12 Jan 2011

Query Paths in Search Funnels

In: Google Adwords, PPC

Hot on the heels of the new Search Funnels features that were recently launched, here’s another new feature: The Top Paths (Query Paths) report.

Broad match keywords in your AdWords account may be matched to a variety of keywords your users are searching for. You bid on certain keywords, but what about the actual queries that these keywords were matched to? You can see Keyword Paths within Search Funnels – and now, you can see Query Paths as well.

Within the existing Top Paths reports:

Select the Top Paths (Query Paths) option in the Dimension drop down menu to show you the actual queries that were matched to your ads and clicked prior to a conversion.

Note: this option will only show queries for search ads that were clicked, and not for impressions.

This data gives even more insight into the searches users make before finding and then purchasing on your site. With this information, you should be able to better target these users by seeing how they find you, and gain confidence in bidding on keywords that convert or assist in the conversion path.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

Google Global Market Finder

This tool will help you to set your new market.

Will you use it?

Overview:

Google Global Market Finder is a free, online application that helps you find new markets for your products or services overseas.

It helps you compare opportunities from different locations around the world using the following:

  • Google Search data
  • Google Translate keyword translation
  • AdWords keyword bid and competition

These metrics allow you to compare the cost of acquiring a new customer with your product margins and help you to determine whether reaching customers in a new market is good for your business.

Differences between Global Market Finder and Keyword Tool:

There are a few key differences between Global Market Finder and Keyword Tool.

Global Market Finder:

  • Automatically translates your keywords and, if applicable, shows alternative translations.
  • Calculates each location’s Opportunity Score based on broad-based matches of translated keywords.
  • Organizes market opportunities by location.

Global Market Finder determines Opportunity Score:

Opportunity Score is a dynamic metric based on local monthly search volume, suggested bid, and competition between different locations in your target market. If two locations have the same search volume, then the location with the lower suggested bid receives a higher Opportunity Score. Similarly, if two locations have the same suggested bid, then the location with the higher search volume gets a higher Opportunity Score.

Global Market:

Global Market Finder groups locations into global markets as follows:

  • Africa: Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda
  • Americas: Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Greenland, Isle of Man, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, United States, Venezuela
  • Asia: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong (SAR), India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea (South), Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam
  • Emerging Markets: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Hong Kong (SAR), India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey
  • Europe: Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom
  • European Union: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom
  • G20: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea (South), Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States
  • Middle East: Bahrain, Brunei, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates
  • Oceania: Australia, New Zealand

Global Market Finder group keywords in each location:

Global Market Finder groups keywords according to language, which are sorted alphabetically within each locale.

Keyword language is sometimes ambiguous. For example, the keyword hotel is valid in English, Spanish, German, and a number of other languages. In order to determine a keyword’s language, Global Market Finder uses a number of signals, which includes:

  • the keyword language: for example, the word ??? is unambiguously Japanese; in contrast, the word entrepreneur is both English and French
  • the Google interface language: for example, a Spanish-speaking user in the United States might search for taco using Google’s Spanish-language interface, while an English-speaking user in the United States might search for the same word using Google’s English-language interface
  • the Google domain: for example, a user in the United States may use www.google.com while another user in the United States may use www.google.com.mx

In addition, Global Market Finder combines variants of the same keyword or broad-based matches into a single keyword. For example, the keyword hotel and its relevant variation hôtel, which may be used by both English and French-speaking users in the United States, are combined into hotel. Eliminating broad-matched duplicates helps avoid inflating advertising opportunities in a new market.

By  Tawfek Shalapy

Top 5 Things for Facebook Page Success

1. Promote your page to your current customers:

  • The first step you want to take after you have created your page is to increase the number of connections to your page by promoting your presence on facebook to your current customers.
  • There are a couple free ways to encourage users to connect to your page using facebook tools:

a)      Page Badge: This allows you to promote your facebook page on your website.

b)      The Like Box: On your website.

  • This integration allows you to gain more connections by giving customers the ability to like your page from your website.

c)      Another way to drive more connections to your page is to include a link in your newsletter & e-mail encouraging                your subscribers to connect with you on facebook.

d)      You can also promote your page on facebook with facebook Ads.

2. Publish Relevant Information:

  • Be personal & write in your true voice & not as a business.
  • Talk about things that are important to you & your customers.
  • Make sure to provide interesting, fun & relevant updates.

3. Talk to your customers:

  • Encourage people to write on your page.
  • Respond o their comments.
  • Calls to action, are very important to drive more word-of-mouth marketing.
    • You can use your fan page to ask your customers for feedback on new products or services you are thinking about rolling it.

Remember to: review your page insights which provide aggregated statistics about the people who are connected to                                       your page.

4. Use Photos & Videos:

  • Using tools like photos is great way to make your page more interactive & drives customer loyalty.
  • Photos & videos are No. 1 tools used on pages as they bring your business & product to life.

5. Update your page anytime, anywhere:

  • It’s very easy to update your page when you are on the road using “Facebook Custom

E-mail”, which can be used to post photos or videos directly to their page from mobile device.

HOW TO: Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Here’s nothing like the basics to help bring things back into focus when you feel lost. In “Marketing 101,” the acronym “AIDA” stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. This is the most simple and rudimentary of sales and marketing funnels and is still incredibly relevant today when it comes to social media and Internet marketing strategies.
Each section of AIDA represents a section of your sales and marketing process and can help you set your expectations, decide what to monitor, and visualize the relationships between each part. Understanding the flow of the tools and tactics will also help you get your measurements and analytics in line with your goals.
Here’s a closer look at the breakdown of this marketing funnel, some tips on how to apply it to your social media strategy, and a look at how the model is evolving in the social media age.


Awareness


Awareness is social media’s bread and butter. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and other networks are built for this. You can’t easily display your inventory via Twitter, set up a shopping cart on LinkedIn, or fill orders through YouTube. These networks are not going to be your point of sale. Instead, they are your communication and outreach tools — the spokes that lead back to your hub (sales page, blog, site, etc.) where you will be making your conversions.
Awareness can take many forms, but its main goal is getting people to know you exist and that you can solve a problem they might have. At this level, conversations, interaction and content are king. A few metrics you might want to measure around your brand are conversation frequency, increased mentions and sentiment.


Interest


Now that you have their attention, you need to get customers interested in your product. You can bolster interest with offers and compelling reasons why you’re better than the competition, and how you can solve customers’ problems. Features and benefits weigh heavily in this level, and social media can help you kick their interest into high gear.
If you’re running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and have some targeted landing pages set up for your products or services, those are what you want to link to — not your homepage. Even if you’re not utilizing paid ads, the same strategy of linking to targeted pages through social media is applicable. A few of the metrics you will want to look at here are CTR (click through rate), retweets (of deals and links), and conversations about specific products.


Desire


Social media can help bolster desire through communication and engagement, but to fully satisfy someone’s desire to buy, you need to have a site that is streamlined and optimized. Recently, I tried using a popular car rental site to make a reservation, but it was so difficult to navigate that I gave up, despite having a great discount code. The unmanageable user interface killed my desire in two minutes flat, and my business went straight to the competition. Your site makes a huge impression, and people will judge your company by it.
Take the time to go through your site and optimize the presentation and the shopping cart experience. Testimonials gathered from linkable social profiles are a great asset.
Take the customer from interest to desire with a clean, easy to navigate, info rich, and functional site. Some of the metrics that matter at this level are bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed and incoming links.


Action


Now that your customers are itching to buy your product, and their money is burning a hole in their PayPal pocket, you need to seal the deal. At this point, your site is your number one tool, and while social media can influence the action through the previous levels, it’s not going to have the same influence here. You need to make it easy and obvious for your customer to complete your desired action (purchase, sign up, lead form, etc.).
The action is also where you can finally calculate some of your end metrics, like conversion rate and ROI. This is where you can see how everything is performing and the final impact your work is having. Often, these are the metrics that your boss (and your boss’s boss) are looking for.


New Additions to the Marketing Funnel


Over the years, the traditional AIDA has evolved and added two extra levels. These levels represent not only a shift in the technology and methods that are used to market, but the people behind it.


Loyalty


How are you getting your customers to buy from you again? One very simple way to stave off any buyer’s remorse is to follow up via the same social media you used to get customers in the first place. If you know they purchased via a link on Facebook, send them a Facebook message saying “thanks,” and provide them with your customer service contact info.
Perform customer service on Twitter. Monitor the online conversations around people who are already using your product and see if they have any questions or problems that you can resolve quickly. You can build social loyalty programs and use the communities you create to keep customers coming back. This is where CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can play a leading role, and many social CRM solutions are emerging to fill that need. A few things you might want to monitor here are repeat buyers, the use of loyalty codes, sentiment of mentions post-purchase and sentiment of specific products.


Advocacy


Advocacy is the dream of any marketer. It’s the “sweet spot,” where your customers do your marketing for you. It’s when customers love your products, brand, services and people so much that they can’t help but talk about you. This is why you want to make it easy for people to share your brand. Any hindrance to this — be it a bad website interface or an anti-social company ethic — will really discourage this extremely valuable source of traffic and interest.
If it’s an option, I’m far more inclined to click on a “Tweet This” or “Like” button than I am to take the link, shorten it in bit., and post it to my various social networks. Remove any barriers to advocacy and then both encourage and reward it. Some metrics to look at here are mentions, conversations and referrals.


The problem with AIDA


As you can see, the levels of our old friend AIDA can get a bit muddy, especially when it comes to the areas of awareness and interest. This has given birth to dozens, probably even hundreds, of fresh interpretations. The main thing to remember is how the funnels flow and to set your measurement and expectations accordingly.
You also don’t need to live and die by this funnel. People can easily skip a level or go through multiple levels at once. It’s not a perfect model, but then nothing is. But keep AIDA in mind as you shape your social marketing strategy. It should help you focus and prioritize your goals for success.

21 Oct 2010

The Bid Simulator reaches a new level

In: Google Adwords, PPC

A few weeks ago, we announced the launch of Estimated Top Impressions in the bid simulator. Today we’re announcing another improvement: the ability to view bid simulations across keywords in an ad group at once. With this launch, we hope to give you a faster and more scalable way of making bidding decisions across keywords in aggregate.

The ad group level bid simulator provides simulations for two types of changes:

  1. Applying a single bid to all the keywords in the ad group.
  2. Updating the ad group default bid (this only impacts those keywords that do not have their own keyword-level CPC bid and use the ad group default bid).

If you’re like many advertisers and manage your bids at the keyword-level, it may be worth taking a look at ad group level bid simulations: You could be surprised to find out that, in some cases, you could have achieved similar or better results had you managed your bids by using a single ad group default Max CPC bid.

Let’s take a closer look at an ad group where this is the case:

The highlighted row shows that, for the past seven days, the ad group received 339 clicks, costing a total of $182.37. Beneath this row, you can see simulations for the potential clicks, cost, and impressions that the ad group could have received had the keywords all used a single Max CPC bid.

In this case, if all keywords in the ad group had used a Max. CPC bid of $0.53, the ad group could have received an additional 49 clicks (for a total of 398) for about the same cost ($182). Thus, if clicks from all keywords in the ad group are equally valuable to the advertiser, it would make sense to set a single bid of $0.53 to all the keywords.

Note: For this type of bid simulation, look to see if the yellow dot is above the green line in the chart to the right of the table. If it is, this indicates that you may be able to get more clicks for the same cost.

If a few keywords in an ad group are especially profitable to your business (i.e. they convert at higher conversion rates or at higher values) you may choose to manage them separately by assigning keyword-level Max CPC bids. If this is the case, the bid simulator will display simulations for the remaining keywords in the ad group that use the ad group default bid. If you select a new ad group default bid, this bid will apply to all keywords in the ad group for which you haven’t specified a keyword-level Max CPC.

Here are two tips to help you get the most out of the bid simulator:

  1. Check out ad group level simulations to find out if using a single bid for all the keywords in the ad group could save you time and money.
  2. If you view a bid simulation for a specific keyword and do not see click cost estimates, this is likely because the keyword doesn’t receive enough traffic. Consider managing low traffic keywords in aggregate by using the ad group default bid for them by deleting their keyword level bids.

To see ad group level bid simulations, go to the “Ad groups” tab and look at the “Default Max. CPC” column in our chart icon.

Post Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew