Google – Page 15 – The Web Authority

April 13, 2016April 8, 2016

Where Should You Spend You Money for Online Activities

You can recoveIf your business isn't in recovery yet, where can you trim money?r from a hack. — If your business isn’t in recovery yet, where can you trim money?

If your business is pulling back where can you realistically chop in your marketing plan and not get hurt?

Chop Away

Social Media – if you are paying to update Facebook, Twitter and Google+ you could easily take a break to save money.

Blogging – try not to kill all your writing as the SEO juice you get from well-written blog posts helps you in the long run, but maybe consider moving from three days a week to two or from two days a week to one. Try to still keep the momentum up but maybe lower the word count or frequency.

Chop Not!

Google AdWords – don’t touch it unless you absolutely have to. AdWords is hands down the best way to generate new leads and start cash pumping back into your business.

e-newsletters – they build loyalty and repeat business. Newsletters are especially important to businesses that have annual renewals for service plans like pest control firms and HVAC firms. If you chop this, your name is not kept in front of your customers and come time to renew, they may not see the value of renewing; which will hurt your sales even further.

Need some practical sense to make the most of the budget you do have or to get AdWords to work harder for you? We’re the firm to call and chat with first especially if you are looking for honest advice you can trust with no sales pressure.

April 6, 2016April 6, 2016

Google Removed Sidebar Ads – What Happened to Advertisers? Part Two

Continued from Monday.

The full impact of what happens to AdWords advertisers is not known yet, but the data is flowing.

For now it appears that for advertisers not limited by budget:

Clicks have dropped
Impressions have dropped
CTR has improved
Average cost per click has increased about 5%
Cost has dropped by about 1%
Average position has increased by marginally
Conversions have increased
Cost per conversion has gone down
Conversion rate has gone up

For advertisers with small ad spends and budget limited:

Clicks have gone up
Impressions have gone up
CTR has declined
Average cost per click has gone down about 3%
Costs have gone up
Average position has decreased significantly
Conversions have dropped
Cost per conversion has gone way up
Conversion rate has gone down

Clearly for those with a limited budget the landscape of AdWords has changed and there is increased pressure from large advertisers wanting to fill the top spots. It may be that the drop in conversions is due to the fact that small budget programs now are showing in the off hours versus in prime time impacting click through rates and conversions.

I’ll know more as we get more statistical data, but for now, large advertisers won’t notice much of a change, but smaller advertisers with limited budgets will have to increase the cost per click to be more competitive now that ads only appear at the top and the bottom of the page at Google.com.

April 4, 2016April 1, 2016

Google Removed Sidebar Ads – What Happened to Advertisers? Part One

Google Partner Badge — McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

It may still be too soon to know what impact the removal of the sidebar ads from Google will have for AdWords advertisers, but here’s some of the data from the number of clients that we manage for the last month.

Client Results Not Limited by Budget – Large Ad Spends
Average clicks dropped 1.2% – some as much as 10%
Average impressions dropped 3.2% – some as much as 8.39% drop
Average cost per click increased 3.5% – some as much as 6.37%
Conversion rate increased by 14.1% – some as much as 44.95%
Average position dropped by 2.49% – some saw a 8.9% drop

Client Results Limited by Budget – Small Ad Spends
Average clicks increased by 18.8% – some by 59.8%
Average impressions increased by 23.7% – some by 42%
Average cost per click decreased by 7.5% some by 20.2%
Conversion rate decreased by 30.3% – some by 73%
Average position dropped by 16.2% – some by 27.6%

I expected to see a stronger increase in the cost per click and not a decrease. For lower spend accounts the big change was drop in ad position which caused a drop in conversion rate.

Come back on Wednesday for more details on the impact of Google’s removal of the right sidebar ads and what it means for you the AdWords advertiser.

March 23, 2016March 18, 2016

AdWords Standard Beats AdWords Express

I had a client who wanted to promote a new service in Manhattan, New York but wanted to spend $200 to $300 for clicks for a 30 day period. The price of her service is about $900 a pop. She wanted to move back into an old AdWords Express program to try to generate some buzz.

Sounds like you should be able to quickly and efficiently do this right? But what kind of quality of clicks would you get with AdWords Express.

Here’s a concrete example.

In AdWords Express we would enter one version of ad text and about 10 or so keywords we want to have the activity focus on. Let’s say the service was permanent eyebrow tattoos. Once we entered in our keyword set, Google would use broad match variations, synonyms, plurals, similar words and even parts of our keyword we wanted ads to show on.

So, even if we really only wanted to show ads on permanent eyebrows, or permanent eyebrow tattoos, Google would show ads on eyebrows, eyebrow makeup, eyebrow powder, eyebrow tweasers. As an AdWord Standard Expert User, I consider this type of non-targeted advertising not worth the clicks that this type of program may generate. But, to get general makeup interested consumer traffic AdWords Express might be okay.

However, when you combine all this with the fact you may have to pay $1.25 to $3.75 a click, you will want to be pickier about who may see your ads so as to not blow through your AdWords budget and not end up with any real prospects.

From my viewpoint, there is simply no replacement for using the Standard AdWords program. Set up and management costs may be higher, but the results are “golden” in comparison.