Many businesses we have worked with over the years seem to be overly concerned with impressions and clicks in their ads.  After all, the more exposure and traffic you get to your website, the more business you get, right?  Well, not necessarily.  Let's break it down.

Why am I getting so many impressions on one keyword and not on others?  

The number of impressions that your ads receive is based on several factors:

• Keyword search volume:
  • The number of times people search on terms related to your keywords
  • Seasonality, popularity, and trending of the keyphrase
• How relevant your keywords are in relation to the searcher’s IP address, search history, and personal search patterns
• The networks your ads are running on (the display network garners 50 to 100 times more search traffic than Google Search and Search partners do)
• Size of your daily budget (your ads are turned off after the daily budget is reached)
• Whether the phrase is broad, phrase, or exact matched.  If the term new york city ny is broad matched, it means that any keyphrase that has any combination of new york city and ny in it will trigger the ad whether it's relevant to your business or not.  Broad matched keyphrases are designed for maximum impressions, whereas phrase or exact matched keyphrases are designed to trigger ads on more relevant keyphrases.  The result with phrase/exact matched keyphrases is fewer impressions but higher quality traffic.

How do I get more clicks and a better click-through rate?

Clicks and click-through rates are largely affected by the following factors:

• The keyword’s quality score, which is based on how relevant the keyphrase is to the intended landing page of the ad.  For example, if the keyword is “New York City Hotels” and the landing page is more about tourism than hotels, the quality score will be lower than if the landing page is specifically related to NYC hotel reviews
• Again, the size of your daily budget matters (your ads are turned off after the daily budget is reached)
• Max CPC of the keyword.  If your competitors have outbid you and/or you have a weak quality score, your ad will appear lower and the consequence is fewer clicks
• The quality of the ad copy.  How well your ad distinguishes itself from the other ads on the page can significantly affect click-through rates.
• The competitiveness of the keyphrase.  If there are many competitors for a keyphrase, and your campaign is affected by any of the above factors, your ad could appear lower on the first page or on pages 2 and beyond

Should I spread out my impressions? 

It's not really necessary unless the keyword is ineffective.  Impressions don’t cost anything in an AdWords campaign.  Only clicks cost money.  You should be looking for opportunities to improve the quality of your clicks and remove costly clicks that don’t convert.  But it will be impossible to determine how well a keyphrase converts unless you are able to 1) define a conversion for your business, 2) place script on the site to measure conversions from ads, and 3) analyze and compare conversions on all keyphrases.  This a pretty simple task and all you need is a little conversion tracking code that's provided within your Google AdWords account, access to your website files, and time to analyze. If you aren't measuring conversions, how do you know how much you are really paying for leads.

WSI Pro Marketing has significant expertise in conversion architecture and measurement systems for all types of source traffic, including PPC traffic.  Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about this article.

B2B marketing involves a recipe, planned and orchestrated across multiple channels in order to build credibility and generate an increase in leads. To gauge the effectiveness of your marketing plan or recipe, it’s important to regularly evaluate your marketing initiatives against the overall sales and business goals you are trying to achieve. You can then  calculate the  ROI of those marketing efforts.

When using Twitter as part of your B2B social media marketing plan, in order to ensure the greatest return, consider the following tips:

1. Have multiple employees as users – One way to ensure a steady flow of messages from your company Twitter account is to have many users represent your business and brand. This expands the amount of content, the style of that content, and the amount of conversations. This shows multiple people’s (employees) views and ideas rather than just one.

2. Understand the timing of your tweets – Review the analytics and get an understanding of the specific days and times your company’s messages are more likely to be read and shared.  If your followers retweet and share content more frequently at lunchtime or early in the week, be sure that your most compelling content hits during those times.

3. The information must have value to your existing or  potential customers –Twitter adds to your effective B2B marketing campaign because it is able to share your message with a large number of people in a short amount of time.  Instantly, your message can be shared with a community. And the more valuable the content, the more likely it is to get passed along.

4. Encourage your employees to tweet – Encourage your employees to create their own personal Twitter accounts and share news about the company, its goods and/or services, and its culture. Your companies Twitter strategy needs to incorporate the use of brand messaging, which gives personal value to prospects and existing customers.

Remember, and this is very important, B2B social media policies and training need to be in place before your employees begin to tweet personally about the company.

5. Optimize – At search.twitter.com it’s easy to find out who is tweeting about a particular topic and how frequently that topic is mentioned.    Here you can quickly size up the market and the level of interest for your top keywords, therefore this is a smart place to begin your B2B Twitter strategy.

You should use a similar keyword research strategy for Twitter as you would for creating web content. Obviously the keywords and phrases should be relevant to your industry; and you should target those keywords. Who are your biggest competitors and what are they doing? Who’s part of their conversation?

However, also use lay person terminology; include popular keywords or industry trends in your tweets.

6. Hashtags – The # sign is a hashtag and it is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. People use the hashtag symbol before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search. These tags build a targeted search and they are powerful ways to find, and send out content to a wider audience, not just your own followers.

Research current hashtags in your industry or create a new hashtag to promote your updates. Many B2B consumers start with a simple hashtag search on Twitter.

Keep in mind, when your employees are at an industry event or trade show, they should participate in the hashtag stream, most every event has one.  They can tweet about the event, retweet other people’s experiences and, tweet links to your company’s blog posts, promotions and booth information.

7. Proper URL length – The maximum amount of characters you can have on a Twitter update is 140. So leave out non-essential information. For optimal social messaging with Twitter, there are web tools, such as bit.ly that are URL shorteners.

8. Become an information resource – Sharing content, information and news from sources and companies other than your own provides additional value to your followers, increases your credibility, and increases the chances that your tweets will be shared. One of the keys to an effective B2B social media program is sharing.

9. Use the right tools – There are many Twitter tools that can help your existing marketing strategy. Industry knowledge and a well thought out B2B social media strategy are essential elements to increasing your brand recognition and presence. Combined with the right tools, you can achieve optimal results and reach your projected business goals.

A colleague asked recently: 

"We need a solution to track which keywords (Organic or PPC) are generating phone calls. This service also needs to record phone calls and it needs to integrate into Google Analytics conversion tracking. What solutions have people used to track which keywords (Organic or PPC) generate the most phone calls?."

It seems like a tough question but it's not, really.

WSI Pro Marketing has about 40 client using telephone lead tracking to monitor organic phone leads, that is, telephone leads generated from the company website. It's an amazing service and honestly, it's something our clients truly understand amongst all the other reports and data they receive. You need to have at least a WSI Voice Marketer Gold account in order to connect to Google Analytics.  Tracking phone calls and standard phone call routing options are enough for most clients so we normally don't use the Gold plan; thus, most of our accounts are Silver.

One thing to be cautious of is that you will need a Google Analytics expert to set up filtering as the calls tracked  register as a visit and a bounce; thus, skewing visitor data if combined together. This is a good idea anyways becasue it allows segmentation of data points.  

For more information you can contact WSI Pro Marketing and a digital marketing consultant will be happy to explain the service and technology.

If you are a business owner, you're probably marketing yourself somehow.  Whether it be through direct mail, Yellow Pages, or the internet you have to be out there to be found.  But which method is giving you the greatest return on investment?  Are you measuring the number of phone calls you are receiving from those marketing sources and comparing them to each other?  It's quite likely that you aren't measuring ANY phone calls as this is a burgeoning technology that few business owners are using.  This is shocking considering how inexpensive it is.

Some of our savvy clients are using phone lead tracking on all of their marketing methods. For example:  a Smithfield VA Insurance Agent is not only using WSI Voice Marketer on his website, he's also using it for direct mail, phone books, and flyers.  Another client who operates 20 assisted living facilities in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee uses a unique call tracking number on each of its locations pages to independently track and measure leads to those facilities.

WSI Voice Marketer is the tool we use to give keen insight into this important measure of success.  It's powered by Ifbyphone.  Check out Ifbyphone's YouTube video, which does a pretty good job of explaining this.