Dog food manufacturers typically sold what they thought users wanted; food for small, medium and large dogs, in small, medium or large bags, you’re probably thinking that there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s what users need, dog food in easy to buy bags of the right size to suit the timescale the user has budget for.

Well it turns out that dog owners are a very diverse bunch and in reality they didn’t see their dogs as just small, medium or large, they actually viewed and bought for them based on their own perception of the relationship that they (and their families) had with their dog.

Nash identified five separate categories of dog owner :
Pampered Parents – View their dog as a child.
Concerned Caregivers – View their dog as part of the family.
Performance Fuelers – View their dog as an active partner.
Budget Conscious Family – View their dog as a pet.
Minimalists – View their dog as a farm implement.

The five categories range from those who love their dog like a child to those that see their dog as a tool to get work done, consequently each of these groups is prepared to spend vastly different amounts on their dog in general as well as specifically on food, the Pampered Parents would be the ones that could lavish obscene amounts of money on their dog for everything from toys to bottled doggy water to beauty treatments, whilst the minimalists don’t spend a penny more than they need to keep the dog healthy and ready to work. That’s not to say they mistreat a dog, just that they see it as a tool and treat it in a totally different way to the other groups.

Once these five different groups have been identified it’s easier to spot new opportunities and market to them in a way that includes strong buying triggers; for example tt was established from the research that the “Performance Fuelers” category was a vast untapped market where there was a latent demand because they were highly engaged consumers who check the ingredients of their dog food and would be willing to pay more for food with what they perceive is a higher nutritional value, yet nobody catered for this sector, once it was identified and marketed to there category grew rapidly.
In fact each of the groups can be targeted with a different value proposition; Minimalist can be targeted with value and health, the budget conscious with low cost, the concerned caregivers with value, health variety and the pampered parents targeted with food that has human standard characteristics. If the dog food manufacturer had simply stayed in the mindset of small, medium and large dogs a whole range of market share acquiring opportunities would have been lost.

If you can apply the mindset of trying to really establish all the reasons your potential customers are looking to buy your products or services then you’ll find you can hit your market (or even new market(s)) from fantastic angles that generate strong affinity to your brand, service or products very quickly as your offering resonates strongly with the buyers needs, wants and likes.

It’s wise to frequently sit down (at least once per year!) and work out your value proposition, why clients should need what you sell, why they should take your product or service specifically and try to step away objectively and see if you can quantify and segment your target market/identify new ones or at least the latent demands that appear as markets evolve and devise marketing strategies that push the strongest buying triggers to each one.

One surprising factor is that different mobile platforms deliver different sales conversion figures and Average Order Values too so it’s worth knowing how they perform on your products/services, stats indicate that around 10% of site visits are from mobile devices, although for more premium brands it’s nearer 15%, over 80% of mobile visits are from Apple devices although basket values vary by device.

Speaking of Apple, the iPad delivers conversion rates twice as high as desktop computers, from a dataset collected by Affiliate Window and Buy.at of 81.9 million visits to retailer sites in their portfolio’s 1.57 millions sales were generated and the following average order value and mobile platform stats noted :

As you can see from the stats, Apple leads the field in average order value, the iPhone does well and even breaks out above the AOV for non mobile devices, with the iPad coming out on top of all mobile devices (more than double the AOV of BlackBerry) and even comes out with a higher than average non mobile order value, various conclusions can be drawn from this such as iPad owners have higher disposable income/spend more or it’s just easier to use the iPad to research and shop as it’s more of a recreational item than a work machine etc.

Regardless of your thoughts on mobile it’s a channel that can’t be ignored, Google AdWords is catering for it on pay per click with their new targeting options available to AdWords mobile advertisers, Advertisers are already able to run separate campaigns that target tablet devices or specific mobile phone carriers and now they are rolling out Wi-Fi targeting so you can send those users on Wi-Fi to a different page/serve different content to other users who may be on a faster connection etc.

In addition to Wi-Fi targeting advertisers can now also target AdWords by Operating System and thus tailor content to specific users based upon whether they are using Apple IOS, Android, WebOS etc.
More details here

The uses of this additional targeting in your PPC Management strategy might not be immediately apparent for some advertisers but over time as the mobile sector develops more granular targeting can only aid advertisers to improve their ROI and strip out lower performing areas thus freeing up budget for areas that are working.

With regard to mobile, at the very least you should check your site across a range of mobile devices and ensure that it’s rendering properly and the navigation and contact options work and of course the basket and payment system if you sell products on your site, Currently around 10% of visits are made by mobile users which doesn’t sound like much but that’s the equivalent of over one month worth of visitors per year that you need to cater for to ensure maximum conversions are achieved.

Google is saying that they are seeing an overall 600% increase in traffic to retailers with Product Listings Ads compared to last year so now is probably THE best time of the year to start using them as most AdWords advertisers have yet to take advantage of Product Listings Ads.

When viewed on a results page they stand out quite a bit and will continue to do so until everyone starts using them, at which point we would guess Google will limit the feature to certain performance parameters as they have done with other featured offerings.

Below you can see the two AdWords Product Listings Ads take up quite a bit of real estate visually, the eye is naturally dragged from the top of the page’s first result across to the product listings ads.

Images for products do elicit better click through when used on normal sales pages so it’s only natural that they would be expected to perform better in search listings if the user knows what they want, if they see it they are more likely to click than keep reading other sites which may not have the exact product they are looking for.

Images also stand out as people scan search results and even ads, this is why bold text works well in AdWords when the keyword is typed in, it stands out and now with Google AdWords Product Listings the images for your products can cut through the clutter of text and attract searchers to click and view your offering.

Google Product Listings are performing well for advertisers, that’s not to say they will perform as well for you but they at least deserve a test and you’ll get to ride the wave before the slow adopters get around to it some time next year!

Google have put together a quick video (1 minute 40 seconds) to explain product listings ads in more detail :

If you’d like some advice or help then feel free to drop us a line on our contact number at the top or the contact us or call me back forms.

Google AdWords listings are spread across the top and down the right hand side of the Google search results page, they get shown to any person who types in the right keyword to trigger the adverts yet despite being side by side with organic results vastly different metrics could be in play, we’ve seen countless times that paid search traffic outperforms organic in terms of conversion rate, basket value and even repeat order value, so you really need to establish the real value of paid search traffic and not just assume it’s the same as organic.

The screenshot below is for a merchant in the adult toy industry, look closely at the paid v organic figures at the bottom : (click here to enlarge)

Looking across the bottom two rows the first thing that stands out as a big disparity is the Average Value column, that’s the average order value, you’ll notice it’s £21.27 for organic and £36.50 for paid search, that’s a whopping 75% difference in favour of paid search.

The next figure that stands out is the E-Commerce Conversion Rate, it’s 1.89% for organic and 2.00% for paid search, that’s a tasty 7% increase again in favour of paid search, traffic converts better from AdWords, it’s only a small difference but it’s a high volume site so every conversion means money in the bank.

The Per Visit Value or EPC (Earnings Per Click) is vastly disparate at 40p for organic v 73p for paid, that’s an 83% uplift in earnings per click via google AdWords compared to each visitor from organic search listings.

Obviously the extra EPC due to higher conversion rates and higher basket values is great news but it needs to be remembered that the traffic via AdWords isn’t free, there’s a bill to pay on this although most organic traffic isn’t fee in this day and age either, for most serious companies earning a living online SEO consultants and services need to be purchased, links need to be bought etc. so whilst SEO doesn’t cost per click like AdWords does, there is often a cost that needs to be figured into the EPC’s so whilst SEO may look like free money it’s often not the case and therefore makes AdWords PPC more viable in most cases.

One other factor needs taking into account for a majority of merchants and that’s offline sales, sales generated over the telephone account for a huge chunk of many merchant’s sales and these sales should be attributed to the source that generated them, there are a couple of ways to do this; A good coder will be able to write code to display different telephone numbers to visitors arriving via paid search to those arriving via organic results thus allowing the tracking of sales via the two channels in bulk, one local or 0800 number for each channel and in-house recording of which number sales come in via would work albeit somewhat in bulk as just two figures would be generated.

Another way would be to use an AdWords call tracking solution, we offer our own AdWords call tracking system: AdverTrack, Which displays a different telephone number to every unique visitor to the site, this way the actual keywords that generate sales can be established, even their Earnings per call can be calculated and displayed directly in Google AdWords/Analytics, this then gives full visibility as to the value of any given keyword in AdWords and is a fantastic tool to fully understand the value of your AdWords, as well as organic too!

In some cases it’s resulted in keeping keywords running that don’t drive online sales and would have normally been culled from the AdWords account so it’s definitely worth a test at the very least.

To learn more about AdverTrack drop us a line, it’s free for our PPC Management clients but it’s also a very reasonably priced system for non clients who’d like to use it too.

A whopping 45% said no and 37% were unsure if their sales exceeded costs, of that 37% an interesting fact comes to light in that 20% said they’d rather not know if it is or not.

We are a little lost with these percentages, 500 isn’t a huge slice in the grand scheme of things compared to how many companies advertise on AdWords but it is a decent figure to draw some conclusions from, almost half of the companies questioned were running AdWords accounts that they knew weren’t working, yet were still using AdWords to market their businesses.

We often come across AdWords accounts that have no conversion tracking installed or aren’t monitored that well, aren’t worked on that often etc. but to not know if your AdWords account is working or not is something that every advertiser should rectify immediately, (If you are in this group then PLEASE drop us a line we will help you get conversion tracking installed, free of charge!)

The 20% that said they’d rather not know if their AdWords is working or not need a good shake, why would a business keep spending money on direct marketing without trying to establish if it’s being successful!?. Google has made it quite easy to generate and install conversion tracking which shows if each keyword is working or not, there are even solutions now that can track which keywords drive offline sales over the telephone so the full value of AdWords can be seen.

The first thing we do on any account that doesn’t have AdWords conversion tracking installed is to put it on there, it’s essential to ascertain which keywords work and which don’t, this is where big savings can be made and AdWords is often made profitable here before any further work is done expanding an account.

We can only hope that those 82% of businesses that know that their AdWords accounts aren’t working or aren’t sure if they are speak to a ppc management agency like us quickly and get to find out and either stop running AdWords if their position in the marketplace and the account is optimised as well as it’s likely to perform or they take advice and spend time optimising their account or enlist an AdWords agency to sort out their AdWords account out.

If you fall into that 82% then drop us a line for a free no obligation AdWords account review where we can point out where things may be going wrong and how to put them right, don’t sit back for another month, we can give you some direction if you wish to try to rectify it yourself or take the problem off your hands and get your AdWords account working healthily and get it firmly into the 18% of AdWords accounts that run at a profit.

PPC on AdWords can be a bit frustrating at times, we see cases where people’s accounts have run smoothly for a while and they’ve taken their eye off the account and then small issues have had a knock on effect which have snowballed and then they need to take radical action to rescue the account, it’s a bit like having a dog that you take for a walk a couple times per day at first, then it slips to once daily, once per week and in some cases then once a month and then before you know it you have a fat dog that can’t do anything except eat, snooze and need the vet to sort problems out thus costing you money, Walking regularly avoids all sorts of problems down the line and this is the case with PPC management too, regular ongoing ppc account work is required for an and AdWords account to stay fit and healthy and perform at it’s best for you.

It’s not only the account owners who need to regularly work on the account; Whilst undertaking free PPC Managment audits we’ve seen AdWords accounts that have been left to fester by PPC Agencies too! We check the history and there’s been very little action, no new keywords, no adcopy changes, no landing page tests etc. often it’s just bid changes, usually these bid changes are managed by software so in reality the PPC Agency is doing next to no physical work.

If your PPC management is currently being done by a PPC Agency then take a look at the recent change history in your account and see if they’re earning their fee or charging hundreds (in some cases thousands) of pounds to let an automated program simply adjust bids, this isn’t ppc management, it’s bid management and YOU can get this done yourself easily and for a fraction of the cost (or even free if using Google’s Rules tool) but unless it’s coupled with ongoing, regular ppc management it will only keep the account limping along and not help it reach it’s full potential in terms of lowest cost per lead/sale and maximum volume.

A good PPC Agency should be working on your account weekly at the very least, and often daily, most merchants work on their PPC when they remember to or when business goes slow or when an issue arises and by then they’re usually trying to repair the damage that’s been done frantically and they change many things at once, all which have a knock on effect, then they wonder why the changes didn’t work, and more importantly which one(s) didn’t or did work, one or two competitors who are on the ball can soon overtake positions as well as hone their adcopy, refine their landing pages and target your customers and start grabbing market share.

AdWords and PPC methodology is constantly evolving so new changes mean it’s possible to be missing out on some of the tools and practices that are available that make ppc management more successful, a good ppc management agency will keep it’s finger on the pulse of the constant changes and stay on the crest of the wave where most merchants tend to just be struggling to just stay afloat.

If you do nothing else as a result of reading this article set a reminder in your phone/email/task manager to just once a week login and spend 5 minutes looking at click through rates compared to the previous week, run a search query report to see which keywords have been used to cause your advert to show and generate a click and add them as phrase or exact match or negatives, you’ll boost your click through ratio there and at least stay afloat, but remember you only need a competitor or two who’s working ON their ppc management instead of just reacting to it and you’ll start to slip behind.

If you’d like a free AdWords health check then drop us a call on our freephone number or use the contact or call me back form and we’ll give you a call and take it from there, we never charge any upfront fees, our health check is always free and we treat each account like it’s our own so you’ll get in-depth feedback as to what work needs doing to bring the account up to full health.

Walk the dog regularly! – work on your ppc management regularly OR get a dog walker and ppc managment specialist .. just do something regularly!

Their current ppc management agency own the AdWords account and won’t give the merchant access so they don’t know which keywords are being targeted and if that wasn’t bad enough there is no conversion tracking in place so even the ppc agency don’t know which keywords are driving traffic which is converting into leads. The ppc agency simply say that they spend £600 per month on the PPC traffic and then £400 per month is charged in fees, which seems a touch excessive to us as it’s a simple service not a product driven website so there’s not really £400 worth of work needing to be done per month here for starters but each agency has the right to charge whatever structure they wish so that’s simply theirs, ours would work out cheaper though.

The best client and PPC agency relationships are built on transparency and mutually rewarding relationship, the client has full knowledge as to spend, conversions, ROI and fees yet here there’s no transparency and the client isn’t feeling happy about this, understandably so, there’s no valid reason for a PPC agency to not give a client access to the account, the account should belong to the client in the first place if the ppc agency has any confidence in their work. However it’s sadly often the case that the AdWords account is used as leverage to keep a client on board due to the time, cost, effort and hassle of setting a new account up and starting from scratch.

This isn’t the only bad thing that can happen when a client doesn’t have access to their PPC account, some unscrupulous ppc agencies add a percentage or set fee onto each cost per click to pad the spend out further, they produce fancy spreadsheet reports to “show” what’s going on inside the AdWords account but in reality they just add a slice on the top of each click and inflate the spend budget this way.

Not all ppc agencies that deny clients access to the AdWords account driving their traffic are behaving in a dishonest manner but one does have to wonder what they are hiding as there is no real valid reason as to not have an open book policy with the client so we always advise any merchant looking to outsource their ppc management should ensure that they AdWords account is their own property and they have full access to it at all times.

Merchants should also check the spend they are being charged for ppc management is actually how much is being spent, and the fees match up etc. as overcharging is a frequent issue in the ppc management sector and whilst a good percentage of the ppc management agencies out there are honest and do good work if you get with one that isn’t you’ll find it’s hard work to get back not track so do ensure that you control the AdWords account from the start and give the agency access to it, do not let the ppc agency own the account or it could cost you many thousands of pounds in the long run should you want to move to another ppc management agency.

After a 20 minute chat on the phone the unhappy client is now a new client for us, we’ll be starting from scratch but given that it’s a specific service to homeowners in an area around one city it won’t be too much work and the client will soon be back up to speed, with their own AdWords account, with a free £75 voucher and full transparency, they’ll see exactly how much is being spent, which keywords we are targeting for them and what is converting, this way their marketing budget will be maximised, and it won’t cost them £400 per month!

It’s choosing the best PPC management payment model that can cause the most confusion, Agencies will pitch that their model is best and substantiate why but here’s an overview of the three most common PPC management payment models.

Percentage of spend PPC Management
In favour of the percentage of spend PPC management payment model is the big plus point that your agency are incentivised to try harder every day, the more they can spend for you the more the agency earns, but of course it’s not just a case of spend, spend, spend, the agency will try to hit your cost per lead/sale targets whilst growing the spend consistently, you know that the agency will work hard and keep doing so, on the down side it may start costing you more than the minimum fee most agencies set as they expand your sales, but then again as it should be linked to the volume of leads/sales you get this is a proportionate cost and of course keeps the agency incentivised to constantly work harder for you.

Yay’s : Low initial cost, you usually keep control of your AdWords account (which can avoid a world of hurt if things don’t work out) The agency is like a sales person on a bonus payment working harder to earn more.
Boo’s : Your initial fixed cost will rise as the spend rises, but it should do so in line with the performance of the account so always a relative earnings to cost ratio.

Flat Fee PPC Management
In favour of a flat fee PPC management model would be the fact that as a merchant you have a fixed cost each month regardless of what the ppc agency does and how much your spend is, it’s quite easy to budget the PPC fees into your fixed costs, but you really have to trust that your PPC agency is going to work consistently hard for their fixed fee, often, as in many advertising agencies, the client will be added to the pool and managed by a junior or even someone not in the UK.

Yay’s : Fixed cost, you know exactly how much your ppc management will cost every month.
Boo’s : Flat fee PPc agencies are hard to scale and make a profit so they rely on having hundreds of customers and lower paid account managers to make a profit, you could just go on the shelf along with hundreds of other merchants and your sales might not grow as expected as the agency has no incentive to work too hard on the account.

Performance Marketing PPC Management
In favour of the performance marketing PPC management option from a merchant point of view would be the fact that it’s a low risk approach, the ppc agency will usually set up the account themselves and fund it, they’ll do all the keyword research and get the account live and driving sales. The main downside is that they’ll focus harder on the products/services which you offer that can make them the most money, not you, so you could find some of your services/products are missing out on sales as they stop focussing on them as much and target higher profit (for them) ones to maximise the return on capital employed.

Yay’s : Performance Marketing is popular amongst the big London agencies and their clients as they feel the agency works harder for their money and they save on having too much cash flow tied up in AdWords
Boo’s : The AdWords account doesn’t belong to the merchant, which can cause enormous issues later if the performance PPC management model doesn’t work out and the merchant wishes to employ another agency. Performance PPC agencies will tend to focus on what makes them the most money rather than what’s best for the merchant. Brand terms may become the biggest drivers as the low profit margin generic keywords are culled as the ROI is less for the agency.

Closing thoughts :

Any merchant looking to outsource their PPC marketing to a PPC agency should take the time to consider the agency and their payment model carefully. Some agencies specialise in working to just one payment method whilst others are more flexible, the payment model shouldn’t be the main concern really as you should look to find a PPC management agency that you feel understands your business needs and expansion goals. Although after 10 years in PPC management we would advise that any merchant thinking about the performance model tread very cautiously and ask for case studies and chat with other merchants currently using this payment model.

We work on a fixed minimum fee and then percentage of spend model although for some clients we are happy to consider working to a flat fee model but it’s not our preferred model as we feel that the client knowing that we earn more if we can drive more sales means that we are always working hard and just being “put on the shelf” is never an issue.

Drop us a line via the “call me back” form to the right of this article or via the contact page to discuss how we may be able to help you move your PPC marketing forward, in most cases we can offer a free 30 day trial after our free no obligation account review and in-depth report.

This is an easy claim to make and you may be thinking how can we be so brash as to state this, well here’s how.

It’s easier for us or any other high quality and dedicated PPC agency to learn the key information about your business and apply our PPC management skill and marketing methods to your business than it is for you to learn and keep up to date with the constantly evolving PPC landscape and apply it to your business.

You know your business inside out, we know PPC inside out  and it’s easier for us to learn the key traffic drivers, what motivates searchers to become buyers and how to maximise conversion ratios for your business in a very short space of time, we’ve been doing this over a decade so we are specialists in hitting the ground in new sectors and assimilating information quickly then applying our proven holistic PPC methodology to it.

A good ppc management agency will have AdWords qualified professional staff working for them, they’ll be an AdWords Certified Partner Agency and thus have good contacts at Google AdWords who can resolve issues quickly, they’ll keep abreast of new changes as they happen via the Google agency news channels and be able to react quickly to changes in PPC policy and tools.

With an agency their staff will undergo regular training in the latest methods and features and be working on multiple accounts so have a wide body knowledge that they can apply across the accounts they manage. This alone develops a very valuable skill set, they get to see what works across different sectors and develop their account management skills far wider than an in house team could ever do working on one website.

A dedicated PPC management agency should cover more than the cost of employing them to manage your AdWords accounts. in some cases we’ve shaved as much as 50% off the spend, a recent one we did saved 46% of their monthly spend from around £6,700 per month we shaved off over £3,000 in the first month AND increased the amount of sales the PPC account drove!.

Feel free to drop us a line via the freephone number above or call back form on the right side of this page or our contact form