I’ve made it clear earlier how PPC is one of the most perfect advertising methods in existence. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can cause more harm than help. When done incorrectly, PPC can run up a huge bill with nothing to show for it.

That’s why I’m putting together this big list of all-too-common mistakes: so you, my savvy reader, know what to avoid.

The Big Bad List of Expensive PPC Mistakes

Mistake: Throwing together a huge list of generic keywords

Avoid just putting together a big keyword list of terms that are not related to your business. The traffic generated from those is unlikely to lead to sales. Instead, seek to dominate the market for a few, highly specific terms. (How to perform effective keyword research)

Mistake: Only using broad match keywords

Exact matching keywords improves your targeting ability, and usually, performance.

Mistake: Not bidding for your hotel name

Usually it’s cheap, and is a good defensive marketing move.

Mistake:  Spending on unqualified clicks

Use negative keyword matching to exclude searches from people unlikely to buy.

Mistake: Not highlighting the unique selling point of your hotel in ad copy

Failing to identify what makes you unique from your competitors will make it less likely for your potential guests to understand the difference.

Mistake: Not including keywords in your ad copy

Putting keywords in your ad copy increases relevance and typically leads to more clicks.

Mistake: Not building landing pages for each campaign

Building landing pages is an under-used part of PPC marketing, but very important. Here’s ten tips to improve your landing pages.

Mistake: No relevance on the landing page

There must be a clear link between PPC ad copy and the first page people see on your website. Don’t confuse them.

Mistake: Running only one ad campaign

Don’t launch just one campaign – multiple campaigns allow you to specify different geographic or content distribution options.

Mistake: Using just one ad group

Campaigns are made up of ad groups – and there should be more than one. Using multiple ad groups lets you write ad copy that is more targeted…and likely to earn clicks. Using multiple ad groups is also important for reporting purposes.

Mistake: Not keeping an eye on distribution coverage

Use a service such as AdGooRoo to make sure your ads are being shown every time someone searches for your target keywords. Otherwise, you’re losing out on ad impressions and additional exposure.

Mistake: Not lowering bids for the content network

The content network often generates lower quality traffic, and it’s important to adjust your bidding strategy accordingly.

Mistake: Failing to track performance data

Search engines – Google in particular – provide such a wealth of information to their advertisers, that you’re missing out if you’re not taking advantage of it.

Mistake: Not testing regularly

You must perform ongoing optimization on your campaign to maximize performance. This should include regular split testing of ad copy, and constant keyword adjustments.

Mistake: Overpaying for the top ad spot

Research shows ad positions #3-7 typically has best ROI.

Mistake: Not using geo-targeting

Even if your product and services performs well worldwide, you should still use a geo-targeting strategy for best results.

Mistake: Not monitoring fraudulent clicks

Search engines are cracking down on click fraud – but it still exists. If you suspect it, cross-check your PPC reports with website analytics data.

Mistake: Not employing content network reports

Content network campaigns can be lucrative if managed well, so make sure you run reporting that gives you insight here.

Mistake: Trying to bid your way out of poor quality score

Quality score is a feature Google uses to gague the relevance of an advertiser’s campaign. If your quality score is low, fix it by improving relevance – not just paying more.

Mistake: Not using the Search Query Performance Report

To enhance CTR and ROI, companies should review the Search Query Performance Report weekly to find out what keywords inappropriately lead to your ad so you can include these in the negative keyword list.

Mistake: Not reporting policy violation to Google

Don’t let your competitors cheat and put you at an unfair disadvantage!

Mistake: Focusing on CTR instead of Conversion Rate

Unless your strategically focusing elsewhere, make sales a priority. In your testing, optimize for the highest sales conversion rate…not just high ad clickthroughs. (Extreme example: using the word ‘free’ may attract lots of clicks, but not from people looking to buy)

Advertising in search engine results – or pay-per-click (PPC) – has the potential to give you an excellent return on investment. (For those new to this, you can see why here: 10 Reasons Hotels Should Invest in PPC Advertising)

I have helped dozens of businesses use PPC for the past 7 years, am a Google-certified specialist, and personally manage over $1,000,000 in annual ad spend. From this experience, I’ve observed a few common misconceptions.

Myth: High natural search positions make PPC ads redundant

Reality: Paying for clicks when it’s likely a person would click your natural search listing may not seem logical. However, it’s important to do it for branding reasons. Ever wonder why huge corporations advertise for their own names?

They have a ‘lock’ on the top spot in organic rankings, but often purchase ads to increase the certainty that a person ends up on their site…not a competitor’s. Redundancy is good in this situation. It also gives them the ability to quickly distribute new special offers.

Myth: Set it and forget it – You’ll see the best results immediately

Reality: The best results come through continual optimization. There needs to be ongoing split-testing to determine the most effective ad copy, keywords, and bidding strategies. I have seen results improve each week for 6+ months in many cases: you don’t want to settle for sub-par performance.

Myth: Every search engine’s PPC program is the same

Reality: There are obvious similarities between the search platforms offered by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others – but each has unique nuances. It’s important to learn even the subtle differences to get the best results.

Myth: Only Google matters

Reality: Google currently dominates between 75-80% of the entire paid search market. However, it’s often very competitive. You may get even more visitors by running a campaign on Yahoo or a less popular search engine.

Myth: Click bids are the only factor in ad rankings

Reality: There are many factors involved. Google uses quality score – a mix of ad relevance and clickthrough rates – to determine where to position ads. Bidding more may increase your ranking to a certain extent, but cash-rich companies cannot just buy their way in with a weak campaign.

Myth: The content network should always be avoided

Reality: The content network is where search engines allow other websites to display PPC ads for additional revenue. Sometimes, the click quality is slightly lower than search – but not always. Clicks are often cheaper to obtain here, and the overall cost per conversion (sale) may be lower. You need to test to find what is true in your market.

Myth: Position #1 is the most effective

Reality: It may feel good to win the auction and be on top, but that doesn’t always mean you’ll get best ROI. Research shows that positions 2-5 often have much better conversion rates. My experience confirms this.

Myth: Click fraud is too large a risk

Reality: The risk does exist, but its presence should not stop you from starting a campaign. Since their revenue is dependent on getting advertisers to use their networks, search engines have gotten smarter about detecting and preventing fraud. More importantly, there are several steps you can take to minimize your exposure to risk. Geo-targeting, analytics checking, and testing all help to prevent fraud.

Myth: A good PPC campaign will always give good ROI

Reality: Even a brilliant ad campaign will fail if your website isn’t properly optimized. A good ad campaign will only bring more people to your website – it cannot guarantee sales. I suggest you take a few lessons from ecommerce websites, and give your web booking system a makeover to turn more clicks into reservations.

Microsoft and Yahoo recently announced a major partnership to develop their search technologies. This is an important development in the search industry, so I wanted to briefly share the facts with you.

What happened

Microsoft and Yahoo created a partnership where:

• Microsoft’s technology and Bing! algorithm will power Yahoo search
• Yahoo will become the exclusive sales force for both companies’ premium (large) advertisers
• Self-serve (smaller) advertisers will use Microsoft AdCenter for both platforms
• Each company will maintain their separate display advertising businesses

The agreement will last for 10 years. However, the deal must pass regulatory approval in 6 months, and will take at least 2 years after that to complete.

Why it’s important

Basically, this alliance was formed to make a stronger competitive alternative to Google. Since Google currently has around a 78% paid search market share, it was often not worthwhile to develop separate ad campaigns for the Yahoo and Microsoft platforms (especially for smaller properties).

Hotel advertising implications

Nothing will change immediately: this is a long-term deal. It will take many months (if not years) to fully realize. But it’s encouraging to see a serious competitor to Google in the search marketing space. The combined R&D capabilities of these two companies could drive innovation…which is always a good thing.

What’s your opinion on this development?

Even the most careful marketing plans can lead to disaster without real market feedback. The best marketers – online and off – test different variables of their campaigns to make them much more effective and reduce the risk of failure.

How to get 500+ opinions for under $100

Google AdWords provides great ROI for selling things, but it’s also an exceptional (and underrated) marketing research tool.

Read more…

When a guest leaves you a positive review on a site like TripAdvisor, it’s not only more powerful than advertising – it can have multiple uses. I encourage you to “recycle” your positive guest reviews to get the most benefit:

1) Publish it on your website – Rather than just pontificating on how great your hotel is, get others to sing your praises. You may want to feature positive reviews directly on your home page, or create a separate page like the Inn at Bay Harbor did.

2) Include it in your reservations system – In my web booking system makeover, I talked about the importance of reassuring the guest if you want to improve conversions. You may want to put the positive review in the sidebar so it’s visible without being distracting. With a little piece of code, you can randomly draw from a list, and display a different review each time.

3) Feature it in your offline advertising – Electronics retailer Best Buy understands the role customer reviews play in influencing buying decisions. That’s why they use snippets of online reviews in their print advertising.

4) Use it in your marketing collateral – Take this beyond advertising: what other communications materials could you put positive feedback on or in? Newsletters? Press releases? Social networks?

5) Borrow it for your AdWords campaign – Frankly, I’m a little hesitant to share this tip because its effectiveness may diminish if a lot of people use it. In limited AdWords test campaigns for a few clients, I’ve experimented with using guest testimonials in the ad copy. Because this stands out from the self-praise most hotels publish, I’ve seen excellent results. You may want to give it a try:

Guest-written Adwords copy

Occasionally a business outside the hospitality industry contacts me to optimize their pay per click campaign. A few weeks ago West Chester Vacation Rentals – an Anchorage, Alaska-based firm that rents furnished apartments on a short-term basis hired me to fix up their campaign.

Following the optimization, we were able to reduce their average cost per click from $4.47 to $1.55. My fee quickly paid for itself, and now the company has a much more efficient advertising system for bringing in new business.

I’d like to share the steps I used to accomplish this, so you can avoid paying more than you have to for pay-per-click visitors:

I performed extensive keyword research to find hundreds of 3-5 word “long tail” phrases that cost less than generic terms.

I added very specific keywords to only display ads to people likely to reserve an apartment.

I targeted ad positions 2-4 instead of trying to always be at the top of results. Research shows ads in the top position give less ROI.

I split the campaign into separate ad groups for more control and flexibility.

I achieved strong clickthrough rates (CTR) – by writing benefits-oriented ad copy and using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI). With some ads earning over 7% CTR (up from 0.09%), this improved our quality score and dropped the cost per click.

If you decide to use PPC as part of your marketing strategy, it’s important to optimize your campaign for best results. A few basic changes like the ones above can save you thousands each month.

For more information on pay per click marketing for hotels, see:

• Top 10 Reasons Hotels Should Invest in PPC Advertising
• How to setup your hotel AdWords account
• Geo-targeting for precision and profits
• Advanced Metrics for Hotel PPC Campaigns
• 23 Questions You Must Ask PPC Management Companies

To hire us for Adwords PPC campaign management, call 1 (800) 737-5817 ext. 2 or email josiah[at]gradigio.com.

Keyword research is the foundation of any search marketing campaign: paid or organic. I’ve spent some time discussing the benefits and practical uses of search marketing, so now I’d like to go back to the basics and show you how to actually do the keyword research.

Your goal is to find a list of terms that is:

1) Relevant to your hotel

2) Popular with searchers (potential guests)

3) Obtainable in your competitive space

In my experience, the best way to do this is with a 2-step approach.

Begin with brainstorming. As Alicia wrote earlier this week, you want to get everyone involved: from your General Manager to your front desk staff. What words describe your hotel? your guests? your experience? Come up with as many terms as you can.

Next, get technical. Use keyword research tools to determine which terms are popular and how competitive the market is for them. In a future post, I’ll share the best keyword research tools, but to begin try using Google’s free keyword tool.

Enter your keywords into the box, and click the button to get suggestions. Using the controls, you can sort by search volume (popularity) and how strong the competition (in PPC) is.

Example of Google keyword search

You will need this information in the future, so open up a spreadsheet where you can save your research. Organize the terms by categories – “keyword themes.” Under each theme, put your longer, 2-4+ word phrases. In this example, if “San Francisco Hotel” is one of our themes, we would place longer phrases underneath it:

Example of keyword theme spreadsheet

The final result will be very useful in your search marketing campaign. For organic optimization, use one keyword theme for each page. For paid search marketing, you’ll want to create a new ad group for each theme.

(This is part 3 of this series. Also see Advanced Blogging Metrics and Advanced Metrics for Social Media.)

As I showed yesterday, ad clickthrough (CTR) and cost per click (CPC) aren’t sufficient for measuring the performance of your hotel’s PPC campaign. By all means, track these statistics as well as revenue-related numbers such as:

• number of conversions (reservations, email inquiries from website, etc)
• cost per conversion
• conversion rate/percentage

Photo by aussiegall

But any search marketing manager worth her pay is already tracking those numbers. Here’s how you can push further and receive more insight from your hotel’s PPC campaign.

Advanced metric #1: Keyword quality score. Google assigns each keyword in your AdWords campaign a quality score of 1-10. The higher your score, the lower you pay for each click and the higher your ad may appear in search results. (Yahoo and MSN have similar systems) Dave Davis has a good post on how to improve your quality score.

Advanced metric #2: Coverage. I first learned about coverage from Richard Stokes, author of Mastering Search Advertising (an excellent book), and founder of Adgooroo. Basically, coverage is the percentage of times your ads appear when someone searches for your target keywords. If your coverage rate is low, you are missing out on potential clicks. I’ve personally seen campaigns that were missing 90-95% of impressions, which is a huge loss from a branding standpoint.

Advanced metric #3: Position vs. CTR. Another piece of good advice from Richard, you can often achieve comparable CTR at a lower cost by intentionally lowering your position from the very top. Doing this gets you around bidders with big budgets and increases your coverage.

Advanced metric #4: Position vs. Conversion. Many beginning search marketers think that conversion rates improve with their ad’s position. This isn’t usually true. The top position usually receives more clicks, but conversions usually remain the same through positions 2-5. Plus, with a lower ad position, your cost per click is much lower. Do you own testing to see if this is true in your situation.

Ad clickthrough rates (CTR) and cost per click (CPC) are common benchmarks of PPC advertising performance. But are they the best numbers to track? Maybe not:

Potential failure #1: Cheap clicks may be acquired through keywords with low CTR. This typically happens with general, broad match keyword phrases.

Potential failure #2: Qualifiers in ad copy usually improve click quality, but can reduce CTR. For example, if you say rates start at $1,200, you’ll probably get fewer clicks – but people who click may be more likely to book a room.

Potential failure #3: Strategically important keywords can yield poor CPC or CTR. Bidding on competively important keywords isn’t always efficient.

Potential failure #4: When your ads aren’t clicked, you receive free branding exposure. This is an important advantage over traditional advertising, and one of my top 10 reasons hotels should invest in PPC.

Of course, you still need to be tracking CPC and CTR for your hotel’s campaign. Ad clickthrough rate is integral to your ad’s cost and position, while cost per click is useful for measuring efficiency. Just understand their limitations, and use other metrics for performance evaluation. Tomorrow I’ll share advanced metrics to use in your PPC campaigns…

1. You can start small
It’s possible to start with just $50 (though raising this will accelerate testing and help you get a better feel of the market).

2. Success is instantly measurable
Within 48 hours of campaign launch, you should be able to determine if the campaign is a success. Either it works or it doesn’t. Conversion tracking is easy, so you can see how much you pay for each new booking. This rapid feedback is not possible for many other types of media.

3. Ad delivery is very targeted
Search engines provide a wide variety of distribution options for your ads, so you can appear to your target markets. Depending on the tactics you use, you can show ads for relevant keywords, on selected websites, or to a group with similar demographics.

4. You reach people actively searching for your product
By showing your ads to people as they search the web, you reach them at the decision making stage of the buying cycle and dramatically improve the quality of the impressions.

5. Message testing is easy
Using split testing, you can perform accurate market tests to see which headlines and ad copy pulls the best. After just a few days, you can take this knowledge, and apply it to other promotional material.

6. Instant changes are possible
Is something not working? Want to change the direction of your ad copy? This can be done with a couple clicks, and your campaign is instantly updated. There is not need to wait until the next issue or ad cycle.

7. International advertising is simplified
With a globalized world, your potential guests could be coming from 10,000 miles away. PPC makes it easier to reach people searching for hotels in your area.

8. Branding exposure is free
Even when people aren’t clicking on your ads, you still get brand exposure. And unlike traditional ad campaigns, these impressions don’t cost you a thing.

9. You only pay for results
By definition, you’re only paying for actual website visitors – but when you begin using conversion tracking, you can make sure your ad spend is actually tied to new guest reservations. This eliminates all the risk you face when considering other types of media.

10. High ROI is typical
The combination of all the reasons above usually results in highly profitable pay per click campaigns for hoteliers.

If you’re still wondering whether to try PPC marketing, I encourage you to give it a try. There’s not much you can lose.