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Adwords has recently given us a new gift to online marketers: “Sitelinks”.  You can know add sitelinks to your AD’s and this is a fantastic way to increase your virtual real estate in your PPC AD.  This will usually make your AD stand out more and thus result in higher CTR’s and when you have higher CTR’s you usually lower your CPC’s.  It’s a win-win!

I also suggest that if you have a local business that you include your address option too.  This can give almost a full 1/4 more AD space then your competitors.  Any option where Google Adwords gives you an opportunity to stand out over your competition you want to take it!  Jump on this now before it becomes common knowledge.

Example Adwords Sitelinks Image

* Click on image to see in full size.

Let us know (below) in the comment section, did you know about the sitelinks option in Adwords? Do have a question on how to best use sitelinks in your Adwords PPC marketing?

One of the biggest mistakes people make when improving on CTR’s (click thurs rates) on their PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is they forget to match the landing page to their AD.

I am ALL for split testing and trying to improve your AD’s as long as you remember to keep your landing page congruent with your AD.

For example: (not real ADs, just for demo purposes)

AD 1: (CTR: 3.2%)
Divorce Lawyer Vancouver
Easy, Affordable, 100% Guaranteed.
25 Years Experience With Divorce.
www.EasyDivorceVancouver.com

Ad 2: (CTR: 5%)
Divorce Lawyer Vancouver
We’ll Have You Divorced in 60 Days
Via Mediation or It’s Free! 1 Flat Fee.
www.EasyDivorceVancouver.com

Two totally different AD’s.  Both Adword’s ADs have great click thru rates in this example, but they each are offering two different things.  One is offering a ‘general divorce lawyer practice’ services and the other is offering ‘divorce mediation’ services.   So if you send traffic from AD 2 to the same landing page for AD 1, it will not convert as well because of the landing page is not congruent with the AD.

If you immediately want to improve your conversions remember to make your landing pages support your AD.  So when you are split testing ADs you may need to offer two different landing pages to support each AD.

Get your Small Business products and/or services on TV with Google Adwords. The entry point to TV has definitely been lowered thanks to Google.  This is pretty exciting stuff! I know I am pretty “pro” internet marketing, but this might be another great  advertising medium for small businesses to market their local businesses.

I am for sure going to start testing this program. I think a Small Business can easily make a solid commercial using a tool like Animoto or even use YouTube’s Free Search Story Tool (this the type of commercial that ran during the Super Bowl for Google, and if it’s good enough for Google it can certainly be good enough for your business). Making a solid 30 second video is simple with the right tools and now getting some decent air time during relevant shows that relate to your local business is easier than ever.

If you have local small business, it might worth taking $1000-2000 and doing some testing for one of your services and/or products.  Be sure to set-up a unique landing page and/or website so you can directly track the results of this advertising medium.  If it coverts the run with it.  Just like PPC this will only become more expensive, so you may be able to snag some great airtime for dirt cheap if you are an early adopter.  The early bird gets the worm!

LIMITED OFFER: If there is a local business out there that would like to test this type of advertising out (then for a limited time ) I  can help them test it FOR FREE (no management fees, for the first 3 months.) as long as they cover their own Adword’s TV budget.   This is limited offer and won’t around for long. Note: This offer can stopped at anytime without any notice.

What I Will Do: I will help them make and manage the Adwords TV ADs, create the video, and create a unique website/landing page to track the campaign.   If you are interested please email at: sales@smallbusinessonlinecoach.com and make the subject line: “Adwords TV help”.  You must have at least a budget of $2000 or more you are willing to spend with Adwords.  If you are not at least willing to spend that then please do not contact me.

Let me know your thoughts of this new Adword’s TV advertising…?  Do you see this as a viable advertising option for your local business..?

Great tip here from Austin Lau on how to target Gmail PPC ads in the Adwords content network.  Remember to not to mix this in with the rest of your content ads nor your search campaigns, run it as a separate Adwords campaign to allow proper tracking.

Another important tip to make sure you are leverage this with the right mind set. Remember your prospects are in their email.

Example

Here is a real example of an email I sent my wife and lets look at what shows up in the Gmail Adword’s Ad.  For those, that can’t see the image below, the email says, “call a carpet cleaner before the holidays – thx!”

What if the ‘Funbox’ ad said this instead…?

Carpet Cleaners [your city] – CarpetCleaningXXX.com – 10% OFF if you mention “Gmail Ad”.  Call Now 416 XXX XXX to save!

It might get the attention of my wife a little more and it gives her a call to action based on her Gmail.  The point I am trying to make is to make sure you are writing Ads that are specific to Gmail users and remember people are reading their email, so you have to grab their attention from that.

Think of keywords that will be listed in people’s emails that would be relevant to your local business and write ads that will stand out and still be related to what their email might be about.

You also might want to write ads that can steal business from the competition too. So a long list of your competitions products and services would be handy, you can make Ads that make counter offers to your competitors products and services.

If you are creative with PPC you can find tons of low hanging fruit. Let us know if you have done any testing with PPC in Gmail in the comment section below, love to hear your experiences.

I just found this interesting post today at WebProNews.com where they revealed the Coles Notes version of a recent study done by two NYU Professors.   It basically shows that by having a strong SEO presence and running PPC ads together will improve your conversions rates.  If you would like to read the full meal deal, then you may do so here.  For WebProNews.com’s condensed notes see below:

• On average, the impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa, possibly because of the tendency of consumers to trust organic listings more than paid ads.
• The positive association between paid and organic listings increases advertisers’ profits by at least 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of them. The positive association is strongest when advertiser-specific keywords are used and weakest when brand-specific and generic keywords are used.
• Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.
• The combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.
• The combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.
• Paid search advertising drives up to 54% of total revenue growth.

I have been telling merchants for years now that the best strategy is to have both SEO and PPC campaigns running parallel with each and this study just proves more that this a great plan.  They make the perfect couple.  The King & Queen.  A great partnership that compliments each other…. you get the point.

What are your thoughts…? Let us know in the comment section below.

Many small businesses do not understand how Adwords PPC auctions works. They have a hard time understanding how rankings and pricing works. This video must be the most brilliant explanation on how it all works.

If you can track your efforts then you can improve on your results. A/B split testing should be a part of your marketing efforts. If you use Google Adwords you will want to use their free optimizer tool. Here is webinar explaining how to set-up Google’s free website optimizer.

Online videos and all the video sharing sites have been around for some time now and we all understand that they are a huge part of how the web operates, especially when Google purchased YouTube for $US1.65 billion. Google even claims that 13 hours worth of video is uploaded every minute on YouTube. The most current internet marketing news is how YouTube has released PPC (Pay-Per-Click) service that enables YouTube users to have their videos appear at the top of the search results on YouTube for keywords they choose in their ad campaign. Watch this video below where Product Manager Matthew Liu explains how you can you use Sponsored Videos to promote your videos on YouTube.

Michelle MacPhearson has also written a pretty good post on how to set-up a YouTube PPC account. According to Ed Dale (30 Day Challenge’s Maverick) at his Seesmic video account he states that video will be have to be apart of every persons marketing strategy and explains that YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world.

It is obvious this will be a great opportunity for all types businesses and artists to promote and help find their niche group of fans. I can’t wait for all the success stories and new IM’ing businesses that will develop due to this new PPC platform. I will assume that the other video sharing sites will also soon follow suit with their own pay-per-click just like how MySpace followed with their own PPC after Facebook’s PPC program finding huge successes.

I am now signing up for an account and will do some testing. Once I have done a some testing I will report back with the results on how I found YouTube’s new PPC. Before I do, what do you think this will do for your business? Are you currently using YouTube and videos to market your business? If not, will this maybe become a new marketing strategy for you? Let me know in the comments below…

Oh! And if you want to sign up too… go to: YouTube PPC