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Why Philippines Small Businesses Should Invest in Google AdWords

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What is Google AdWords? An example of search engine advertising is through the use of Google AdWords. Google AdWords is the single most popular PPC advertising system in the world. AdWords platform enables ads to appear on Google’s search engine and other Google properties. AdWords operates on a pay-per-click model, in which users bid on keywords and pay for each click on their advertisements. For example, your business offers cosmetic procedure services. We can bid for the keyword “Cosmetic Surgery in Philippines”. Every time someone enters this query on Google search engine, your ad might show up on the top spot of Google result page. When your ad was clicked, redirecting the searcher to your website, you will only pay for a small fee. In an article released by Forbes last year, Mr. Avi Dan, founder of AviDan Strategies points out that the fundamentals of marketing will always remain. However, with the emergence of different platform that goes along with the speedy development of technology, marketers should be in front of the trends. If you are reading this post, it means that you were bitten by digital bug and were interested with marketing your business digitally. Maybe you’re already doing digital marketing and now reading to gain more knowledge to implement with your existing marketing strategy. Or you can be a business owner who never tried digital marketing but looking for a strategy to market your business and most of all to acquire more sales. What is Pay-per-Click? Pay-per-click or PPC is a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. It is a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to get those visits organically. PPC, also called cost-per-click, defined as the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked. Search Engine Advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their products or services. Why Consider Google AdWords? The World is Quickly Becoming Digital Digital Marketing is not the future of marketing, it’s already happening and only few businesses in the Philippines is taking advantage of this. Today is the generation where consumers embrace digital media consumption because they basically live with internet and smart phones. It is important for businesses to have online presence as most of the consumers spend their time through surfing the internet and mobile phones on their free time or even at work. Webrooming With 88% of Shoppers Webrooming is the process of researching online before buying in store. As of last year, webrooming became more popular with online consumers. According to the report, 72% of people prefer online process for product comparisons. On the critical moment when consumers are deciding to avail a particular product or service through browsing the internet, are your advertisements available to them. You Have a Website, But Do You Have Visits? You did the first step to have online presence with creating a website, but does your website drive sales or qualified visitors? Is your site even appears on search pages? Google AdWords will help your site be visible on Google search page immediately with the use of keywords relevant to what your business is offering. Do Your Ads Available Through Multi-screen? With the availability of accessing internet through smartphones became possible, consumers are now “multi-screening”. Researchers are surfing internet with their smartphones while on their way home, stuck on traffic or waiting for someone. Then before going to bed, they will surf through desktop PC or laptop to review sites and shop online. Consumers expect retailers to be available everywhere they are. Every businesses should Take the opportunity to get online presence anytime, anywhere on multiple devices. Google AdWords is a digital marketing platform that will help you create brand awareness and drive qualified sales on your business. It gives business owners the possibility to track its marketing performance. We can track which keywords and ad variations compel to consumers, which are not readily available in traditional marketing. Are you a business owner who uses traditional marketing and seeks another way to market your products or services? Take the first step by going to our live demo. Smart marketer knows how to be ahead and anticipate which one promises opportunity.

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The Digital Marketing Landscape in the Philippines

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People in the marketing and advertising industries are quite familiar with the term Digital Marketing. It has been used for quite some time already, but it hasn’t been given an exact definition. What many people know is that it compasses so many things related to marketing and promotion – banner advertising, blogging, e-mail marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), podcasting, pay-per-click (PPC), and so much more. However, if you read that closely, it’s easy to see what digital marketing is not. Digital Marketing is a form of marketing strategy that veers away from what we’re used to such as print ads, large billboard ads, TV commercials, and radio advertisements that don’t necessarily produce instantaneous feedback that reaches the knowledge of business owners. Finding out how many people responded positively to a commercial they saw on TV takes a while, and sometimes, the data gathered are merely assumed numbers. On the other hand, since digital marketing revolves around the Internet, verifying feedback, call-to-action responses, and more becomes so much easier. Digital Marketing in the Philippines Digital marketing is fast gaining ground in the Philippines, all thanks to the majority of Filipinos’ affinity to the Internet, particularly social media. In fact, a special report explicitly said that Internet access in the Philippines enjoyed a staggering 500% growth over the last four years! That’s not hard to believe considering almost everyone in the Philippines, young and old alike, owns laptops, computers, tablets, and smartphones. Because of their exposure to the Internet, Filipinos are becoming more and more tech-savvy. Whereas before, they were content with accessing the Internet to browse YouTube videos, check their emails, or browse their social networking accounts, nowadays, they have become more adventurous in exploring the World Wide Web. Many Filipinos are now active bloggers, video bloggers, social media managers, online shoppers, and more, and all these despite the fact that about 70% of Filipinos have yet to have Internet access. That says a lot about the potential for growth of digital marketing in the Philippines. That’s also the reason why business owners who want to reach many prospective customers should strive harder to be where these people are – online. On that note, let’s look at four things business owners and digital marketers can do to rake in those immeasurable ROIs. 1. Visuals say a lot in internet marketing. Most would agree that content marketing is usually the first option of digital marketers when brainstorming campaign ideas. There’s actually nothing wrong with that, except that most digital marketers focus on a single aspect of content marketing – writing articles. The truth is articles are not the only form of content. Videos, comics, white paper, PR, and infographics are all forms of content that digital marketers can try out. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and a visually stimulating infographic can say a lot about your business. What’s more, some people just don’t have time to read lengthy articles but enjoy looking at visual content posted on Pinterest or Instagram during their lunch break. So tap into your inner Picasso and start doodling those infographics and see your business soar. 2. Diversity is the key if you want to win in your Digital Marketing Campaign. There was a time when social media meant Facebook, Twitter, and occasionally, YouTube. Nevertheless, the emergence of more diverse social media players like Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Path, and even Tumblr is making business owners think twice. Apparently, experts see these social media platforms dominating many digital marketing campaigns not only this year but also in the coming years. Hence, business owners should start zeroing in on these and use these to their advantage. 3. Sharing is caring. Creating a blog for your business is a great way to build not only a strong online presence but also links. A blog requires a tremendous amount of work from your end, but you can actually turn the tide around and make your customers do the branding for you. First, make sure your blog has a seamless look that makes it easy for visitors to leave meaningful comments. Second, make sure to integrate social media sharing buttons to prompt visitors to share the content they just read on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and everywhere else. 4. Steer your Digital Marketing in the right direction. Pay close attention to location-based digital marketing. What does that mean? Many smartphone and tablet users install apps with GPS or location-based features. At the same time, a few of the more popular social networking sites encourage users to “check-in” and update everyone on their location anywhere they are in the world. If digital marketers focus on location-based digital marketing, it would be so much easier for them to send the most relevant content or information to their existing and potential customers based on their geographical location, which in turn leads to a more personalized approach. There you have it; four things you can try out to jumpstart your digital marketing campaigns. Please read part 2 of our review on the latest Digital Landscape and Digital Transformation (DX) in the Philippines in our blog entitled “How Digital Marketing Helps Philippine Businesses Fast-Track Growth“.

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5 Simple tips on how you can improve ad copy by testing

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Along with the keywords, ad copies are the backbone of each PPC account. A good list of keywords will do nothing if you don’t have compelling ads that will draw the attention of searchers. Sure it will give your ads more impressions but might not gather clicks. It will hurt your click-through rate (CTR) and quality score and soon, your ads will not appear on top pages anymore. This will be a nightmare for every PPC managers. It is mainly the reason why PPC marketers should think ads variations that may tickle the interest of customers as good as their keyword list. The challenge is, you only have 95 characters to sell your products or services. Google AdWords gives you the control to have up to 50 ads per ad group, however the ideal number of active ads in each ad group is 3 to 4. PPC managers should use these ad slots wisely by testing variety of ad copies to determine which ad appeals with the customers. Let’s discuss further why you should do ad copy test and how to test? 1. Why do Ad Copy Test? In marketing, A/B testing was being done to determine which ones produce positive results. PPC ad is not an exemption. Account managers run 3 to 4 variations of ads with each ad group and measures which one gathers more responses from searchers. It is also to determine what type of ad customers will most likely to click and convert to sales. 2. What should be included in Ad copy? Ads are the introduction to your website and it should create good impression. To have a good introduction, you should know your goals; what is the purpose of your campaign? Ads should include clear description of your product, its benefits, special offers or promotions, key products and call to actions. You can sit down with your client or boss and discuss about them. 3. Test one thing at a time. Honestly, I did not know about this until I read different blogs about PPC strategies. When I do testing, I just think variations about the products or services we sell. I practically change whole thing about the ads with its varieties. But the ideal way to test ads is you should only change one line at a time with each ad copy. It is to measure which of the headline or the description lines received higher Click-through rate (CTR) and number of converted clicks. You can test as well with company name on headline or products / services name on headline, with or without official website on ad copy and with or without keywords on display URL. 4. Track and analyze the result. Though it is an obvious step after setting up a test, most of the PPC managers who are bloggers as well, state that there are still managers who tend to forget to stop the testing and figure out the ad winner. It maybe because ads should run with long enough time to gather data and measure the champion ads. And after waiting a long time, they forget to draw their attention back on testing. Account managers should set a specific date to review each testing and stick with that. It is ideal to let the testing run for a month or gather up to 100 clicks before analyzing the result. For large accounts, it is advisable to review testing every two weeks. You can use labels to keep track when do ads starts running. 5. Keep testing your Ad Copy After getting the ad which collected most clicks and conversions, you may think you can stop testing. Your champion ad which continues to give you positive result is running on the first place. But you should not stop experimenting about new ideas and variations with your ads. Start testing new ad copies against your winner ad. There might be another ad copy which can outperform your champion ad. If you’re running out of new ideas, you can try to run your loser ads again and let them compete with your champion ad. There are instances that “losers” performed better than champion ads. As what they say, treat it as a fashion, you are looking for what works best at the moment. One way of being successful in managing PPC accounts is to think like a customer. You should know your audience, know their interests and know what attracts their attention. If you are not sure about them, test it!

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Tips For Keeping High Performing PPC Keyword for Marketers

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The first step in starting a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) account is creating a PPC keyword list. PPC Keyword List is the foundation or the bread and butter of any PPC account. Keywords are the words or phrases your customers would use when searching for your product or service. PPC blogs and articles provide different techniques on how to create keyword list, the right approach in PPC keyword research and the best way of choosing the right keywords. However, as you go through in setting your account up and running, you will realize it doesn’t end in having that final keyword list. You will need to optimize your account and optimizing will mean keeping the high performing keywords. It will require removing, pausing and adding new keywords which may lead for you to have a whole new keyword list. If you are new in managing PPC accounts, you might have wonder why you need to go through optimizing your keywords since you had already chose the best keyword list possible. We will clear some of those confusions. 1. Why you have to add new PPC keywords? As you gather enough data with your account, Google AdWords offers the Search Term Report function that will provide the specific words or phrases the customers used in searching for your product or service. This report will give you new keyword ideas to add in your account. These new keywords may gather more traffics or clicks since you get an idea on how customers think and what words they usually use in searching. 2. Why you need to pause keywords? Pause those under-performing keywords. This action varies in different situations: Pause those keywords with a status of “Low search volume”. Unless they have clicks you can give more time for them to perform well. But usually, keywords with this status don’t have any click. You can just pause these keywords to make your account look clean. AdWords Best Practices described low search volume keywords as waste of space in your campaign. You need to give keywords a week or 8 days of running before considering them to pause. Pause those keywords with very low Click-Through Rate (CTR) CTR determines the relativity of your keywords to your ads. The ideal CTR is 1 % and those keywords with CTR below it did not perform well. You can consider pausing these keywords since it can affect your Quality Score that will determine your ad’s position on the search page. Low CTR with low quality score will result to low Ad Rank. Review those keywords with low Quality Score In this step, I recommend review your ads and keywords first for you to identify what can be done to improve your Quality Score. The ideal quality score is 5 and above. Low quality score means your keyword is not relevant enough with your ads. You can consider optimizing your ads first. After experimenting with ads and your keywords did not generate high quality score, you need to pause them. Pause keywords with high clicks but did not generate conversions The main goal of every campaign is to generate conversions that will lead to Return–on –investment (ROI). You may think that those with high clicks are performing well but those which did not lead to any conversions may only cause you expenses. Pausing these keywords will allow you to focus your budget on profitable keywords. 3. Why you need to remove your keywords? The truth is, removing keywords is not really an option in optimizing accounts. It is on the best practices that it would be better if you only pause those keywords that did not perform well so you can go back to them if you are expanding your campaigns. Google AdWords gives you the control to undo your changes but it is only for the span of twenty-four hours after your changes had done. Removing them will mean deleting them permanently. Unless you have keywords conflicting with negative keywords, you can consider removing them right away. When I was new in managing accounts, I was hesitant to pause or remove those keywords in my initial list. I was thinking they may generate traffic and conversions in the long run. But as I go through optimizing accounts, I realized it would be better to have fewer keywords that will give you high amount of Return-on-investment than having a lot of keywords that may lead to high expenses.

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