I welcome your comments on my posts, and would be happy to hear any suggestions for future articles - if you're feeling shy and would rather not comment on the blog, email me - hannah@gravytrain.co.uk
I'm fairly active in a few online communities - to find me click on Stalk Me :)
Once of our double glazing clients have asked us to prepare a paper for them exploring whether or not they should create a corporate blog.
For me, creating a corporate blog is a complete no-brainer.
Of course there are reasons not to -
It does take time to write good quality blog posts
It needs managing - someone ideally needs to 'own' the blog and make sure that comments are responded to appropriately, spam comments are removed etc
BUT! The benefits truly are fantastic:
It gives a corporation a human face / voice - making you seem more approachable
It makes it really easy for your customers (existing and potential) to interact with you
It enables you to promote your service / products in new ways
It allows you freedom to write about more than just what you sell / the service you provide - e.g. if you undertake charitable work - you can blog about it; if you want to give your take on industry news - you can - the possibilities are endless
Providing fresh content on your website gives your customers reasons to keep returning to your site
SEO! Providing fresh content also keeps the search engine's coming back and can help your rankings - so you could even grow your business via your blog
Links! (SEO again!) Good blog posts are often linked to and links are an extremely important factor when it comes to ranking.
It can be a great way to develop your staff - obviously one person needs to own the blog; but get as many as possible to contribute to it - it will improve their written communication skills
It gives you a quick and easy right of reply - whether you like it or not people on the web are talking about you - and you can use your blog help manage your online reputation
The opportunity to make new contacts online which can translate into PR and/or real business opportunities
Will I manage to persuade our client? I really hope so!
I'd love to hear more about your experiences of corporate blogging - benefits, pitfalls - the lot, don't be shy now :)
I originally wrote a post on Playing with Google Optimiser back in September based on my first impressions of utilising it on behalf of one of our clients.
Rich was kind enough to head on over and comment on the post with regard to a problem which he had encountered with it, which gave me the idea for this post.
By way of a short recap, Google Optimiser allows advertisers to stipulate a maximum cost per conversion, and their algorithm will automatically move and change the maximum bids on your keywords throughout the day in order to deliver you conversions beneath the maximum cost per conversion which you have stipulated.
You should use Google Optimiser if your main focus is to get the maximum number of conversions for your spend...
We used the Google Optimiser on one of our insurance clients.
I would suggest that for this type of campaign the optimiser is ideal. Our client has a limited budget in a very competitive sector, and they need to get as many conversions (in this instance online quote requests) as possible for their budget, so in this instance Google Optimiser works really well.
But...
Imagine that your campaign is a little more complex. For example, we have some clients who want to appear for certain keywords, mainly for branding reasons - even though these particular keywords may not offer the cheapest conversion.
In this instance, Google Optimiser may well stop your ads showing for these keywords. Excellent for your cost per conversion, not so good for your brand.
If you have keywords like this within your campaigns, you'll need to simply place them in their own campaign, (and pause them within their original campaign) and manage the bids manually, rather than using Google Optimiser.
Would anyone else care to share any of their experiences - either good or bad?
NB - I feel it's only fair to point out this is something of an 'in-joke'. I referrred to something as being spanky - as in 'new', which tickled Gary - I guess it's not a word you hear often :)
So how can we interpret the results?
Well, everyone was pretty nice about me. That's not too surprising as people's comments were not anonymous no one felt too comfortable about being mean.
What surprised me the most was the responses from people who I know online only. Barring Swerveball (Gary), for the most part, these guys are descibing my avatar:
There I am!
Not too surprising perhaps, but if you remember my question was
'Can you give me 5 words which you think describe me?'
Perhaps I'm over-analysing this, but it seems to me, that online - your avatar goes beyond simply being a visible expression of you... It IS you.
Now clearly I'm a bit naive, because I never gave much thought when picking my avatar picture. I picked it simply because it's one of the few photos of me where I'm on my own rather than in a group, I don't look too drunk (always a bonus) and you can (hopefully) recognise me in real life from my picture.
But I think it probably deserves a lot more thought.
Disclaimer - my loves, this post is entirely whimsy... but I'm in that kind of mood today :)
So why the title eh?
Well whether you work for an agency like me, or if you work clientside I'm sure that you've sometimes felt like you were expected to deliver the impossible i.e. 'get the girl, kill the baddies & save the entire planet', with little or no direction / resource / budget / technology / assistance of any kind.
I'd really love to hear a few of your stories - it really doesn't matter whether or not they're SEO / PPC / Social Media related. Feel free to post any-ol'-thang you like.
Only rules are - keep it clean, and protect the identities of those who you're ranting about.
I wanted to share the bones of it again though, as Impression Share is a really useful report. Also, since I've been talking to our clients about this report a fair few misconceptions have been revealed which I wanted to try to clear up here. So here we go:
What is Impression Share?
Simply put, impression share is the percentage of views that your ad appears receives for relevant search queries on the Search Network and / or on relevant sites on the Content Network.
Using the Search Network as an example - let's imagine that there are 100 relevant searches performed per day and currently your ad appears for 80 of those searches - you therefore have an 80% impression share.
What affects Impression Share?
Essentially two factors:
Rank (i.e. where your ad appears) - if you're appearing on the second page, and the searcher does not view the second page of results, then you will miss out on that impression.
Budget (i.e. your spend per day) - Google offer two options for ad delivery: Standard - show ads evenly over time; & Accelerated - show ads as quickly as possible. It doesn't matter which option you choose - if your budget is lower than the potential number of clicks you can receive your ads will miss out on some impressions.
What does NOT affect Impression Share?
When Google calculate your impression share they only take into account the possible impressions available based on your campaign settings. For example if your campaign targets only Manchester, Google will not include impressions from the rest of the UK.
Therefore the following factors do not affect impression share:
Geo-targeting
Whether or not you've opted into Google Search / Search Partners / Content Network
Whether or not you employ ad scheduling for specific days and/or times of day
How do I run the Impression Share report?
Google do have the functionality to let you run reports on this – but they don’t exactly shout about it… Here’s what you need to do:
1. Click on the 'Reports' tab
2. Click on 'Create Report'
3. Select 'Campaign Performance'
4. Within 'Settings':
a. Select an appropriate unit of time (it automatically defaults to summary but you can choose to drill down to hourly if you so desire - this is particularly useful if you want to illustrate that by 3pm your campaign has run out of money)
b. Select your date range
c. Select to view all campaigns or to select from a list
5. Within 'Advanced Settings':
a. Click on 'Add or Remove Columns'
b. Make sure you have selected - Impression Share (IS), Lost IS (Rank) and Lost IS (Budget)
c. Click on any other stats which you would also like to see
6. Click 'Create Report'
So what does it mean?
Well you should find yourself with a report that looks something like this:
Campaign - Motorcycle Insurance
Impressions - 773
Clicks - 90
IS - 42%
Lost IS (Rank) - 6%
Lost IS (Budget) - 52%
In the above example we are losing 6% of the impressions due to Rank, and 52% due to our budget.
All assuming this is a profitable campaign, by increasing daily budget we can get more clicks and conversions.
Now if you find that you are losing out based on your Rank, unfortunately there is a bit more work to do. With some optimisation you may be able to improve your quality score, which in turn will improve your rank without you having to increase your bids.
Alternatively, if the campaign is already fairly well optimised you might try increasing your bids for a short time to see if you can make it profitable for you to appear higher up in the results.
But remember - it's all about ROI - gaining impression share should not be a key metric for you unless you're seeing the returns :)
Now secretly (or not so secretly now I'm blogging it) I'd hoped that the Conversion Optimiser might be some kind of comic-book-type-superhero character. It's not. It's a rather clever algorithm. (Which was gonna be my second guess for sure).
The Conversion Optimiser allows you to set a maximum cost per acquisition, rather than a maximum cost per click.
Via a very nifty algorithm Google will dynamically move and change the maximum bids on the keywords within your campaign throughout the day in order to try to deliver acquisitions beneath the maximum cost per acquisition which you stipulate.
It makes the changes to your CPC bids based on previous conversion history, where the ad is appearing (particularly pertinent for Content Network), the user's location, the user's search query and 'other factors'.
Now I could tell you what those 'other factors' are, but then I'd have to kill you :)
How do you qualify?
1) You must have conversion tracking enabled (for fairly obvious reasons)
2) Your campaign must have received at least 100 conversions in the last 30 days, and have been receiving conversions at a similar rate for at least a few days.
The Test...
We found a client who qualified and was happy to give it a go.
Now the process, whilst ridiculously easy, is a little scary.
Google recommend a maximum CPA - for our client this was more than 50% higher than our current average CPA. We elected to go with it as they did say that it would yield an average CPA that was pretty close to our current CPA.
I then kept a ridiculously close eye on it - (I am a control freak).
Results...
Actually, it was pretty darn good. We saw CPAs drop by about 10% - not bad, eh?
Has anyone else had a go? Care to share? Would love to hear from you :)
This is a bit of an introductory post really - I'm embarassed to admit that unfortunately this blog has been neglected since Miles left Gravytrain - but no longer.
I hereby promise to keep this blog updated with news / developments / case studies and all things PPC from now on.
Just in case you were wondering who the devil I am - here's a little potted history...
I've done quite a few jobs - I was a cleaner, sold very posh school uniforms (yep, some of them had to have capes), taught dancing to teenagers, was a betting shop manager and for the past 9 years I've been working in Marketing.
I work at Gravytrain as the Marketing Manager, but I also manage some PPC Campaigns for our clients, am learning about SEO and am facinated by Social Media marketing.
PPC & Social Media blog. 
