Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

JumpFly, the top ranked Search Engine Marketing Consultants in the US, was awarded the 2009 Best of Elgin Award in the Search Engine Marketing Consultants category for the 3rd year in a row. Each year, the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) selects outstanding local businesses they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. Only companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community are chosen.

The USCA was established with the intention to recognize the best of local businesses in their community. The organization works exclusively with local business owners, professional associations, chambers of commerce and other business advertising and marketing groups to help promote local business activity through public relations, marketing and advertising. JumpFly was selected for the 2009 USCA Best of Local Business award in the Search Engine Marketing Consultants Category based on information gathered by the USCA and data provided by third parties.

Based in the Chicago suburb of Elgin, Illinois, JumpFly has served as the leading Search Engine Marketing Consultants for small and medium businesses throughout the United States for over 10 years. Specializing in PPC Management, JumpFly’s sole purpose is to enable its clients to maximize the results of their PPC advertising efforts while saving time and money. As proven Search Engine Marketing Consultants, JumpFly has earned several industry awards, in addition to the USCA recognition, due to its commitment to client satisfaction and successful client results. In 2009, JumpFly received an “A” grade from the Better Business Bureau and was also proudly recognized as TopSEOs’ #1 PPC Management Company in the US.

“We are grateful to be recognized for providing a valuable service to our community and our clients. This award is a testament to our staff and their ongoing contributions and dedication. We are fortunate to have a group of committed professionals that all have the same goal in mind, and that is to help our clients achieve success. An over-abundance of self proclaimed search engine marketing consultants often makes identifying truly qualified companies a challenge. This award and others achieved by JumpFly over the past several years, in addition to our clients’ ongoing success, help demonstrate why JumpFly is the PPC Management Authority.”

Google has made yet another change to their Google AdWords reports in the area of conversion tracking.

Conversion tracking is one of the most important aspects of any PPC advertising account and you need to be sure that you have this installed correctly. Conversion tracking allows your account to be managed to the most important criteria for your business – and that is – “What am I getting out of this?”.

What Google AdWords has changed is the name of “Conversions” to “Conversions (1-per-click)” and they have added a new metric called “Conversions (many-per-click)”. The Conversion (1-per-click) field can only be filled once per customer and the Conversions (many-per-click) is incremented whenever any conversion occurs within 30 days after a click.

This can mean a couple of things to you depending on what your conversion structure is.

First, if your conversion is strictly measuring sales, it can mean that you have customers that come back within the first 30 days after their first purchase to purchase again. This is especially common in stores that sell commodities or that cross-sell a customer with more accessories to compliment their first purchase. (By the way – that begs the question – what kind of follow-up do you have with a first time customer to be sure they have everything they need and are you measuring the success of that follow-up?)

Also, if you have setup several types of conversions to be tracked on your site – for example, mailing list sign-up, contact form and sale – the “many-per-click” field will give you information about customers that have performed several goals on your site. You may have customers that do all three and that will show up in the many-per-click field. There are additional fields regarding the type of conversion that will give you the information you need to micro-manage these conversion types as well.

And don’t forget, Google AdWords revenue tracking can be exceptionally powerful for tracking specific revenue achieved for each specific product sold. This is certainly not for everyone, but can be incredibly valuable when applicable and is usually very easy to implement. If you have questions or need help with this, contact a professional PPC Management Company for asssitance.

The bottom line is this – understand what these Google AdWords conversion tracking numbers mean to you and use this valuable information to enhance your sales-funnel on your website.

According to Google, “Click Through Rate (CTR) is the number of clicks your ad received divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions).”

Every once in a while a new pay-per-click (PPC) advertising client will come in who considers their account CTR to be the benchmark by which their accounts performance is judged. Depending on the keyword strategy, it is most likely not a good idea to use CTR to judge an entire account’s performance.

True, we know that CTR has a big influence on the somewhat mysterious Google AdWords Quality Score(s). It is also a great indicator for comparing performance on your various AdGroups’ different ad copies. There are certainly many instances when Click Through Rate (CTR) is a very good indicator of performance.

Now, what about when low CTR is a good thing?

There are definitely times you want to eliminate a worthless click from a potential keyword, and while this would have a negative impact on the Click Through Rate (CTR) it would certainly have a positive effect on the account.

For example, a strategy that I recently adopted for a client really drives this point home.

One of my client’s competitors has a very common word for a company name. For the sake of confidentiality I will simply call it “widget.” Well, this competitor name “widget” is also the name of a very popular movie, an artist, a location overseas, a highway landmark, and dozens of other completely unrelated things. As you might imagine, the search volume for this popular term is through the roof, while the percentage of people actually using it for the company name we wished to target is extremely small. So small in fact, that it would almost certainly discourage anybody from even trying it as a keyword.

I thought it was worth trying, and to give it the best chance at success I used only the exact match version of “widget” in its own campaign, with a very specific ad designed to only solicit the searchers looking for my client’s services.

The results were surprisingly great. The campaign resulted in my client converting at half of his target conversion cost. The CTR for this keyword was a downright horrible 0.02%, however this was a good thing as it meant the ad was eliminating all of the unnecessary searchers and only targeting the exceptionally small amount of people looking for my clients competitor. In this case, the exceptionally low CTR was a good thing.

The low CTR also had a definite impact on the keyword’s quality score and forced my client’s minimum bid up to $10/click. Even with the the high minimum bid, the conversion cost was cheap and the quality of leads generated tens of thousands of dollars in new revenue for my client. Winner.

Now, the 0.02% CTR dramatically lowered the whole account’s CTR. If that figure had been used as a benchmark to judge performance, it would have been a huge mistake that would have cost my client a considerable amount of revenue. In this case, the actual conversion cost/rate was a far better benchmark than the pathetic CTR.

The bottom line here is that a low CTR can be a good thing in some strategies and is not always the best indicator of an entire account’s performance. Every account is different, just as every marketing strategy is different. Helping to determine the best strategy for your PPC marketing campaign is just one of the many unique skills that JumpFly PPC account manager brings to the table.

What’s your benchmark?