by bigmouth media

A few further areas to consider.

Combining affiliate marketing and SEM

Affiliates can hugely affect the PPC landscape. Some super affiliates have very large budgets and can run significant campaigns.

Should you let affiliates drive traffic to your site through PPC campaigns? Should you let them bid on your brand? Should
affiliates be allowed - or encouraged - to set up sub-domains which echo your domain?

All these questions should be asked and answered as part of your SEM campaign. The right answer for one site may be the wrong answer for another. The way to resolve these issues for your campaign is to test safely where you can.

In every case it is best practise not to battle with your affiliates. Work with your affiliates to explore opportunities and keep them in the loop.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate Testing is an analytical method which fine tunes your landing pages to be as effective as possible. Whereas A/B testing allows you to compare the performance of two landing pages (page A versus page B) multivariate testing allows you to compare the performance of hundreds of variables.

For example, you could try your landing page with four different images, three different headlines, eight different “buy now” button colours and five different “buy now” button positions. The software is able to test all these variations at once and determine which variation is the most successful at generating leads (or other KPIs). The more variations you try at once the more traffic you need in order to complete the test.

There are a number of multivariate testing providers: Omniture (who now own Offermatica and Touch Clarity), Maxymiser and Google’s free Website Optimiser product, for example. These systems tend to work with JavaScript and tracking tags. These tracking tags are often in addition to your current web analytics or SEM tracking tags. A key point to note is that when JavaScript is used to produce content it can significantly harm SEO rankings. Ideally, multivariate testing is done in coordination with SEM, SEO and affiliate marketing campaigns.

Quality score improvements

Search engines reward advertisers who have quality and relevant adverts. An improved Quality Score can lead to a decrease in the minimum CPC and improvement in the ad position. A number of factors affect Quality Score; clickthrough rate, relevance of ad text to keyword bids and the quality of the landing page. One technique to improve the Quality Score of a landing page is to make sure the search engines can plainly see what the page is about (a core part of SEO) and ensuring the ad textreflects that. Landing pages which let users buy the product advertised in the creative are good as well as landing pages with unique content. Sites with privacy policies or which do not require registration often enjoy better Quality Scores than those with content behind preview-less subscription barriers.

Integrating search with stock availability

This is the process of changing your PPC ad copy, or changing the amount of ads in PPC search dependant on your stock availability. This process can be considered for campaigns that could end up incurring extra costs or poor customer service as a result of continuing to drive traffic to their websites with misleading messaging. For instance, if you are offering sale items and you run out of stock it is important to remove any ads from search engines displaying the offer, or to change the wording to ‘preorder’. It is sometimes possible to provide this service manually (in a similar way to 24/7 PPC management) depending on the size of the account or the frequency of changes. Predictive analytics software is also available for you to predict when in-stock and out-of-stock situations will occur. Any automated solution needs to ensure that the additional costs of API quota, database integration and the lost of bid history do not exceed the benefits of having up to date PPC ad copy.