The webinar on “5 Minute Online Marketing: Daily Tasks to Improve your Digital Footprint”, presented by Nilesh Patel, CEO, LeadSquared and Rob Peck, Director of Client Services at O3M Directional Marketing was a success, thanks to the active participation and cooperation of the attendees. For the benefit of those who missed it, this post has covered some of the questions asked during the webinar. Alternatively, you can also watch the webinar here.
Webinar FAQs
Question 1
How effective is Google Adword’s new feature, the ‘Remarketing List’?
It is in general very useful. For instance, if I’m running a campaign – I’m generally going after fairly expensive managed placements in google display network. For those, I have to bid aggressively to get clicks. Once someone clicks through and visits my site, I tag them with my remarketing list. So now, since they are on my remarketing list, I could essentially target them on any site within my Google display network at a comparatively lower cost.
Question 2
If I have unhealthy links on my site, how would I go about dissolving them?
The primary precaution that you can take is to not register in ‘link building’ sites. Now, if you already have unhealthy links to the site, you can get rid of them through the ‘Disavow tool’ on Google Webmasters.
Go to Webmasters and take a look at the disavow tool. You will find all the unhealthy sites listed there. Get rid of them.
Question 3
How we can track competitors, CPC? Is there any tool for that?
There are a few tools that give you fairly decent estimates. Keywordspy, Keyword Ninja are among them. But they are just estimates.
What I like to do – Once I have a fairly stable Adwords campaign, I can keep an eye on my Adwords position. You can bid up a little and see where your average position goes, bid down a little and see where your average position goes. You can also look at quality score, ad rate considerations, and that should give you some idea of where they fall.
Once you have a stable Adwords account, if you have low click through rates or low quality score – you will have to bid much higher to get those prime positions. But if you see a quality score of 6/10, then you can try experimenting with your bids and see what position that gets you too.
The other tools you could look at are SEMrush, SpyFu. They give you high level information on the budget, etc of your competitors but then those are restricted for certain markets so I’m not sure if they cover the Indian geo. You could try these if you are bidding outside the Indian market like UK, US and other places.
Question 4
What is Google Merchant Center? Is it necessary to list the data feeds into Google Merchant Center?
Google Merchant is “the place to upload your product data to Google and make it available to Google Shopping or other Google services”. It is associated with Product Listing Ads.
Product Listing Ads, for the Indian market is a slightly newer ad type – let’s say 5-6 months old. If you do a product level search, the results of that are Product Listing Ads.
For instance, if I’m looking for a 2l pressure cooker – on the right side I see the actual product, title, price, etc. Those are product listing ads. If you have a functional e-commerce site, that’s a great ad type to run.
To create it, we go into Google Merchant Center and create a feed of Products from our e-commerce site into Google Merchant Center.
Generally, for most ecommerce sites, like SMEs, where you have 5-50 products, you manually create a feed on excel or spreadsheet software, upload that to Google Merchant center, then from Google Merchant Center, you link it to your Adwords account, to run the PLAs.
Plus point – PLAs are a fantastic ad type, – we certainly run them for many of our clients,
Negative point – The way you target things are very limited. For search campaigns, you have ‘n’ number of keywords to choose from, for display campaign, we have different sites on the Google Display Network to target.
However, for PLAs, the things to concentrate on are the Product Attribute Field, Product Description Field and then the brand.
So I should create my feed for e-commerce site into Google Merchant Center, link that with Adwords, and run PLAs.
Question 5
How do I run the MOZ report on my site? Is there a tool that I can use?
Go to moz.com, then go to the ‘Tools’ page and find it there. Alternatively, you could go to Open Site Explorer, enter your website URL and view reports.
One would be the page report, where you will find the health analysis of your home page. The second is the domain report which has the health across the whole domain. Third would be the sub-domain report which you don’t really need, except in certain cases.
I would certainly focus on the domain and page reports. It will give you the metrics, MOZ score, how many links are pointing at your site, etc.
Question 6
For optimizing clicks, what option should I choose, automatic or manual bidding option?
There are a few bidding options available. There’s manual where you can decide how much to pay for a click and there’s automatic where you tell Google – give me the most clicks for my daily budget. The third option is conversion optimizer where if you have history of leads, and where you’re telling Google to run the campaign if they seek fit – give the most leads in their eyes.
The important metric to keep in mind is the quality score. Quality score helps to find add rate where you are listed on the search results page.
What we like to do is, generally we start off with fairly high manual bidding, get a campaign history with a high click through rate (which will help our quality rise because it will help our CTR rise), and then hope to see a higher add rate.
So generally I like manual bidding, as the campaign starts, making sure I have quality ads. Once I have a healthy campaign, I have the Google guys happy with a high CTR – relevant ads, relevant keywords, relevant landing pages, then I need to decide what the goals of my business are and how much attention I can dedicate to my campaigns.
But otherwise if you want to set it up and forget about it, automatic bidding is a completely viable option. Manual bidding if you have time, automatic bidding if you don’t have time.
Question 7
How many keywords should I have in an ad group?
It depends. Generally it needs to be a number that you can control on some rational basis. This is where planning ahead of time really comes into play. If I had to toss out, just a number, I would say maybe 20-30. It is a general benchmark. But it depends.
