Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Choosing a Domain Name 

Can your domain name (your website address or URL) impact your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising? You’ve probably heard that your domain is important when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and your natural or organic rankings, but it can affect your pay per click advertising too.

There’s a couple of reasons why:

• Your domain name tells people what you do and what you are about: Consider the following two (made-up) domains: www.BuyBlueWidgets.com or www.BuyBWOnline.com. If you were an ecommerce site that sold blue widgets, which would be the better domain? You probably guessed it, it’s the first one. If someone sees this domain name, they know that they can purchase blue widgets. Do you get that from the second? You know you can buy something, but not what that something is.
• It makes good use of the limited ad real estate that you get: You get a very limited amount of space to get your point across, and your Display URL, if it makes sense based on your keywords, can be an added line to use.
• It can be “bolded” in an ad: if you use your main keyword in your domain, and someone uses it in a search term (i.e. – your domain is www.BuyBlueWidgets.com, and someone searches on “Blue Widgets Sale”), than the words that they used in the search will be “bolded” in your Display URL. The display URL for our above example would look like www.BuyBlueWidgets.com, making it stand out more.

One thing that you do need to keep in mind, when choosing a domain name, is to beware of trademark infringement. If someone owned the trademark to Blue Widgets, and you own the URL www.BlueWidgets.com, it’s very likely that the trademark owner will be able to legally acquire that domain from you. I’m not a trademark attorney, but I’ve seen several instances of clients who have had to give up domains that they’ve owned for years and years to the trademark owner.

Domains are important in how they affect your identity, so think carefully about them. When in doubt, buy several variations and test them out. Domains can be bought for under $10 now, so it’s not a hardship on the pocketbook. When creating your online identity, there are many critical things to consider, but don’t overlook the importance of choosing a domain name that is going to best represent and benefit your business.

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So says Reuters News Service. 1 in 2 pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns paying out money for clicks they don’t really need. So says me. It’s really just a made-up statistic, but I’ve seen that happen often enough that I can say with certainty that it’s happening quite often in quite a lot of campaigns that we have seen over the years. I think many people managing PPC campaigns in Google AdWords, Yahoo and MSN have a tendency to hold on to keywords far longer than they probably should, or they’ll hold on tenaciously to higher positions when the ROI simply just does not justify holding on to such aggressive spots.

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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Looking for positive ROI from your PPC campaigns? Then it’s time to start thinking negative! Are you using negative keywords in your accounts? If you are not, you should be, especially if your pay per click advertising accounts are heavily populated with broad match keywords. You can use negative keywords to filter out searches for products you don’t stock, for brands you don’t carry, or for customers you don’t want, just to name a few things you can exclude.

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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