Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

It is a fact that when I am searching for any number of random products or services on the internet - those things where it doesn’t matter if the product is shipped from my hometown, across the country, or even in a different country - I tend to pay attention to those ads that are geospecific to me. I give them a second look, even if they don’t have the best PPC placement in the bunch of ads. I notice them because their use of geolocation jumps out at me.

First, consumers are driven by price, especially when looking at buying a product. But there is still the mentality of “support the little guy” and “support the local guy” and the desire to buy locally rather than from “big box” or “multi-national corporation”. Then there is consumer confidence and the feeling of value and service one gets from a local company versus a large corporate company. So if you are competitive on price - or even slightly higher - you can actually increase conversions by giving potential visitors the idea you are local, simply by using geolocation targeting in your ad copy.

Let’s use Seattle as an example. Now, first off, you don’t want to actually lie and tell people you are located in or shipping from Seattle, unless you really are. But there are many ways you can use to imply your service is targeting those in the Seattle area, which can then be replicated across many other cities and states. You could make your url seattle.greenwidgets.com. Your description could mention something about express or free “shipping to Seattle.” Or if your product is somehow customized for Seattle, you can use that in your description too.

That said, don’t go overboard You don’t need to be repititious and mention Seattle four times in a single PPC advertisement because not only does it waste space you could be putting to better use with more keyword-laden ad copy, but it also starts to sound a bit spammy and unprofessional if you have repeated the same word over and over again - especially if it isn’t the most important “widget” keyword. Once in the description or title and once in the URL would be fine. Or if you really need that ad copy space, start off testing with Seattle just in the URL.

Now, once you have created your Seattle-specific ad copy, you need to geotarget that campaign so that it just shows to Seattle. It isn’t as effective to show your Seattle ad to someone in Boston, and it will very likely cause your CTR rate to drop dramatically… not to mention the problems a low CTR rate can bring with it in Google AdWords. So you should specifically geotarget Seattle, and perhaps some areas outside Seattle as well. Then remember which areas you target, especially if you create ads for other other Washington State cities, or if you then create a specific one that covers Washington State as a whole.

If you product or service is world-wide, even creating a country-specific ad would get the attention of users, especially outside of the United States. When I am searching for products, those that mention Canada specifically will always get my clicks first, because if they mention Canada, odds are pretty good that they either ship to Canada or are located in Canada. And that has just cut my work significantly from hunting and clicking on sites where the second page I view is their shipping information to see if they ship to Canada.

When you create your campaigns, you should also do A/B testing with a generic non-location-specific ad copy. In AdWords, Google will automatically auto-optimize your ad copy by doing testing in rotation and then showing the one that performs best, so you don’t need to do that work. You might discover that your Seattle specific ad rocks, but for some reason, those in Boston prefer the non-location one.

Not sure where to start? Start by testing a metro area local to you, or maybe pick 3 or 4 locations throughout your country to test. And Google has anything and everything to do with AdWords location targeting and there is also information on Yahoo Search Marketing Geo-targeting and Microsoft adCenter’s geolation targeting. Funny how all three call the same thing something different

Many people have the misconception that all PPC clicks are created equal when they come from the same source with the same keywords. But user intent plays a huge part in conversions, and if the people who click your ads are looky-loos without any intention of buying what your ad is advertising - at least not at the stage of the buying cycle they are in - then those clicks you have paid for don’t convert at all.

When you are selling a product that is not exclusive to your site, especially with high-ticket items or items that people tend to shop around for to find the best pricing, you end up paying for clicks from people who are just checking to see if you have the best price or not, and they don’t have the intention of buying from you right then… unless you were fortunate enough to be the last site they checked (which goes against regular PPC techniques where you want to be the first click) AND you had the best price. And obviously, you will have lower conversions and a low ROI (return on investment) when you do have a high percentage of non-buyers. Keep reading…

When doing keyword research it is important not to get in a rut and simply look at keyword research as “consumer” only… or worse, from the business point of view rather than the potential customer’s point of view. But smart keyword researchers realize there are many angles to consider when planning your keywords so that you don’t miss out on a particular segment which could equal clicks and conversions. And this is especially important because not all pay per click advertisers consider all the different angles that a searcher might search on, meaning less competition and lower cost per clicks for you. And if you are struggling to get more traffic on specific pay per click platforms, such as Microsoft adCenter, this can enable you to add some new keywords to your campaigns and get some additional traffic from any of these angles you weren’t previously bidding on.

Obviously, this shouldn’t take the place of your main keyword research, but to enhance what you currently have or to add to your repertoire when you do research for new campaigns.

So look at your keywords and market from some new angles, and see if you can’t enhance your pay per click campaigns by considering new or complimentary keywords from these angles: Keep reading…

There are always those people who are looking for things for free… even when you know that what they are looking for isn’t free (looking for a “Free iPod” or “Free XBox” anyone?). But when you are broad matching your PPC campaigns, you want to ensure you aren’t paying for ads when it is the freeloaders looking.

Here is a list of common freeloading keywords that you can add to your negative keyword list.

free
freebie
cheap
complimentary (and mispellings of the word)
“free download”
“free sample”
offers
comp
complimentary
gratis
pass

If you sell any kind of software or subscription service, you will also want to add these keywords to your negative keyword list too.

crack
crack
warez
cracked
keygen
keygen
torrent
password
p2p
hack
cheat

Now, if you are offering something for free, you need to take care that you aren’t actually losing traffic because if this, such as if you are offering a free consultation or free eBook!

Not sure if you are getting traffic from any of these freeloading keywords currently? If you are using dynamic keyword insertion in your URLs, you will be able to track the exact keywords people are using when they click your ad. So if you are selling iPods or XBoxes, you can see how many of those people were actually looking for free iPods or XBoxes, and not seriously looking to purchase one. People looking for freebies rarely convert, particularly when they are searching for these types of products.

Cheap can be a tricky one, because in some markets it can work well, but in others it is much harder to convert. If you are selling a service, for example, you don’t necessarily want to be known as “cheap”, especially if customers are paying a premium for your service… if you are good at what you do you can charge a premium for it that someone new or not as well known wouldn’t be able to do. If you are selling a product that you are pricing very competitively, this can be a good converting keyword for you. Remember people who are using the keyword “cheap” are usually shopping around for the best possible price and might hit 4 different advertisers looking for which one is the cheapest. So if you are the cheapest you have a much higher chance of converting… but if you aren’t, this is one you will want to either watch very carefully for conversions or add to your negative keyword list. Bottom line: “cheap” can be successful if whatever you are selling or offering is the cheapest, but people are looking for the cheapest above anything else you can offer and your conversion rate will reflect this.

Once you have selected which negative freebie keywords you need to add, simply cut and paste it into your PPC campaigns so that you will no longer be serving up broad match ads when they keywords searched for include those words.

Not all of us have hit the household status we all wish our company names had. So if you aren’t a Sony or a WalMart, have you ever considered the fact that someone might be trying to find your company or product and either spelling it wrong or searching for a slight variation because the person who recommended you pronounced it incorrectly? And even the best SEO can’t rank your site number one for every single variation of your company name or brand. The last thing you want to do is lose those potential customers to competitors, when they were trying to find your site in the first place.

If you are lucky, Google might direct some of those misspellings to your site via their “Did you mean: ____” hint that it shows above the results when they believe there is a good chance that someone made a typo. But you have to be pretty well known to have Google do that for all your potential misspellings and typos of your company name. Keep reading…

Sometimes I click on a Google ad when searching for something and run into a perfect example of a landing page that offers zero chance of converting, no matter how you slice or dice it. Usually it is an attrocious design or some sort of coding error that causes those 0% conversion landing pages to show up. Then you get the really, really bad 0% landing pages, the ones that not only won’t convert, but that also send those first-time visitors hitting the back button as quickly as humanly possible… because…. wait for it… the landing page is one that is threatening to report first-time visitors to the authorities with possible legal action being taken. The reason? The site is flagging completely legitimate clicks as fraudulent ones, and sending them off to a special landing page threatening legal action. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to shake the webmaster and say “What on earth were you thinking???”

Here is a perfect example of one of those landing pages (click for full-sized):

My friend sent this to me, wondering what she possibly could have done to get this kind of message accusing her of fraud after simply clicking a Google ad… because while those in the industry know what this means, Joe Surfer does not know what an “IP address” or what “fraudulent click activity” is, and instead focus on the part “reported to the proper authorities” and “legal action may be taken”. So of course, I think maybe there was a slow response and she inadvertantly double or triple clicked the ad. And since I am moving soon, I tried the same search: Victoria movers and clicked on the moveit.ca advertisement (that link is to the site’s homepage not a click through the ad), which happened to be the first on the list, sitting above the organic listings, being careful to only click it a single time. And sure enough, I was greeted with the same warning threatening me with legal action. Now, I have a static IP, and have had the same IP for eons. I have never searched for Victoria movers and have never seen the site before, yet I got this same warning message. The URL seems to automatically forward from http://www.moveit.ca/?cd=gle to http://www.moveit.ca/security.htm

Now, any click fraud detection system that is set to ship new users visiting a site for the first time off to a click fraud warning page is definitely flawed. I am on a fairly common Canadian ISP, so it is not an issue with multiple people from an obscure ISP possibly hitting the page multiple times. And with a static IP address, there shouldn’t be any issue with that tripping any click fraud detectors.

There are definitely lessons to be learned, especially for those pay per click advertisers who are concerned about click fraud and are using an automated solution to deal with it that might be too powerful or too outdated, either of which could be the problem in this case.

First, never send your pay per click traffic to a webpage threatening legal action unless you are 110% sure that person you are sending is truly engaged in click fraud, such as isolating a competitor’s IP address that seems to hit your site 5 times every morning at 9am and sending that one person off to that landing page. But when you threaten innocent surfers, you will discover that your seemingly low conversion rates in your Google AdWords pay per click campaigns are not because your landing page sucks or you have a high number of invalid clicks, it is simply because you are sending them to a page that is threatening them! Trust me, the vast majority of people really don’t like to be threatened, especially when they are in the role of customer! There are too many competitors out there vying for that customer to lose them this way. Remove the warning page and your conversions will go up since you won’t be alienating so many visitors from the very first page view. I can only imagine the stats for the number people who have landed on that threatening landing page in error.

Second, you are paying for the traffic through AdWords regardless of what landing page you send the visitor to… so you might as well send them to a page that has a chance of converting into a customer (which it likely would have done so with my friend) rather than having those people click the back button as quickly as they possibly can for the fear of having the authorities showing up!

Third, make sure if you use click fraud detection software that it isn’t wrongly flagging legitimate clicks. And likewise, ensure that your pay per click expert who is handing your campaigns actually knows what he/she is doing and is not sending people off to that threatening landing page in error (like is definitely the case in this instance!). When your click fraud detection software isn’t correctly identifying what is possibly invalid click activity, it will make applying for credits with Google, Yahoo & MSN much more difficult since there are so many legitimate clicks mixed in. In this case, I am guessing someone handling the detection software went and added a major Canadian ISP to the filter, and effectively blocked a huge % of Canadian web surfers, including a very high percentage of those who would be doing a search for “Victoria movers”.

Fourth, this could definitely cause issues with Google AdWords and the terms of service when you are not only sending visitors to an incorrect landing page, but also threatening those legitimate visitors with legal action. Not to mention the nasty things it can do to your quality score if the click fraud detection software sends the AdWords bot off to that threatening landing page too!

And fifth, remember that everything you present to a visitor makes an impression and doing something like this makes a big one, and not neccessarily the kind of impression most business want to make! As a result, my friend will not use MoveIt.ca to find a moving company, and neither will I. And I am open to suggestions for a good moving company in Victoria

Anyone else run across any AdWords/YSM/AdCenter ads that you know have zero chance of converting? Some of my favorite ads are the ones that were clearly done by people training others on creating AdWords ad, with “example” or “sample” used as the title and in the text, but with the company’s URL used because you know someone forgot to turn off the campaign after training was over

So, the majority of people who read my blog (if not all of them) know that the PPC in the title means Pay Per Click. But have you considered the use of acronyms, abbreviations and industry lingo in your own PPC campaigns?

SEO? ROI? NHL? PDA? RPG? B2B? Yes, we all use shorthand abbreviations when writing IMs today, but I have definitely noticed it creeping into YSM (yes, that is Yahoo Search Marketing) & AdWords campaigns quite frequently. But should you let it encroach on yours? While using acronyms and industry jargon can be perfectly acceptable in some situations, in other cases all you will achieve is confusing your potential visitor and handing them over to your competitor on a silver platter. So here are some things to keep in mind when using industry jargon and acronyms in your pay per click campaigns.

Keep reading…

It is still amazing to me the number of people who care most about what their AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing CTR is on their ads, while seemingly ignoring what is arguably the far more important - not to mention valuable - pay per click metric. Yes, CTR is valuable to know, but in reality, a higher CTR doesn’t necessarily equate to higher profits or sales.

Keep reading…

When you create the content on your landing page, it is important to consider not only the elements that go into your landing page design, but also consider the things that should be avoided. Yet time after time I come across landing pages – some which advertisers are paying premium prices per click to send traffic to – that seem to break many of the landing page rules and very likely result in a high loss of potential conversions.

So what are the things that should and shouldn’t be included on a landing page? Here are some tips on creating and maintaining a high converting landing page for both organic and paid search results. And as an added bonus, some of these also help with your AdWords quality score if you are having issues with it.

Keep reading…

When planning and researching your keywords to target for either pay per click advertising campaigns or on-page keyword focus within your content, most marketers don’t realize they are leaving a lot of potential keyword options on the table. And what’s more, these alternative keywords are often less expensive to purchase or less competitive to target in the search results for. Why is this? Because too many people take what keywords the various keyword tools give them to heart. There is a huge wealth of traffic to be gleaned by targeting variations of your top chosen keywords.

So what exactly do these “variations” refer to? It definitely goes far beyond the typical misspellings, which is what most people think of when considering alternative keywords. And while misspellings are a crucial part of your keyword variations, there are more areas to look at. Here is what they are and how you can use them to your advantage when creating keyword lists.

Keep reading…