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In deciding what position to show your ad and how much to charge you per click the Google AdWords system looks at two aspects; firstly the maximum cost per click you’re willing to pay for the keyword and the keyword’s quality score. What is quality score? It’s a scoring system that AdWords utilises to gauge the success and relevance of your keywords. Your keyword’s quality scores can be shown by revealing the quality score column in your AdWords account, check the help section for details.

The components that make up quality score (for search advertising) include the following:

Clickthrough rate (CTR): The overall, ad group and the specific keyword’s past CTR plays a large role in the quality score calculation. Well focused ad groups and ads will help you improve your clickthrough rate and quality score.

Landing page: AdWords will evaluate the quality of your landing page, looking at optimisation, relevancy, usability and navigation. Pay attention to your site or get us to optimise it for you. This will improve your quality score, bring your costs down and improve your positions.

Keyword relevance: How relevant are the keywords you’ve chosen to the ads you have created. Once again focus your ad groups and ads.

Geographic performance: The success of your account in the regions you are targeting.

By paying attention to all these components you will ensure a maximum quality score, the benefits are well worth the work.

In the next mail we’ll discuss an alternative to Google AdWords.

If you’d like some help with it all please consider one of our internet marketing packages.

Monday, 16 April 2012 07:23

Google AdWords Basics - Negative Keywords

Written by Dr Peter Fish

The Google AdWords system will show your ads for any searches it thinks are related to your list of keywords, sometimes this can be a good thing as it expands your catch, yet sometimes it can eat away unnecessarily at your budget. For instance if you’re selling a newspaper ads and you have the term “newspaper ads” in one of your ad groups Google will definitely trigger your ad for the search “Japanese newspaper ads”. You can see how this can waste your budget if you have nothing to do with anything Japanese.

By clicking through to the keywords tab under your campaigns you can add and manage negative keywords by clicking the “Negative Keywords” link at the bottom of the screen. Two options are offered; ad group level or campaign level. Normally the negative keywords can be applied across your campaigns, but give it some thought before adding them.

We suggest spending some time creating a list of all the keywords you would like to exclude from your campaigns and add them. Review these often and keep them up to date.

Short and sweet, but powerful.

As always, if you’d like some help with it all please consider one of our internet marketing packages

Friday, 13 April 2012 06:28

Google AdWords Basics - Designing Your Ads

Written by Dr Peter Fish

In our last post we discussed a few tips on choosing your search terms. Today we’ll run over the basics of designing ads that not only perform, but pre-select quality visitors. This will result in a lower average cost per click and more returns in the long run.

Focus: Make sure your ad focuses on the area that the associated ad group focuses, by keeping it tight and tidy you will ensure a higher click through rate.

Rules: Adhere to the punctuation guidelines that AdWords stipulates; review these in order to get the most out of your campaigns.

Qualify your clicks: If your target market is price sensitive include the price in the ad; “Priced from only R##!” Or even the reverse, if you offer high-end products or services include the price to dissuade bargain hunters from clicking and wasting your budget. Include the important info on you offering; is it based in a specific area etc?

Call-to-action: Make sure your ad contains a call-to-action driving your visitor to convert once they are on your site. “Enquire now to find out more about our Summer Special!”, “Call today..”, “Sign up now…” etc.

Display URL: Customise your display URL to sneak a traffic boost. “yourdomain/Summer-Special”. Google only forces you to display the same base URL as your site, thereafter it allows you to add a snippet as you please.

Trial-and–error: As mentioned in a previous mail, always add multiple ads per ad group, slight variations might make a difference. Review these often, you’ll be surprised how one variation will outperform another.

Dynamic Keywords: Look up more info on these in the AdWords help section if you’re interested, but you can set up sections of your ad to utilise the triggered keyword, if used properly they can drive even more clicks.

Apply these tips and you’ll see the results creeping in! In the post mail we’ll discuss the use of negative keywords.

If you’d like some help with it all please consider one of our internet marketing packages.

Tuesday, 10 April 2012 08:33

Google AdWords Basics - Choosing Your Keywords

Written by Dr Peter Fish

In this entry we’ll cover some tips for focusing your keyphrase choices.

Your targeted keyphrases are an important decision and before dedicating a lot of time and effort to it we suggest considering the following two simple, yet important aspects:

Your offering: Your targeted keyphrase should be very well aligned with the specifics of your offering. It’s pointless to target the word “advertising” if your service focuses on “newspaper advertising”. There multiple reasons for this guidance; firstly the broader term is far more competitive and will cost you a arm and a leg, secondly the quality of visitor with the second more specific keyword will be better as the searcher is definitely looking for your services.

Location:
Geo-targeting is highly important and can bring good results. Incorporate the geographic location to your keyphrase, if you supply locally add “South Africa”, if your target market is more focused to a province, city or suburb add those, for example “newspaper advertising rivonia”.

These are two simple aspects that will help you hone in on your niche target market. Crafting your targeted keyphrases intelligently can yield great returns and are a very important aspect.

For those of you who want to delve a bit deeper, have a look at the different keyword match types in the AdWords help section – these can be complex, but they reduce AdWords diffuse keyword matching.

If you’d like some help with it all please consider one of our internet marketing packages.
Wednesday, 04 April 2012 10:35

Google AdWords Basics - Ad Groups & Campaigns

Written by Dr Peter Fish

If you'd like to set up a Google AdWords account and you need a little help, we've prepared a few tips and explanations that should increase your success.

Google AdWords has two hierarchy levels; campaigns and ad groups, here's a quick breakdown of the important settings for each.

Campaing Level:

Localization: You can choose what geographical area you would like your ads to show, this can be very specific, down to a city or even a suburb or broad to a country or a group of countries. Think about where your target market searches from.

Budget: A budget can be set for each campaign, give some thought to how you would like to split your AdWords budget when you set up your campaigns.

Ad Group Level:

Avg. cost per click: Avg. CPC needs to be decided, yet this can be edited on an individual keyword level as well.

Ads: For each ad group you need to set up the actual advert. We suggest you set up a few ads per ad group, AdWords will initially display all of them, yet it will eventually and automatically tend towards the ad with the highest click through rate.

Landing page: Carefully select the landing page for each ad group; keep the visitor in the area they have searched. It can be very frustrating to arrive on a page and not immediately see what they are looking for.

Keep your ad groups tight; focusing on one area of your services or products with a small and similar list of search terms.

If you’d like some help with it all please consider one of our internet marketing packages.

Monday, 07 November 2011 06:47

How to Create Transition Effects using CSS3

Written by Chris Jacoby

By using the latest version of web browsers, such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer, you always get little enhancements and always have the latest technology available. One of these technologies includes CSS3 capabilities.

CSS3 is the new kid on the block in the web design world and has mostly been around since 2009. It offers exciting new possibilities to create an impact with your designs, allowing you to use more diverse style sheets for a variety of occasions and lots more.

One of the CSS3 capabilities is transitions. CSS3 transitions are effects that let an element gradually change from one style to another.

Monday, 31 October 2011 05:36

Wiredoo-The Relational Search Engine

Written by Alexi Vontas
Recently at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, an unlikely speaker took the podium to announce a new search engine he is launching. The 1980’s rapper MC Hammer announced that in the next few weeks his team of developers would be unveiling the latest in search engine technology that has been 2 years in the making.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011 06:47

The threat to your profile is REAL

Written by Thom Henderson

We are all worried about our own personal security yet we hardly take any notice of it when we are on Facebook. There are many features to make your account more secure yet we ignore these thinking that it just won’t happen to me. Well it will and it is more common than you thing. Let’s go through some of the latest updates to Facebooks security systems.

Microsoft Pushes deeper into Search

The battle of the search engines continues with more functionality piggy backing on the Google +1 feature. The Bing search engine is making the search results more relevant to the user considering his or her Likes on Facebook.likethumb_75x67
Monday, 16 May 2011 13:03

Microsoft Buys Skype for $8 Billion

Written by Thom Henderson
The property on the web fetches the highest prices these days. Donald Trumps era is evaporating as the number of properties dwindles and declines in price. Online websites can turn over huge amounts of traffic and we can safely say, will never die. Only be reincarnated with every development of the internet. Online property doesn't only include domains, but the software we are using. Your messenger client and your email client and other interfacing tools are part and parcel of the web experience. So why is Microsoft buying Skype?microsoft-skype_125x95
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