROI value you want to hit. But for the latter, you need to place a value on having a fan, and what those fans do in terms of either buying from you or recommending you to others.

Set a CPC and a budget

Integral to defining your financials is setting a budget and maximum CPC. You should set the CPC much lower than the amount you are prepared to pay for a click from search, since the conversion rate will be lower. Once the system works out how many clicks your ad generates it may well push up the CPC you have to pay in order to get traffic.

As with AdWords, set the budget at a level that will not limit your exposure. A campaign that gets suspended because it hits a daily cap is not making efficient use of the platform.

Creative must-haves

This might be obvious, but ads with images get a much higher CTR than those without. Try to make the image intriguing – not just your logo – but at the same time it’s got to relate to your brand and product too.

Your message should follow similar rules to AdWords creative. Avoid excessive punctuation. Write clearly in correct English. Highlight benefits. And add urgency with your call to action.

Make sure you track your ad with a parameter. If you measure your campaigns with Google analytics just use the URL Builder. The chances are that you will be testing out a variety of creatives with a range of targeting options. Be sure to give each ad a unique tracking link to make optimisation much easier.

Reaching the right target market – demographics

Facebook lets you target your audience using some very precise targeting tools. You can choose from:

location
demographic
language

and you then get to delve into the keywords that people use to describe what they like.

Reaching the right target market – likes and interests

If your target market should be into fashion, it might be that they include words like ‘fashion’ and ‘clothes’ in their interests, so make sure you add them. But also try adding brand names too, even if they compete with your own. As you type your keywords, Facebook will make suggestions – so where relevant try to include those too.

Reaching the right market – Connections

Within Facebook, you can choose to target particular people who are only connected to a group or Facebook page that you look after, which means that you can actively reach out to your current audience.

Unless you’ve got a new product and want to get people back to your page or site, you might consider this a waste of money, so try excluding users with this connection.

Another option is to target ‘friends of connections’, so that your will be reaching out to those users who are connected to people that are already fans of your Facebook page. This is a really powerful feature: your users have probably mentioned you and your products in passing, which will have spiked their friend’s interest. When they see your ad, it acts to jog the memory and get them to your site. You’ve reached that user through word of mouth AND advertising, and they will be much more likely to buy.

Testing

The great thing about having so many targeting options is that you can test the performance of one audience against another. If you’re not sure whether you want to target web designers or web developers, then set up identical campaigns, creatives and targeting options but focus one around web designers and the other for web developers. Then measure the results you get from each.

This example is just a simple A/B, but the chances are that you have lots of different targeting options to test. Sketch out all the different options and go through testing each one.

This might seem laborious, but the prize is large: If you crack Facebook as an advertising platform, the potential to scale is huge.

Do you like my advertising?

You may have noticed that it’s possible for users to ‘like’ adverts without actually clicking on them. Aside from adding that advertiser to the list of likes within a users’ profile, it’s not completely clear what it means to an advertiser whose adverts are ‘liked’. Facebook themselves don’t say, but the chances are that if not already, it will have an impact on a ‘quality score’ that means your advert has a greater chance of being shown, and at a lower CPC.

Given this, ask your friends or followers to ‘like’ the ad if they see it – you may see the benefits later on.

That’s it

Facebook advertising can offer you the potential to reach a huge audience with some quite advanced targeting tools. Follow this guide to give you campaigns a good start. Think I’ve missed something? Leave us a comment below.

Posted in Display, Social Media | No Comments »

Advertiser Goals now appearing in the Opportunities Tab

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Here at Euston Digital we’re big fans of the Google AdWords Opportunities Tab – its once of the best new features of the new AdWords interface.

Aside from offering you recent and relevant keyword suggestions, Google recently added the opportunity to gauge campaign performance against competitors.

Set your own Goals

Now Google AdWords have added a new feature to the opportunities tab – advertiser goals. These allow you to tailor the suggestions that Google give you each campaign you’re working on.

When optimising a campaign, you’ve often got a specific objective in mind. It might be you’re trying to boost the traffic to a site. Maybe you’re trying to cut cost. Or you might be trying to improve efficiency by maintaining traffic and spend whilst improving conversions and reducing CPA.

Now in the opportunities tab you can preselect your campaign goal, and get suggestions based on that goal. The options are to:

*Reduce Cost – where might you cut expenditure from the campaign
*Boost traffic – which keywords and bids can lead to an increase in traffic
*Get a bit of both – a balance of increased traffic and reduced cost.

This is what the options look like:

Once you’ve selected the specific campaign goal, the suggestions AdWords will make customised to fit that goal. Unless you change it, all future suggestions will be for the same goal.

What do you think?

As ever, take Google’s ideas with a pinch of salt, and apply your normal rules to the optimisation suggestions it comes up with.

Take a look and let us know what you think.

Posted in PPC | No Comments »

What is worth more – an organic or paid click?

Monday, July 19th, 2010

As any marketer knows, search engines can bring your website traffic from two separate areas of the search engine results page (SERPs).

The red section is the paid-for listings (PPC). The green is for the organic listings (SEO). Euston Digital can help with both your PPC and SEO.

The question is: which side brings the most valuable traffic?

The short answer is: it depends. It varies from site to site, and the only way to really work it out is by analysing your conversion rate and ROI using your web analytics.

And the long answer? What about ‘on average’? Well according to an economic study published recently by Google, it’s the paid for – or sponsored listings – that bring the most valuable traffic. Google go as far to say that organic clicks are worth just 70% of their paid-for counterparts.

Why are paid-for listings worth more?

Google don’t say why they make that call, so here are a few ideas of our own.

1. People who click on the adverts have a specific intent. They know what they want, and are prepared to cost a business money in order to get it. They consider that a fair exchange, and are prepared to enter a transactional relationship.

2. There’s fewer paid-for listings that organic listings. For each search term there are probably just a few thousand competing advertisers, but 100s of thousands of websites competing for the organic listings. So a click on the paid for listing is takes a great share of the overall opportunity.

3. The only advertising that sticks around is the stuff that’s working. By and large, business won’t poor money into advertising that doesn’t work, and would sooner turn it off. By contrast, a website might continue to rank highly in the organic listings even though it no longer sells a product. Therefore the paid clicks are more likely to be accurate and result in good value for both users and website owner.

4.Adverts are human edited and controlled more closely. Not only are they written, and placed on a keyword by keyword basis, they also pass a ‘quality score’ judgement by the AdWords system. Therefore they are more likely to represent the best place for that user to arrive. By contrast, the organic listings are Google’s best guess at the user’s intention.

5. Adverts are deep linked to the most appropriate page on the website. By contrast, organic listings often send traffic to the home or category page, or make poor judgement due bad signals as to the best landing page.

Which side of the page brings you the most traffic? How does it vary in quality? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: organic traffic, PPC, SEO
Posted in PPC, SEO | No Comments »

SEO News Round Up

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Here’s the latest news and developments in the world of SEO to help you keep up to date.

LINK BUILDING

In this article there are some fantastic tips and ideas about how to get links in tough industries.

LOCAL

How can you improve your ranking in Google Places? In this article you will find some great tips for optimising your listing and rankings in Google places.

The latest changes in Google Places OneBox – now if you click on the OneBox result, it does not take you to the business’s website but to the Google Place Page for that website (and the “More Info” link has been renamed “Place Page”).

SEO GENERAL

The biggest SEO Dont’s as suggested by SEOmoz

And the biggest SEO Dont’s for small businesses as suggested by Searchengineland

Does Google pay attention to the presence of a keyword in the URL? Apparently so … and so do Yahoo and Bing, take a look at this interesting test!

Starting from August/September 2010, Yahoo! and Bing organic search results will merge … We will keep on monitoring them head-to-head, so stay tuned!

Need a laugh? Well this guy tried to boost his website rankings by using the word “page rank” in the meta tags.

SEO EDUCATIONAL

If you want to find out more about SEO and even become an expert in this subject, we recommend this fantastic list of SEO resources.

That’s it!

Any of your own to add? Please leave ‘em below!

Tags: Link Building, SEO, SEO News
Posted in Link Building, SEO | No Comments »

Euston Digital July Newsletter

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Welcome to the Euston Digital July Newsletter!

The World Cup and warm weather have had a big impact on search volumes this month, pushing traffic south across many markets. Despite this, there’s been a lot of innovation to keep up with.

Google quietly launched a new match type called ‘modified broad’. This can give you all the control of phrase match with the opportunity to grab the extra exposure offered by broad match.

The Google AdWords Sitelinks feature has also been updated. Adding Sitelinks has become a lot more important for all AdWords campaigns.

Google did a big favour to larger retailers by introducing brand suggestions in the Search Engine Results Pages. They then gave something back to the smaller website owner with the addition of something similar.

In our roundup of the latest SEO news, there’s confirmation that a few well chosen links help a lot more than many low value links. We’re also got some good advice about the best link building tools.

And finally is this the future of Telecommunications [VIDEO]?!

That’s all for now!

Posted in Newsletters | No Comments »

Good Reviews can now boost your AdWords campaign

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

We’ve written previously about the importance of fostering positive review. Great user feedback should form the cornerstone of your social media strategy.

Reviews are set to become even more important, as is now Google starting to include ratings within your AdWords creative. Called ‘Seller Rating Extensions’, these are designed to make it easier for users to identify those merchants who are highly rated.

This is what they look like:

Appearing as a series of stars from Google Product Search, these rating are aggregated from a series of review sites across the web

In order to get star ratings on your ads, you need to be rated in Google Product Search with at least 4 or more stars, along with at least 30 reviews. Those searching can choose to look at the reviews before they visit your site. And you only get charged once they click to visit your website.

What to do?

If you’re not already appearing in Google Product Search, then now is the time to start to get listed. Let us know if you want help with that.

Once your product is live, make sure you work hard to get as many reviews as possible. Here’s some easy to follow advice on growing positive reviews. For in depth expert advice on that and other part of your social media marketing strategy, get in touch.

Tags: Google AdWords, reviews, Social Media
Posted in PPC, Social Media | No Comments »

Are your AdWords campaigns better than your competitors?

Friday, July 9th, 2010

It’s been about a year since the Google AdWords User Interface underwent a huge overhaul.

One of the interesting new elements is the ‘opportunities’ tab. Here Google makes new keyword suggestions based on search query data, allowing you to add or exclude them directly to your campaigns.

There’s a new Beta feature just added which improves this even further, by allowing you to compare your campaign performance to those of similar advertisers.

Analyze competition

This tool looks at campaign activity over the previous two weeks, and sorts it into categories that make up the advertiser products or services. It then analyses the continuity between search query, keyword, ad text and landing page text. Based on this analysis, the tool then produces a bar graph indicating performance compared to other advertisers in the same category.

If you hover over the ‘competitive range’, you can see the median and mean performance for other advertisers in the range, and the extreme top and bottom too.

The metrics which you can compare to other advertisers include Impressions, clicks, average position and CTR.

This screen grab shows how a campaign CTR is compared to competitors:

You can also export the data to a .csv file.

Campaign Management

This tool is a powerful aid to campaign management and reporting. It allows you to prove that your campaigns are performing well against others; and gives you insights into the area which you need to work on.

For example, if you find that your campaign is getting impressions than the competitors, then you might want to take action. This is not necessarily something to worry about – maybe you’re just running your campaign on exact match – but this means that you can at least see and upper ceiling of how many more times your ad could be appearing. Want some more impressions? Then it’s time to expand your keyword list and take a look at using phrase or expanded broad match [link].

If your campaigns are under performing against competitor CTR, then without a doubt this means that it’s time to check the continuity between your keywords and ads. Are you keywords broken down and tied to matching ads? Are you giving searches the product they’re looking for? Are you selling it in a compelling way? Take a look at how others are promoting their services and test some new ideas.

Want to know more? Take a look at this video all about the new feature.

If you want to know how Euston Digital can help with your Pay Per Click campaign, then get in touch.

Tags: Google AdWords, pay per click
Posted in PPC | No Comments »

Have you tried Google Ad News?

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

I arrived back from holiday last week to be greeted by over 1,000 emails. That doesn’t mean that I’ve got 1,000 things to do – my work has been well covered whilst I was away.

Most of these emails are newsletters, Google alerts and updates from the Advertising industry in general, and the specific markets I focus on.

Aside from this, I’ve got about a g’zillion tweets to read, Google reader updates, and all the essential stuff I feed to my iGoogle page.

It’s a tough task to keep on top of it all, but it’s also part of what you need to do to keep abreast of the latest developments in Advertising generally, and online, search and social media specifically. The problem is that most of that stuff isn’t completely new: there are a few innovations here and there, but most is just repetitious regurgitation of a few unique items.

So I’m interested to see that Google have now added a Google Ad News site, powered by Google News. You can subscribe to the specific area you’re interested in, be that search, display or mobile. You can even get news specific to your news or brand.

This makes it easy to identify what is genuinely new, and what can be ignored.

I’m going to be using it to cut some chaff but retain the wheat… something that feels sorely needed right now. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Tags: advertising, PPC, SEO
Posted in And Finally | No Comments »

Google AdWords Sitelinks: An update

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Last year we let you know all about a great new feature in AdWords called Sitelinks.

This is what it looks like:

This feature lets you add additional words to your AdWords creative that link to deeper pages within your site.

From a users perspective its great – you can quickly navigate to the best page on the destination website. And from an AdWords advertiser perspective its good news too – you can dominate more of the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) and boost CTR through the roof.

An update

Sitelinks used to appear just for the top advertiser, and only when that advertiser had a high quality score. In the last week Google has updated ‘Sitelinks’ so that more than 1 advertiser can recieve them. Here’s an example:

What does this mean for Advertisers?

Its mixed news. If you were previously the top advertiser and the only one with Sitelinks, you’ve now lost that privileged position. As your CTR drops you’re going to have to increase your bids to maintain position.

However, if you were not the top advertisers, now you’ve got an opportunity to boost CTR with sitelinks even when you’re outside of the top position.

Try it, test it.

As ever, the only way to work out what is best for each campaign is to test adding Sitelinks, and see what effect it has on CTR, Cost and ultimately ROI.

If you want Euston Digital to use our world class pay per click management to help you test, then get in touch.

Tags: Google AdWords, quality score, Sitelinks
Posted in PPC | No Comments »

SEO News Round up

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Every couple of weeks, we’re going to be bringing you the most important developments in SEO, along with links to the most valuable sources.

LINK BUILDING

In Link building less is definitely better than more. This is a good example of how 1 good link is far better than 100s … this link building article shows how a site with 1 link from  a very powerful directory (I guess it is yahoo directory) is doing better than a site with 100s of poor quality links.

Further considerations on Google Reasonable Surfer Patent, all links on a page do not have to carry (or pass) the same weight.

IMAGES & VIDEOS

Images are a very good “engagement object” to add to your website, they improve user experience and are also essential for your SEO. In fact 1 image can be worth more than 1000 words, check this out !

…and a video is worth more than 100 images, an interesting presentation on video marketing at the International Search Summit held in Berlin in June.

LOCAL

Google Expanding Local Tags, Pushing Them Into Mobile.  Google announced that it’s rolling out its fixed-fee local ad product “Tags” (formerly “enhanced listings“) nationally. It also announced that Tags will be showing up in mobile search results. Tags offers local businesses (or locations) a way to make their listings in the map-related 7-Pack “pop.”

MAY DAY UPDATE

May day update 5/30/10: Matt Cutts from Google has posted a YouTube video  about the change. In it, he says “it’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long tail queries”. This should be good news for us! In this interesting post by Vanessa Fox says this change will mean an increase in traffic for long tail keywords = smaller sites stand a chance.

Tags: SEO News
Posted in SEO | No Comments »

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