Have you ever done a Google search, looked at the paid search advertisements on the top and right side of the search results, and thought … “What does that advertisement have anything to do with my search?”

Recently, I executed a search for the keyword “insurance”.  Amongst all of the competition for top billing in these search results, I saw an ad for “Assurance Wireless” promoting a free cell phone:

Obviously, this is a poorly placed PPC advertisement.  The advertiser didn’t want to appear in results for the highly competitive and highly searched term “insurance”.  The obvious mistake is that the advertiser (either intentionally or not) targeted the misspelling of their brand name “Assurance”.  The advertiser will not be happy when it realizes that a large percentage of their paid search budget is eaten up by clicks that come from a keyword that isn’t relevant to their business at all. Inevitably, search engine users will see this ad, click through (perhaps by mistake) to the advertiser’s site, and quickly exit, obviously with a poor user experience.  The advertiser has potentially just paid $25-$30 for each click on this mistakenly placed advertisement.  That is an expensive mistake.

This is an extreme example of poor ad copy construction, but it got me thinking about three common PPC ad copy mistakes that advertisers often make.

Mistake #1: Using your brand name in the ad’s headline

The “headline” in a PPC advertisement is the blue bolded line at the top of every text ad.  It is the attention-grabber, the first thing that your audience sees when your ad comes up in search results.  One hint: don’t waste that space on introducing your company’s name.  Chances are (and I’m sorry to break the news), your small company doesn’t carry enough brand recognition to become an asset in text-based advertisements.  If someone searches on the term “auto insurance quote”, they’re not necessarily looking for a specific company (like yours), they’re just looking to get a quote.  So, instead of mentioning your company in the headline, why not focus on what is going to be most effective in drawing in the audience?  The first thing that searchers should see is the benefits of your “product” — such as “Free Auto Insurance Quote”.  Don’t waste valuable space on your company’s brand, unless you’re a company with strong brand recognition (like Geico).  Besides, if someone is actually looking for your company by name, you’ll show up in search results regardless (because you ARE advertising for your company’s name … aren’t you??).

Mistake #2: Don’t be too broad in your ad copy

Make sure that your ad is as close to the search query (the term that search users choose in Google) as possible. Be as specific as possible.  In keeping with the insurance example from above, imagine that you are an agency looking to attract new customers for home insurance, auto insurance, and flood insurance. Make sure that your ads for each category are specific to that search as possible.  When someone searches for “flood insurance”, make sure that the ad they are served doesn’t reference a broad and generalized “insurance company”.  Instead, make sure that you include language specific to “flood insurance”, otherwise your competition will have a leg up on you.

So, tailor your ad copy to each type of keyword search that you are targeting – don’t run a homogenized “insurance”-based ad copy for each type of insurance, make sure you speak to the search engine user’s intent with specific language in your ad.

Mistake #3: Target the audience that is at the end of the buying cycle

In other words, we want to attract search engine users who are ready to perform a specific action – such as “get an insurance quote” or “buy auto insurance”.   These people are the most qualified audience out there, those who have signaled their intent to purchase with their keyword search.  Not only do we want to show up on keywords like those I just mentioned, but we want to emphasize those behaviors in our ad copy.

Too many advertisers use broad language in their ads, with the hope of attracting as many users as possible.  I’ve actually seen some ads with the headline “Curious about insurance?” – an attempt at generating visits to the advertiser’s web site, no matter what the user is looking for.  Instead, make sure that you don’t waste your PPC budget on people at the top of the sales funnel (those who are just browsing, or are curious) by offering ad copy that speaks specifically to those who are close to purchasing.  Use language like “Buying auto insurance?”, “Need a home insurance quote?” , or “Get a fast and free business insurance quote now”.  Not only will you appeal to those who are near the end of their search, but you’ll actually dissuade those who are just browsing (and thus saving your PPC budget for more serious shoppers!).

The lesson, when constructing paid search advertisements, is to speak to your audience as specifically as possible.  It will benefit your campaign by providing just the traffic that you are searching for.

So, everyone is talking about “Pinterest” these days. If you haven’t checked it out already and you are a woman – you definitely should. If you are a guy, you should also jump on the bandwagon and upload as many “manly” pins as possible – just to try to balance things out.

People who use Pinterest know that probably 80% of the site ends up dedicated to finger nail polish, hair styles, shoes, and cute baby animals. It is almost the online version of magazines like “First for Women” that my wife buys at the grocery store. It doesn’t have many articles, but there are always weight-loss miracles, hair styles, shoes, and of course those cute baby animals.

The premise is that you have virtual corkboards and when you find things you like on the web, you “pin” them to your board. You organize your boards by topics, and people can then follow what you pin, re-pin your pins, like your pins, and discuss them. You can also search and sort pins by topics, and find gift ideas. It is very easy to use, and easy to set up. The interface is clean and well organized.

Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing websites of all time, and has reached the 10 million monthly visitors milestone faster than Twitter and even Facebook. The unusual aspect to this meteoric growth is that it has been fueled mainly by women. In most cases, internet start-up sites become popular with users who are men under 35. According to comScore, 65% of Pinterest users are women, and these women drive 85% of the traffic on the site. More than half of the women using Pinterest are 35 or older.

Pinterest seems poised to be a huge player in the social media game. As a guy, I find it cool to be able to pin the things I find on the internet and to keep them organized. I do realize that nobody on Pinterest is probably going to follow my psychedelic poster art board, but I like having the collection in one place, and adding to it when I come across more. I don’t have much use for fingernails that look like the solar system, motivational slogans, cute shoes, or wedding ideas – but there are evidently a BUNCH of women who do.

It will be interesting to see how companies embrace Pinterest. I mean if I had a craft or jewelry business, I would be pinning my work all the time, with links to where people can buy my creations. This can also be applied to a larger scale business model. I would think Pinterest will become another tool for businesses, just like Facebook and Twitter.

So guys, head on over to Pinterest and see what the women are up to. Once you get an “invite”, don’t forget to pin your favorite motorcycle, cars, rock and roll music, sports teams, tech toys, grills, and even your favorite BBQ recipes. Of course someone has already come up with “Manteresting.com” where you nail instead of pin, and it’s mostly beer, guns, and lingerie models. Hopefully Pinterest can become a little more balanced and we can all pin what we love together!

Thinking outside the box and becoming more creative to generate leads is a great insurance marketing strategy for your insurance agency. Social media has become one of the leading ways to impact your community, generate interest, and draw in prospective clients. Whether you are heavily invested in Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you have got to start somewhere.

All of these social media sites provide different opportunities for your agency to brand itself on. As a leader in the insurance industry, you will want to use social media to integrate fundraising and community service into your agency. This creative and humbling Internet marketing tactic will not only bring you leads, but it will build a stronger community for your agency.

Integrating fundraising and community service into your social media strategy:

Through Facebook, you are going to be able to optimize your experience by creating interesting posts that people want to interact with. Through Twitter, you are going to be able to promote good things going on with your event or service to provide real time updates. And through LinkedIn you can update your initiative through your professional networking groups.

Being involved on a day to day basis with your Facebook friends and potential clients is a great way to generate new leads through social media. Creating a fundraiser or community service event to bring the community together, will not only benefit the non-profit or business you are donating your proceeds to, but it will benefit the community, and even better your agency. Think outside the box and bring people together through social media, and you will be guaranteed to build a larger and more beneficial community surrounding your insurance agency.

We’ve all seen it: Twitter accounts we follow, run by people and companies we trust, tweeting links to weight loss and free iPad websites. Surely you’ve received a direct message from a friend announcing that they “can’t believe what you’re doing in this photo,” accompanied by a phishing link, which will ask you for your username and password to view the content that actually doesn’t exist.

That’s where hacks can be dangerous. If you use the same password for everything, hackers could gain access to your email, Facebook, or even bank accounts.

Consider what happened to the NBC News Twitter account in September, just before the tenth anniversary of the September 11 Ground Zero Attacks. Hacking collective The Script Kiddies hacked the account, tweeting that Ground Zero had been attacked, complete with specific flight numbers and a #groundzeroattacked hashtag.

So what can you do to prevent your personal and company accounts from being hacked? Here are five tips to help:

Follow these simple guidelines – and incorporate them into your employees’ social networking training – and your Twitter account should be airtight!

There are many facets to a company, and everyone plays an important role in helping build the client base.  However, having each team come together for a common cause, especially through social networking, you can greatly help your internet marketing strategy!

To attract more business and secure greater exposure, you can empower your staff with the inside scoop on what’s happening with the company’s social media, why it’s important, and how it benefits customers.  According to the blog SpinSucks, this can ultimately be a powerful way to engage your employees and elevate them into brand ambassadors for your company.  Some tips to do so include:

It is important to remember that employees who feel valued and appreciated will want to talk about the wonderful place where they work.  By creating a positive culture, workers will become more engaged in the company and its goals.  So improve your internet marketing strategy by paying it forward to your foundation, your employees, and watch the results show in your customer base!

Every industry has its own language – the Internet Marketing world is no different. For those of us who work in the industry, it can be so easy to get swept up in the jargon that we forget not everyone uses these terms on a daily basis. At Astonish Results, we’re constantly communicating with clients who do not have backgrounds in Internet Marketing, so it’s important that we stay away from the lingo we’ve become accustomed to and speak in plain English.

My goal for this post is to translate some of the terms we throw around most often into basic English. Here we go…

Internet Marketing

The practice of marketing products or services over the internet. It is also referred to as online marketing, web marketing, or digital marketing. Internet marketing includes websites, email marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization – The practice of helping a website show up in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Search engine optimization is an internet marketing strategy that analyzes web searches – from determining how the search engines are ranking websites in the search results to figuring out what people are searching for and what specific terms (or keywords) are being used.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing – also known as Paid Search – is the practice of increasing a website’s exposure through paid search tactics such as PPC (pay per click). In a very general overview, SEM involves paying to have a search result appear when a search is done for a certain keyword term. If someone clicks on your ad, you pay an agreed upon price. The goals are in line with those of an SEO strategy, but SEO involves organic results and SEM involves paid results.

Link Building

Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to your site in order to boost rankings in the search engines. Having a relevant, quality website link to your site is like getting a vote. If the search engines see that other websites want to share your information and promote your website, then they are more likely to deem your site worthy of a higher search ranking.

Search Spiders

When we refer to search spiders, or web crawlers, we’re referring to the computer program that can browse the web to find search results. The search engines use search spiders to come up with a quick, up-to-date, organized list of what’s available on the web so the search engine can then determine how relevant the content is – this turns into the search results you see on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Unique Content

We all know about plagiarism and the negative consequences associated with it – providing unique content for your website and blog will keep you out of trouble. The search engines love fresh, honest, helpful content – doing so will make your site seem more useful. Every page on your website and every blog post should say something different. You cannot copy content from your website and post it on your blog – the search engines will recognize this as duplicate content and you could be punished. The best way to stay in the search engines’ good graces is to create unique content every time you write.

Search Volume

Search volume is the number of times a certain term is typed into the search engines on a monthly basis. When we decide which keywords should be used in your SEO strategy, we are comparing the search volume for hundreds of terms to determine which are the best fit. In addition to the search volume, we need to look at a term’s search competition before we decide to select it as one of your keywords.

Search Competition

A term’s search competition lets us know how many other sites are trying to be found for the term. If we find that a term has a search competition of 100% then we know it will be very difficult to rank for that keyword because a lot of other sites are also trying to rank for it. We want to find a term that has a high search volume and a low search competition when we are selecting your keywords.

There is much more internet jargon that we use on a daily basis, this was a peak at the topics we reference most often. What are some of the Internet Marketing terms you hear on a regular basis? Let us know if there are any terms you need clarification on and we can feature them in a future post!

In every case, posting the content online you write for your agency is never enough. Just because you make a blog post or a press release available on the internet doesn’t mean that everyone will access it. Let’s be honest, these posts are often tucked away on websites and in order to get the word out you need to do things like post them on your Facebook and Twitter accounts in the hope that your friends and followers will relay the message. However, sometimes even that isn’t enough so it becomes necessary to consult alternative methods to link sharing, one of these methods being social bookmarking. Bookmarking websites have been around for a while, but only recently have they begun gaining steam in the business community. While most people use these for news and finding unique articles, your company should be implementing them to grow traffic to your insurance agency website. But how is this done? How should your agency go about sharing content on social bookmarking sites? It’s easy!

Your best bet is start off with three of the most common bookmarking sites—Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. These sites—especially Stumbleupon and Reddit—are commonly used for internet users to share links of news articles or anything interesting they find on the web. Websites are separated and shared via categories, so for instance topics such as “news,” “entertainment,” and “lifestyle” are commonly browsed tabs. What sets apart social bookmarking from social media is that social bookmarking allows you to reach an audience outside of your community on Facebook and Twitter. If done correctly, your links will hopefully show up in lists under whatever category you choose.

In order to bookmark a link, you’ll need to create a login for every site you want to bookmark with. For now, we’re going to use Reddit as an example because not only is it one of the most visited bookmarking sites, it’s the 45th most visited website in the U.S., according to Alexa.  After registering and creating a username and password, you’re ready to begin bookmarking! To start, jump to Reddit’s homepage where you will see medium-sized text reading “Submit a link” in the upper right hand corner. You’ll be brought to a page where the next step is to fill out information regarding the link you’re posting. Whether it’s a blog post, press release, or any other form of content, it’s important to make sure your title is creative and eye-popping while also including your keyword. If you’re having trouble coming up with a catchy title that includes the keyword, don’t worry; making the title stand out is the most important thing and in some cases it’s okay to omit the keyword. Once you come up with a title, all you need to do is copy and paste the link from your post and you’re site is bookmarked!

Once you start bookmarking your pages, make sure to keep posting them on your social media sites as well: the goal is to reach as many people as possible. Once you start bookmarking every piece of content you post online, you should start seeing better results and more hits to your website.

In addition to Reddit, Digg, and Stumbleupon, here are additional bookmarking sites to consider: Delicious, Jumptags, and, of course, Google.

Most users flock to the internet’s search engines for one thing: to find help.  Help in finding the answer to a question.  Help in solving a problem that they have. Help in purchasing the right car at their local dealership.

Being visible on a variety of keyword searches in Google is applicable and valuable for businesses in every industry.  The world’s largest companies use their websites as the best (and most accessible) source of information about their brand, products, or services. At the same time the world’s smallest companies have established a web presence as a vital lifeline to previously inaccessible markets.

In the end, search engines pull them all together: the smallest companies can compete right next to the largest.  Search engines are the great equalizer of digital marketing.

Or are they?

Not all markets are the same. The search “landscape” for certain industries are more competitive than others.  The big box electronics chains are fighting tooth and nail for top position on keywords like“blu ray dvd player” and “flat screen tv”.

The insurance industry, both personal and commercial products, is no different.  In fact, one leading industry blog just proclaimed the search landscape for insurance-related searches to be the most competitive amongst all PPC keywords. A study conducted on the average cost-per-click (CPC) across millions of keywords found that insurance-related terms were the most expensive, ahead of keyword groups such as “mortgage” and “loans”.

Does that mean that this search landscape is inaccessible and cost-inefficient for the smaller agencies in the industry?  I would offer an emphatic “NO”.  In fact, I believe just the opposite: the high competition in this particular realm indicates the sheer demand for insurance information that potential customers are looking for. Does that mean that smaller agencies should focus their PPC marketing dollars into bids for high-dollar keywords like “car insurance”?  No.  It simply means that these agencies need to have their paid search campaigns strategies modified to get the biggest “bang” for their marketing buck. There is room in this competitive space to be active…and profitable!  After all, if 80% of all insurance customers are beginning their search for their policy online, can you afford to ignore this marketing tactic?

Here are some strategies to be competitive in a competitive paid search marketplace:

With these simple steps, you are well on your way to becoming effective in a competitive advertising space.  Companies of any size can be active in this marketing medium, and capitalize on all of those people who are saying “HELP!” to their search engines.

Here it is — the last installment of my series on driving qualified visitors through your paid search (SEM) campaign.  In part one of this series, I discussed PPC keyword selection as the first two steps in qualifying traffic, and in part two I showed you how to optimize your ad copy in order to drive traffic from the visitors that you’d most prefer.

Remember that qualifying your paid search traffic has two parts:

Also remember that, as compared to organic search traffic (where you welcome visitors in all phases of the sales funnel), the most effective and efficient SEM campaigns can focus on driving visits that produce conversions.  Let your organic search optimization efforts drive the “information-gathering” traffic, use your PPC campaign to target the “purchasing” consumer.

Now that we’ve covered three steps to improve your campaign, let’s dive into the next tactic that will help you drive valuable clicks:

Step 4: Create Landing Pages to Promote Your Conversion Point

You’ve set up your PPC keywords, you’ve created some unbelievably enticing ad copy to get your audience to click … now what? The process of converting your traffic from visitors into customers is technically over, as you’ve now received a visitor from your SEM campaign.  But the most effective PPC campaigns do not stop optimization until after the most important part of this process – the conversion point.  If I am running a campaign to sell a widget, and I’ve received my captive audience through paid search, I want to make darn sure that I make the final piece of their purchasing process is both obvious and easy.

Once I’ve paid for this click, the last thing that I want the visitor to do is get distracted, bored, confused or frustrated. I want to subtly but firmly guide them through the conversion (or transactional) process.  That’s why the landing page in a paid search campaign is so important.  I’ll give you three quick tips to create an effective landing page, all geared towards promoting a conversion point.

Note that the page is simple, does not contain too much text, and provides no linking away from this page.  The visitor, who has arrived on a very specific keyword search (including the word “quote”) is confronted with exactly the type of information that they have requested, and are more likely to convert as a result!

There you have it – four easy steps to generating and converting qualified paid search traffic! Apply these tactics to your campaign and you just might get a more efficient use of your marketing dollars.

In my last post, I began to tackle the idea of “qualifying” leads and visits that come to your site through paid search advertising. After all, if we can help it, we’d rather pay for only those clicks that are coming to your site by completing the action that we desire: purchase, sign up, download, or upload, just to name a few conversion points that online marketers target.  Remember that qualifying traffic has two parts:

If you can optimize your paid search campaign to achieve these things, or at least get better at them, you are well on your way to using your marketing dollars efficiently.

There are several ways to do this tactically. Part 1 of this topic talked about the importance of targeting value-based keywords as well as utilizing “negative” keywords to eliminate traffic from visitors who have very little chance to convert.

This blog post investigates the next step to qualifying search traffic: ad copy optimization.

Step 3: Use Ad Copy to Tell Potential Visitors EXACTLY What You Want Them to DO

Your text-based ad that appears in Google’s paid search results is the last thing that visitors see before clicking through to your site, and thus, incurring you a potentially expensive cost per click. So why not make sure that those users know exactly what they are about to see or do before they add to your Google bill? You can do just that by using language in your ads that talks about exactly what the user will find on the other side of the click.  Let’s continue with an example from our friends in the insurance industry who are trying to get visitors to request a quote for their personal insurance. Can you spot the difference between these two pieces of ad copy?

Ad copy #1

California Auto Insurance

Questions about car insurance in CA?

Click here for more info!

CA-auto-insurers.com

Ad copy #2

Auto Insurance Quotes

Get your free car insurance quote

from Acme Insurance today!

Acme-insurance.com

The first ad entices users to click through to a page that is offering broad, generalized insurance information. This could include answers to the questions “what is auto insurance?”, “where can I find a list of California insurance companies?”, and “where can I get some general insurance questions answered?”.  This ad doesn’t speak at all to the conversion point, and instead will attract many visits from people looking to satisfy general insurance informational search queries.  This will lead to clicks (and cost) from visits that will have a much lower conversion ratio (conversions/clicks).  Many of these people will find what they are looking for (or worse, maybe not!), and immediately exit the site with their search intent satisfied.

The second ad speaks much more directly to a subset of potential visitors who are looking to do a particular thing with their insurance search: get an insurance quote.  The headline (top line) and description lines speak directly to this point, leaving little to the imagination in the way of what lies on the other side of their click.  This will accomplish the two goals that we’ve discussed when trying to qualify traffic:

Research has shown that the better you can match your ad copy to the actual search that the user performs, the better chance you have in acquiring that user.  This is reflected in click-through-rate (CTR), which measures the number of clicks as a percentage of those who are exposed to the ad. If the ad appeals to the searcher, they will click on it.  If we can match our ad to their actual search query, we’re more likely to get the click, and if we target our ad and keywords to specifically target an insurance quote, we’re more likely to get the conversion.

That, folks, is the definition of a qualified visitor!

Stay tuned to this blog for our next step in driving qualifying our traffic: paid search-specific landing page optimization.