Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Google recently announced that beginning in January 2010 they will be showing location targeted business phone numbers and addresses in Mobile Ads that are viewed on high end smartphones.  This new feature will allow people searching from their mobile device to click-to-call businesses just as easily as they click to visit websites.

This is an exciting development for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising because these click-to-call actions are extremely relevant leads and should be frequently converted into customers.  When searches are performed on high-end mobile devices with full HTML browsers (iPhones, Android, Palm WebOS), Google AdWords will communicate with the user’s mobile GPS to determine geographic location of the search.  With this information, Google is able to show the phone numbers and business addresses for the closest advertisers which will appear in a fifth line of ad text.  This is an extremely convenient development for people who use the mobile browsing capabilities on their phones.

This is not only exciting for potential customers, but for advertisers as well.  Advertisers will be charged the exact same way they are charged for clicks to their website and will not incur additional charges for receiving a call from a click.  Who doesn’t want more highly targeted, relevant traffic for the same price, right?

In order to make Google AdWords Mobile Ads appear with a location-specific click-to-call phone number, advertisers need to make sure their Google AdWords Campaigns are targeting all mobile devices with full HTML browsers.  Phone numbers and business addresses must also be added in the locations section of the Campaign settings.

To learn more about implementing click-to-call Google AdWords Mobile Ads, contact a qualified PPC Management Company.

I’ve blogged before about how Google AdWords can track revenue within the AdWords interface, without relying on Google Analytics. You can do the same for Yahoo Sponsored Search.

A note about why you might not want to only use Google Analytics to report revenue: Google Analytics attributes a conversion to “last touch” while Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search attribute it to “first touch.” What that means is if someone came to your website on a Monday through a paid ad, and didn’t buy anything, then returned a week later (either through a bookmark and manually typing in your URL) and bought something, Google Analytics would count that conversion as a Direct referral (the last way they came to your site), while AdWords and Sponsored Search would attribute it to PPC (the first way they came to your site).

It’s not a big deal when the vast majority of your visitors order on their first visit, but becomes a big deal when a large percentage of them don’t. I have several clients where over 50% of their visitors don’t buy on that first visit, which makes PPC look like it doesn’t perform that well. Once you factor in those “first touch” conversions, PPC certainly is a much more important piece of the marketing puzzle.

So back to how you track revenue in Yahoo Sponsored Search… I have to give Yahoo credit – they beat Google on this by including revenue right in the normal screens you use to manage your Yahoo Sponsored Search campaigns. Google only reports revenue on their actual reports, which makes it more of a pain to manage; Not impossible, just not as easy to analyze and then make quick changes.

To track Yahoo Sponsored Search revenue, you’ll just need to add one more tiny bit of code to your conversion tracking. Replace where I have ORDER.SUBTOTAL with your dynamically generated Order Subtotal field into this line of your Yahoo Sponsored Search Analytics code (You can also do Order Total, but I recommend doing the Subtotal which excludes tax and shipping, for a more accurate picture of your revenue.):

window.ysm_customData.conversion = “transId=,currency=,amount=ORDER.SUBTOTAL“;

That’s it. Pretty simple and pretty powerful. Now you can actually see what kind of revenue your Yahoo Sponsored Search campaigns are actually generating, and then make better informed decisions about where your PPC advertising dollars should be spent.

A note on this: I attempted to do it for a client that uses a Volusion cart and processes credit cards offline (meaning they don’t actually process the credit card at the time of order, but do it manually at a later time), but this won’t work for them. I’m guessing that this will hold true for any shopping cart; if you don’t process credit cards in real-time, it won’t work. In fact, for this client, it also prevented the number of conversions from tracking.

One last note: Unfortunately, MSN AdCenter does not have the same functionality. Here’s hoping they get that solved before they take over supplying Yahoo’s paid ads.

If you need help getting Yahoo Sponsored Search Revenue Tracking implemented and/or analyzed, contact a reputable PPC management company for assistance.

Google AdWords provides a lot of data regarding your campaign performance.  And if you have Google Analytics installed (which you should – it’s free and easy), you have access to a lot of useful data there as well.  

It can actually be overwhelming when you first start to poke around your PPC advertising campaign or your Google Analytics account to figure out what the most valuable data really is, so let me point you in a couple key places.

The new interface has some really great ways to view, filter and analyze your Google AdWords campaign data quickly and efficiently.  These options used to only be available in the reports area, but now they can be seen for every campaign and ad group.

With the new Google AdWords interface, you now have a great new data reporting tool on the right hand side.  It is a graph that will show you the trend for the time period you have selected on several different data values.  You can change the date range to view as many days as you like – I prefer either 30 or 7 depending on the campaign.  The two data items I keep an eye on from this “30 thousand foot” view are Impressions and Cost.  Basically we are looking for any trends – up or down – of the number of impressions your ads are getting and the amount that is being spent on the entire account.  If either one has an unusual spike, there is going to be some digging to do to be sure everything is running as planned.

Also, while you are getting that overview perspective for your AdWords account, go ahead and sort campaigns and ad groups by Cost (descending). This way, your attention is focused on the highest spenders at a high level.  This will also alert you to situations where your highest spenders shouldn’t be your highest spenders and you can make changes accordingly. If you have PPC advertising questions, you might want to consider contacting a professional PPC management company with questions or to plan a consultation.