Our just-posted article looks at the benefits of advertising on Facebook versus PPC ads.

Both forums have benefits and drawbacks. This article outlines 5 benefits of Facebook advertising and 5 benefits of PPC advertising. They two are noticeably different, so before you commit to either one, take a look at some of the details and see which column your business would most benefit from.

Check out the article, “Should You Advertise on Facebook?” on the HeroWeb.com site and let us know what you think. If you have considered online advertising, what was your final decision?

Last month I heard this from a friend of mine, who self-manages his PPC campaign.  He was reacting to a recent downturn in conversion rates from his Google AdWords campaign, which had historically been very profitable for his business.  Because it generated good return at the outset, he expected it should continue to do so indefinitely.  This “Set it and forget it” mentality, very prevalent among small-business PPC advertisers, might have sufficed in the adolescence of online marketing, but it definitely won’t today.

My friend failed to understand several characteristics of the online marketing space, which demands that you  update and adapt your PPC account constantly.

• The marketplace is constantly changing. More businesses are advertising online than ever.  You likely have more competitors than you did when you set up your account, bidding on the same keywords as you are. If they are being aggressive with their bidding, your ads might be showing quite a bit lower on Google’s homepage than they were before. As hard times mandate trackable results for advertising dollars, businesses are allocating more spend online than offline, increasing the competition for precious ad space on Google.
• You may be missing out on Google’s newest features. In the last two years, Google has beefed up their PPC environment for advertisers with Ad Extensions, Demographic Bidding, Remarketing Audiences, Product Ads, and much more.  Your bigger competitors are certainly taking advantages of these, leaving your quaint, old ads in the dust.
• User behavior provides valuable data on how effective your ads are. After only weeks of setting up your account, CTR (click-through-rate) data gives you valuable insight on what sort of language is appealing to users. If you’re running a few different ad variations at once (which you definitely should be), it’s easy to see which ads are more effective and which are less. Low CTR will lower your ads’ quality scores; Google now uses quality scores as well as bids to determine your CPC, so low CTR ads will literally cost you.

So, log-in to AdWords often and,

• Review ad performance. This is very easy in the Google AdWords Interface.  Going adgroup-by-adgroup, review all of your ads every few weeks. Overwrite ads with low CTR with new variations of the high CTR ads. Consider running a promotion to pique users’ interest.
• Check out other ads in your industry. Your competitors are checking out your ads and writing more persuasive ones; you should do the same. Check out the wording of your competition’s ads; urgent, compelling wording has been shown to be highly effective in getting users to click-through. You only get 70 short characters; don’t waste them describing the sterile details of your products, but rather how your great products will make them feel. Don’t forget to test different landing pages, too.
• Adjust keyword bids. Increased competition might demand that you need to bid higher in order to keep the same positioning. Also, you might be over-paying for spot #1 when your ad could be much more profitable in positions #2 or #3.  Take a few weeks or months to test different positions.
• Review search queries. Google’s Search Query report shows you the longer keywords users are searching for which trigger your ad.  If you are bidding on “used DVDS” and get a lot of users who searched for “foreign used DVDs”, you should add that longer keyword to your campaign, as long-tail keywords are almost always less expensive, making your campaign that much more profitable. If you don’t carry foreign DVDs, then add “foreign” to your negative keyword list to prevent those costly clicks.
• Add new products. Has your product inventory changed? Often business are surprised by what “takes off” online, so it might be worth it to test running your entire product catalog.
• Stay up-to-date. Familiarize yourself with all the new ways Google lets you manage your campaigns, target specific audiences, and add some pizzazz to your ads.

If all of this feels to daunting, consider having a professional manage your campaign for you. HEROweb originally launched its marketing department because of the great interest our clients had in marketing with Google, but little time they had to pursue it on their own.

Now is not the time to maintain the status-quo, but invest time and attention on advancing a fresh, relevant PPC campaign. Great results are at your fingertips!

Watch out for upcoming videos from HEROweb! We recently installed a green screen in our office and are psyched to create quality videos that give you great information on web marketing, ecommerce, internet how-to’s, and a range of other topics.

Check out our first video where HEROweb Marketing Director, Mike Brown, answers frequently asked questions about PPC.

Keep your eyes peeled because we will be posting more videos soon. If you are interested in creating video content for your own web site give us a call at 541-746-6418 or 1-888-257-2567.

Some online retailers have marketing campaigns that run on autopilot all year. Surely, you don’t count yourself in that group (nudge, nudge).

If you aren’t tuning and tweaking for key seasonal holidays, your campaigns are likely underperforming. As we head into the holiday shopping season, which is just moments away, it is a good time to assess your big three of SEM: Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click, and Comparison Shopping Engines. Do you have your titles, descriptions, and ads tweaked to give you maximum exposure?

For an overview of our recommendations, please head over to our HEROweb Marketing & Design article archive and take a look at Q4 SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Pointers.

You’ve made the decision to jump (or at least dip a toe) into the waters of Search Marketing, either through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or a comparison shopping engine (CSE) program.  You have your keyword list ready and feed sent off to your shopping engine of choice.  The campaigns launch and your products are now in front of millions!

Once the orders start coming in and revenue is being generated, the question now is, how do I know if this thing is working for me on a financial level?

The answer is that you should have an idea on this even before the first visitor hits the site.

One of the great aspects of advertising online through either PPC or a CSE, is the ability to accurately track performance.  So before devoting time and money to an online campaign, one should make a decision on the specific goals of the endeavor.  While all businesses have different P&L (profit and loss) models, overhead costs, etc., the one metric most all have an interest in ultimately,  is Return.

This metric can be looked at in a few different ways, most often through either Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or Return on Investment (ROI) calculations.

ROAS can be measured simply as Total Revenue divided by Total Ad Cost.

In this scenario, if you spent $100 on an AdWords or CSE campaign and made $500 in revenue, your ROAS is $5 (or 5x).

ROI can be measured in much the same way, with a few new variables added to the equation.

On the Revenue side, one would likely subtract Tax and Shipping income, while on the Ad Cost side, items such as profit margin and management fee (when using an agency to manage the campaign) can be taken into account.  ROI then, is typically a better indicator of the true profitability of an online campaign.

The image below provides a good estimate, based on product-level margin, what type of ROAS one would need to see for profit at an ROI level.

Either way you slice it, the Return metric is one that every advertiser should consider before marketing online and once out there, calculate correctly to  effectively assess campaign performance.

Yesterday’s newspaper was three times the size it normally is, thanks to an inch and a half of advertisements plugging their five-alarm fabulous Friday sales. I’m not the type of person to get up at 4 am to get to a 6 am, 4-hour only sale, and if I could subscribe to a version of the newspaper without these shopping bonanza ads, I probably would.

As MightyMerchant’s marketing specialist, I’m always trying to balance the notion of how to utilize marketing effectively with my personal desire to not be indiscriminately marketed to. I know I’m not alone, so when I found this Firefox add-on that blocks ads from appearing, I wanted to talk about it.

Adblock, a free Firefox browser plug-in which blocks website ads, is one of Firefox’s most popular plug-ins. Adblock uses simple and regular expression filtering to block content. A simple filter is a string of text with one or more wildcards (*). Regular expressions are more complex ways to add filters. The Mozdev website provides some sample filters.

Once Adblock is installed, go to the Firefox add-ons menu, and select Adblock preferences. Add these expressions, or others of your choice, to the ‘add new filter’ field– to block all images: .gif; to block all DoubleClick content: doubleclick.net; to block the contents of an ad-directory: http://example.com/ads/

The Wikipedia entry for Adblock provides more examples of filters, including how to block the “donate to Wikipedia” banner!– wikipedia.org#DIV(id=siteNotice

Read further down this entry, however, and you get to some meaty controversy involving use of this add-on. Understandably, web masters who serve ads do not support the use of this blocker, and some criticism has gone far enough to conclude that this blocker could kill the online revenue model. Some site owners feel that Firefox developers Mozilla should be responsible for an inestimable loss of click-through income, and have retaliated by blocking the Firefox browser from accessing their site at all. One site that advocates for a boycott of Adblock, whyfirefoxisblocked.com, provides a Firefox user with the headline, “You’ve reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the Firefox browser,” and calls Adblock “internet theft.”

So far, most large search and ad companies like Google and MSN have ignored the phenomena of ad blocking, presumably because the service isn’t hugely popular yet. But with growing numbers of people installing Adblock, Adblock Plus, and related content blockers, it’s destines to be on the radar screen of small and large companies alike before too long.

Let me know where you stand on this. Perhaps this service isn’t widespread enough yet to concern you. Do you use Adblock? Would you use Adblock? Would it make a difference to you if you served ads which you knew were being blocked by this tool?

A recent Webmaster World forum thread discusses tips on using AdSense. There was a lot of information in this thread and if you missed it, I urge you to check it out.

Here is some of what I gathered as usable advice from this discussion:

Place all clickable ads above the fold. Avoid placing ads in headers; mixed in with content seems to perform best. Modulate the number of ads you are running so that you don’t appear spammy. The 300×250 block size is most popular. Once you find something that works, leave it alone. And finally, don’t spend all day and night stressing about AdSense!

These tips might be no-news for those of you who have been using AdSense for a while and have found the winning combination, but for those just getting involved, the many different theories on using AdSense can make for a scary proposition.

Case in point: The initiator of this particular thread said he eventually wanted to be able to “think like the AdSense bot” to maximize his investment. That idea was shot down later by someone who said to avoid thinking like the AdSense bot. Someone else suggested removing all but the highest earning pages, others said that was nonsense. In fact, many of the ideas set forth were later disputed as unimportant or unwise. Where do you weigh in on these contradictory ideas?

Do you ever feel adrift in a ‘C’ of acronyms? PPC, CPC, CPM . . . Some are more well-known, like PPC and SEO, but authors and speakers frequently throw many of these terms out with no explanation of the cryptic letters. I’ve gathered and defined the most common Internet marketing and search acronyms that I’ve come across, and offer them here as a mini-glossary. If you stumble across other acronyms, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impressions
Literally, “cost per mille,” which in Latin means thousand. Sometimes, CPI and CPM are used interchangeably, as when an ad campaign is sold on the basis of 1000 impressions. One thousand impressions at a $10 CPI results in a $10,000 CPM ad campaign.

eCPM - Effective Cost Per Mille
Measures what a publisher would receive if their advertising inventory was sold on a CPM basis as opposed to a CPA, CPC, or CPT basis (see below for these definitions).

CPI – Cost Per Impression
This is the cost paid each time an online advertisement, such as a banner ad, is displayed.

CPT – Cost Per Transaction
Similar to CPA, in that advertisers pay whenever a visitor who clicked on their advertisement completes a transaction.

CPA – Cost Per Action, or Cost Per Acquisition
In the PPA advertising model, the CPA is the actual cost paid when the action is completed.

CTR – Click Through Ratio
A ratio of the number of times an ad was clicked on by the viewer and the number of times the ad was displayed. For a banner that was clicked 100 times and displayed 1000 times, the CTR is 100:1000 or 1:10. This can be changed to a percentage value by multiplying by 100: 1/10 * 100 = 10%, meaning 10% of the impressions have led to clicks on the banner.

CPC – Cost Per Click
The amount an advertiser pays each time an ad is clicked. Sometimes this is set through a bidding process, other times the cost is determined by calculating the CPI/%CTR

PPC – Pay Per Click
An advertising model where advertisers pay only when a user clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website.

PPA – Pay Per Action
Advertisers pay only when pre-specified actions are completed by a user on their site, such as when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, fills out a form, or downloads a free trial.

CPS – Cost Per Sale
The cost an advertiser pays only for those click-throughs on an ad that result in a purchase.

EPC – Earnings Per Click
The commission you pay to a publisher or affiliate advertiser for each click (visitor) they send to you. If you pay $20 after receiving 100 visitors, $20/100 = 0.20 and the EPC is 20 cents per click.

CPL – Cost Per Lead
A payment arrangement where an advertiser pays a publisher for a lead, which is a verified potential customer. For example, the publisher may run an ad for a free trial. A user that clicks on the free trial link is a lead that may become a future customer, and the publisher is paid a certain CPL.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization
The act of enhancing a site’s ability to be crawled frequently and effectively by search engines.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing
Internet marketing that seeks to increase a site’s visibility in the search engines through ad campaigns and SEO.

SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages
The listing of web pages returned when a search is performed.

MLM – Multi-level Marketing
Often indistinguishable from “pyramid schemes” in which commissions are paid to each seller based on the number of additional sellers that they can recruit.

B to B or B2B – Business to Business
Internet-based business-to-business commerce typically engaged in by manufacturers, wholesalers and suppliers who market to other businesses.

B to C or B2C – Business to Consumer or Business to Customer
Retailers who typically market to an individual consumer rather than a business.

CPGs – Consumer Packaged Goods
Any consumable goods that are ready for purchase by a consumer.

P to P or P2P – Peer To Peer
Not really a marketing acronym but it is fairly common; P2P refers to file sharing over the Internet or on small networks.

MFA - Made For AdSense
Refers to an advertisement that is developed specifically for AdSense.

ROAS - Return On Advertising Spending
Dollars earned versus dollars spent on an advertising campaign.

Practical eCommerce is a resource for online retailers, including an article archive, a print magazine and an e-newsletter about ecommerce. They have announced a new monthly feature, “PPC Report Card.” This feature critiques the pay-per-click advertising campaigns of selected ecommerce businesses. Currently, Practical eCommerce has “SEO Report Card” and “Usability Report Card,” which are also regular monthly features. For each of these features, ecommerce merchants can request that their site be selected for review.

Practical eCommerce has partnered with third-party professionals who review the submissions and select the sites to grade. Practical eCommerce then publishes the results as a “case study.”

Greg Laptevsky, Senior Pay-Per-Click Strategist with search engine marketing firm PRIME Visibility, will write the “PPC Report Card” feature, which will consist of six categories: Account Structure, 
Keyword Choices, 
Relevancy, 
Landing Page, 
Account Settings
, and Performance Testing

Practical eCommerce warns that in order to complete a thorough review of your site you must share some confidential information with Laptevsky, and reviewing the actual keywords, ads and landing pages that you use could have a minor effect on your pay-per-click costs and, perhaps, your quality or relevancy score.

But if that is the price to pay for a free review by a professional, I’d call that worth it! If you’re interested in submitting your site for possible review, email ppc[at]practicalecommerce[dot]com

[For more about Practical eCommerce, who recently interviewed Staci Schipporeit, the co-owner of MightyMerchant, for their cover story, "100 Notable Shopping Carts," see MightyMerchant's September 2007 SiteBeat.]

OK, so you’ve got your PPC campaign all figured out. You’ve budgeted for each click you’re likely to get based on keyword search volume, and you’re comfortable using this targeted advertising approach. Now here’s one more thing to consider. What landing page have you selected for your PPC ads? If the landing page doesn’t match the ad, your chances of a conversion plummet.

Here’s an example of a website that’s doing it right, http://www.teamlogo.com. I recently searched for “directors chair” you know, the wooden folding chairs with canvas seats and back. The number one sponsored link was for an ad touting “folding chairs in a bag”. While a director’s chair does fold, it’s not normally found in a bag. Sure enough, one look at their website told me they were selling camping chairs. Close, but no sale. I moved on to TeamLogo. Yes! Their ad took me right to the part of their site selling director’s chairs, just what I wanted.

TeamLogo’s site is large. If their ad had linked me to their home page instead, I would have been ticked off and might not have searched for directors chairs. So TeamLogo is drawing people right where they want them, and not making them work twice.

Back to the ads. Number three is for Sears, and took me to their patio furniture. Again, not what I want. Number four is for JC Penneys, and also links to their patio furniture department. Three of the next four ads were for outdoor chairs, and the ad for “folding chair” was for the uncomfortable metal kind you sit on at graduations. Not even close. StacksAndStacks.com bids on “directors chair”, but they don’t have any. TeamLogo wins!

In an unrelated search, I was surfing for information about natural flea control. I sought information about “pyrethrins”, a class of toxic organic compounds with insecticidal properties. Well, http://www.cedarcide.com bids on the term. From the looks of the ad, this company has information about pyrethrins on their website. However, if you click on the ad, you go to their home page and it’s nowhere to be found. So they’re drawing people to their site, right? Not really. A visitor to their site expecting to see information about pyrethrins would be disappointed, and most likely click the back button. Had they pointed the visitor to their article, which I found by making a game out of it and searching their site map, the visitor could read what they said, and if they liked the article maybe buy some of their products.

This is an Aesop’s fable with a moral. Make it easy for visitors to find what they want. Landing them directly onto your home page and making them search again is not the way to maximize conversions.