Archives for July 2007

We got the answer for “Can You Mass-Update Billing Information On Google Adwords?” directly from Google’s Adwords support team via email:

“After doing a little research, I found that it is not currently possible to do a mass billing information edit. In order to change the billing address you will need to go into every individual account and edit the information.

There is some good news.  There is a payment option that you may be eligible for: monthly invoicing. Monthly invoicing will eliminate the need of updating credit card information and will bill you once a month for your advertising costs. Below, I have included the form for monthly invoicing in addition to information about our new Manager Defined Spending option.”

So no, you can’t change the billing of multiple accounts at once, but you can switch over the invoicing as a work-around. The only drawback to that is that you will no longer be using a credit card, which has some advantages in terms of flexibility.

If you’re tired of dealing with the billing on your Google Adwords account, and require professional assistance, please contact us for a free initial consultation on your SEM campaign.

Google Adwords Billing FAQ by BigSERP.Com

Unless you’re in the business of selling antique soap dispensers, your competitors are aggressively marketing through sponsored search (the results that show up above, to the right, and even below the natural, or “organic” listings). It’s critical not to let them dominate that stream of advertising and brand themselves at your expense, especially if you have a new site that won’t rank naturally for months.

What you can do with PPC/SEM campaigns is level the playing field by immediately getting your branding, products, and service out there with first-page recognition via the search engines. Our website is filled with lots of helpful suggestions for setting up your own campaigns, which can be done properly if you have the will, technical and marketing ability, and the time to invest into it. Please do not hesitate to contact us should you need professional assistance. We’d be happy to set up a free initial consultation with you to assess your business goals and what would work best to meet them.

 Aggressive Small Business Marketing Through SEM at BigSERP.Com

We received the official answer to “How Do I Permanently Remove Client Accounts From Google Adwords?” straight from Google via a support email:

“I’m happy to assist you removing client accounts from your My Client Center. First, I recommend unlinking your client accounts from your My Client Center, then replying to this email with an explicit request to cancel these accounts, including the CID and login email address associated with these accounts.

After your client accounts have been cancelled they will not accrue additional charges. While you are unable to permanently remove credit card information from your account, I am happy to completely disable the accounts so that you cannot reactivate them. I have included below instructions for unlinking your AdWords accounts from your My Client Center. If you would like the accounts permanently cancelled, please include a request with explicit language to do so in a reply to this email.”

So basically all you have to do is disassociate the accounts from your My Client Center and then call Google up to make sure they are permanently cancelled.

You’re a busy small business owner, or a really aggressive do-it-yourselfer. You know the value of using search engine marketing (SEM) to instantly promote your products and services. You spend a great deal of time working with it. And you’ve probably heard about the certification programs Google and Yahoo have, but might not be sure if they are worth the time to pursue yourself. So what does it mean to be a Google Qualified Individual (or Company) or a Yahoo Ambassador?

Of course from a sales perspective, if you are in the business of listing stuff for sale, I would think the biggest benefit is that you can tell potential clients that members of our internet marketing team have been certified by the search engines as expert search marketing consultants. That means you are versed on the latest best practices in search marketing, and that, coupled with the vast amount of experience you have in setting up and managing literally dozens of successful PPC accounts that perform well over industry standards in terms of click through rate and conversion rate (into a lead), gives them a big advantage over going with an uncertified company.

You can proudly say that you will deliver better results because you know how to properly use the SEM tools that will drive them business. You’ll be able to say in your pitches: “Rest assured that when you choose to work with us, you’ll have our powerful team of Google & Yahoo certified search marketing professionals in your corner.” Do these certifications instantly qualify you as an expert in SEM? No, you definitely need a lot of experience using the systems and building your own success stories (often through trial and error) before you can pronounce yourself that. But you are taking a great first step, and are also doing what you need to do to stay abreast with your competition, and in some industries, stay well ahead of the pack.

If you decide these exams aren’t for you, and would like to receive some professional assistance with your search marketing campaigns, please contact us for a free initial consultation at BigSERP.Com.

SEM Certified Experts at BigSERP.Com 

If you take a close look at your company’s PPC accounts and the way they are currently configured, most of you are probably not getting even close to the max ROI, and there’s a lot of things we can do to improve upon their performance. Many of these things won’t take long to implement and see results of, while others (including developing and split testing multiple landing pages, text ads, and terms) will help out big time in the long run. Here’s where I’d start as far as making changes goes:

1. Set up separate landing pages and campaigns for each product line to better target demographics and turn them into leads at a higher rate.

2. Split test different text ads and landing pages to find out which ones are getting the most leads.

3. Refine bids to place emphasis on terms that are getting the highest number of leads.

4. Experiment with content-only campaigns to find out if they are effective or not from a lead-gen standpoint.

5. Run Analytics on all the landing pages to find out where you might be losing leads.

To be honest, doing all of these things right is a job in and of itself. Yet if these things are done, we can assure you that the return on those resources will be quite measurable in terms of the volume, cost, and quality of leads you receive after.

We know that you may have been running these campaigns in a set way for awhile now, and that making any big changes would require sufficient planning. Perhaps it would be best for us to have a meeting to discuss how best to go about implementing them? Please use our contact form to receive your free SEM/PPC management consultation.

 Corporate SEM/PPC Campaigns at BigSERP.Com

Nothing can undermine the effectiveness of a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign like a bad landing page (also called “marketing page” in the industry). You could send the most qualified traffic to it, only to have your hot prospects bouncing off to a page they can truly relate to. Since we don’t want you to do that, we’re giving you ten quick and helpful tips that will improve the quality of your marketing pages so that you don’t have to worry about throwing your money away.

1. Make It Specific
What demographic are you targeting? Where do they live? What kinds of unique products and services are they looking for? A good landing page will clearly answer all of these questions for a unique type of visitor that you are driving to it via PPC keywords and text ads. Never think of a landing page as a multi-purpose page. A real estate broker who tries to sell homes in all of Arizona on one page will have a much harder time convincing potential clients that he is a local expert than one who sets up a custom-tailored marketing page for every community in Arizona he serves.

2. Make It Current
You don’t have to real the news headlines and update your landing page every day, but it never hurts to ride the waves of holiday sentimentality and construct pages that run promotions geared towards those nationally treasured occasions. Also, stop using “Welcome to Anytown!” on your landing page, it’s not 1997 any longer!

3. De-Sleaze It
Unless successful sales tactics for your industry dip into car salesman-like depths of moral compass, there’s no sense to try and amp up your landing page with cliched buzz words. Believe it or not, the first thing web shoppers are trying to do is quickly find out if your site is “full of it” or not. If the marketing page contains little factual information or appealing offers, you can rest assured that your visitors will bounce faster than one of those rubber balls you buy out of a quarter machine at the grocery store.

4. Earn the Trust of Your Visitors
Is your landing page doing all it can to assure those who see it that you are worthy of their trust? Do you have current client testimonials on it? Do your forms contain privacy disclaimers and anti-spam logos? Is a human picture on it? Making the page as “human” as possible with pictures, quotes, and statements that bring the complexities of your online order system down to a better comfort zone will only increase your conversions.

5. Follow Eye Drift
Ah, the magic of our ingrained cultural tendencies. Since the western world reads from left to right and from top to bottom, it surfs pages nearly the same way. Below your header, if you have one, you should always have the most important image or offer in the upper left corner. That’s where people are looking for grounding, that this page contains exactly what they were looking for. To the right is where you want to hit them with an opportunity to convert immediately, if you haven’t already given them the chance. A side note with eye drift: even though the above example is two-column, single column formats can work really well too with this because they force the visitor to follow the page straight down.

6. Label It Properly
Did you title the page with the keywords and text ad offer that referred the visitor to it? Are your meta keywords and description also in line with them? And what about your h1 tags? If you don’t make sure the entire landing page delivers the right language to the visitor, not only does it increase the chances that they will bounce, but there’s also a good chance the search engines (like Google) will penalize you with a poor quality score for having what appears to be an irrelevant marketing page to the keywords you’ve bid on. And the end result of that is less visitors at a higher average cost-per-click (CPC).

7. Keep It Above the Fold
If your visitors can’t see it right away, there’s a good chance they won’t ever. Don’t ever assume that even a majority of your traffic will take the time to scroll down the page. Put everything that’s important in the top 500 or so pixels of the page. That way you can rest assured that most browsers will display all the information you need your prospective buyers to consider, and maximize your chances of making an impression.

8. Ample Opportunity to Convert
What good is all the information your qualified online shoppers are looking for without frequent and compelling chances for them to do business with you right away. Unless your industry usually makes “soft sales,” we recommend hitting people with an offer right after your first piece of information. Whether it be a picture of your featured product, or a well-worded introduction to your company, it never hurts to let the people who are ready to buy now do so.

9. Optimized Forms
Are your forms asking for too much information? Do they ask for information over several forms, allowing for individual customization of each user’s opt-in to your offer? The more you make the forms simple, nice looking, functional, easy to understand, and capable of reacting correctly to input, the less likely you are going to have people leave the page because your page is either too confusing or intrusive.

10. Make It Legible
This could very well be the most important tip in the list. Are your fonts white on black, black on white, or another high-contrast pairing? Do you avoid the overuse of italics and small type size? Are your paragraphs well-formatted? Are they free of spelling and grammar mistakes? If all of these conditions are not met, you are selling your campaign short by making your landing page difficult to read, and therefore less compelling.

BigSERP runs effective internet marketing campaigns of all shapes and sizes, operating on the west side of Los Angeles, California.

For those of you wanting to be considered Yahoo Ambassadors, certified in using Yahoo’s new (and hardly improved) pay-per-click (PPC) account management system, you must pass their online test. What we’ve had a fair number of people ask us is what they need to score in order to pass the test. Well, we’ve taken the test, and can say with certainty that the passing score is 85%. Now if you’re wondering how hard it is to get that score, well, let’s just say that it’s considerably less difficult than the Google Qualified Professional Exam.