Think you know how to set up the perfect Google Ads campaign? Let’s take a closer look at 9 common Google Ads mistakes that most new campaigns fall prey to and discuss how you can avoid them. See if you are making one of these deceptively common mistakes, and learn strategies and techniques to fix them.
When small businesses and start-ups think about selling online, the primary markets other than Google are eBay and Amazon. The justification for this is simple; they are the largest ecommerce platforms for the UK and global markets, plus it’s fairly quick and easy to create a store on both platforms and start selling fast.
So what’s the problem?
The eBay and Amazon dilemma
The dilemma is that eBay and Amazon are also among the most highly competitive online marketplaces and include a combination of the largest e-tailers as well as the established smaller players too.
Many businesses that are new to these markets fall into the price-based marketing strategy, which can very quickly result in low to no ROI. In other cases, these smaller businesses are only advertising a fraction of their product range which have the largest return on revenue scope.
The issue with this is that you are either selling lots of items for almost zero return, or you are restricting your online selling success to a small percentage of the total opportunity.
So what’s the solution?
As you would expect there are many ways to tackle this problem, including making eBay/Amazon work harder for your business.
The remainder of this post explores this point, and more specifically other ways in which you can compete against the online dominance of eBay and Amazon when you have much smaller budgets at your disposal.
1. Improve the value you derive from eBay/Amazon
There’s a lot of tactics you can use in order to make the most out of eBay and Amazon, and I would not suggest ruling out these online markets for your business (you just don’t want to rely on them in isolation or use them at an unfulfilling level of satisfaction). You can certainly make them become more effective for you.
With both markets there are many basic “getting going” tips, help and advice which I urge you not to skip over, but to embrace and act on – you will be surprised how doing the basics right can often lead to you having a competitive edge over your immediate competition.
For example, with Amazon there are many specific items to pay added attention to when listing your products for the first time – I’ve listed a few of these below.
Some basic Amazon product listing tips:
Categories matter a lot – take time to place your products in the right search areas.
Be aware of the Amazon Style guidelines for your products to help keep them active and ranking.
Create unique and compelling product descriptions – don’t scrape other content.
Use high-quality, unique images to help your products stand out.
Research the keywords that you use – include them in the product title and description where applicable.
For more, check out WordStream’s Complete Beginner’s Guide to Amazon Advertising and 3 Amazon Seller ‘Tips Of The Trade’ For Small Business.
2. Optimize your organic listings on Amazon and eBay
According to WorldFirst, it is important to:
“Spend time and resource understanding Amazon’s ranking factors so your product gets in front of as many customers as possible. Make sure you find out the right keywords and descriptors for your product and make use of the additional keywords that Amazon allows you to add to include similar listings.”
The same applies to eBay and associated ecommerce platforms, all of which rely on a form of crawling, indexing and ranking system, not a million miles away from the more complex examples of search engines deployed by the likes of Bing and Google.
3. Compete locally and on your terms
When you market your products and services online the natural inclination for many businesses is to want to appear for everyone, everywhere, regardless of location, audience or other demographical nuances.
As a business with a smaller budget you need to maximise the odds in your favour. To do this you need to place added emphasis on dominating your niche, your specific audience, the highest lifetime value users/customers that you know about, plus everyone within a certain radius of your physical location.
Tactics for location optimization for startups include:
Claiming and optimizing (completing profiles, posting updates, etc.) Google My Business (GMB) and Bing Places.
Creating local resources on your site to encourage businesses in the region to engage, share and link to the site.
Building location-based content including targeting the growing demand for “near me” and other voice-driven and mobile search queries.
Ensure your website has location pages rich with mixed content types and showcasing local expertise and insight difficult for larger brands to replicate with any credibility.
4. Seek out and explore new online marketplaces
Have you ever herd of Trade Me, Newegg, Tophatter or ePRICE? These are some of the fastest growing international online marketplaces for businesses looking to expand their horizons outside, instead of or in addition to the main players.
Here’s an overview of a couple of the above to help fuel your interest and perhaps whet your online marketplace appetite:
“Newegg is the number one technology marketplace in the USA with a customer base of 33 million. Newegg receives 17 million visitors a month, making it the perfect place for retailors to market their products to a large online shopping audience…
ePRICE is the No. 2 Italian marketplace, with a history in tech and gaming but has witnessed a more recent roll-out of a multi-category offering for those who want to access the online savvy Italian European Market.”
These marketplaces are just the beginning. There will be niche platforms tailored to your industry, audience, location and other segmentation types that your business will be able to be a more dominant marketing force within – it is worth spending the time discovering and nurturing these to supplement and compete with the likes of eBay and Amazon.
5. Turn your own website into a selling destination
This is by far my favorite action area for any smaller ecommerce business.
By showcasing the trust, authority and expertise that your business has on your website and finding unique ways to create content to educate, inform and solve your audience’s needs, you begin to compete with the large ecommerce platforms in ways impossible for them to replicate.
The largest tactical advantage for a smaller business is to remove budget from the equation and build your audience through value, help, advice and a unique understanding of their needs and pain points that is much more difficult to facilitate as a global entity.
My top tip for progressing on this approach (as it can sound quite daunting when getting started) is to build on:
What you know
Your brand differentiators
Things that stir passion in your team and customer base
Your products and services that are naturally shared, engaged with and purchased
6. Be the bigger fish in smaller ponds
Look to integrate online and offline more strategically and don’t write off smaller groups of relevant audiences for the draw of everyone being in the same place.
Adding many niche groups and market segment targeting to your marketing mix means that you also get to be the bigger player sometimes and derive the value that comes from this, including:
Faster sales
Repeat customers
More frequent referrals
Less purchase justification
Reduced buyer comparisons
Offline within your industry, including associated governing bodies, events, memberships and interest groups, you will find lots of opportunities that can be integrated for online gains too.
As you gather and build your unique business audience and a foundation which embraces niche and small as much as it does all-inclusive and global, you will start to form the community that becomes synonymous with your brand and business.
Closing thoughts
eBay and Amazon have undoubted attraction to small businesses; however they have their pitfalls and challenges too (budget perhaps the greatest).
There are, however, alternatives to make eBay and Amazon work harder for your business, as well as alternative approaches to help empower businesses with smaller budgets so they can compete and perform effectively.
About the author
Lee Wilson is Head of Enterprise SEO at Vertical Leap. He has been leading digital marketing teams since the early 2000’s.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
So here you are, staring at a million empty cells on an Excel spreadsheet, brainstorming your best calls to action, aka CTA’s and your catchiest taglines; you’ve got your best keywords sticky-noted to the computer screen as you write. We see you, writing ad copy is a little intimidating. Writing ad copy at scale? Even scarier.
You might find yourself here because you’re building out a new account, creating a new campaign, or just editing your existing ads after Google has introduced its newest and shiniest ad type, like responsive search ads.
Whatever it may be, sitting and waiting for a creative epiphany and attempting to channel your inner advertising visionary genius can be frustrating, to say the least. On top of that, it’s crucial to stay on your toes as Google constantly updates the details of its ad capabilities and features; it’s a lot to keep up with. That’s why we’ve outlined our best tips for writing paid search ads at scale, so you can take a deep breath and feel a little more confident in your quest to conquer the beast that goes by the name of PPC advertising.
1. Stop! Close that spreadsheet! Research! Before anything else!
For a lot of people, doing your ad copywriting research might mean googling best practices. This isn’t necessarily bad practice, but it’s not the only research you should be doing. In reality, ad copy best practices aren’t one-size-fits-all. The most successful CTA’s for one industry or company may not be best for your business. So, how do you overcome that, you ask?
Start searching the way you would imagine your target market searches for you. See how your competitors are baiting them in, and start to identify ways to infiltrate that space. Your process should start with some strong keyword research. You can’t successfully write an ad for your target market without at least showing up when they’re searching for you! Figure out what keywords are important for your business to include in ad copy so you can get in front of your most worthwhile audience. Trying to see things from a prospect’s perspective within your buyer’s journey will do wonders for your ability to match their intent and drive engagement with your ad.
Here’s a guide to getting started with keyword research, and here are some of our favorite competitive keyword research tools.
This research also helps you better understand your target market, and can assist you in nailing down some solid buyer personas even further. What’s your target audience searching for? How are they wording it? What are the most common keywords? Who are your PPC competitors? We’ll talk more about that a little later, but standing in your potential customers’ shoes before any cells on the Excel sheet get filled in is the ultimate goal here.
2. Organize yourself before you start
I know, I know, I said I was offering tips for writing ad copy at scale, but that research advice is pretty standard with any amount of ads you’re writing, so hold tight, and also, you’re welcome. Here’s where the tips are a little more technical/process oriented.
I start by organizing a spreadsheet (those empty cells I keep referencing) and filling in the ad group and campaign columns before anything else. The ad group includes the keywords I’m optimizing for, so including them within the headlines is crucial to matching search query intent and gaining exposure.
Here’s what the organization of the process looks like, from a spreadsheet to a live ad on the world wide web! They grow up so fast.
3. Make multiple variations within each ad group
Creating a few different variations for each ad group you’re writing for is your best bet. This way, you can measure the success of them against each other, and yes I’m gonna say it again, gain a better understanding of your audience and their behavior.
If that doesn’t convince you, consider how creating multiple variations for the same ad also broadens your reach. Some segments of your target audience might be more inclined to click on an ad with a more negative tone, offering a solution to a problem, and some might be more interested in a positive tone that highlights an opportunity.
But what kind of emotional ad will appeal the most to your target audience? The only way to find out: Make. Multiple. Variations.
When you’re writing a few different variations for the same ad group, it’s easy to run out of thesaurus suggestions for your wording. Rather than using a bunch of synonyms in your ad varying efforts, focus more on the tone of your messaging. For example, you could write two ads with a positive tone, and two with a more negative tone. One of each could include a question in the headline, and the others could be more statement-driven. Here’s an example of creating different variations for the same ad:
Notice how they’re all being written for the same AdWords Grader campaign, but using a slightly different messaging and tone. The first and third variations are focused more on appealing to the people searching for guidance on the new platform. They identify a pain point for searchers, and offer support and solutions to those problems that may prompt them to click on the ad. The second and fourth variations are geared towards those who are less emotionally engaged with the AdWords changes, but may still be searching for guidance. The slight variations in wording, perspective, and tone broaden your message and help your ad appeal to the largest and most favorable audience possible.
No matter how blocked you may feel in the creative process, do your best to tackle one ad group at a time. It gets complicated when you jump back and forth between ad groups, and it can also hurt the fluidity of your messaging. If you’re feeling particularly blocked, skipping the descriptions and working on other ad groups is the way to go. You’ll have to refresh your memory when you go back later to write them, but it won’t mess with the flow of your headlines, which are probably the most important parts of your ads.
4. Open all the landing pages your ad will direct clicks to
While you’re writing your ads, have the landing pages they’ll direct people to from the SERPs open in front of you. You might be thinking, “I know everything on the landing page and what it means, I wrote it,” but I’m still recommending it.
When you’re writing ad copy at scale, sometimes all the ad groups mush together in your brain and you start losing the connection between the ad and the specific page it’s bringing people to. With the landing page open, not only do you avoid writing landing page copy that’s irrelevant to the matching ad, but it can help you ensure that the people clicking on the ad know what they’re being directed to, which helps you avoid high bounce rates, low CTR, and brief page visits. Focus on making the customer’s journey from the ad to the landing page as seamless and fluid as possible within the messaging.
5. Even while diversifying voice, keep your message consistent
Ok, now that you’re all set up and organized in writing your ad copy, let’s talk about the technicalities within the actual messaging. Remember what I said about diversifying your message across variations of the same ad group? Varying with positive/negative tones is good advice, but let’s talk about some alternative ideas to test your ad copy.
If you haven’t already, you should have come across some common pain points for your target market when you were doing your research on keywords, search queries, and customer personas. What is it about your business that improves the lives of your customers? What do you offer to fix, or make easier/more efficient for your customers?
Your value proposition should be highlighted one way or another throughout your ad copy. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes (yes, I said it again) and focus on emphasizing the benefits your business provides them with over the features of your product. Speak to, and offer solutions for, your market’s most common pain points. For example, at WordStream, we’re offering customers the optimization of their online advertising with superior, easy to use software and expert guidance (humble brag). Instead of all of our ads saying “Our Software Can Grade Your Google Ads Account,” they’ll say things like “More Leads for Your Business.” That’s the true end benefit. To make your ads stand out, mirror the customer’s ultimate goal in your copy.
6. Test till you drop
The value of regularly running A/B tests on your PPC ads is impossible to overlook. You can monitor the engagement of one version of an ad directly against another, and gain real, actionable insight into writing more successful ads.
Try testing different CTA’s, tones, wording, verbs, numbers in headlines, questions, capitalization of certain letters; the limit does not exist! I know sometimes it’s hard to imagine that little tweaks in the wording would make any significant difference in engagement, but they really can.
In the end, there are no rules here; test whatever you think is worth testing. By regularly testing them as they roll out for your campaigns, you’ll be able to constantly improve the success of your ads. It’s as simple as:
Write two ads
Run them simultaneously
Check which ad has more favorable metrics (CTR, Conversion Rate, etc.)
Remove the ad with lower performance, replace it with another
Repeat!
So, there you have it! Tips for writing ad copy at scale, from organizing your process to best practices within the detail of your copy; intimidation, be gone! Take your time, do your research, stay organized, follow best practices for the copy, and test, test, test.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
For those of you who are actively trying to build up your business’s Facebook presence, now is your chance to hear about it from someone who has been on the front lines every single day for the past two years.Here is how he did it.
With over 80 million small businesses using Pages to engage customers and drive growth, Facebook has become an indispensable resource for local advertisers.
1.6 billion people use Facebook to connect with small businesses, and the majority of these users visit their favorite businesses’ Pages on a weekly basis.
And while pay-per-click platforms like Google Ads offer a number of tools to help the little guy grow, Facebook wields a huge advantage: the ability to directly communicate with eager prospects and loyal customers alike.
Now, due to popular demand, the social media giant is ramping up its local business game with a suite of changes and updates. Let’s look at each one in turn.
1. Letting Visitors Take Action on Your Page
Whether you’re creating a landing page form or building a website, a core principle of online marketing is making the consumer exert the least effort possible. The less your prospect has to do, the happier she is. The same logic applies to your business Page.
That’s why Facebook is making super easy for the users who visit your Page to take immediate action. Whether you sling pizzas, offer luxury massages, or both—Pizza & Pamper would be incredible—you can enable consumers to convert as soon as they land on your Page.
Via Facebook
Facebook is especially focused on local businesses that sell tickets to events. Every month, 700 million consumers use Events when looking for something to do in their neighborhoods. To help your business drive more sales, Facebook is now enabling you to sell tickets directly through the platform. No longer will your business lose prospects who don’t make the transition from your Event to your website.
2. Encouraging Customers to Do the Selling For You
When someone is in the market for a cup of coffee or a new pair of slacks, he’s inclined to ask friends and family for their suggestions. Facebook tapped into the influence of social circles with the introduction of Recommendations.
The original idea: a user can indicate that he’s looking for Recommendations when posting a status. Then, when his friends comment with their ideas, Facebook populates the comments with names, locations, and reviews of relevant local businesses.
Via Facebook
That’s still around. And now, Facebook users can post Recommendations—complete with text, images, and tags—directly on your Page. Essentially, Facebook is enabling your most enthusiastic customers to post testimonials for all your prospects to see.
Via Facebook
And don’t worry—the platform will make sure your competitors aren’t undermining your business with negative reviews.
3. Giving Visitors an Inside Look into Your Business
As emphasized in our recent blog posts, social media is trending toward Stories. Between Facebook and Instagram alone, over half a billion people use Stories to provide friends and followers with immersive visual updates.
Stories are a stellar way for your business to give Page visitors a behind-the-scenes look at your daily operations. Consumers love their local businesses because they contribute to a sense of community and togetherness. You can take this one step further by using Stories to develop a personable, community-oriented brand.
Plus, talk about ease of use: all a visitor needs to do in order to experience your local brand Story is click on your Page profile image.
4. Making it Easy for Consumers to Find You
This is the part I find most exciting. Mobile Facebook users have access to a section of the app titled “Local.” Here, nearby consumers will find tons of information about your business: location, hours, ratings, reviews, and friends’ Recommendations. Of course, users can also click through to your Page to find all the same stuff and more.
Via Facebook
There’s a Facebook Local app, too. Based on a user’s location, she’ll find everything she needs to know about local businesses, upcoming events, places her friends have gone, and the like.
As consumers spend more time on mobile—and dedicate more mobile time to social media—it becomes increasingly crucial for your business to cultivate a friendly, engaging Facebook Page. By taking advantage of Actions, posting Stories, encouraging Recommendations, and cementing your presence in the Local section and app, you’re setting your business up for success in an era of immediate consumption via digital platforms.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.