Posts Tagged ‘ROI’

How To Boost Traffic & ROI With Your Daily Budget

August 11th, 2009

Google AdWords Daily Budget

The daily budget in Google AdWords is kind of confusing for some advertisers. If you set your budget to $50, you will notice some days it will spend $48 some days it will spend $59.32.

Even though it is called the daily budget, the way Google actually calculates it is slightly different. They will take your daily budget and multiply it by the number of days in the month to get a monthly budget. This is the magic number that your campaign will not spend more than. I believe anything over this number Google will actually refund you. (Can anyone confirm this?)

Budgeting

It is important to look at the daily budget and see if you are hitting your daily budget on most days. If you are, chances are you can get more traffic for your campaign if you raise you budget. As long as your ROI is ok, you will want to raise your daily budget where you will not be losing out on traffic.

In addition to bringing more traffic, you will probably see an increase in overall ROI. When you have more traffic you have a better chance of turning conversions.

Image Courtesy: Darren Hester

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Use Search Query Performance Report To Reduce Extra Spend

August 5th, 2009

Although broad match keywords should be only be used sparingly, there are many instances where you will find the need to use them. In such cases it is a good idea to look at what terms Google matches your ads to and what terms are getting clicked on.

Search Query Performance Report

In the new Google AdWords interface this is relatively simple. When you are in the keyword tab select a few broad match keywords or select all, and click the ‘See Search Terms…” button and select show all. This will pop open a new window with a list of the terms that trigger your ad. From this list you can check of specific keywords and select exclude. You have the ability to exclude terms on the campaign level or ad group level. These keywords will be added as negatives to you campaign or ad group depending on what you selected.

search-query-data

Bottom Line

Best practice is to run this every two weeks or so, especially if you are constantly making changes to your campaigns. You will find that you are shaving off significant chunks of your spend which you can reallocate to better performing keywords.

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How To Track Your Phone Sales By Referring Source

July 30th, 2009

Old Telephone

Anyone who runs an ecommerce business will tell you that it extremely hard to track where their phone sales are coming from. Some online retailers have upwards of 35% of their sales coming in over the phone. How do you keep track os these sales from an advertising perspective? What campaigns/keywords are not performing well? Here are two ways to track telephone sales properly.

Multiple Phone Numbers

High Level Tracking

The easy way to track phone sales on a high level is to get multiple phone numbers and set you website to display a different phone number based on the refering source. For example if  someone came from Google, show them one number — when someone come sfrom Yahoo, show another number etc… Now everytime someone calls you know where they originally came from.

Depending on your phone system, you should be able to display which line the calls come in from and then have your sales people enter a referring source into your system as they put the order through for the customer. As your system aggregates this info, you will know what your ROI is. Keep in mind that this can get as granular as you’d like, but it will be a pain to manage this for very many keywords/phone numbers. This solution works best at a very high level of tracking.

Tracking ID

Granular Tracking

If you have an in-house developer and would like more granular tracking, this is for you. Every time a unique visitor comes to your site generate a unique session ID and store their referring source in your database. You will then want to display this session ID on all pages of your site. The ID number should be short and easy to tell your sales representative over the phone.

When your sales reps take an order over the phone they should ask the customer to read them the session ID (call it Phone Tracking ID or something easy) which they will then input into your system with the order. Once your sales screen has this number it should mimic the customers cookie and send the relevant order info to your tracking pixels. When it does this, the customers original referring source as well as keywords or any other data that you track with the session ID will pass through and your will be able to see your ROI on a very granular level.

Bottom Line

If you just want tracking by channel or have very few campaigns, the first option is easy to set up and will work well for you. If you like granular data and have the development resources to go crazy, go for the second option.

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Posted in Platform, Tracking & Analytics

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Is The Google AdWords Content Network Right For You?

July 29th, 2009

Content Network

Google’s Content Network is huge. In minutes you can get thousands of impressions and clicks. Does it work? Here is an easy way to measure your ROI.

If you already have a campaign running for Brand A or Category A, change the targeting option under Settings to be Search only. This will only show your ad to Google’s search network which includes searches done on google.com as well as Google’s search partners (i.e. CableVision or other ISPs). Now create an exact copy of your previous campaign and check off the opposite settings, choose only the Content Network. When the campaign is only tageting the Content Network you will be able to effectively monitor the performance from just this channel.

Keep in mind that as a general rule the Content Network does not perform too well for eCommerce websites. I’ve had better results from display ads in the content network, but your best bet is to test text ads as well.

Image Courtesy: PROFITAPOLIS

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Maximize Your ROI On Comparison Shopping Engines

July 22nd, 2009

Apples And Oranges

Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) are a great marketing channel to promote the products you are selling. Most CSEs work on a pay per click model with rates varying by category. Because the CSE gets paid per click they try to drive as much traffic as possible and for most part it is targeted traffic. However, when you have a large product feed you will have a lot of products with many clicks and no return on investment (ROI). There are several thing you can do to rectify this.

Competitive Analysis:

The first thing to keep in mind is that people go to Comparison Shopping Engines to… Compare Prices! You will want to map out your competitive landscape and ensure that you are priced competitively. An item priced a penny cheaper than the competition will show up much higher on the page. Some websites will advertise the same product significantly cheaper just to lure the customer in and then tack on a ‘shipping/handling/processing’ charge. Make you your price looks competitive from the first glance on the CSEs.

Consumer Ratings:

Another thing consumers compare on CSEs ar your store ratings. Those little stars can make the difference between night and day. When a consumer sees 4 or 5 stars, they feel comfortable purchasing from you even though they never heard of you before. You should always push your happy customers to leave reviews for you because as a general rule of thumb, only pissed off customers go out of there way to leave reviews about their shopping experience. One additional reason to strive for positive reviews (aside from having happy customers) is that most CSEs incorporate store reviews into their ranking algorithms and will display your products higher on the page because of it.

Categorization:

Always make sure that your products show up in the correct categories. When an item is not categorized properly you will start receiving unwanted clicks that will not convert into sales. On the flip side, if your items are categorized properly you will receive much more qualified traffic and it will have a much better ROI. However you generate your feeds it will be in your best interests to map your sites category structure to each CSE.

Kill Reports:

When you have a large number of products in your feed it becomes imperative to run Kill Reports on a constant basis. A Kill Report is a performance report from any tracking software that contains the following columns:

  • SKU (Identifying ID)
  • Amount of Clicks
  • Cost
  • Amount of Orders
  • Revenue
  • Brand Name (optional)

What you will now need to do is analyze which items are not worth the cost based on a threshold that you define. For example any item with more that 50 clicks and no revenue, or any item with a cost of more than 50% of revenue produced. Once you come up with a magic formula that works for your business, you should run a Kill Report once or twice a month and exclude those items from future feeds. Something to keep in mind, is that if you see a specific brand performing poorly consistently over time you may want to exclude all that brands products from your feed. Results vary from CSE to CSE so I would suggest running a separate report for each CSE.

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