As I have been working on my affiliate/internet marketing business I have learned that there is no shortage of work to be done. SEO optimization has really taken the largest part of my efforts lately.
In order to continue to be effective in this business it helps to balance out the work being done. One cannot neglect paying close attention to the cost-per-click campaigns and their optimization. All of the SEO work in the world is meaningless if you have not optimized both the CPC campaigns, as well as the website itself.
In collaborating with others on proper ad form and keyword choice the need for experimenting with different variations of the same ad has become apparent. Sometimes it is hard to explain why a particular ad would attract more attention than another, but it is worthwhile to keep trying different variations until you achieve high click through rates for each ad.
I think you will understand what I mean, or at least also be able to join in on the question as to why this small difference would cause such a drastic increase in click through rate. Here is an example:
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When experimenting with ad variations and keywords alike it is important to keep in mind the proper length of the test. When working on optimization it makes sense to try variations out for a week at the very least. That literally means once you have decided on a variation and published it to your campaign, you should not alter or tweak it for a week at a minimum. With that in mind the first ad variation yielded a 7.63% click through rate over a weeks time. Some days during that week were as high as 33%, and other days were as low as 2%. The the second variation yielded a fraction of a percent over the same week. Another important note is that the two ads were done as completely different ad groups rather than variations on the same ad group. If you do variations within the same ad group, you do get to see which one performs better due to the fact that Google/Yahoo/MSN will give more exposure to the better performing ad, but since they compete for exposure the click through rates that you see will not fully reflect standalone ad performance.
Google Analytics is full of great tools that can help with ad group/keyword performance. I will briefly go over what I have been doing with Google Analytics, and actually drill down into the topic in the next blog post.
I originally spoke about Google Analytics in an earlier post titled Tools and Tips – For your PPC Campaigns. There I listed and briefly explained all of the various metrics that Google Analytics displays and reports on. Here I will show how to get at the various screens. First I will state that there is a great set of YouTube videos that talk directly to the point of using analytics to monitor your site, PPC ads, and keyword performance.
There are a couple of setups that I mentioned before when it comes to analytics. There is the case where you have full control over your marketing, meaning you have control of your website as well as your PPC/PPM ad campaigns, and the case where your site is managed by a team of designers who maintain and update the site on a consistent basis, leaving the affiliate only needing to worry about driving traffic to the site. I am operating within the boundaries of the latter case. There are merits to doing it this way, especially when there are a large number of offers on the website, legalities, as well as new offer updates, expirations, amendments and the like. So I will first talk about my case. I will add the second case in the next post.
Google Analytics(GA) is tightly bound to Google Adwords. You actually access GA through your Adwords account. The area of the GA that I will be focusing on is “Traffic Sources”. I am of course assuming that you already set your website up with Google Analytics. I will place a walkthrough in the next post. You have to go to the “Reporting” tab in your Adwords account in order to get to GA.
When you log into Google Analytics the first page that you come to is the dashboard. From the dashboard you select view report on the website profile that you wish to analyze. Once there look for the traffic sources link on the upper left frame of the page.
That will take you to a traffic sources overview. From there you can see that there are quite a few things that you can do here. I will be looking at “Ad versions”, and “Keywords” here. Obviously at first glance looking at the keywords in the picture, it is time to optimize them. The metric that I have been paying attention to is the bounce rate. Bounce rates of higher than 40-50% really need to be reworked. Ideally having bounce rates of 40% or less would be best. So as you can see in the picture above I have selected “Keywords” in the traffic sources menu (circled in red). I am in the process of reworking the keywords shown in the report above, along with trying different ad bodies as well. For keywords or I should say a keyword tool, I would say use the one that comes with Adwords, or an external tool such as keywordspy.com. The basic truth is to stay away from the words that have high cost per click, and focus on those that are not so popular but still attract ample attention to your ads and site. There is yet another tool offered by Google called the Search Based Keyword Tool still beta but highly useful. I found it while going through the Google Analytics Blog. I would recommend having a look there since it really does do a great job of showing you keywords that are relevant to your site. It too is bound to Adwords so the site that you are targeting with your ads will appear in the tool. What the tool does is give you either all relevant keywords across your entire website, or a specific set of keywords if you enter in keywords for the search. What is really cool about this tool is that it gives your the keywords for each page of your website, thus you can be highly specific in your ads. FANTASTIC!!!
The other item that I mentioned was the “Ad Versions” traffic source. Here you can see your ads, and how each of them is performing. Again I was looking at bounce rate for each ad so that I know which ones to optimize by trying different ad body or keywords.
The overall campaign bounce rate average is actually not so bad, but if you look at the individual ads you can see that there are some issues. What I see first is that there are several ads that are underperforming, while others have a high bounce rate. So looking here I could look at the keywords for a each specific ad and work on those, and/or try different ad bodies for those that are not receiving many clicks.
This is a quick way to see how ads and keywords are performing allowing us to maximize ROI by showing us where the trouble spots are in the campaigns.
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