Back at the beginning of the month, Hanapin/PPC Hero co-hosted a webinar with Intrapromote to review the best ways to coordinate your PPC and SEO marketing efforts. You can watch the recording to get all the delivered content, but we also had some fantastic questions and ran out of time to answer them all live. So I wanted to follow up on the questions we didn’t get to and provide those answers today!
- Q: Do you suggest posting on social platforms on your highest PPC day?
- While I’m admittedly not sure what this user meant by “highest PPC day,” I don’t think that changes my answer. Any cross-platform marketing you can do is encouraged. So if that means on a particular day of the week PPC traffic is high, I would certainly target that day to post a new blog on my site and then spread the word via social networks. If it helps your organic rankings for a particular term show closer to your paid search ads for the same or similar term, the saturation could mean solid things for click-through.
- Q: Should the agency reporting be providing ROI data, or should I be calculating that for my own business??
- If you can provide reconciled sales/revenue information back to your agency, then they can, and should, report back to you ad spend and fees compared to revenue or sales generated. The purpose of hiring an agency is to take some of the work off your hands, but of course that requires you to communicate sales numbers back for them to do so.
- Q: What report structures have you seen?
- Quite literally too many to name! Generally speaking, the best practice way of reporting is to show a current date range of metric performance, a comparison of those numbers to the last reported numbers, where projected metrics are sitting compared to goals, summary of optimizations made that contributed to the change in performance, and then a ‘next steps’ section of what is planned optimization-wise in the coming days/weeks/months. However, as agency-client relationships mature, some clients prefer a quick email with KPI metrics projected against goals and any high-level or important notes about that performance. Most agencies have templates of some sort to plug these reports in to, but ultimately those reports should be formatted according to client preferences.
- Q: I read at some point that approximately 80% of all users who enter a search query in a search engine can’t tell the difference between ads and organic results. How does this aspect influence both PPC and SEO?
- I can’t speak to the 80% portion, but I can say without a doubt that there are certainly a large group of searchers who don’t realize that the two segments of results are different. Along the same lines, there are buckets of searchers who believe paid and/or organic results are all spam and not to be trusted. So clearly, this searcher psychology greatly influences PPC and SEO results and traffic. This is just another reason why you want to address both marketing segments in your overall marketing plan, if possible, so you aren’t losing any audience pools by ignoring one segment of search results.
- Q: If we have two agencies, one for SEO and one for PPC, how can we monitor Google Analytics? Who will have Google Analytics, is it with the SEO or PPC agency?
- I would recommend and encourage both agencies to have access to Analytics in order to utilize that data for their reporting and optimizations. I know for sure that both SEO and PPC need and benefit greatly from using Analytics data.
- Q: One website can only have one Analytics code, so how do PPC and SEO agencies both use this to track performance?
- The one Analytics account will track both PPC and SEO performance in the one account, and then each agency will get in and pull reports that are applicable to their particular marketing segment.
- Q: Customers search for a dance school using “studio,” “school,” and “academy.” Do I need a separate page for each term when they are searching for the same thing?
- Yes and no. From a Quality Score standpoint, aligning an individual ad group with each of the three studio/school/academy buckets of keywords will allow for ad copy to be written to contain the most relevant terms to the searchers query. Likewise, having separate landing pages that utilize each of the three buckets of searches will just further incorporate the accompanying keywords and improve relevancy/Quality Score. However, if separate landing pages are not possible, I’d likely test including all of those term variations on the landing page, if possible. You’re mostly looking out for the search engines in this case by segmenting separate landing pages, rather than the searcher, as the searcher would likely make the determination that a school/academy/studio are similar things, but the engine wouldn’t. Not saying to write your pages to please the engines alone, but the segmented strategy could assist with overall performance of your campaigns.
That about covers it! If you attended the webinar or watched the recording and have additional questions, post them in the comments section below and I’ll gladly respond! Likewise if you’re just interested in the topic and have a question or additional ideas to contribute…comments section!
