Building a mobile site does not guarantee visitors will flood your site. Like any website, a mobile site requires a strong marketing strategy to draw users in. And it seems that one of the most popular online marketing tools in Australia – paid search – provides a lucrative opportunity for mobile marketers.

Globally it seems that whilst paid search represents a tiny portion of the total search market it is one that is showing rapid growth. This lack of share is partly attributed to the current low levels of market saturation meaning that those who enter early may benefit from lower than normal CPCs.

Is It Worthwhile To Invest in Paid Search in Australia?
With paid search commanding such a small piece of the paid search pie does it justify the effort to invest time and resources into maintaining a mobile paid search campaign? Statistics on mobile search in Australia are difficult to come by. Thus to illustrate the type of volume searches particular categories are attracting I have used the Google mobile keyword tool. The keywords utilised are taken from 4 key segments – jobs, real estate, holidays and entertainment.

What is interesting to see but not surprising is that those within the entertainment category such as movies and dining have a much larger ratio of searches on mobile to desktop. This is because users on the move are actively seeking information to make quick decisions about “where to next”. However other categories such as real estate still show promise not in terms of ratio’s but in overall volumes that users are searching via their mobile phone.

Setting Up A Campaign – What You Need To Know
Setting up a paid search mobile campaign is much like setting up a campaign for paid search on a desktop with a few key differences;
1) Ad Length; WAP text ads are much shorter in nature – with only 2 lines of text with a maximum of 18 characters for each. Display URLs can only be a maximum of 20 characters
2) Call To Action; Mobile ads can display a click to call button at the end of the ad instead of a display URL. In these instances the advertiser pays when a user clicks to call.
3) Carrier Targeting Options; In Australia like the US advertisers can choose to target ads to users on specific carrier networks ie Optus Mobile, Telstra etc.

What’s Coming
As always simple search advertising is just the beginning for Google. If we look further afield to the US, there are several interesting developments that will hopefully hit our shores;

1) Application Targeting; With the phenomenal growth of applications for mobiles it is no wonder that Google has begun to offer app targeting in the US. Similar to the growth of video, Google has pounced on this opportunity to provide widespread distribution of ads within applications.

2) Handset Targeting; In the US, Google has also started to offer mobile device targeting options. Thus if you only want your advertising to be shown on an iPhone you can do so. This enables marketers to have the flexibility to drive users to their mobile sites on devices that are compatible. Read more on this here

Perhaps however the most interesting developments are yet to come. In a recent interview Eric Schmidt alluded to the fact that Google has much more up their sleeve in this arena when he stated “serious growth in mobile advertising will take time. It’s probably the case that the real impact on mobile advertising will come from products that aren’t yet built,”

© Digital Marketing Lab Blog

Written By: Teresa Sperti

Paid search now represents over 50% of online advertising in Australia, and continues to grow. Despite it being a cost effective marketing tool, marketers need to drive paid search harder than ever before to combat rising costs associated with keyword inflation. This article exposes some of the major areas that are often under-utilised with paid search.

1. Analytics;
Too much time is spent in the AdWords interface / and bid management tools and a lack of time is spent in analytics. Refining a campaign on the basis of the your paid search interface is like making a pizza without the dough – it is sloppy and is missing the vital ingredient to make it a success.

2. Ad Text;
So often marketers forget to modify the ad text or ad groups are too large resulting in untargeted ad text. Clive Peeters for instance has a current sale on with 25% off selected fridges, however when I search for a fridge the Clive Peeters ad doesn’t tell me this! Marketers spend a lot of time to devise messages for glossy ads whilst significant paid search spend is being spent without enough focus on the key message to drive results.

3. Yahoo Search Marketing;
As Yahoo search marketing powers paid search on Bing, it represents approximately 1 in 10 searches in Australia. With significantly less advertisers on their network, it provides an opportunity to drive traffic at a lower cost and provide reach to consumers that you may not be currently attracting to your site.

4. Impression Share;
Whilst conversions and engagement should be your ultimate goals – brand marketers cannot ignore the importance of increasing share of voice within SERPs to reinforce a brand in the market. As many campaigns target broad keywords, it often means impression share can run at low levels, meaning consumers may only be exposed to your brand 10 – 20% of the time that people are searching for relevant queries. Using the Google reporting tool, set some impression share targets to reach – and look for ways to refine the campaign to achieve them ie expanding your negative keyword list, pausing keywords which drive very low click through rates both of which help improve a campaigns performance anyway.

5. Competitors Campaigns;
Is your competitor running a special offer that could be driving new search queries. Consumers often can recall the offer but not necessarily the brand name. Monitor competitor marketing activities and piggy back off some of their media exposure and campaigns by targeting relevant queries related to their latest campaign.

6. News-Worthy Content & Issues;
Topical issues are now driving much search activity on social sites and the internet and thus SEOs are focussing on this area heavily. However paid search is more agile and targeting keywords based on topical issues could be considered as a technique to drive traffic to content onsite which covers the latest relevant topics.

© Digital Marketing Lab Blog

Written By: Teresa Sperti

With competition driving keyword inflation and marketing budgets falling improving ROI is the hottest topic around for PPC.

As I commenced managing my first PPC campaign a number of years ago, it is interesting to witness the impact competition has had on keyword inflation over time. So just how much is it?

Over the past 2 years alone the average CPC for one campaign I have managed has increased by 150%. Surprisingly whilst keyword costs the keywords quality score has improved and the position has remained nearly identical. All of which has happened in a category which has a moderate level of competition – thus I cannot imagine the rate of keyword inflation in categories such as travel.

This is slightly concerning in a time where Australian organisations are yet to fully embrace the digital phenomenon, so it is not unrealistic to conceive that keyword inflation will continue to grow at a similar rate over the next 18 months.

Thus what is more important than ever is for marketers to become more strategic in their campaign management to lower CPCs and improve ROI to get more bang from the paid search buck.

Here are my top tips to improve campaign ROI;

1. Negative Keyword Matching

If a significant portion of your keyword portfolio is set to “broad match”, it is extremely important to refine your campaign with a long list of negative keywords on an ongoing basis. Whilst broad match keywords are useful to ensure broad coverage across your product or service category, it can also lead to a significant portion of unqualified users visiting your site – decreasing campaign ROI.In particular one of the key issues with broad match keywords is Google will match “similar keywords” to the original query ie if I am targeting spring water, Google will also serve ads to a user searching on mineral water which are 2 very different products. Thus by refining your negative keywords list PPC marketers can maximise ad serving to its most relevant audience.
To understand the exact queries that are driving users to a site – utilise the “search query performance report” in the Google AdWords Report centre. This report enables campaign managers to identify the queries driving traffic to a site which are inappropriate and can be added to a negative keyword list.

2. AdGroup Refinement

After creating AdGroups, PPC marketers often overlook the opportunity to further refine their AdGroup strategy by segmenting AdGroups into smaller more relevant subsets of keywords and ad text. Overtime keywords are added to AdGroups, which can result in the ad text becoming less targeted and relevant to a users search query. Similar to the creation of an initial campaign strategy, review AdGroups and group keywords into new sub-themes which can be used as a basis to create new ad groups. By doing so campaign managers can create more targeted ad text and improve keyword quality scores – thus reducing CPCs.

3. ROAS Based Campaign Segmentation

With limited budgets it is important to allocate funding based on the best performing AdGroups and keywords. As budgets are set at the campaign level it is difficult to allocate funding towards AdGroups that are performing better than others. Thus rather than simply segmenting your campaigns by site or product type – consider segmenting campaigns based on ROAS.By grouping AdGroups into 3 categories, high, moderate and low return, and creating separate campaigns, campaign managers can allocating a higher proportion of ad spend towards the keywords that generate the highest return.

4. Day Parting & Bid Multiplier

Not all days were created equal when is comes to online consumer purchases. For example according to ComScore, consumers are 30% more likely to purchase a holiday on Monday or Tuesday thus using strategies to improve exposure and click-throughs on these given days can improve ROI.

Google AdWords provides campaign managers with 2 key tools to optimise campaigns on higher / lower conversion days. Ad Scheduling allows campaign managers to schedule when ads should and shouldn’t appear, whilst bid multiplier enables marketers to bid above or below the maximum CPC by setting a percentage increase or decrease on bids for given days / times.

5. Testing

Like many other marketing mediums, the importance of testing is integral to improve ROI. Apart from the more obvious elements to test such as ad text and landing pages, trial testing various keyword match types such as phrase or exact match along with keyword positions.
Google offers a position preference function to enable campaign managers to specify ads to be shown in a preferred position. It is important to note that Google does not guarantee position placement preferences because of factors related to the bidding process. However it can be a useful tool to improve campaign performance as many organisations have found better ROI when ads are shown in a given position. When conducting tests, ensure tests results are statistically significant before decisions are made on how to proceed, one tool to help you with the following is - http://splittester.com/.

Do you have any other tips to improve ROI on PPC? Share them below.

© Digital Marketing Lab Blog