However just today Google posted an update that while a little more understated, could prove to be the most significant of the three.

I’m talking about the introduction of the customisable conversion window. So how does the customisable conversion window work and what’s it all about?

What this window does is allow online marketers the ability to customise the length of time you associate a conversion to adwords, from any period of 7 days up to 90 days. Historically Google Adwords only allowed you view conversions occurring within 30 days of a click.

So what does this mean?

Let me paint you a few scenarios:

Scenario 1 – the conversion window

A customer is looking to buy a family member a present; they browse the web and click on an Adwords ad of yours. They then make a purchase from your ecommerce site 20 days from the first PPC click on your site and they then hand it over. What do you know the recipient loves the gift! The buyer, then comes back to buy another gift for Christmas 70 days later, however this time they go direct to your site. This customer’s value is worth more than originally thought and thanks to the new conversion window you can track at keyword level, how much more.

Scenario 2 – How all these new features can interact.

You own a holiday booking site, as well as a separate sister site for travel insurance. Initially a family is shopping for annual holiday insurance.  They visit your site several times following an initial click on a PPC advert for a keyword that doesn’t normally perform at your target CPA. Maybe this is a keyword you would pause due to spending budget without any 30 day conversions attributed to it.

This family then go to your holiday site – through your separate holiday site pay per click campaigns -, they find a deal and then email you an enquiry, but do not buy on this interaction. You reply, answer their questions to the point they are happy to buy. The family call you up and buy a holiday package. You import this phone conversion back into your adwords account.

Two months after the initial PPC click he family then go back to your travel insurance site directly and purchase a policy that protect them all.

With these new features you will be able to see what keyword it was at the top of the conversion funnel that started this relationship, how the customer interacted between the new accounts, attribute the phone sale to the customer and track the whole conversion path over a three month period.

Summary of how this benefits you

• You will capture those longer lead in conversions. Those customers who do thorough research before purchasing months down the line.

• Measure repeat business with slightly more clarity

• Improve the size of your conversion funnel, so you can better understand what keywords play an important early role in the purchasing life cycle of your products.

How to customise your conversion window?

Go to conversions in your adwords.

Click ‘edit conversion window’

Select a length of time to track conversions over (I would recommend the full 90 days for those not sure). Although you can also use the data from the search funnels time lag report to help

Hey presto you have better visibility of your account and what drives performance.

For more on PPC Management please feel free to get in touch.

The post Online Sales Attribution with Adwords – Conversion Window appeared first on .

PPC management used to be easy when we first started in 2001, We just popped keywords into Google AdWords on broad match and then bid 10p/20p/50p etc. (even for what are now high cost keywords like credit card/loan terms!) and let the traffic flow to the site, it was very easy, there wasn’t much competition and traffic converted fantastically so conversion rate optimisation wasn’t something we worried about, traffic was cheap and plentiful, if a visitor didn’t convert we just bought more!

Fast forward 10 years and pay per click has evolved to a specialist sector, competition is high in all but the lowest traffic niches and costs are high, sometimes cripplingly so, we regularly work in sectors costing over £20 per click! so every click really does count and every visitor we can get to a site is one visitor we can try to convert into a sale so conversion optimisation is now (and will continue to be) a very hot topic.

Conversion optimisation (or conversion optimization if you’re American) is defined on wikipedia as “the process of increasing website leads and sales without spending money on attracting more visitors by reducing your visitor “bounce rate” and that’s a pretty good single sentence summary so in essence what normally happens is that small changes are made to the target page, then the page receives visitors for a period of time and the outcome is assessed, if the number of desired actions i.e leads, sales, downloads etc. is greater then that change is declared an improvement and thus the winner of the test.

In short we see successful conversion optimisation test outcomes as free sales for our clients as they have already paid for the traffic, we just make it convert better than it did to begin with and we can chalk those down as extra free sales in effect so it’s worth the effort and cost to test and optimise landing pages to try to squeeze every conversion out of them that we can.

Conversion testing can be carried out on a multitude of areas; page layout, images, button size, text and colours, changes to font size, colour, wording etc. For example, changing “Fast Car Data Check” to “Instant Car Data Check” got a 20% improvement for a Car data company we worked with. Changing the ‘add to cart’ button from red to green on another client’s website resulted in the conversion rate going from 4% to 4.25% which doesn’t sound much but it added £27,000 revenue to their bottom line per year.

One site that we love for conversion optimisation inspiration is WhichTestWon.com as the tests there are many and varied covering elements such as image, font, wording, layout, colours etc. and more subtle variables, more importantly the results of the changes are shared so you get to see which version worked best. So without further delay lets look at the first of two examples that we have images for with kind written permission from whichtestwon.com

Tiles Conversion Optimisation Test.

Version A is on top and Version B is on the bottom.

The conversion optimisation test was trying to figure out if the more tiles were sold if multiple or single benefits were offered, so if you look at to area above the tile description and cost you’ll see a panel in Version A that gives 3 bullet pointed benefits, “Competitive prices, Designer ranges and Full pallet discounts”, then to the right of the three benefits is a free delivery message. In Version B you’ll see that it just mentions the free delivery offer although more prominently than Version A.

Which do you think would work best? Most of the time users need lots of information to form a purchasing decision but in this case Version B won and achieved 27.3% more than Version A. Having said that who’s to know if 3 different bullet points wouldn’t have outperformed Version B, this is why conversion rate optimisation should form part of an ongoing mission for clients of a PPC agency, even when one test wins, there are still variables to test in the ongoing mission to improve the conversion rate.

Conversion rate optimisation example number two is about images, most people give little thought to anything past page layout, they just punt it over to their designer and let them do what they do with little thought on sales, they usually think the adcopy will sell it and little else makes a difference.

Business Cards Optimisation Test.

Version A is on the top and Version B is on the bottom.

The conversion optimisation test was to see if happy smiling people convinced more PPC driven traffic to shop at the stite. Most people assume a smiling face will make sales and in many cases it does, (even then it can be further optimised, for example a smiling woman may increase conversion rate for a product or service over a smiling man or vice versa) but in this instance which version do you think convinced more people to buy?

Most people voted for Version B and if you did too then you were wrong too, Version A convinced 18.2% more people to click the buttons to start buying, so in this instance smiling people didn’t work but that’s not to say conclusively that pictures of people won’t work on this site, if for example they tried  just one person it could have worked better, then again maybe not, but all variations are worth testing.

These two examples show tests that worked well with quite subtle changes that resulted in one of each example converting better and this is what conversion rate optimisation is about, your PPC management team should be tweaking, testing and trying to improve, it’s amazing what an uplift in sales can be achieved by just a couple of changes so make sure you add some conversion optimisation testing into your Pay per click marketing, buying visitors is expensive enough, you should be making ongoing efforts to try to convert more into paying customers.

Thanks again to WhichTestWon.com for letting us feature two of the tests they featured, we love the site as it’s great for inspiration so go have a look and see if you can guess (you vote A or B before you see the results) which test won for each of the conversion optimisation tests that they have on site HERE They also have a great newsletter that keeps you up to date with new tests so it’s definitely worth signing up to.

If your conversion rate could do with a boost then drop us a line today for a no obligation chat about how we may be able to help you improve yours, sometimes it’s the subtle changes that can make meaningful changes that really affect your profitability so give us a call on 0800 228 9122 alternatively use the call me back form on the right or the contact form on our contact us page.

The post Conversion Optimisation – Small Changes Big Results appeared first on .

Advertrack call tracking solution.

Targeted Media is happy to announce that we now offer a PPC phone call tracking system whereby any click on PPC adverts or SEO listings that then results in the potential customer making a phone call to the merchant can be tracked back to the keyword which generated it.

In pay per click marketing being able to see the true value of keywords has always been a tricky task. The online v offline visibility split is hard to monitor and invariably keywords are often cut from an account that have generated no leads or sales online without any visibility as to what is happening offline. Monitoring phone call tracking in an attempt to attribute value to a keyword has meant using separate systems with manual attribution which is time consuming and open to errors so the true value of a keyword to the account hasn’t been an easy thing to uncover.

Our new call tracking system, Advertrack, gives our clients the ability to see exactly what value their PPC and SEO has in regard to the telephone calls they receive.

Traditionally many sectors such as legal, financial, design etc. have a high call rate due to the need to discuss issues our define specifications so a very high percentage of traffic would result in a call, and whilst merchants could tell their staff to ask details of where the customer saw them etc. this data is often not collected or simply attributed incorrectly.

With Advertrack call tracking, data attribution isn’t an issue as the potential customer is shown a unique telephone number when they first land on the client’s website. When a call is made, the click data is attributed to that call in Advertrack’s call tracking back-end system. We can even view the click path the user took on site up to the call and during the call as well as the all important keyword searched prior to the advert or SEO link clicked.

If the Advertrack call results in a lead or sale, the merchant’s staff member can stay on the line after the call and classify it as a lead or enter the sale value. This value is then fed into the system and in the case of Google AdWords for example, it’s pushed into Analytics and then into AdWords interface to count as a sale, with the specified value on the correct keyword thus displaying the true online and offline value of that keyword.

True keyword value attribution is a very important element of the PPC management mix, if the true value of a keyword is known it can be focused on to move it up the page to gain more traffic that converts online and via phone calls if successful or removed for good if it’s not driving online and phone generated sales.

Automated and accurate online and offline keyword visibility is here with Advertrack call tracking and available very cost effectively. So drop us a line to see how we can laser-target your account and cull only the true non performing keywords now with our Advertrack call tracking solution.

The post PPC to Phone Call Tracking System Advertrack appeared first on .

Brand Watcher™ offers trademark, product keywords or brand monitoring and records who’s appearing in ads on them in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

BrandWatcher™ checks hourly 24/7/365 to show you exactly what’s been said to your customers by affiliates and competitors!

Amongst the many brand monitoring reports, all adcopy is archived and searchable to ensure you can find any competitors using your brand or product terms as well as spot any affiliates who aren’t complying with your adcopy terms and conditions.

As well as our suite of affiliate and competitor brand monitoring tools there are market intelligence reports such as daily ad position for the previous 1/7/30 days. This allows you to spot trends such as day-parting, or who’s gaining ground on your brand terms.

[one_half][/one_half] [one_half_last][warning_box]We are saving over £11 per sale on more than 200 bookings per month that were previously being made by brand only affiliates who were solely sitting on our brand related terms and adding zero value to our business, they were taking over £2,200 from our business in commission every month!”[/warning_box] [/one_half_last]

The post BrandWatcher – Brand Monitoring appeared first on .