The Google Grants programme has just celebrated its 10th birthday. Launched in April 2003, this scheme has evolved over the years and Google works with registered charities, providing them with grants to spend in Adwords. However, the number of charities that are actively using this suggests that the majority of UK charities are either overlooking the benefits of this, or are simply not aware of the scheme’s existence. This additional resource of up to $10,000 per month can make a huge difference to a charity’s marketing budgets and so although it can take several months for a grant application to be approved by Google, if you have not yet applied, it is definitely worth doing so here.

This grant does come with a number of restrictions, such as that the ads must only run on Google UK, links in the ads must only be to the pre-approved domain, the ads must be text only and not commercial, there must be no adverts on your own site such as Adsense and each bid must cost no more than $2.

The last criterion is a reasonably new update as Google increased this limit from $1 per click at the end of January. However, this increase in bids came with the announcement that all Grant funded adverts would now be featured underneath any self-funded company or charity adverts. So while this change may open your organisation up to being able to target keywords that were previously outside of this bid limit, sites are likely to have seen a decrease in traffic due to featuring lower down the listings.

However, with the changes that were announced to Adwords just a couple of weeks after this, PPC account managers have been given the opportunity to better manage these adverts. By upgrading to enhanced campaigns, you are now able to manage all devices in one campaign, manually adjust the bid for mobile ads and show call extensions on these mobile ads. This shift from legacy to enhanced campaigns is going to be enforced automatically by the end of June for any accounts that have not made the change themselves. Google have since released a tool that allows you to change campaigns in an account in bulk.

Beyond that, Grant accounts should largely be run in the same way as normal Adwords campaigns. These accounts should be maintained (if you do not work on your account over a 3 month period then Google will stop your funding), the accounts should be well structured and you will need to optimise the account to ensure that you are getting the most out of your spend. Ensure that the keywords that you target are relevant to your organisation and the pages that you are sending visitors to are also relevant and contain a call to action in order to get the best return from your spend.

If you are running a Google Grant account, we would love to know what impact have you noticed since these changes were implemented.

In conjunction with the launch of FocusON for PPC month, we are giving away a Google Chromebook to one lucky reader. Simply visit the PushON Prizes app over at the PushON Facebook page and follow the three simple steps to be in with a chance of winning. HINT: You may want to read FocusON: An Introduction to PPC Marketing first!

The post Are You Making The Most Out Of Your Google Grants Account? appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This month we’re beginning a new series of posts that we’re calling FocusON. Each month we’ll focus our posts on a different aspect of digital marketing, and we’re kicking off by talking about Pay Per Click advertising.

To celebrate the launch of FocusON, we’re giving away a Google Chromebook to one lucky reader. Simply visit the PushON Prizes app over at the PushON Facebook page and follow the three simple steps to be in with a chance of winning. HINT: You may want to read FocusON: An Introduction to PPC Marketing first!

Keep your eyes peeled on Facebook and Twitter for updates throughout the month, and don’t forget to share this great opportunity to be in with a chance of winning a Google Chromebook with your social chums!

The post Win A Google Chromebook with #PushONPrizes appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Pay per click (PPC) marketing is a catch-all term used to describe paid website promotion via a range of platforms, including search engines such as Google and Bing, social platforms such as Facebook, and advertising networks such as Google AdWords. Today we’ll be focussing on PPC search advertising, but we’ll be delving further into paid social advertising and ad networks here on the PushON blog throughout May.

An Introduction to PPC

PPC search marketing is distinct from organic search marketing in that a company can pay to directly promote their website within pay per click listings. While organic listings rely on thousands of factors when determining what website ranks where for which keyword, the positioning of paid listings (which can usually be found directly above and to the right of the organic results) can be influenced with greater immediacy. Broadly speaking, ad rank (i.e. how highly your ad appears above those of your competitors, for the same search term) is raised in line with the relevancy of the ad to the service it describes and to the page to which it points—and the amount paid for it to be placed.

Any company can set up a pay per click search campaign with relatively little difficulty, but it’s essential to understand how to manage and optimise your paid search campaign, in order to deliver the best possible return on investment.

The three major contenders for your PPC budgets are, as you might expect, Google, Bing and Yahoo. Bing and Yahoo are both managed from the same advertising platform, known as Ad Center, whilst pay per click ads at Google are managed from the much more popular AdWords platform. Google dominate the landscape thanks to a much larger user base than any of the competition, and, as such, campaigns run through Google are likely to produce higher levels of traffic, although not necessarily the highest levels of conversions and ROI. It’s worth trialling your campaigns across each network to see what works to create the best ROI for your site.

Setting Up Your Pay Per Click Campaign

In terms of an account set-up, it’s important to have an appropriate email address for your login purposes. To use Google as an example, if you intend to share your new AdWords account amongst other people, it wouldn’t be advisable to use your personal email address, since the AdWords account would then be linked to your Google Main and Google Plus accounts, etc. As is always the case, think of scalability.

Once you’ve signed up to an advertising platform, you’ll have to select your billing options, to pay the search engine for click spend. Options include invoicing and payment, manual payment when your notice that your balance is running low (you’ll need to be efficient and operate a good diary for this!), or automatic payment when your balance dips below a pre-set threshold. On the subject of budget, you can control your spend by setting daily limits on each of the campaigns that you build out. Whilst the advertising centre platforms are fallible and may well cut off some time after the daily limit has been exceeded (if it ever is), they do a pretty good job of turning things off and closing the wallet soon after the budget has been exceeded.

You’ll also need to obtain the unique advertiser tracking code from within your account, and paste this into the code on all of the pages of your website whose activity you wish to track. This is far easier than it sounds, as the steps are outlined within the platform.

The following diagram illustrates the basics of an account setup. The overall account is broken down into campaigns, in which are contained ad groups. The keywords and ads are then contained within these ad groups. Your destination URLs are the bread and butter of your data collection, as they track the user’s click through from the search engine, on your ad, and to your website. You can set destination URLs on either your ads or your keywords. You need only complete this step at one of these levels, and it needs to be consistent across the whole account.

It’s All About Relevancy!

As mentioned previously, the smart way to structure an account is to keep each keyword and each ad relevant to your product, service or offering. Google in particular will reward this relevance, over time, by affording you good levels of visibility in the paid space for less money. Another way to control spend is to make use of the different match types. Again, we’ll apply this to Google, as the match types are more profound with this advertising provider. The following is taken from the Google AdWords help Centre, and serves to outline the difference in match types:

It’s legitimate to set up accounts with the same keyword spread across different match types. It would, however, be advisable to gauge which of these performs after a month or so, and pause anything that is spending money without incremental gains i.e. conversions.

In terms of the amount that you pay per click, you can set a maximum CPC (cost pet click) per keyword, or you could set this at ad group level, to apply to all keywords within. We’d advise setting everything at keyword level, as this approach will enable you to tweak bids as and when enough time has elapsed for you to draw meaningful conclusions from the data that the account has amassed.

It is this point of data interpretation that sorts the winners from the losers in the paid search game. Optimise your keywords and ads based on their performance, and know what your own KPIs are in terms of cost per acquisition or order. In this way, PPC moves from behind its smokescreen to become the measured, controllable activity that it is.

The post FocusON: An introduction to Pay Per Click Search Advertising appeared first on PushON Ltd.

These Interest Lists are actually good news for advertisers as they will group people into broad categories which can be selected when setting up Facebook adverts. A lot of user interests are outdated and a lot of Facebook advertising budget is wasted. For instance five years ago someone may have been in the Parents (0-3) category and may still be seeing adverts related to baby milk. Moving forward I believe that Facebook should try and update user interests yearly or even every two years. By doing this more advertisers may be willing to invest more budget in Facebook advertising.

Having managed several Facebook advertising campaigns , I believe the results lie on two extremes. Half the visitors generated from Facebook will engage with the external site and the goal completion rate will be very good but on the other hand companies can see a high bounce rate from the social network. This is due to many reasons:

• Users do not like to leave Facebook to go to an external site.
• The message is wrong in the advert and misleads users.
• The offer outlined in the ad text is not shown on the landing page

It is best practice when advertising on Facebook that the advert leads to a Facebook business page. Here Facebook can measure conversions which are called connections. It is a lot easier to Like, Want or Own something while still on Facebook rather than trawling around a website looking for products or information. From my experience when a user is transported to a Facebook brand page the engagement is greater and it is also a place where a company can supply exclusive discount codes which can be used on the site. By doing this you are enticing a user to visit the site with this unique code when they are done browsing Facebook. This takes the pressure and urgency away from the situation and gives the brand a cool appeal as if to say “Here you go, here’s a 20% off discount code, use it if you want, if not thanks for browsing our fan page”.

A real life example of the interaction levels can be seen below. Example 1 is an advertiser who led users to an external site and Example 2 is an advertiser who led users to their fan page.

Example 1

Example 2

As you can see the interaction levels in Example 2 are much higher than Example 1 therefore looking at these results it is a must that advertisers have a Facebook page when advertising on Facebook. If you have any questions or comments please just post underneath.

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Google Adwords

The Google Grants programme will give any organisation who hold a current and valid charity status $10,000 worth of advertising budget on Google Adwords completely free. This is an opportunity not to be missed whether you are a worldwide, national or local charity – the reach is endless. As a PPC Specialist it is great to see charities utilising this free budget provided by Google. I have been fortunate enough to manage a not for profit PPC account and I can’t help but feel a bit like Robin Hood. Taking from the rich to give to the poor. The Grants programme has some restrictions but can still prove to be a valuable source of donations:

• Maximum bid is $1
• Cannot advertise on the Google Display Network.

These restrictions are easily overcome as the target keyword list can be as big as you want. The only issue is with the $1 maximum CPC. A lot of the major charities self fund a lot of their campaigns and can bid anywhere up to £10 per click. This bid is determined by the lifetime value of the customer. For a user who signs up to donate regularly to a charity £10 is a low price to pay. Also if the account spends $9,500 during any 2 months then the non-profit organisation can apply for a $40,000 a month Google Grants account. This is huge for any charity giving a yearly budget of $480,000. Let’s break that down further and give a real life return on that spend. In this example we will speculate that the average cost per click is $0.50, the conversion rate is 5% (average for charity websites) and the average order value is £40. The yearly donation figures are:

• 48,000 donations
• £1,920,000 revenue

And remember the above figures will have been generated without the charity paying a penny, well not to Google anyway. To apply just visit this link and fill out the contact form. Google usually responds within a week or two with a decision on whether to accept you or not.

YouTube Advertising

Video is one of the most effectively used platforms for charities. It is easier to convey a certain situation or issue through video than any other medium and thus is why the majority of charities have YouTube channels. YouTube also offer a charity grant which has a lot of advertising benefits:

• There is an increased uploading capacity.
• Beneficiaries can benefit from call to action video overlays.
• Get a listing on the non profit channel page.

YouTube advertising is usually run and managed through Google Adwords. If YouTube was a search engine it would be the 2nd largest in the world and has immense reach. Using the video overlay feature means that advertisers can hit donors at exactly the right time.

The above grants are the only online charity grants that we utilise and I am sure that it won’t be long before Bing & Yahoo introduce a charity grant themselves. For more information on our management of charity accounts or to get involved just give us a buzz on 0844 967 0565. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

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This new feature allows PPC advertisers to view Adwords data in Analytics such as spend, click through rate, average cost per click, return on investment and margin. This report can be run at campaign, ad group and keyword level. From a reporting perspective this is a lot easier as PPC managers can find everything in the one place, will save a lot of time and eliminate the need for endless VLOOKUP’s in Excel matching revenue against spend.

The headings that are listed in the report appear in the screenshot below.

While this is a great tool for PPC managers it is also a very insightful tool to use for new business. It is often common that a potential client will give access to their Google Analytics but not their Adwords. This is probably due to the fact that there may be several companies pitching for their business and they do not want them to alter their keywords or account in Adwords. This is very frustrating as it was impossible to gauge spend figures and forecast accurately. With this feature an agency can see key metrics such as spend, average cpc and click through rate which will help in forecasting revenue figures for the potential client.

Does anyone think that they will use this report or still create custom reports?

The post New Clicks Feature in Google Analytics appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Reasons to avoid bidding on your competitors brand terms

• It can annoy your competitors, and you’re likely to receive a cross email/call asking you to stop.  It is however completely legal, and does not break any of Google’s policies as long as you are not ‘passing off’ or using trademarked terms in your ad text.
• It doesn’t always work – especially if your product has significant differences, has a higher price, or where brand loyalty is high.
• It can result in high bounce rates – especially if your adverts suggest you are the competitor that you’re bidding on (something to avoid). You need to work your adverts and landing pages hard to ensure you are giving the user a good experience.
• If your competitors notice it – they can also retaliate and start bidding on your brand.

Reasons to bid on your competitors brand terms

• You’re targeting people who have a specific interest in buying relevant products/services.
• Total cost, cost per click and subsequent cost per conversion is normally very low.
• You can achieve a good ROI with a small investment. This depends on the scale, volume and relevancy of the competitors.
• It can be good if your brand is not yet established. You can ride on the back of a competitors marketing activity/brand.
• You can exclude the area where you know their head office is to reduce the chances of your competitors noticing.

The post Pros and Cons of Competitor Brand Bidding In PPC appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Foursquare business pages

Foursquare have finally opened business pages to the masses. Previously, only the biggest of brands seemed to be allowed a business page that had to be created by Foursquare’s in-house development team. This move however should help open the location-based network to the rest of the business world.

More information about Foursquare business pages from Mashable.

Bing Webmaster Tools Update

Often overlooked and overshadowed, Bing’s webmaster tools offering has been given an update recently. The new look toolset consists of the usual account dashboard offering an overall view of site performance, and 3 tabs that give in depth detail of Bing views your site; crawl, index and traffic tabs.

More information about Bing Webmaster Tools Update from Ineedhits.

WordStream AdWords performance tool

PPC campaigns can be complicated, confusing and extremely tiresome. Any tool that helps to alleviate this stress, and give you more time to focus on driving results cost effectively is a life saver.

Once such tool has just launched; WordStream’s Adwords Performance Grader. It allows you to check your quality score, use of land pages and wasted spending among other things.

More information on WordStream AdWords performance tool from bnet.

MozCon 2011

MozCon 2011 was at the end of last month and was a massive hit. Luckily for those of us who didn’t get the chance go, Ken Colborn compiled a list of the top 6 highlights from the Seattle event.

More information on MozCon 2011 from Blastam.

SEO plugins for Excel

Continuing in the same vein, here is a site filled with great SEO plugins for Excel, ranging from one that finds available domain names to one that find duplicate content within spread sheets.

More information on SEO plugins for Excel from Niels Bosma.

SEOMoz image optimisation

Although an important part of on-site optimisation, image optimisation isn’t usually treated as such. However, Kasy Allen’s great post on SEOMoz showed the real importance of image optimisation, especially in food/recipe related images.

As well as showing the importance of image optimisation, she also explores the most important ranking factors for Google’s Image search.

More information on SEOMoz image optimisation.

Analytics reports

Everyone loves a useful tool, don’t they? Well here are 3 awesome tools to help reporting become more efficient, simple and focussed. There is one focussed on page efficiency analysis, one for visitor acquisition efficiency and one for paid search performance analysis.

More information on Analytics reports from Kaushik.

The post SEO Weekly Roundup #8 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Police.UK Launches & Fails – Well temporarily anyway. The release of Police.uk was greeted with great media hype and the day after its launch it experienced some serious downtime. For those of you who have not seen this it is a site that lets you see the number of crimes in your area. The break downs or categorisation of crimes are a little sketchy but it does make good use of maps. Defininetly worth 5 minutes of your time.

Website: http://www.police.uk/

Footer Link Practices – Michael Gray shares some great tips ways to build an effective footer. This is useful to both web developers and SEO’s and provides a nice overview. I personally like his use of the term ‘link brothel’ to describe sites that dump a large number of links within the footer. Nothing new here but worth a read.

Source: Building an Effective Footer

Site Re-Launch Checklist – Aaron provides a detailed breakdown of a website relaunch process. As SEO’s we know the trails and tribulations that relaunching a website can cause. Aaron has provided a nice list for which to refer back to.

Source: Website Relaunch Process

Corporate Link Building – There’s no real gems here but well worth a read. David shares his story on corporate link building.

Source: Corporate Link Building

Bing Apparently Copies Google, Yawn – This story has been raging on for little over a week now and is where Google accuses Bing of copying its search results. Google setup a low level test to see if the same results would appear in Bing. Some weeks later these did and to say Google is not best pleased would be an understatement. As you can imagine there has been a lot of accusations being thrown between the two parties.

Source: Is Bing Copying Google’s Results

Google Algorithm Update – As you can imagine this story got us slightly more exciting. It had been coming for a while but Matt Cutt’s announced that Google would be updating its algorithm to clamp down on sites that scrape or copy other sites content. There has been some interesting debate around this and it looks like article sites will be hit hard.

Source: Matt Cutts

The Benefits of Great Information Architecture – This is a post by Tony Adam (not the footballer, god help us) and provides a nice overview of information architecture and usability. This is particularly important on larger sites and is often more difficult than you think. Tony also uses a great example to describe the process.

Source: Benefits of Great Information Architecture

We hope you find these roundups useful and look forward to hearing from you.

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at there is a Wikipedia article about the journalist so clearly, if Wikipedia says he exists, he must do.

SERPs for Roger Boyes

But hang on, look to the right at the PPC ads. Oh dear. Ebay has “Feed your passion on Ebay.co.uk”, Play has “Roger Boyes books £9.99″ and my personal favourite “Roger Boyes at Amazon”

I guess there’s a serious point here as well that you’d better make sure that if you’re punting at terms you dont clearly understand by an automated process, you got some big risk

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