Maintaining your Ad Campaign - #seopodcast 179

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. Hi, I'm Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you guys for tuning in to the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. We always like to stress that is because of you. You. You right there, you who just logged on. Appreciate you tuning in. As we say here in Texas, all y'all. As always, there is a tip from a previous podcast. Just so you know, this podcast is number 179. 179. The number just seems to keep getting bigger. Yeah. It'll be 180 next week. Wow. The tip is, your SEO strategy should focus on more than one keyword. Yeah, you definitely want to make sure when you're optimizing, when you're strategizing for what your SEO campaign is going to be and how it's going to be executed, include more than one phrase. Frankly, you should use a series of the same phrase in different variations, especially if you provide a service and that's your primary method of generating revenue. If your site is maybe an e-commerce site and you sell different products, then of course, adjust your SEO keyword strategy accordingly. You may need to include like regional terms, suburbs, actual city towns, whatever. You may want to include services that your product you sell is used for, right, as secondary key phrases to help your content rank. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is, Don't be a deuce. If you can, right now, pick up some sort of electrical device that has the shape of a phone. This part of the program is brought to you by Google Nexus. And Google Nexus would recommend that you tweet the following. Hashtag SEO podcast. Make sure it is 179. Be sure to tag us at eWebStyle so we can link up and network and have all of that fun. As always, we'd like to mention, if you get something good, positive out of this podcast, please do us a very

small favor. One of them has only three steps. Go on to iTunes, write a review, create an account, and then write a review. There you go. I almost missed one. And if you choose to, send us an email. You can email us at podcast at e-wolfstyle.com. And send that to us. Let us know that you're actually, there's somebody right now who's tweeting. Probably should turn the volume off. So go ahead and send us an email. Let us know that you wrote a review on iTunes, and we will give you a punch in the face. And that's a good thing. That is a good thing. We just got to make sure that's clear. The other thing that you could do for us is you could go to e-webstyle.com slash gplus or slash gplus or slash google plus or slash google plus. That will, of course, forward you to our gplus account. Of course. Or Google Plus account. I think it's just a gplus account, right? Gplus, yeah. And leave us a review when you get there. Tell us what you learned. Matter of fact, do this for me. You mentioned which podcast you listened to. And tell me what you thought about it. Please. Hey, we got a couple of reviews. One almost brought a tear to my eye. Not a tattoo, but a tear to my eye. This one, the title is only two stars, which is actually not bad for the complaint. The title says, Poor Sound Quality. This is by Draze84. It says, The sound quality was unlistenable. Yeah. Is that a word? Unlistenable. Yeah. I don't think I can say that. Got to get that worked out. We agree. We're working it out. Working on it. Hopefully this sounds right. I mean, you notice the little contraption that's clipped to the collar on my shirt should be improving that sound quality. So, yeah, we actually are aware that one or two of our podcasts after we got the lapels actually got worse. So, we're pretty confident that we've got that fixed. So,

if not, let us know. Which one was you listening to? Yeah. Yeah. So, if it's bad, let us know. We are aware that some are out there that aren't good. Frankly, we're not going to go back and record them. We don't have that kind of time. And we're going to end on a positive note. This is a five-star great SEO podcast. This is by Bill Getwick. Now, Bill has done what we really appreciate our podcast listeners to do. He has hit us up on Facebook with some positive comments. He has gotten on to G Plus and written a review. Hit us up on Twitter. Hit us up on Twitter a number of times. And now he's actually written a review on iTunes. And this goes, if you want to complain about sound quality, go and there's a little misspell here. Probably submitted on his phone or something. But we'll go with, go listen to music. If you want to stay on top of the ever-changing SEO landscape, then come listen to these guys. I've listened to about 80 of the podcasts so far. It has become part of what I look forward to in my day. Chris and Chuck know their stuff. I follow this stuff to, and can assure you, they have their finger on the pulse of the internet marketing world. Putts in the face. Patoof. Uppercut. Patoof. Right hook. Left hook. Smack. Don't hit the iPhone. iPad. Come on. You've got to hurt, but take the picture. Oh, thank you, sir. So, thank you, Mr. Gelwick. We really appreciate your effort. Now let's get into a little bit of news. Good. We got that up. You know, I'm just going to throw that one away. Kicking the scene. You almost got it. I know. All right. So, a little bit of news. I thought this was cool. Samsung. I've got a Samsung Galaxy S2. We've got an S3 here at the office somewhere. Actually, maybe even two. Two S3s in the office. They've come out with a rugged Galaxy phone. Right? One

you can drop and stuff. Yeah, because Nick broke his first drop. Yeah, first drop, first week, we think. We all shed a little tear for Nick. Yeah, I feel bad. We saw that. That's just not right. So, this one is apparently a little more droppable, and you can actually put it in three feet of water, up to three feet of water, for 30 minutes. So, wouldn't it just be cool? You're like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Well, that would just be weird. I'm calling you underwater. What if you head over to a duck pond, and you see some fish, and you drop your phone in the water and take a picture? That'd be kind of cool. What about those rare instances when you actually see a mermaid? Right? You can't take a picture with a regular phone. You need a rugged GS3. Hey, Galaxy, if you want to hire me as your spokesperson. You sold me on it. Shout out to me. You almost made me believe I could might see a mermaid. With the Galaxy Rugged 5, you can see mermaids. All right. I'm not really pleased with this. Apparently, as of this Saturday, unauthorized unlocking of cell phones is illegal. Yeah. That just sucks. Yeah. So, now they can't just send you a threatening letter. They can actually prosecute you. They can actually prosecute you. I didn't mention the penalties. I'm assuming that that wasn't covered because the penalties are few, like 50 bucks. Yeah. Like, what you going to do? And how do they get caught? One last little piece of news, and then we'll get on how you can stalk us, haunt us, and chase us. Please don't haunt us. Bill, this is a little article. Bill Gates' kids, at least he claims, have never asked for Apple products. Bill is lying. Bill is straight up lying. They don't see you as Mr. Microsoft. They see you as dad. And they see all their other friends with Apple devices, a lot of them that work a lot better, they're

asking for them. Yeah. And if they're not, then you have some sort of domineering presence in your household that scares them. Yeah, maybe your house is branded, you know, Microsoft or Windows and so. Or maybe you slip them an iPhone with a Microsoft logo on it. And so they really have never asked for an Apple product. All right, we really like it when you stalk us and chase us and find us, and you can do those things by going to facebook.com slash eWebStyle, twitter.com slash eWebStyle, youtube.com slash eWebStyle. And again, if you want to give us some content, ask us a question, you can do that either on our Facebook page, which we just mentioned, or send us an email, podcast at e-webStyle.com. And that is the potatoes of our podcast. Time to get into the meat. So last week, if anybody tuned in to SEO Podcast 178, we talked about some SEO fundamentals and things you could do. We talked about keyword strategy more importantly. So today, I wanted to go into some PPC details. I know that most of our listeners are also agencies, and so this is a good time to drop that referral info. Remember, if you're an SEO company and you've got some clients that maybe are in a competitive industry that you're not really comfortable taking on, send them our direction. We actually have at the bottom of our webpage, e-webStyle.com, is a link to our referral program, and you could get compensated for sending us that referral. Yeah, so back to PPC now. So what I wanted to do was present some information to help any of those agencies or people who are managing a pay-per-click campaign, let's say through AdWords, with a low budget. Right? So anytime your budget is low, but you're maybe in an industry or a service that's high competition, then how you manage that budget and how you structure that campaign is key to the success of it. And so I've got a few tips. Pulled this from Search Engine Land. My guy,

Matt Lawson, wrote it. Pretty good information in here. And these are actually kind of default things we do anyway when managing a PPC campaign. Number one, adjust your ad scheduling. So, you know, AdWords, and we'll use that as our, you know, I could go in the ad center, which I'm going to get off my soapbox. So back to AdWords, adjust your ad scheduling. You didn't even get on. That was a good move. Yeah. Fake. Soapbox, no. Your ad scheduling is essentially when your ads are being shown, right? And so the one mistake a lot of people tend to make is they'll add budget, they'll add keywords, they'll create these ads, and then they'll go live with it. And their ads will show either all day. And if you have a small budget, then that means sporadically, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night. Or they may have it switch to show, run through the budget quickly and show ads as fast as possible. And then by lunchtime, your budget's depleted, and now your ads don't show for the rest of the day. Instead, look at your sales process. Figure out when is your peak time to close deals, especially like if your ad's a phone call driven, then run your ads from, you know, 9 to 3, right? When you're most, when you're there to probably take that phone call. If you notice that you get tons of conversions or product sales overnight, then run your ads overnight, and not during the day when people are kind of window shopping. So take advantage of the ad scheduling feature. As an example, if you were, say you wanted to have a PPC campaign for, I don't know, emergency SEO services, clearly you would want to run that after hours. Because during regular time, you can just pick up the phone and call us. Let's use emergency plumber. You want to run that emergency plumber campaign after hours. Yeah, because that's when it's an emergency. So number two, add negatives to block irrelevant

or unwanted traffic. This is key. And the key to really managing negatives correctly is to do it in conjunction with match types. So, for example, you can go with an exact match, you know, emergency plumber, using that same example, and only show for emergency plumber. The problem is, if you happen to run that same ad on, let's say, broad match, then you may get emergency plumber blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah has nothing to do with your company. And so you either need to go exact match or make blah, blah, blah a negative. As an example, blah, blah, blah could be another company name. Exactly. Right, emergency plumber, you know, ABC plumbing, and you're CDF plumbing. So, clearly, that's a negative word that you probably don't want to go after. They're looking for that company. Some people bid on company names, but, yeah, just do your research and figure out if that's the best conversion for you. Take advantage of the negatives. And my personal tip, which is not on the paper, is block them at the campaign level because that way you don't miss out on any other terms. Now, if you have a huge, humongous negative list, then do it at the ad group level because it makes sense to be more granular. Number three. That sounded really complex. It sounded complex? So, you can do it at a campaign level, right? Your campaign has emergency plumber, water heater repair, and bathroom remodeling, all in that campaign. You can create negatives, and those same negatives would apply to all of those ad groups, or you can apply negatives to each one of the ad groups. Because, depending on how your campaign is set, make the best decision on how your negatives should go. That makes sense. Yeah, overall negative for the entire thing. For instance, if you want to get rid of ABC Plumber, then you would want to do that at the campaign level. Exactly. If you wanted to get rid of some other more granular term, maybe you don't need

to get rid of it in other of those campaigns, of those ad groups. Interesting. Number three, shift your campaign budgets around. So, that's like using that same example. Let's say bathroom remodeler is really bringing in nice conversions. You're getting leads from it. You're getting phone calls, and you're closing a couple, but it's spending more. And then you have your other campaign, emergency water heater or emergency plumbing repair, and it's spending money, too, but it's not really converting. Pay attention to that. Don't just let it run. Pause it. As a matter of fact, we made it with a client today talking about pause it and shift that money towards working, and then reanalyze. Now that you've shifted it towards working, go back to the first step. You can make it work better by probably adjusting the ad scheduling or adding some negatives and things like that. So, it's okay to shift money around to different campaigns. I'll take it a step further and say it's okay to do it on different platforms. So, you know, Bing, for example, may be costing a lower click, and you may be getting lower traffic, but you may be getting higher conversions there. That Bing searcher may just be in more of a purchasing decision than the person from Google. If that's the case, then shift those funds to Bing and start working in Bing to figure out how you can get more traffic there. In general, we do recommend shifting to Bing because the cost per click is lower, and we normally argue, despite the example, which is still valid, we normally argue that it's the same search traffic, so why not pay less for the clicks? But, yeah, it's still valid to know that there's a difference. You know, I was also thinking, you mentioned shift money as opposed to drop a campaign. And maybe if you, excuse me, an ad group, so maybe you're running a couple ad groups, and you see that one of them is running a much more efficient, you're getting a better close

ratio on actual business, not just people getting to your site. Then your tendency is to shut off the others and put those on, and that may be okay, but you should periodically bring them back on because people's search habits or the way they search can change over time. For instance, you know, our podcast used to be just the internet marketing podcast, and then we realized more people searched for SEO, so we added SEO. And then we realized that it's actually both. It's actually shifted back, so we just included both in those terms. So if the search environment is changing from the user's perspective, you may have all your money in the ad group that's currently no longer the most valuable one. So turn it back on. Or even check your ads, right? Ads can go stale. So you may have a campaign that's been running smoothly and effectively. It's spending okay. You're getting leads, but you're constantly showing the same ad, right? Remix your ads. Do some A&B testing because that could improve. Wicca, wicca, wicca. Yeah. Do that. Remix the ad. No, that's what that was. We said wicca, wicca. Wikipedia. Next. Just moving on. Nothing to see here. Okay. So number four says confirm a standard campaign delivery method. I think in simple terms what he's saying is come with something kind of consistent in regards to your strategy. So, for example, with paid search, if you're going to do display network and you're only going to use it for remarketing, then do display network and only use it for remarketing. But test it, not saying it's not okay to do something different, but you don't want to do a lot of display, a lot of remarketing, a lot of Google search network, a lot of search partners and all this other stuff. And you're not gathering enough data to figure out what's exactly working. So make sure if you're going to do those things, track them with dates, with times, take notes on the things you've changed, and then, you know, rinse

and repeat and review your data to figure out which one of those strategies work the best for you. I like number five. Number five is utilize device targeting. So AdWords gives you the option to target devices, right? So I can make these ads only show up on desktop and laptops or only show up on mobile phones or only show up on tablets, frankly, only show up on iPod tablets or only show up on Android tablets. I mean, you have that sort of functionality. And so if your service, let's say we had a client does a windshield repair, if you're doing windshield repair, it's key that you make sure your ads showing up on mobile devices because anybody searching for a windshield repair, likely just happened, and now they need that windshield repair, they're probably mobile, they're probably willing to make a decision right then. Also keep in mind that, first off, I read this stat earlier this morning, 25% of searches are not coming from a mobile device. Yeah. That's just going to keep growing. One out of four searches happen from a mobile device. So if you have a product, make sure you're targeting mobile devices, especially if that transaction can happen right there. Take advantage of that. Number six, leverage location targeting. This is key. One of the things this article doesn't talk about, which I'll say right now, is make sure your analytics and everything is set up because that's the only way to really know what location you should be targeting. Right? If you're looking at analytics and you're seeing you have your conversion tracking set up, like use all of the tools available, and you're seeing that you have high conversions in New York, right, and lower conversions in Texas, or even frankly you have higher conversions on an iPad in New York and lower conversions on an iPad in Texas, then take advantage of the tools and target New York, only iPad, and go back to step forward, shift that budget there, and then rinse and repeat and see

how that goes. So take advantage of the location. We're actually in the process of doing exactly that, what you described, and not particularly iPad-related, with a client that we met with this morning. So, yeah. And last but not least, adjust your network settings. So, like I was saying earlier, you have a display network, you have Google search network, then you can only do, you can have it so it only shows on google.com. So take advantage of which networks tend to work for you. In analytics, you can go and see where that traffic came from, so you'll know which ad it came from, and since it's your campaign, you'll know where you ran those ads at. And that's how you can determine which network you should be using, which one you should be focusing on, and which one you should not. Just because it's not working in a specific network doesn't mean you shouldn't use it, it just means you're probably using it the wrong way. For example, if you're using display network and you're spending your budget fairly fast probably, and you're not getting any leads or conversions from it, then you're probably using display network wrong. Instead, use display network for, let's say, remarketing, right? And so that way you're sending traffic, you're sending people to your site who've already visited your site before. And so now they're more likely to convert this time, you're still using display network, but at a better usage for your campaign. So that was it, optimization tips for a low-budget PPC account. I'll post this on Facebook, and you guys hit us up, tell me what you think. Excellent. I just wanted to, we got a tweet here, which was, learning at the feet of the SEO masters. You've got to love that. The feet of the SEO. Yeah, that's awesome. So you guys go out and follow at your underscore world underscore pro. Oh, AT. Yeah. All right, this is the end of podcast. I think we covered everything. Seems like it was really fast. Oh, cataclysm.

Oh, we got, ooh, we forgot to do that in the beginning. So now is the portion of the podcast where we do the algorithm cataclysm. So, yeah, I mean, typical, you saw that? That was awesome. So typical, typical algorithm change. This one happened the other day, January 22nd, another panda refresh. And so, according to what I read on the Google blog, it affected 1.8 of searches worldwide. So that was January 22nd, like three days ago? Mm-hmm. We saw a pop at, like, one of our sites. Our site, SEO Houston, is up position three now. So, yeah, we're doing something right. We didn't get pooped on by Panda. All right. So you guys have been listening to the most popular Internet and SEO podcast on iTunes. Yeah, we see it. Again, that is because of all y'all. Thank you so much. Remember, do us that little favor. Go on to iTunes, write a review. Go to our G Plus account, write a review. We really appreciate that. We'll give you a punch in the face, which is a very good thing. And this wraps up podcast number 179. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.