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Posts Tagged ‘PPC’

How does TV Advertising affect your PPC campaign?

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Here at Euston Digital we have found that an effective and efficient return on on investment can be achieved by running a Pay Per Click AdWords campaign in conjunction with a TV ad campaign.

The mediums work in tandem – TV advertising drives people to search online, and online adverts can raise receptiveness to TV advertising. And if you get it right, then 1+1 can often come to more than 2.

But there are a few things that you need to do to make sure your PPC campaign is capitalising on your TV Ad spend.

Budget
A basic one this, but TV ads can hugely boost both your brand searches, and general searches in the market advertised. You need to make sure your daily caps are set way in excess of any theoretical limit. It would be the worst possible situation for your TV spend to drive people to Google, only to find that the user couldn’t find your site

Use all search engines
PPC specialists tend to put all their effort into Google and give Yahoo, Bing and others require token attention. But the difference with TV adverts is that they tend to make less experienced users search online. And less experienced users are more likely to use search engines other than Google.

Position
It goes without saying that you need to make sure that you are in position 1 across all your brand terms. Many companies survive by picking up the search tidbits left by big spending competitors. A large advertising campaign will drive brand searches: others will try to capitalise on the users’ lack of experience by grabbing their attention high up in the SERPs.

Bidding strategy
Now is the time to be more flexible with your CPA targets and to get more aggressive on generic search terms. Your television ad spend will drive general searches in your market; its reassuring for searchers to find your ads at the top of the SERPs as well as on television. It makes them more likely to buy from you. Its worth raising your CPA targets in the short term to grab as much market share as possible.

Message: Be Official
To start with you need to make your brand name really stands out in the ad copy, so that users are sure that the company they saw on the TV is the same one that they’ve found on Google. Put the brand name in the headline of your ad, and make sure that you use official ‘TM’ signs to add a stamp of authority.

Message: Use your strapline
If your TV campaign has a strapline, then repeat that in the final sentence of your ad. It makes sure that users get the a consistent take-away from all your advertising. Again this adds reassurance.

Message: Try to be tailored
Continue to test tailored headlines. It might be that your TV advert does not have strong brand recollection; you need to continue to make sure your adverts reflect the terms that users are searching for.

Create a ‘product + TV’ ad group
If they can’t remember your company name, users will often search for you product + TV, in the hope that Google can find the people who have advertising on TV. For these keywords, it makes sense to create a dedicated ad group and to include a ‘As seen on TV’ message in your advert.

Use keywords from your Strapline
Some users will not be able to remember your company name, but may well search using your strapline. Make sure that you’re bidding on these keywords and consider them as ‘brand’ traffic.

Summary
TV advertising in conjunction with a PPC campaign can deliver strong ROI. But to make sure that you get the most from both, your PPC campaign needs to cover a lot more bases. For help on how Euston Digital can boost the returns from your Pay Per Click Internet marketing, get in touch.

Any comments, please leave them below.

Tags: PPC, tv advertising
Posted in PPC | 1 Comment »

Searches up, clicks down

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Some research by Comscore, an online traffic measurement company, came out last week. It was covered in some depth over on Techcrunch.

The research is based on US traffic, but it applies here too.

Comscore have basically found that whilst the number of searches rose last year by 68%, the number of clicks on search advertisements went up by just 18%.

Here’s a graph that shows it all:

Comscore are attributing the relative decline in clicks compared to searches to the increasing length of search queries. They say that as the number of 3, 4 or 5 word searches increases, adverts are less likely to appear because advertisers are less like to have those word combinations in their AdWords account.

Comscore say: “And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.”

Techcrunch think that this doesn’t explain it enough. They reckon that clicks on adverts have declined because many US advertisers have reduced or stopped their AdWords campaigns.

They say: “Sharper Image, Wickes Furniture, Levitz, Foot Locker, Wilson’s Leather, Ann Taylor, Zales, Mervyn’s, Macy’s, Circuit City and a ton of other retailers are either shutting down entirely or closing lots of stores… All of these companies used to spend tons of money on paid search ads. Those budgets don’t exist any more.”

Another idea is that as Google gets better at displaying more relevant results pages (SERPs), maybe users are less drawn to the sponsored AdWords ads because they find what they want in the organic listings. I haven’t got any evidence for that, it just seems like logical conclusion.

Whatever the reason, once again its a good opportunity for your to get your website to the top of the SERPs. Make sure you are ranking highly for the specific search phrases that people will use that are relevant to your website.

Do you find yourself clicking less on ads these days? Or have you never done so? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: PPC
Posted in PPC, Search Engines | No Comments »