How can I get the best results out of my Search Engine Marketing campaign?

We get this question a lot — and the real answer is: “it depends.”

The best way that I can possibly explain search engine marketing, in general, has to do with your ability to properly “tweak” the dials to optimize for your desired result.

Understanding that more clicks = more cost, it’s best to describe the process is visually in this format:

The "SEM Dials" can be turned to dictate the performance of your campaign. Here, I illustrate all of the moving parts and their impact on certain areas of the campaign's performance.

To view the full sized image that indicates the search engine marketing dials, please click here.

Allow me to explain in short:

• Targeting Area
• Geotargeting to an acute area of focus will limit the search volumes, keeping cost/clicks down.
• Opening it up to more of a wide area of focus will allow for a higher number of impressions, clicks and cost.
• Max Daily Budget
• If your max daily budget is low, Google’s algorithm doesn’t give you “preferential treatment,” which means that your ads will show in off-peak times, or in highly competitive time zones with poor ad positioning.
• If your max daily budget is high, you’re signaling to Google that you’re capable and willing to spend advertising dollars on your campaign, thereby providing you with a “preferential treatment” in terms of seeding.
• Max CPC Bid
• If your max CPC bid is low, you’ll receive poor ad position placements, which will translate to less clicks and less conversions.
• By maximizing your CPC bid, you can (over time) back off once you’ve “earned clout” by proving that your ads are relevant to certain keywords, but a high CPC amount gives you a chance to compete with a new campaign (although the costs will be high at first).
• Keyword Specificity
• The more “general” your keywords, the higher number of visitors you will receive to your website, but your conversion rate will drop, and the visitor quality will be more “shopper” than buyer. That’s not to say that the net result won’t be a higher amount of revenue, just that you’re hoping that you can find buyers sprinkled into the mixture of shoppers that you’re reaching, and your cost per acquisition should rise dramatically.
• The more specific your keywords are, the inverse relationship will be from the above statement. Ideally, you’ve got a mixture of these keyword types, in their own ad groups, with their own budget requirements.
• Ad Creative Messaging
• If you’re attracting more “shopper” audiences in an attempt to attract more visitors, your call to action will be more passive in nature (i.e. “Learn more now”). Your conversion rate should take a hit with the increase in traffic, but could overall net better results than if you optimized for lower traffic volumes.
• If you want to attract more “buyers,” your ad creative will be written in such a way that pre-qualifies the traffic (i.e., “Become a member now with a $25 or higher donation”). Your conversion rate should improve dramatically, but you’ll be sending far less traffic to your landing page.

Does this make sense? I hope so.

— GC

Effectiveness of your holiday fundraising appeals

Good morning, all!

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted, and for that delay, I give you my apologies.

I’m working on developing a few different things here, but I wanted to take a moment to provide a blog for you all as we enter into December, where you will undoubtedly be putting together end of year appeals to your house files to close out 2010 in  a strong fashion.

A recent study written by Convio called the “2010 HOLIDAY GIVING Report” — included one chart that particularly piqued my interest. It was a survey sent to a wide array of existing and potential donors to nonprofit organizations across all sub verticals, and here is how they surveyed audience responded:

This tells us that the top two most effective appeal types are: (1) Appeals that focus on people, animals, or places in need of the donor’s financial help, or (2) Appeals that explain the need for funds now.

This goes back to the old argument of “emotion vs. logic” (which I just so happened to write about in a blog post earlier in the year — check it by clicking here).

This tells us that both with high-dollar and holiday giver audiences, that focusing on the emotional side of the coin (i.e. here’s what your funds will do to help these people/animals in need) AND creating a sense of urgency (by describing WHY the funds are needed at this time) help to drive the effectiveness of your end of year fund raising campaigns.

I also found it interesting that 40% of high-dollar donors said that they would be willing to provide a gift in the event that your appeal reminded them that they will receive a tax deduction for their end of year gift.

Perhaps segmenting your donor file into “high-dollar donors” and “average-donors” and writing two separate messages to include this sort of message in the appeal to your high-dollar donor segment might be effective. Feel free to test it & roll out the better performing message to the remainder of the email files.

Good luck this holiday season in closing out 2010 strongly!

All the best,

— GC

Further evidence that the preselected level on your conversion form increases your average sale

Further evidence that the preselected value increases your average sale.

In an article that I wrote on this  blog back in July titled, “Preselected values — your donation form’s best friend,” I covered a test conducted by our friends at the Salem Web Network regarding how their average gift values were increased by sending visitors in a split test to a form with (A) no preselected values, and (B) a preselected value of $50.

In an effort to further implement this line of thinking into our processes for fund raising, we conducted a test with one of our clients in an attempt to increase our average gift (or average sale) amount.

As seen in the chart above, we had seven different donation levels, each level being given a specific dollar amount tied to each level. Our goal was to set the preselected value at “Supporting Member,” which was a $50 giving level.

We started our testing on 7/28 and ran it through 9/30.

Over the test period, we have seen an increase of “Supporting Member” or the $50 giving level amount increase by 24.2%.

One of the things that we wanted to do was ensure that there were no negative impact on other key measurement categories such as conversion rate, or a decline in upper tiered giving levels. It’s important to pay attention to these figures, as if we increase the number of $50 gifts in exchange for a large decrease in $75, or $100 gifts — we negatively impact the revenue we are generating.

Also, if we decrease the conversion rate, we’re losing donors as a result of our changes — which will have a negative impact on our lifetime donor values and subsequent year revenue figures.

I am proud to report that (at least through this test period) that we did not see a significant decrease in either of the two figures mentioned above.

In fact, you can see an increase in the next level up (“Level 3”) throughout this testing period and a decline in the amount of “Level 1” (the donor level below) throughout.

This tells us that those arriving at the site with the intent to give a gift/donate, are willing to give a gift at our preselected value level, or the next level up, as opposed to the “least expensive” option available on the form.

We’ll continue to run tests, and will be providing sporadic updates on the subject matter as time goes on.

Enjoy.

— GC

How can I increase my Google AdWords Quality Score?

For those of you using Google AdWords, you’re likely wondering how you can optimize your campaigns and increase your overall results. One area that you should be focused on is your campaign keyword selections — and most specifically, your Google provided “quality score”.

The quality score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the calculated relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page(s).

There are several ways that you can improve your quality score, but here are ten good ways to do so:

Factors your can manage within AdWords:

1.) Split your keywords into smaller more targeted ad groups

By grouping your keywords into smaller more targeted ad groups, you can manage each subset of the overall campaign individually, and build small victories into overall campaign increases with a compounding effect. Consider using the built-in keyword grouper tool in Adwords editor to group keywords into 15 groups of 20 related keywords.

2.) Create relevant ad copy for each group

Once you’ve broken up your keywords into smaller more targeted groups, you must then focus on the ads for each group. If you have one ad group focusing on selling “Red Widgets” — then write copy specific to that product, or offer.

3.) Optimize Creatives

Create multiple versions of ads for each group that you’ve created. By doing this, you can test different ad variants and determine the best performing ads for each group to emphasize over time. Measuring the ad clickthrough rate (CTR) as the measurement for which ad creative is performing best.

You should consider turning “ad serving optimization” to the “OFF” setting so that you can accurately split test all 4 ads yourself.

4.) Experiment With Matching Options

If you are using broad matches for your keyword sets within the campaign, you may want to consider using “exact match” and “phrase match” keywords to each ad group. By doing this, you can measure which keywords generate the best quality score and lowest cost-per-click (CPC). According to studies that I’ve read, the exact match keyword groupings will achieve higher quality scores in most cases.

On-page factors you can manage:

5.) Link Building And SEO

As with any Google-related ranking, the number of inbound links and the quality in which your webpage or website is built will have implications upon your quality score. Essentially, if you don’t focus on organic ranking factors, the odds are that you will not achieve as high a quality score as you otherwise could.

Considering launching deep link building campaigns (paid links through third-party (relevant) websites, directory listings, and the like). Additionally, ensure that you have all of the factors in place that generate good organic rankings (title tags, alt tags on images and links, a well constructed and properly internally linked website, and so on). Ensure that your navigation structure works properly and include a site map to help accelerate the indexing of your website.

6.) Implement Keywords

For each page we implement most of the keywords into the copy used in your AdWords campaigns into the on-page copy.

7.) Split Test Landing Page

By doing multivariate or A/B split testing on landing pages used within your Google AdWords campaigns, you have a chance to measure which page is performing better. Ultimately, I always say that “a marketer’s intuition is trumped by cold, hard data” — there’s no way to arrive at that data unless you setup a control and a test version of your experiment.

8.) Meta Tags

Take your best performing keywords within your AdWords campaign and place them into meta tags within your landing page’s back-end file. Use the exact ad text from the best performing creative in the meta description. Also use the best performing and most descriptive keywords as the title of the page.

9.) Essential Site Pages

Ensure that your landing page (at least in the footer of the page) includes basic web page content, such as an “About us”, “Contact us”, or “Privacy policy” pages. This just helps build additional brand-specific keywords into your overall quality score ranking.

10.) Make Sure Google Thinks You’re Relevant

Use the Site-related keyword tool to make sure that Google thinks that your landing page is related to the keywords that you are targeting. Just simply type in your landing page address and double check that your selected keywords are included in the results found. If not, consider adding the results of your search into your campaign sets where appropriate.

I hope this helps all of you guys out there and you enjoyed the read.

— GC