Google Re-opens UK to Online Gambling Ads

The US Search Giant Google made a stand on online gambling in 2004, banning advertising that would point to or promote online gambling sites. Google’s AdWords content policy on the matter classifies online gambling as including but not limited to the following:
• sports books and sports betting
• lotteries• bingo
• poker
• sites that provide tips, odds, and handicapping
• software facilitating online casinos and gambling
• gambling tutoring online• gambling-related eBooks
• ’play for fun’ gambling or casino games of skill including sites where the primary purpose is ’play for fun’ gambling
• affiliate sites with the primary purpose of driving traffic to online gambling sites

The policy, which previously banned all gambling advertising, now merely cautions not to promote online gambling or related sites when targeting ads outside Great Britain. Ads for online gambling will not be displayed in other countries.
All of this will still apply in the States, but UK ads may now be targeted to show gambling ads due to new relaxed rules in Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales, excluding Northern Ireland). Betting ads will now be permitted to run on TV around sports events and after the 9 pm watershed, and this opens the door for online ads as well. They don’t meet the criteria for family friendly, however, so Google’s Safe Search mode will filter them out.
Google AdWords advertisers will have to be registered with the Gambling Commission and provides a valid operating license number to be allowed to place gambling related ads, and must be licensed to advertise online gambling in their respective country.
source: www.submitedge.com

Web Analytics

Must read analytics blogs
Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
Web Metrics Guru by Marshall Sponder
Unofficial Google Analytics Blogby Shawn Purtell
Web Analytics Demystified Blogs (various authors)
Web Analytics World by Manoj Jasra

Useful web analytics sites
Web Analytics Association - highly recommended
Web Analytics Demystified by Eric T. Peterson
Web Trends Educational Guides on Web Analytics
Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) - yes they can a resource for analytics...especially for SEM pros.
20 Resources For Google Analytics by Manoj Jasra on Search Engine Guide
Web Analytics Resource Center - found this while doing research for this post. Great links here!

Analytics Books
Web Analytics Demystified By Eric T. Peterson (or "Josh's Red Bible")
Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik (I have this)
Google Analytics 2.0 by Mary E. Tyler and Jerri Ledford
Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success by Jim Sterne
Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis

Select web analytics vendors (good source of research, white papers, etc)
Google Analytics (free)
Omniture
Web Trends
Unica
Coremetrics

Set it and forget it doesn’t work when it comes to ad text. Whether in Google Adwords, Yahoo! Or MSN Adcenter, creating attention getting and effective ad text is critical to the success and growth of your account. Below I’ve common mistakes advertisers can make when it comes to writing ad text.

1. No call to action: Never leave the customer hanging! Its best practice to lead the customer onto the action you want them to perform. Buy using action words you can guide the customers down the path to signing up or downloading a white paper or potentially purchasing your product or service. Key action words can be: Read more…download the whitepaper now…Shop now…Request more info today, etc.
2. Not differentiating yourself from your competition: This was a mistake I made when I first began PPC advertising. I would look at my competitions ads and make mine identical. What a mistake! Check out your competitors ads and have something different to say. It will make your ad stand out more, hence potentially creating a higher click-through rate.
3. Not using Dynamic Keyword Insertion: DKI is a great way to test ad text. By using DKI, some words within your ad text can be in bold, which will make your ad stand out a little more amongst your competitors. Using DKI can also serve your customers with a more targeted ad, depending on what the customer types in search is typically what you have in place for your ad title or description.
4. Not having your top keyword phrase somewhere in your ad text: When I’m looking to re-write some ad text for an ad group that’s been live for a while, I will look at my top performing keyword phrase and enter that phrase into my ad title and description if possible. If that’s the phrase most people are typing in, it’s best to use it to your advantage.
5. Not testing: I think most advertisers would agree that not ad text testing is a huge mistake. I know it can be difficult when adding new ad groups to add multiple ad text per ad group. But you must! By ad test testing you can determine which keyword phrases and descriptions best influence your target customers.
6. Deleting ad text before it’s time: Two days of testing is not enough time to accurately test your ad text. Make sure you give your new ad text at least a week of testing for accurate results. For accounts that don’t get that much traffic, give it even more time. Also, your results may show different stats depending on the date range your using, be sure to watch that carefully. Example, one ad may show better performance within the past seven days, however that same ad is the worst performing ad for the month. Always use longer date ranges before making decisions.
7. Not setting your campaign settings (Adwords) to Rotate: Display ads evenly: In Adwords there is an option in your campaign settings to either Optimize your ad text to display the best performing ad automatically or to distribute ads evenly. By setting your ads evenly this will allow you to test your ad text more efficiently. By setting it to optimize your ad text, it will continue to show one ad over the other again and again, not letting you test appropriately. Note: when you first set up a campaign in Adwords, your settings are automatically set to optimize ad display, be sure to go back and change it to display ads evenly.
8. Not using your ad text to qualify your customers: If you have a client who is extremely picky about the type of customers you bring into their site, and lets face, we all have at least one, then think about ways you can deter that “I’m just window shopping customer” from clicking on your ad and costing you money. Have a clear idea of the kind of customers you don’t want, and write ad text to ‘weed’ those people out. This will lower your spend by not allowing people who won’t benefit from your product or service from clicking on your ads. Some people agree that putting prices in your ad may be a good way to way to qualify your traffic. It’s definitely an option that you would have to test.
9. Not stating the benefits: This goes back to looking at your competitors ads. What do you have that your competitors don’t? What benefits the customer from clicking on your ad versus your competitors and what is most important to your customers? Are you promoting a sale or Free Shipping offer? Do you have 100 items to choose from versus the 5 that your competitors have? Or it is the convenience factor: Fast, free delivery…24 Hour customer service, Cost effective… Whatever the benefit may be, make it clear in your ad text.

Now Adwords and Yahoo! have released tools to help you write ad text. I would not rely entirely on their suggestions as a whole for your ad text. But you can use the tools and take away ideas to help improve your existing ad text. There is also a lot of studies and tips out there on how to write better ad text. Read them, use them, and don’t forget to test! What may work for someone may not work for you. So it’s always important to do your own testing

Create Good Landing Pages

In the field of online marketing landing page plays vital role, a landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search engine result link. It is sometimes known as a lead capture page and usually displays content that reinforces the message contained in the ad or search snippet.

Why Are Landing Pages Important?
In PPC and search marketing campaigns, the landing page is usually customized very closely to the advertisement which triggered it. In PPC campaigns, landing pages are vital in order to "close the sale" and encourage visitors to take the action you want them to take. By adding a parameter to the landing page URL (and therefore forming a tracking URL), advertisers can measure the ROI on their PPC ads based on relative clíck-through rates.

While enticing ad copy is very important in order to attract clicks, effective landing pages are vital in order to "close the sale" and encourage your visitors to take the action you want them to take.

Landing pages often determine whether you make a conversion or not. Using landing pages on your site also means that some visitors won't ever see your home page. First impressions haven't ever been so important, so you need your landing pages to represent your business, product or service in the best possible light.

Types of Landing Pages:

1. Reference Landing Page : Reference landing pages deliver information relevant to the visitor. This could include text, images, links or other elements not requiring interaction.
2. Transactional Landing Page: Transactional landing pages ask visitors to complete a transaction such as clicking on an advertisement, filling out a form or downloading a file with the aim being immediate or eventual conversion of that prospect to a sale. To aid the capturing of new leads, transactional pages generally seek visitor contact details such as a name, email address and/or a telephone number.
   
   A visitor taking the desired action on a transactional landing page is known as a conversion. Landing page quality can be measured by the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action (the conversion rate). Since the Return on Investment (ROI) of pay per clíck (PPC) campaigns is often determined by the conversion rate, advertisers should be constantly testing, tweaking and improving their landing pages.

What are the Goals of a Landing Page?
Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that a conversion is the main goal of an effective landing page. But attracting and capturing qualified leads is an easier and more important goal. Why? Because you can always "sell" to visitors later. Grabbing their contact details ensures you have captured them at the height of their interest.

So the main goals of a landing page are:

• To Attract Prospects (primary goal) - grab email address and/or phone number
• To Produce Conversions (secondary goal)

Features of an Effective Landing Page:

The ingredients for an effective landing page include:

• Reinforced Ad Message
• Punchy Headings
• Short Paragraphs
• Enticing Copy
• Few Distractions
• Value Proposition
• Compelling Images
• Little or No Navigation
• Calls to Action
• Few choices
• Simple Language and Concepts
• Important Content "Above the Fold"
• Testimonials
• Establish Visitor Trust
• Foolproof Conversion Process
• Test, Tweak and Test Again

Best Advice on Improving Your Google & Yahoo Quality Scores

• Break down your ad groups!!! First and foremost, organize your ad groups into smaller, more targeted ad groups. This is the cream of the crop in achieving a better quality score. By breaking down your campaigns and ad groups into smaller ad groups (meaning fewer keywords in each ad group) it allows you to write more relevant ads for a select number of keywords in your ad group. Google and Yahoo both say that by including your keywords in your ad title and descriptions will greatly help increase your quality scores.At one time I had a rather large campaign of Dating keywords. The keywords are targeted to different persons and different age groups. I took the campaign and created several new ad groups within Google Adwords Editor for each different type of Keywords. This allowed me to write ads that included a specific keyword in my ad title and description that would be more targeted and relevant to the end user. Now I have about 45different ad groups in this one campaign, but they are all as targeted as possible to the user, and that’s my end goal. Because my keywords, ads and landing page are completely targeted and relevant to each other, I have a ‘great’ quality score on most keywords and my conversions and click-through rates have increased. Once I was finished creating all my new ad groups within Adwords Editor, I then used the 3rd party converter tool in Yahoo to copy and paste my Google campaign into Yahoo.
  
• Ad text display settings. In both Google and Yahoo the default settings for ad display are set to optimize, which always displays the better performing ad. What you want to do is set your ad display settings to rotate in Google and set the Yahoo optimize ad display to off. This allows you to actually test your ads. Why is testing your ads important? Click-through rates are a determining factor in quality score. So if you have two ads you are running, and they both have a low click-through rate, and you’re not testing new ads, then you can never achieve a higher click-through rate. Google and Yahoo will simply always display the higher of the two, even if it’s a low CTR!There are many resources of ways to test your ads to achieve not only a higher click-through rate but higher conversion rates as well.
  
• Keyword and ad text relevancy. Google & Yahoo both want to reward advertisers when they deliver the most targeted and relevant ads to users. That’s really the main point of all this quality score talk. So by including your main keywords in both the title and description of your ad text is not something you should overlook or disregard. That’s why breaking down your ad groups into smaller, more targeted ad groups with fewer keywords is so important. You’ll have fewer variations of keywords that you would need to include in your ad text. One step you can take over adding keywords in your ad text manually is using the dynamic keyword insertion feature. This allows the advertiser to dynamically insert the keyword into the ad text which will be the most relevant to what the user has typed in the search box. When using dynamic keyword insertion be careful, if you don’t use it correctly it can make your ad’s wording read a little funky.

Source : ppchero

5 Stats to Begin Analyzing Your Performance

Visits vs. Clicks: First, lets tackle a basic, but slightly confusing stat. Within Google Analytics, clicks indicate how many times your advertisements were clicked by users. Visitors indicates the number of actual unique sessions that are initiated by your visitors. According to Google, there are a few reasons why these numbers will not be the same:

• A visitor may click your ad multiple times. When one person clicks on one advertisement multiple times in the same session, AdWords will record multiple clicks while Analytics recognizes the separate pageviews as one visit. This is a common behavior among visitors engaging in comparison shopping.
• A user may click on an ad, and then later, during a different session, return directly to the site through a bookmark. The referral information from the original visit will be retained in this case, so the one click will result in multiple visits.
• A visitor may click on your advertisement, but prevent the page from fully loading by navigating to another page or by pressing their browser’s Stop button. In this case, the Analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data to the Google servers. However, AdWords will still register a click.
• To ensure more accurate billing, Google AdWords automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports. However, Analytics reports these clicks as visits to your website in order to show the complete set of traffic data.

New vs. Returning Visitors: Depending on the goals of your PPC campaign, you can interpret these stats in a couple different ways. If your percent of new visitors is predominant within your account, this means that you are successfully driving new visitors/traffic to your site. If you have a high percentage of returning visitors this could indicate that your site’s content is engaging to your users, and they are returning multiple times. To delve further into your visitor’s behavior, you can explore the “Visitor Loyalty” reports.
Knowing this data can shed some light on your PPC campaign by allowing you to determine the percent of new visitors to your site. With a PPC campaign, you will want to have a higher percent of new visitors as you try to acquire sales & leads.
Average page views per visitor: Average page views is another metric that can indicate the quality of your traffic. A high average page views per visitor is a sign that you are generating the right kind of traffic and your content engages your audience. If this stat is low, then this means that something is not working properly with your site, or your traffic isn’t as targeted as it could be.
Your conversion rate can be tied to your average page views per visitor. If users are not engaged in your site, then they certainly aren’t going to purchase your product or request additional information (if you are sending your traffic directly to your website, not a one-page landing page).
Bounce rate: Actually, Google has a pretty good definition of this term so I’ll let them take if from here: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.
Use this metric to measure visitor quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that your site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and advertisement that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
Average time on site: This metric means exactly what it measures; the average time that users spend on your site. Again, this metric is also tied to the quality of your traffic. If visitors stay on your site for an extended period of time, then they are engaged and exploring what your site has to offer. Keep in mind, time on site can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using your site.

Don't Make This Mistake When Opening A New PPC Account!

The problem:

The advertiser opened a new Google Adwords account and generated no impressions or clicks for days. When he went to look at the ad diagnostics tool, it said that campaign had already exceeded his daily budget. How could he have exceeded his campaign budget if he's never received any impressions or clicks?

The mistake:

The mistake the advertiser made was he set his keyword bids too high, and his daily budgets were too low. This combination can cause a lot of frustration when first beginning a new account. Google thinks that if it starts showing the ads and people click on them, they won't be able to shut them off in enough time to not go over budget, so they just turn it off as soon as it is turned on.

The fix:

Simply lower your bids or increase your daily budget. Once the advertiser did this, his ads immediately began showing. There was no technical problem with the account or with Google.