Central Perk

joi, 17 aprilie 2014

7 Critical Steps to Boosting your Campaign’s CTR

Posted: 17 Apr 2014 02:14 AM PDT

People don't generally have a favourable attitude towards ads, so it was delightful for us lovers of PPC to hear Jon Myers talk at January's Biddable World Conference about present and future paid search trends, where he identified an upward trend in CTR.

CTR is such an important metric when measuring PPC performance, as it represents a direct response from the user. CTR is an indication of people taking action and voting with their mouse; they are making a conscious decision to click on an ad. Therefore, CTR is a sound representation of how good and relevant your ad is, and is absolutely pivotal. If your ad gets a click, this indicates to Google that people have found the ad relevant and helpful.

CTR is the most influential component in the Quality Score algorithm and Quality Score is correlative to the success of a PPC campaign. At keyword level, Quality Score is calculated on exact match search queries and is based on historic CTR. So, the higher the CTR the higher the Quality Score, and the higher the Quality Score the lower the Cost Per Click (CPC). Additionally, the lower the CPC, the less spend you will accrue and the more return you will get for your investment. So, to summarise, CTR is extremely important and a good CTR is likely to correlate with a good PPC campaign.

BUT, what is a good CTR? This very much depends on the industry that you are operating in, so it is very difficult to categorise. With this being said, there are a number techniques we can all adopt to increase our CTRs.

7 tips and tricks to boost your campaign's CTR

1. Group keywords into semantically tight ad groups

Focus on the relationship between your keywords and your ad creative. This relationship needs to be tight. This can be achieved by increasing and maintaining the relevance between your keywords and the ads that these keywords trigger. Additionally, your keyword may have one semantic meaning, but multiple versions. For example 'women' has two other commonly used synonyms, 'ladies' and 'females'. Each synonym should have its own ad group and that synonym should be used in the ad creative to achieve a tighter, more targeted approach.

2. Think audience personas

Ensure that your keywords are highly relevant to your audience. Think about your audience's personas and make sure you give your customers a real identity rather than regarding them as an abstract collective. Spend some time determining how these personas are going to enter their search query into the search engines. This may give you inspiration for new keywords that you hadn't already considered, to ensure that you are targeting every aspect of that persona.

You also need to think about personas when structuring your ads. Are your target audience likely to be triggered by emotive language or rational language? Are they likely to prefer to be presented with the benefits, or the features and functions? What kind of information do they value? Price and promotions, or exclusivity?

It's likely that you will have several personas to represent your target audience, so organising your keywords and ad groups at a very granular level will support and enable you to target your potential customer whilst keeping the user at the centre of the process.

3. Simplify things

Your audience are going to be presented with a lot of choice when deciding which ad to give their click to. Therefore, it is important that you do one vital thing – simplify the decision for them. We have a tendency to favour information that is consistent with our expectations and beliefs. So, take advantage of this confirmation bias and display information that confirms their expectations and is consistent with their beliefs.
To explain, let's take this search query 'city break to Rome'. The individual behind this search query is likely to be thinking about visiting Rome's most renowned sights such as the Coliseum and the Vatican during their break. So why not confirm their expectations and present this information in the ad text? Doing this should mean they are likely to have a more favourable attitude to the ad, and the impression is more likely to achieve a click.

Additionally, simplify the decision for them with a strong, definitive headline that is consistent with what they are looking for. A strong headline will take control of the audience and draw them in. In contrast, a weak headline is likely to require too much processing effort, interest is likely to be lost and another ad will steal the click. DKI can help with this. It makes the ad more targeted by using the specific keyword(s) that were used in the search query, which are then presented in bold, attaining a more stand-out presence. Using price points and savings is effective as this information is simple, easy to process and convincing. The trick is not to confuse the audience as this will only distract them. Further simplify their decision with a compelling call to action.

4. Always consider the end goal

The end goal is a conversion, so your keywords and your ads need to prepare the audience in advance of landing on the website. Therefore, the information in the ad needs to be consistent and synchronous with the information on the landing page. The style and language in the ad should depict the style and language of the content on the landing page. By doing this the user will have a more coherent experience throughout their journey and path to conversion.

5. Take up more space on the SERPs

Take advantage of extensions to not only provide more valuable information to your audience but to also occupy more valuable space on the results page. Dominating more space increases the opportunity of achieving a click. Furthermore, you can take up more 'screen estate' with Brand bidding.

6. Test and record

Building a continual testing plan will provide a platform for discovering new opportunities and optimising existing ones. When testing and optimising it is helpful to keep an up-to-date change history log, as this will enable you to identify what changes may have influenced the fluctuation in performance. For example, if you altered your ad creative on 20/03/14, and in a weekly report dated 01/04/14 – 07/04/14 you identified a 15% increase in CTR, you could infer that the increase in CTR was attributed to the ad creative changed on 20/03/14. As well as helping to determine causality and correlation, it also quite plainly indicates what works well and what doesn't.

Use your best performing ad and run it alongside close variations of this ad, and eventually you will have a combination of the best snippets from each, giving you a great piece of clickable content. When testing new ads, ensure that they are set to rotate evenly and not optimised, so that you can gain a conclusive breakdown of ad performance.

As well as discovering new opportunities, current keyword performance should be frequently reviewed and bid optimisations made. Keywords with poor CTRs should be paused to ensure that the performance of other keywords within the ad group are not affected.

7. Exclude the irrelevant

Do you want your ads to show for people who have already converted? Obviously the answer to this question varies very much depending on the type of product/service you offer, but even if your product/service can support multiple conversions, those that have converted are now aware of your brand, so showing ads to these people may be a wasted impression, which could negatively impact CTR. If you would like to exclude already-converted customers from seeing your ads, allowing you to put more spend into targeting those who have not yet converted, go to Shared Libraries > Audiences and you can add a remarketing tag to all pages on the website. Once this has been implemented, you can create a new remarketing list. When enough date is collected you can add 'converters' as a negative audience by going to the audience tab.

Additionally, using negative keywords is essential to improving your CTR. Regularly reviewing your search query reports will ensure you are capturing all of the relevant keywords that should be excluded from your campaigns.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear all about the tips & tricks you are currently using to give your CTR a boost!

(Image credit Flickr)

The post 7 Critical Steps to Boosting your Campaign's CTR appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : The bottomless pit of pleasing strangers

The bottomless pit of pleasing strangers

You will never, ever run out of strangers.

And so, the goal of perfectly pleasing an infinite number of passersby is a fool's errand. They come with their own worldview, their own issues, their own biases.

Since they don't know you or trust you and don't get you, they're not inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt or invest what it takes to understand you.

Sure, some of them will applaud or smile or buy. And if that's your mission, have fun.

But perfection in stranger-pleasing? Not going to happen, not worth the journey.

For some people, some of the time, the only response is, "it's not for you."

• Email to a friend •

miercuri, 16 aprilie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Austerity In Spain? Where? Public Debt Threatens to Exceed 100% of GDP in 2014
Ukraine Separatists Seize Six Armored Personnel Carriers, Parade Them in Two Towns
Europe Without €: Former EU Commissioner Says "Monetary Union has Failed"
Gold Doomed or Resting? Gold vs. Major Currencies; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Reiterate Sell Signal

Austerity In Spain? Where? Public Debt Threatens to Exceed 100% of GDP in 2014

Posted: 16 Apr 2014 06:29 PM PDT

EL Pais reports Spanish Public Debt Threatens to Exceed 100% of GDP in 2014

Via translation

General government debt accumulated through February was 987.945 billion euros, an amount that represents 96.5% of gross domestic product (GDP). This represents a new record in the amount of money the state, communities, and the municipalities have to return to financial institutions and investment funds. In February alone, the government liabilities increased by 8.130 billion, up 8% from the previous month.

The debt problem is not just that you have to pay, but the difficulty to stop the frenzied pace to growing-has risen from 37% of GDP in 2007 to 96.5% seven years later.

If this pace continues, the liabilities of the government would scale up to 110% of GDP, an unknown dimension in the last century. Since the early twentieth century, when Spain had to attend entrained war debts of Cuba, the barrier was not exceeded 100%, according to the historical series of the IMF. The debt ended 2013 at 94% of GDP.

The threat that public debt exceeds the red line of 100% of GDP grows as government is unable to decisively reduce the public deficit. The 2014 budget is expected to be in the red by 60.7 billion, 5.8% of GDP.

In addition, the Executive will launch a new section of the Autonomous Liquidity Fund (FLA), liquidity to support to the regions, totaling 23 billion, representing about two-points of GDP. In total, the public debt will grow by about 80 billion, eight points of GDP during 2014. The level of liability of public institutions would reach 104% compared to 98.9% government projection earlier this year.

Treasury Raises Less Than Expected Despite tax Increases

Compounding the spending problem, Treasury Raises Less Than Expected Despite tax Increases

Via translation from Libre Mercado

The Ministry of Finance announced 17 of every 100 workers are employed directly in government up 20% from levels 2007, when the ratio was 14%.

Speaking in net terms, the crisis has wiped out 3.6 million jobs in the private sector but has just reduced the workforce of 136,000 public employees. What does this mean? In essence, that 97% of the labor destruction has taken the private sector, while the government has just 3% of the course setting.

The situation is even more poignant when we realize the increase in spending on handpicked advisers. In 2013, the Ministries have triggered the eventual disbursement of staff salaries by 7.5%. Also the salaries of senior management have risen in 2013. Adding up all the costs of the central administration staff, we see that in 2013 an increase of 0.8% was recorded.

Although tax revenue was 37.8% of GDP and was in line with the historical average, the total outlay of the government in 2013 exceeded 44.4% of GDP. Grants have remained almost intact compared to 2012, while the total personnel costs assumed 900 billion euros.

To keep afloat these structures spending taxpayers in crisis have taken numerous tax increases. However, the resulting fiscal balance has not kept pace than projected by the Treasury:

The tax on winnings from lottery has raised less than half of schedule in 2013.
The 10% surcharge on excise duty on alcohol has not generated the expected returns, 70% lower than expected.
Income tax collection has a gap of 6% vs expectations.
The indirect quintessential tax generated 5% less than estimated by Treasury.

In sum, the income tax office have been 4.21% lower than projected. However, it is important to note that the number of taxpayers who pays this revenue has declined significantly as a result of mass unemployment and the destruction of businesses.

Austerity In Spain? Where?

The biggest things Spain needs to do are cut public spending and public employment, and lower taxes. Instead, it raised taxes on those with real jobs.

It should be no surprise that revenues don't meet expectations and public spending has not declined.

In spite of all the howls from misguided Keynesians and Monetarists over alleged austerity, the approach Spain took is not "austerity", rather it is economic insanity.

By the way, debt does not "threaten" to exceed 100% of GDP, it is a near-certainty.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Ukraine Separatists Seize Six Armored Personnel Carriers, Parade Them in Two Towns

Posted: 16 Apr 2014 11:17 AM PDT

Pro-Russia forces in eastern Ukraine intensified their defiance against Kiev on Wednesday, seizing half a dozen armored vehicles and parading them through towns of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk.

The Financial Times reports Pro-Russia forces intensify defiance in eastern Ukraine

The escalating tension, a day after Kiev launched special operations against the separatists, prompted Nato to bolster its military presence on its eastern border, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the alliance's secretary-general announced on Wednesday.

Hundreds of local people in the centre of Kramatorsk cheered the vehicles and the roughly 100 militia men on them as they drove on to nearby Slavyansk. The defence ministry said the troops were guarded by "people in uniforms who have no relation to Ukraine's armed forces".

The crowd cheering the pro-Russia forces cried "Donbas, Donbas", referring to the region of Donetsk, as they chatted excitedly and took photos on their phones. Some locals said the forces were troops from Kiev that had switched sides. More likely, they were more of the "green men" militants who took control of a series of government buildings in the region in recent days. There was no sign of struggle.

Unidentified armed militants had seized the mayor's office in Donetsk, a large regional capital where pro-Russia separatists nearly two weeks ago seized the regional government building, news agencies reported on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear whether the group was allied with separatists that have in past days seized about 10 regional government buildings in eastern Ukrainian cities.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk told the cabinet that a newly formed "constitutional commission" would swiftly draft constitutional changes delegating more governing power from Kiev's central government to regional legislatures and administrations.

Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian foreign ministry's human rights representative, was quoted as saying: "To all appearances, events [in Ukraine] are beginning to develop under the worst-case scenario." Earlier, Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev claimed Ukraine was close to "civil war".

The comments from Moscow heightened concerns that any bloodshed resulting from attempts by the Kiev authorities to retake control of eastern Ukrainian cities could prompt direct military intervention by Russia.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Europe Without €: Former EU Commissioner Says "Monetary Union has Failed"

Posted: 16 Apr 2014 07:20 AM PDT

Via Translation from the Italian website L'Anti Diplomatico, former EU Commissioner and and signatory of the Manifesto of European solidarity, Frits Bolkestein proclaims the "Monetary Union has Failed".

In his conference "Europe Without €" held in Rome on Saturday 12 April, Fred Bolkestein, a former commissioner of the European Union and signatory of the Manifesto of European solidarity quotes former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in his address to the European Parliament in 1991:

"EU policy is the essential counterpart to monetary union." The political union had to precede the formation of the single currency and a real central bank.

The opposite happened. Maastricht policies to create a monetary union have not had an effect integral politics, but the opposite effect as we see today.

Economic cultures are different and there is no solidarity. The French view is that imbalances of payments and budgets should be adjusted and jointly funded by the surplus countries to finance the deficit countries. It is a vision not sustainable in the long run.

According to Bolkestein, Eurobonds will only dilute the responsibility and "veil" problems. The Germans, moreover, do not want transfers and Eurobonds. Moreover, as history teaches, transfers from rich regions to poor regions do not work.

Monetary union has failed, concludes Bolkestein, and the countries in deficit situation can not solve their problems by themselves. Indeed, this is an additional cause of suffering. Alternatives do not exist and "we have to think about a second step: the exit from the euro."

That the monetary union has failed is certainly not news to Mish readers. But it is both new and news for a former commissioner of the European Union to recognize that simple statement of fact and give a "Europe Without €"conference on it.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Gold Doomed or Resting? Gold vs. Major Currencies; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Reiterate Sell Signal

Posted: 15 Apr 2014 11:17 PM PDT

Here are some interesting charts from my friend Nick at Sharelynx Gold. (Login Required)

Gold vs. US Dollars

Gold vs. Euros

Gold vs. Ukraine Hyyvnia

It took about 4,000 Hyyvnia to buy an ounce of gold at the end of 2008. It takes 17,444 now.

Gold vs. Russia Rubles

Gold vs. India Rupees

Gold vs. Argentina Pesos

Gold vs. Venezuelan Bolivars

Gold vs. Yen

By the way: Those in Argentina and Venezuela cannot buy gold at the quoted rates. The charts reflect "official" exchange rates. Black market rates are much much higher.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Reiterate Sell Signal

Bloomberg reports Goldman Stands by $1,050 Gold Target on Outlook for Recovery

Bullion's rally this year was spurred by poor U.S. data probably linked to the weather and rising tension in Ukraine, analysts led by Jeffrey Currie wrote in a report, describing the reasons as transient. With the tapering of the Federal Reserve's bond-buying program, U.S. economic releases will return as the driving force behind lower prices, he wrote.

Gold's 12-year bull run ended in 2013 as the Fed prepared to reduce monthly bond-buying that fueled gains in asset prices while failing to stoke inflation. Prices rose 10 percent this year even as the Fed cut purchases, with Russia's annexation of Crimea and mixed U.S. economic data boosting haven demand. Last year, Currie described gold as a "slam-dunk sell" for 2014.

"It would require a significant sustained slowdown in U.S. growth for us to revisit our expectation for lower gold prices over the next two years," Currie wrote in the report, dated yesterday. "While further escalation in tensions could support gold prices, we expect a sequential acceleration in both U.S. and Chinese activity, and hence for gold prices to decline."

Gold for immediate delivery traded 0.3 percent higher at $1,322.01 an ounce at 7:43 p.m. in Singapore, according to Bloomberg generic pricing, after the United Nations Security Council met to address the Ukraine crisis. Bullion last traded below $1,050 an ounce in February 2010.

Morgan Stanley

Bullion is the least preferred commodity among metals as prices resume a decline this year on the outlook for rising U.S. interest rates and low inflation expectations, Morgan Stanley said in a report on April 8. Average prices are expected to drop for the next four quarters, it said.

Stronger U.S. growth this year and next will help the world economy withstand weaker recoveries in emerging markets, according to the International Monetary Fund. The world's largest economy will expand 2.8 percent this year and 3 percent in 2015, unchanged from forecasts in January, the IMF said in its World Economic Outlook report last week.

Least Preferred Commodity?

Is gold really the least preferred commodity? Actually, I hope so, because if it is, sentiment will reverse.

Please consider Gold Prices 2014: Do What Goldman Does, Not What It Says

Jeffrey Currie, the investment bank's head of commodities research, has repeated his $1,050 target several times since last October, when he declared gold a "slam-dunk sell" along with other precious metals.

But investors need to be very skeptical when looking at Goldman's forecasts for gold prices. Not only are they often wrong, but the bank frequently does the opposite of what it recommends.

Goldman and Gold Prices: A Shady History

Let's first look at some of Goldman's gold price forecasts over the past few years and how they panned out.

For example, back in 2007, Goldman was bearish on gold, telling its clients to sell. In fact, Goldman declared selling gold in 2008 one of its Top 10 tips of the year.

Of course, gold prices rose 12.2% in 2008 and another 23.4% in 2009.

By November 2011, Goldman was actually bullish on gold prices - it raised its target to $1,930 an ounce about one month after gold prices had peaked.

By May 2012, with gold prices below $1,600, Goldman adjusted its bullish target to $1,840 an ounce. Gold prices did rise slightly after that, but never made it to $1,800, and thereafter started a precipitous decline.

By December 2012 - when gold prices were trading in the neighborhood of $1,700, Goldman revised its forecast to $1,800. Six months later gold prices were slipping toward $1,200.

Goldman finally reversed course in February 2013, beginning its string of bearish forecasts that have continued to the present.

That's actually good news for gold prices, as Goldman always seems to be late figuring out where gold is headed.

Gold Doomed or Resting?

Seldom is sentiment so bad for something that still appears to be a long-term bull market.

When in doubt, it pays to take the opposite side of what Goldman Sachs publicly says. Goldman has a history of not only being wrong, but betting against its own recommendations.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com