That has all changed. And that is great news for many e-commerce sites that sell branded items. If you are a reseller of goods that have a trademarked brand and if your landing pages give significant focus to the trademarked term, then most Google AdWords ads within the United States will now be approved to run on Google. Also, make sure the trademarked term is used in a text format on your website, as opposed to only flash, so Google can recognize the use of the trademarked term on your page.

The approval process for ads the contain trademarked terms is a separate process at Google AdWords. The ads are first approved to run for all other Google policies, and then they are checked so the use of the trademark and the landing page are in alignment with Google’s new trademark policy guidelines. This approval process may take a bit longer than the normal time you may have seen in the past for non-trademarked ads, so you will need to give Google AdWords ads containing trademarks a bit more time to show up on Google.

Also, you might notice that these trademark ads may show a status of “approved-limited.” This means that Google recognizes that the ad contains a trademarked term and that the advertiser was not given direct permission from the owner of the trademark to actually use it in Google pay per click ad copy. This does NOT mean that the ad will only show for a limited time or in limited regions, but it does mean that Google will check this ad continually to make sure it aligns with the new trademark policy. The content of your landing page will be constantly assessed by Google to make sure the trademark is still featured prominently, so be careful of any changes you make to your landing pages, especially after your trademark ads have been approved and are receiving click traffic.

This change is a real plus for anyone doing PPC management because we all know that if someone is searching for branded items, it certainly is nice to have that trademarked brand name in your ad. If I’m looking for Lexmark ink, I’m certainly more inclined to click an ad that has the Lexmark trademarked term in the ad, than on a generic ad that does not.

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The confidentiality of our clients is important so I am not revealing any names here, but I would like to share some actual numbers that we have seen here at JumpFly as a result of our efforts. I looked at some PPC advertising data samples from the first quarter of 2008 and compared them to the first quarter of 2009. Sure, I can make these numbers up, but it’s just much easier to show you the real numbers as they truthfully exist.

JumpFly Client #1

1st Quarter 2008 – 139 conversions at $351.55 each with a total spend of approx. $49,000.
1st Quarter 2009 – 295 conversions at $125.51 each with a total spend of approx. $37,000.

Yes, they spent about $12,000 dollars LESS but more than DOUBLED their number of conversions. True story.

JumpFly Client #2

1st Quarter 2008 – 205 conversions at $62.82 each with a total spend of approx. $21,000.
1st Quarter 2009 – 301 conversions at $32.47 each with a total spend of approx. $10,000.

Yes, they spent about $11,000 dollars LESS but increased conversions by nearly 100 more. True story.

JumpFly Client #3

1st Quarter 2008 – 252 conversions at $9.87 each with a total spend of approx. $2,500.
1st Quarter 2009 – 1,859 conversions at $5.91 each with a total spend of approx. $11,000.

Yes, the spend is greatly increased as we took their business to a whole new level, while bringing their conversion costs down. Huge sales growth with conversions growing over 1,500 compared to the same time period a year earlier. True story.

JumpFly Client #4

1st Quarter 2008 – 4,027 conversions at $9.04 each with a total spend of approx. $36,000.
1st Quarter 2009 – 5,204 conversions at $6.36 each with a total spend of approx. $33,000.

Yes, they spent about $3,000 LESS while growing conversions over 1,000 at a lower cost. True story.

And the numbers above don’t take into the account the time and worry these business owners took off their shoulders by outsourcing their PPC management.

I’m not saying that professional PPC management will produce the same results for every company, but very positive results certainly can come from having a professional pay per click management company like JumpFly assisting you along the way. During these tight economic times, can you afford not to?

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Here at JumpFly, we’ve been a bit hesitant to use Business.com because of some poor results in the past, coupled with the fact that they didn’t have their own simple-to-use conversion tracking system. I’m happy to report that situation has now changed on both fronts. I am currently working with a client who is now advertising on Business.com and we are seeing both a good volume of traffic as well as good quality traffic. Conversions are coming in on a daily basis, with a cost per conversion very similar to the results we are seeing from Google. All in all, it’s working well and we will definitely continue utilizing their PPC program. Their new conversion tracking is just as easy to implement as Google’s — just copy the code they provide and paste into the appropriate “thanks for your order” or “thanks for contacting us” confirmation page. That’s it. Then you’re off to the races.

Another feature that I absolutely love about Business.com’s PPC program is the way they have structured their ads. You can use up to 60 characters in title and 150 keywords in the description. Sure, short is sweet, but sometimes you really do want those extra words in there to really punch up your message. Another cool feature is the ability to use their Multilink functionality. You can use these other links to drive traffic deeper into your site. For example, let’s say you are a printing company and you are bidding on the keyword “printing company”. You can use the main link in the ad to drive traffic to your home page, but your ad can also display a sublink to your magazine printing page, your brochure printing page, and to your postcard printing page. That way, one ad can possibly drive traffic to five different pages on your site depending on the needs of your new potential customer. It is very cool.

If interested in learning more, contact a professional PPC management firm to assist you.

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Google AdWords Content Campaign Strategy

Step 1: Filter out the top performing keywords in your current Google AdWords Search campaign, putting the greatest emphasis on the keywords that are most relevant to the products you sell or most relevant to the services you provide.

Step 2: Individually type each term into a Google Search, using the standard Google search box you find at Google.com. For this example, we will use “golf shoes” as our keyword.

Step 3: Copy the Google URL that is generated in the address bar from the search. In this example, it would be –
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS259US259&q=golf+shoes&btnG=Search

Step 4: Using the Google Keyword Tool, make sure you have Website Content checked, then enter the URL above into the text box. Be sure to check the box labeled “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL.”

By following this process, Google analyzes the organic results, paid ads, and the sites being linked. You will then get a list of keywords that are grouped together by theme. You can then take these lists and create a Google AdWords Content campaign with a similar thematic structure.

Again, not the only way to create an AdWords Content campaign, but it is an interesting process to try and could generate some productive results for you to use as you see fit.

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could put your company name or logo in front of thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people and not have to pay much for it, if anything at all? Wouldn’t it be great if you could splash your company name or company logo across dozens, hundreds, even thousands of different websites? Wouldn’t it be great if you could build brand/business awareness and announce your existence to a broad spectrum of people who might very well be interesting in learning more about your company?

I’m hoping you are answering yes.

Wouldn’t it also be great if you could put the power of Google to work for you doing just this?

Still saying yes?

Okay, then it’s time for you to implement Image Ads in your Google AdWords campaigns. Using Image Ads on Google’s vast content network, you can literally put your company’s name, your company’s logo, visual images of the products you are selling in front of hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. And the beauty of running a CPC Image Ad campaign on Google AdWords is that all these hundreds of thousands of impressions won’t cost you a dime unless someone actually clicks on your ad. Here at JumpFly, we have seen many clients experience impressive results with Google Image Ads.

Another plus is that your low click-thru rate on Google’s content network won’t negatively impact your regular search traffic quality scores, so if you do get hundreds of thousands of impressions and very few clicks it won’t work against you.

Of course, you certainly want to get some clicks and sales out of these Image Ads, too. The good news is that conversion tracking does work with Image Ads, so you can track profitability as well as use this is a powerful branding mechanism.

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Sometimes you do need to just cut your losses and run. Hope is a powerful thing, yes, but hoping a keyword will still convert after it’s received a hundred clicks with no sales attributed to it will only continue padding the coffers of the search engines, not yours. You need every extra penny you can get out of your marketing efforts these days.

Now is the time to perhaps be a little bit more ruthless in your treatment of your ill-performing keywords. You don’t have to be so vicious as to slit their throats (i.e. delete them), but you can certainly give them a healthy dose of chloroform (i.e. pause them). You can always revive those knocked out keywords later if you notice a big drop in your sales, but I’ll bet quite often the only thing you’ll notice is that you’ll actually start saving money.

Don’t give them a bail out, knock them out.

If you’re not sure what to do, you might want to consider a free consultation from a qualified PPC Management Company.

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If your goal is for a potential customer to call you, then why don’t you have your phone number on every page, asking the customer to call you? If your goal is for a potential customer to purchase something, why don’t you have an Add to Cart button immediately visible on the page right next to the product? If your goal is to get a potential client to send you their contact information, then why don’t you have a simple form available for them to fill out with a nice big Submit button right beneath it?

What action do you hope to entice a new customer into performing? You must ask yourself that question because you need to have an answer for it. If you just send potential customers to a page that doesn’t entice them to perform the action you want them to perform, the odds are greatly in favor of them not doing what you want them to do. Is that what you want to accomplish, especially after you’ve paid for that click with your hard-earned money? I sure hope not.

So go ahead and ask yourself that question, too.

If you need assistance with custom landing page optimization or website development, you may want to check out Webivore. They have done impressive work for JumpFly clients.

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However, sometimes a newer ad never really gets a true chance to prove itself because a strong older ad quickly overtakes it. This leads the new ad to languish and die a quick death because the percentage of time this new ad is shown quickly plummets if it doesn’t immediately outperform the older ad. Of course, sometimes that is okay if the new ad really is that much worse than the older ad.

But what if you really want to test an older ad with a newer ad on a level playing field? Then what do you do? Google does offer the opportunity to rotate ads on a more even basis. If you navigate to the Edit Campaign Settings screen in your Google AdWords account, you will see a Scheduling and Serving category where you can choose to either Optimize the ad serving (the default setting) or you can choose to Rotate and show ads on a more even percentage basis. By choosing to rotate ads more evenly you will allow a newer ad to run 50/50 with an older ad. After a set period of times has elapsed, you can then compare the click-thru/conversion rate of the ads and see how well they have performed against one another. This isn’t necessarily something you want to do all the time, but it is certainly worth taking a closer look at once in awhile if you really want to test ad copy in a true head-to-head battle.

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Let’s say you sell golf shoes. There are quite a few branded producers of golf shoes. You’ve got Nike, Adidas, FootJoy, Callaway, Ecco to name a few. So let’s say you are bidding on golf shoes in a broad or even phrase match variation. Your ads will be showing up for all those brands if people search for “adidas golf shoes” or “ecco golf shoes”, etc. But what if you don’t sell the Adidas brand? You are going to be paying to bring in a lot of annoyed searchers to your website expecting to find Adidas golf shoes because your ad is showing up under that search term. However, if you add “adidas” as a negative keyword, then your ad won’t even show up on Google for those searches. You can often filter out the searchers that are not a good fit for your business or service with a few simple negative keyword additions.

So where do you find these negative keywords? You can use the Google Keyword Tool to research potential negative keywords and quickly add them straight into your account. You can also run the Search Query Performance Report in your Google account and take a look at the results. You will see many of the keywords you already have in your account, but you will also see other keywords that are triggering your ads to show on Google. More often than not, you will see keywords that are not related to your product or service, or keywords that contain a brand you do not stock at all. You can then take these keywords that are not a good for your business and add them as negative keywords into your Ad Groups or at the Campaign level.

Sometimes you need to think negative to increase the positive.

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Google Image ads appear on select Google Content Network sites. By integrating the proven targeting of AdWords and the appeal of graphical images, image ads can help you reach an entirely new audience for your product or service. The key difference between the old banner ads and Google Image Ads is that the Image Ads can be matched to a website page’s content. This added level of targeting helps focus the Image Ads on the audience you want to reach, allowing you to better spend your advertising dollars on the customers you want to attract. Some Content Sites only show Image Ads, so the only way to reach some of this audience is by adding Image Ads into your marketing mix. You can even use Flash ads, giving your product or service a little bit of extra pizzaz.

JumpFly is happy to announce that we are now offering high quality image ad production for PPC management clients. There are eight different sizes of Image Ads you can run, so there is a nice variety of potential ads you can create. You can advertise with a large 728 x 90 Leaderboard Ad, or use a smaller 200 x 200 Small Square Ad. One can only wonder if graphical ads are the next evolution in the PPC marketplace. You may want to venture into those waters now while they are still shallow. You may reap the benefits much quicker than those who wait timidly on the shore.

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So, what do you do with a member of your sales team who is performing under expectations? Well, for starters, you can “reduce his pay” by lowering his bid. Note: I’m using “he” just for simplicity sake. If a member of your sales team is underperforming, certainly you don’t want to keep paying him at his normal rate. Bring his pay down to a level that is acceptable to the performance he is delivering. Bring a keyword down in position if it’s not delivering in a high position.

What if you have already “reduced the pay” of an underperfomer? Then what? Well, ultimately you are going to have to fire him. There is no sense in keeping a sales person around if he has proven time and time again that he cannot deliver the results that are expected of him. So, fire him. Shut him down. Pause that stinker. Sometimes it’s hard to let go, but in the long run you’ll be glad you did.

Now, on a happier note, what do you do with a member of your sales team who is kicking butt? What do you do with the guy who’s outperforming expectations? Well, one obvious thing to do is give him a raise. Push that keyword position a bit higher if you have room to grow the position. This doesn’t always translate into more sales, but you should certainly give the keyword the opportunity to shine if it’s proven in the past that it can deliver results.

What if he is already at the top of the pay scale? Then what? Then you might need to start looking beyond raising his pay. Now you need to start looking to him for “referrals.” Does he have any trustworthy friends who need a job? Does that keyword have a few variations that you haven’t considered? Dig deeper into the keyword and see if you can find a few of its “friends” to come join your team. You might be surprised at what you find.

Happy Holidays to all.

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JumpFly PPC Account Executive

I’d like to offer a few simple solutions to help rectify this “empty” feeling. First, you can put up a date stamp on the site that reflects the current date. This can go in your header, near your navigation bar, or anywhere in the upper portion of the website. Yes, it’s a potentially useless bit of data that even an abandoned site could be using, but at least one of the first impressions that a new customer will get is one of “now.” And first impressions are absolutely critical for first time visitors, especially in the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising arena where you are paying per click for each one of these new visitors.

Second, put up a current bit of news about your company, your business category, the products you sell, the brands you carry. Date the news and update it about once a week. Again, it’s all about giving the website a “lively” feeling, that someone is actively minding the store, putting up fresh current tidbits of information. The news really could be about anything, but you’ll get more mileage out of it if it relates to your business and products. This could include starting a blog, which is very similar to this. Or you could just carve out a small space on the home page and update that with some timely bit of information every week or so.

Finally, and I think most importantly, give your calls-to-action a sense of urgency by giving them an end date that’s no more than a few weeks or a month out. If you offer Free Shipping, then also mention the month in the same sentence. For example: Free Shipping in December! Maybe you will offer Free Shipping in January, but then again maybe you won’t. The same thing goes for any sales you might run. If everything is 5% off, then offer 5% off in December. Maybe you will offer 5% off in January, but maybe you won’t. If you leave Free Shipping or sales offers open-ended, then you don’t give customers a strong incentive to buy now. They’ll think they can just come back later and get it, but of course then they have a good chance of never coming back at all. Once they are on your site, you need to do everything you can to close that sale as soon as possible. This all ties back to giving the site a sense of being “current.” By putting an end date, or a month name, into all of your promotional pushes it gives the site a sense of being “alive” and “fresh.”

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JumpFly PPC Account Executive

Actionable Reports:

Every report should be an actionable report. By this I mean if I run a Placement Performance Report that shows me numerous content sites that are clearly spending too much, or not converting well at all, then I want to be able to just click a checkbox next to that site and have it automatically be excluded from further searches. I don’t want to have to run a report, analyze it, then manually create a list of sites to exclude. I want the system to provide me with the data then allow me to take action upon that data right then and there on the spot. This really doesn’t just apply to Google. It applies to all the PPC search platforms, including Yahoo and MSN. We should be able to immediately take some kind of action from every report we run without having to look at the data in place then make adjustments somewhere else entirely.

AdWords Editor Content Isolation: 

AdWords Editor should have a separate tab for Content traffic and spend that highlights and isolates Content traffic spending. Keeping on the Content theme, because the volume of Content sites is so huge, Google should allow us to put in a threshold conversion cost barrier that will automatically exclude a site if the spend reaches a certain unacceptable level. It would be nice if we could put in a parameter that tells Google to automatically exclude a certain Content site if its spend reaches a certain level without producing a conversion. It’s something we do anway, so why not set up an automated function to do the same thing we are going to do manually. It would also be nice if such a parameter could be extended to some of the Search Partners as well. If a site doesn’t work, I don’t want it.

Even though these things don’t exist (yet), the great thing about software-driven advertising platforms is that the possibility exists that they might happen at any time. That’s just another feather in the PPC advertising cap. This is an advertising medium that has the potential to always get just a little better.

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Yahoo search volume is dropping consistently, down from nearly 22% in October 2007 to below 18% for October 2008. MSN took a drop from last year as well in their search volume, but it seems to be holding in the mid 5% range from month to month now. So that does beg the question, is it even worth running PPC campaigns on Yahoo and MSN? Clearly, there is some volume to be had on both of those search networks, so they definitely have some value to some advertisers. If your budget is tight, though, and you are testing the PPC waters, I would suggest starting on Google only and then see where you can go from there.

Another strategy to consider for Yahoo and MSN, which we have implemented and seen success with, is to start out strong on Google for a month or two and then only move your best performers over to Yahoo and MSN. Since Google does bring in the most volume by a large margin, their search platform can really give you a good indicator as to whether a certain product, or a certain groups of keywords, or specific ad copy, will bring you the ROI you are looking for. It isn’t always an apples to apples comparison, and what works on Google does not necessarily always work on Yahoo or MSN, but you can certainly get some strong indicators as to what might work on the other engines by analyzing what is working on Google first.

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Wikipedia defines Cost Per Conversion as an advertising and marketing term, describing the cost of acquiring a customer, typically calculated by dividing the total cost of an advertising campaign by the number of conversions. The definition of “conversion” varies depending upon the situation; it is sometimes considered to be a lead, a sale, or a purchase.

What is a Good Cost Per Conversion?

One question that will typically arise when talking about cost per conversion is: what is a good cost per conversion? Is it $5? Is it $10? Is it 20$? Or perhaps a good conversion is measured by a percentage of spend as it relates to your average sale value — so is 5% a good ratio between pay-per-click (PPC) advertising spend and revenue generated? Is 10%? Or perhaps even 20%? There is no real hard and fast answer to this, but many of our clients here at JumpFly like to use 10% as a solid measuring stick, in case you were looking for a typical ratio. So if you know your average order value is $100, you would look to get your conversion costs around $10 per order.

However, there are other factors that you should consider before deciding upon an acceptable cost per conversion. For example, how much is a new customer actually worth? How many times does a customer order from you within a year? If you know that most of your customers just order from you once and they rarely, if ever, order from you again, then you can use a flat 10% of average order value as a good benchmark for your conversion cost goal. But if you know the average customer orders from you 3 times a year, 5 times a year, or even more, then you really should factor that in to your cost per conversion goals. You may be short-changing your growth if you don’t consider what the total true value of a new customer is worth. You may be willing to push that conversion cost ratio to 20% of average order value, for example, if you know the average new customer orders at least twice from you within a year.

What is the Value of a New Customer? 

The value of a new customer is different for everyone, so you should look at your own average order value and the average number of purchases made by a typical customer before you make that final decision on what your cost per conversion goals are.

What is a new customer worth, especially in these tough economic times? Only you can decide for your business, but they might just be more valuable than you think.

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