A large number of conversions happen over the phone. This can be very problematic for many companies as they have no idea how many calls they received, or they do not know what traffic source or keyword caused the phone to ring.

Call tracking is the answer to this problem. It has been around for several years on the web, but it has not seen the adoption rates one would expect from a technology that can help close the offline sales loop.

Much of this problem stems from companies either not knowing it exists, or not understanding all of its uses.

The next episode of Marketing Nirvana is dedicated to call tracking.

• What is is
• How can it benefit you
• The different types of call tracking and accuracy
• Best practices for choosing vendors
• And a lot more

I have a special guest for this episode, David Szetela.

Many of you might remember David from his days with Clix Marketing and PPC Rockstars. He’s been around for a long time in the PPC industry and has quite a bit of insights to share.

These days, David is semi-retired from the PPC world and has moved into the call tracking space having taken the position of Chief marketing officer for Bionic Click.

Like me, David is an educator first and a sales person second. Therefore, while he does work for a call tracking company that we do discuss in a little bit of detail, the show is geared to educate you how call tracking can help and what to look for in a vendor or technology.

The show will air at 9am PST / 12pm CST Monday the 6th at WebmasterRadio.fm.

Later on, the show will be available for download from our Marketing Nirvana page or on iTunes.

I hope you enjoy the show.

Coupons are experiencing an explosion in popularity—among consumers and marketers alike. For the former, the attraction is clear: coupons are a quick and simple way to save money; if they are available, there is no reason not to put them to use. For the latter, it can be a little more complicated. Coupons offer a juicy incentive for new customers, but coupon-based promotion campaigns can be risky business. Here are some of the elements to take into consideration in order to decide if this sort of strategy is the right choice for your website:

Finding a Target Audience and a Product to Promote

1. Online coupons should be tailored for new, potential buyers: Generally, the objective of any marketing campaign based on coupons is to attract new customers. In the case of online marketing, the idea is to up the website’s conversion rate—in other words, to turn visitors into actual buyers. Therefore, promotions should be put in place where casual viewers will readily find them. On the other hand, too many people making use of coupons can seriously dent profits.
2. The established customer base should not be using online coupons: From a marketing standpoint, it’s a bad thing if proven buyers are finding and using the coupons meant to bring in new patrons. These are the people who would likely buy a given item even without that 50% discount. So—somewhat paradoxically—online coupons work best when they are advertised in such a way that only new buyers find them. There are a few ways to avoid a loss scenario and insure that a couponing campaign reaches the right people:
   • Offer a discount on a very specific, niche product—this way, the buyers using the coupons will be customers with a legitimate interest in the item, not just all-consuming bargain hunters.
   • Use coupons to get rid of excess inventory—items that are beginning to serve only as a drain on resources are always great candidates for discounts

Methods of Distribution

Once you know what you’re discounting and who you want using the coupons, you can figure out a strategy for distributing them:

1. Major players: Vendors like LivingSocial, Google Offers, and Groupon are devoted to the circulation of coupons. However, relying on these third-party players can be risky—once you’ve made a coupon available to a vendor, you lose control of how many customers ultimately end up discovering and redeeming it.
2. Video couponing: Video ads are safer than third-party vendors because they allow you the freedom to disable sent-out coupons after reaching a goal without having to take down the ad and lose the associated boost in visibility.
3. Social media: The brand new Facebook Deals presents yet another avenue for a couponing campaign. The benefits of advertising through Facebook are already well-known to marketers: a massive base of potential customers who are already categorized by their likes and interests is something of an advertisement dream come true. Only time will reveal the true effectiveness of Facebook Deals as a coupon distributor, but for now it looks very promising.

Coupons can seriously boost business for a small company, but it’s important to remember that a poorly thought-out campaign can end in disaster. If you decide that coupons are the way to go for your own business, always plan your marketing strategy very carefully. Make sure you have a complete understanding of your current model, where your profits are coming from, etc. Avoid distributing coupons for proven sellers; focus on new products or less popular items. And give it some thought: is promoting your company and gaining new patrons worth the potential loss in profits? Plan ahead, maintain control, and you’ll be on the road to success. Good luck!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

We’re teaming up with SMX to conduct a one day intensive AdWords training course before the SMX San Jose conference starts.

If you live in the region and want a solid day of training – this is perfect. If you’re going to be at SMX San Jose; come a single day earlier and leave with a lot more knowledge about the intricacies of Google AdWords.

The event will take place on February 27th, 2012. Here’s all the details:

Even with all of the new marketing channels that have opened up over the years, AdWords is still the core of many companies interactive campaigns. If your PPC campaigns are not running efficiently, it can have a drastic impact on your bottom line.

Join Brad Geddes for a full day of AdWords education and discussion that will teach you not only the best practices, but also advanced concepts and strategies that are based upon a decade of research and testing.

What Will I Learn?

Comprehensive Keyword Research: The absolute center of every PPC campaign is keywords. Learn the effective methods to discover and research keywords. While keywords are the lifeblood of PPC, perfecting your match types usage while controlling your negative keywords can drastically increase your overall revenue.

Writing Compelling Ad Copy: You will learn how to sync your ad copy with both your keywords and buying cycle stages.

Ad Copy Testing: Testing ad copy is essential to any AdWords account’s success. You will takeaway several ideas for ads to test by the time you leave the session.

Demystifying Quality Score: Quality Score has a larger effect on your account’s visibility than any other setting inside of AdWords. Quality Score can be a challenge to increase. Receive step-by-step instructions in how to prioritize Quality Score improvement, and what actions to take to increase your Quality Scores.

Increase your Reach Through the Google Display Network: Consumers spend about 5% of their time with the search network. The rest of their time is spent on content sites. Learn how to effectively reach users beyond search with contextual ads, placements, and enhanced campaigns.

Control Your Ad Display with Location Targeting: Do you think that geographic targeting isn’t relevant to a national business? Think again! Whether you are a brick and mortar local business, or a global e-commerce site, learn how geographically targeted campaigns can create additional connections with searchers.

Increase Your Landing Page Conversions: The first impression to a potential customer is the landing page. With only a few seconds to engage the buyer this may be more important in your conversion funnel than anything else. This section of the course will not only go into best practices and usability, but how to test landing pages in a simple and effective method.

Networking Opportunities: Conferences are fantastic places to network and meet fellow practitioners of online marketing. Lunch will be provided so you can spend time getting to know your fellow attendees.

Who is Brad Geddes?

Brad Geddes is the Founder of Certified Knowledge, a company dedicated to consulting, educating, and training marketers on Internet marketing theory and best practices. Not one to hold secrets, Brad is a prominent educator in the PPC industry.

• Google Certified AdWords Trainer
• Author of “Advanced Google AdWords”
• Host of Marketing Nirvana on Webmaster Radio
• Internationally recognized speaker
• Trained more than 10,000 businesses on AdWords
• Columnist for Search Engine Land
• Founder of Certified Knowledge
• Worked with companies with budget ranges from $17 month to millions each month
• Has worked with Red Lobster, Encyclopedia Britannica, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, YellowPages.com

Past Training Video Testimonials

How to Register

If you would like to attend the Advanced AdWords Training @ SMX West you will need one of two passes for SMX:

• Workshop only pass
• All Access Pass + Workshop

More Information:

• Learn about SMX West
• Register for Advanced AdWords Training
• Learn more about the workshops

Please Note: This is a one day event that is a partnership with SMX. This is not the same as the AdWords Seminar for Success. This is one day event that is jammed pack full of information in a short amount of time. Please come ready to learn.

Almost all conversion activities end in some type of form:

• Ecommerce checkout
• Contact form
• Whitepaper download
• Newsletter subscription
• and many more

Yes, most forms are not well designed. The best traffic you can buy will not help you out if your form doesn’t work properly.

However, designing forms isn’t that difficult if you know the major problems to avoid. In this video you can learn some of the major pitfalls to avoid with your forms.

If you avoid the bad stuff, and increase the good stuff – then conversions will go up. And that’s what we all want – more conversions.

The video is recorded in HD. So feel free to increase the resolution to 720 and watch in full screen. If you are reading this in an RSS reader or email; you’ll probably have to click through to the site to see the video.

I hope you enjoy.

When you do AdWords account audits, you need to go beyond the data to see how savvy the AdWords account is. If the account is well put together, then the account manager generally knows what they are doing and you will end up talking quite a bit about the data and the account’s strategy.

If the account is lacking in the advanced use of features, often your conversation will be geared around education and some strategy.

While I often start with the One Minute Account Diagnosis, there are a few signals you can use to see if the account is savvy or not before you start talking to the account manager about increasing the account’s performance.

Conversion Tracking

Every account should be tracking conversions. Sometimes this is in AdWords, other times it might be in Google analytics or their own in-house system.

If the account does not have conversion tracking of some sort, this should be the very first step to getting an account on track.

Extensions

Every account can benefit from some extension. Everyone can use sitelinks. Local accounts can focus on location extensions. Ecommerce accounts have product extensions. There are call extensions, social extensions, etc.

If an account does not have any extensions, then the account manager generally needs to be educated in not just extensions, but also top vs side performance of ads.

I find a lot of older and very sophisticated accounts often do not have location extensions enabled any longer. These accounts are often large hotel or restaurant chains that took the time to create Local Business Ads, which were retired a few years ago. However, when the ad format was retired, these companies often did not take the time to rework all of the data into location extensions.

Search vs Display Campaigns

A properly organized account will have separate search and display campaigns. If the campaigns are targeting both search and display, you will usually need to educate the company about the display network and how to properly organize it.

Negative Keywords

Does the account have negative keywords? Are they using negative keyword lists? If yes, then at least the manager knows what negatives are and you can go beyond education to finding the words that need to be blocked.

If the account has zero negative keywords, then you usually end up in a conversation about match types and search queries.

Modified Broad Match

Is the account using all broad match? If yes, you need to have a serious talk about match types. I find that many accounts use broad match for good reason, but have never heard of modified broad match. Modified broad match is a nice middle ground between phrase and broad match.

If an account is using all exact and phrase match, the account was often set up and optimized more than two years ago when expanded broad match was spending too much money without enough conversions.

Default Bids

Are all the keywords bids ‘default’? This means that all the bids are at the ad group level and are often 0.25, 0.50, 1.00, 2.00, 3.00, etc. If so, Odds are the account has no bidding strategy at all. There are times when you need to bid at the ad group level such as when you have a lack of keyword data. However, if you are bidding from some conversion metric, then some of the bids should be precise numbers such as 1.03, 0.29, 0.98, etc.

If all the bids are roughly the same, then you need to have a chat about bidding strategies that often ends up being about the company’s marketing goals.

Filters & Automated Rules

If an account has saved filters, automated reporting, or has set up automated rules, then usually the PPC manager is fairly educated. These are strong signals that you are going to talk to a smart person who wants a second opinion or is too overworked to get into the nitty gritty data analysis that can help out an account.

Conclusion

There are many other signals you could use to determine how savvy an account is; however, I have found these signals are indicative of how savvy the account is as a whole.  Also, you can see all of these settings in just a few minutes of time. I do recommend using the AdWords editor as that will show you all the campaigns at once so you can quickly see mobile, tablet, desktop, search, display, time of day, location, and other settings from a single screen.

Just because these items are in place does not mean the account is perfect and well run. Also, not having all of these items in place does not mean the account is poorly managed. These settings give you an indication of how many features the account is using so that you can speak to the education level of the account.

You should know your audience, and in a PPC audit – the audience is the account manager and maybe their boss. Therefore, understanding the account manager’s knowledge will help you speak to your audience so that you can make sure you’re spending your time on strategy versus education so at the end of the audit – everyone is happy with the outcome.

Did you know:

• 44% of all US internet users have created some content online (Pew Internet – PDF)
• We create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of man through 2003 (from Eric Schmidt)
• The world’s roughly 27 million computer servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information in 2008 (source)
• More video content is uploaded to YouTube in a 60 day period than the three major U.S. television networks created in 60 years (YouTube press)
• 1.8 zettabytes of data was created in 2011. It would require 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads to store all that info; which would cost $34.4 trillion; or equivalent to the GDP of the United States, Japan, China, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy combined (Source: Mashable)

So what’s my point other than we make a lot of data?

Well – are you having issues with your content marketing? Content takes a lot of time to create. However, there’s a lot of it already.

Therefore, you don’t always have to create content to do content marketing – you can leverage other people’s content (in a legal and ethical way).

That is the subject of this week’s Marketing Nirvana show. It’s about content marketing, but there are some great tips in how to do this type of marketing without having to always create lots of material (sometimes you will want to create it yourself).

The show guest is John Fox (who some of you may remember from a previous episode we did on auto-responders and PPC Mindmeld).

John is also the founder of Venture Marketing – a company that specializes in B2B and partner channel consulting; as well as the author of several books.

We chat about:

• Twitter
• Borrowed credibility (I’m a huge fan of this)
• Connectors vs creators
• A little bit on auto-responders
• Content creation
• Content marketing
• How to leverage (legally and ethically) other people’s content for your marketing
• And a few other random things that hopefully you will find useful

The show aired on January 9th if you caught it live. Right now you can download previous shows on iTunes.

Listen to it, and to previous shows at Webmaster Radio on the Marketing Nirvana page.

It’s yet another fun show, I hope you enjoy it.

I’m a huge fan of making my time as productive as possible. I don’t want to waste time in hunting down if someone has replied or try to add yet more things to my calendar just to try to remember something. I like quick and automated solutions.

When you send an email that you need a reply to, in Outlook you can do this:

• CC yourself
• In the message you sent yourself, add a reminder for that specific email at the time and date you desire
• Archive the email
• The reminder will pop up the email at your set time. If you have a response and are done with the email – just dismiss the message.
• If you do not have a response yet – the email is in front of you – so you can just forward the email with a quick note that you still need a response

With this method, there is no need to try and remember what you are waiting on – its your task list.

When I switched to Google apps, I lose this functionality. It is the single thing I miss the most about Outlook.

I was very happy to find a program that does the exact same thing for Gmail (and it works in Google apps), called Boomerang for GMail.

It’s a browser add on that you can install that adds another tab in your email. You can easily set a reminder that if no one responds by a specific date, put the email back in your inbox so that you can once again forward the email making sure that you get a response.

I find this is very useful for:

• Following up on invoices
• Getting responses from support you send off to other companies
• Getting responses from people on vacation
• Following up on project information (I prefer project management software for most of this)
• Making sure bugs are being reported and followed up on (although I prefer bug tracking software)
• Reminding clients to give you access to their systems
• Anything else you waste time on trying to track down if you have an answer or who is response for that answer

The plugin works with Google Apps, Gmail, Firefox, and Chrome.

There is both a free and paid version. They both have similar functionality, the difference is how many items can be stored in your boomerang queue, and how many systems it integrates with (Google Apps or Salesforce). 

It does have some mobile capabilities, but I find them pretty limiting at the moment as its not a fully integrated app (which it can’t be as GMail doesn’t allow that on mobile devices).

You can download it from Boomerang for Gmail.

Please note: This is not an affiliate link or a paid post. I’m just a happy customer (paying for it) and it’s a huge time saver.

Here’s a video about the program:

Market Motive is making some of their videos free this week. Each day there will be one video available for free.

If you’re curious about the difference between Certified Knowledge and Market motive, you can see the full details in this post about the master certification.

I recommend putting these on your calendar and taking a look. There are some brilliant people at Market Motive and this is your chance to take a peak at some of the content.

• Monday (January 9th) – Web Analytics – Analytics Roles and Keys to Success
• Tuesday (January 10th) – SEO – Analyzing Your SEO Success
• Wednesday (January 11th) – PPC –  Ad Group Organization
• Thursday (January 12th) – PR –  Creating Ads Worth Spreading
• Friday (January 13th) – SEO  – The 4 Dimensions of SEO
• Saturday (January 14th) – Conversion optimization – 21 Tips to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
• Sunday (January 15th) – Social Media – Creating a Social Media Strategy: The Blog as a Home Base

It seems there was a mistake at Market Motive about the free content. Avanish’s content (analytics) will be available on Tuesday and Matt Bailey’s information (Analyzing SEO Success) on Monday. Sorry for the mixup.

Market Motive offers master certifications in a variety of disciplines from analytics to conversion optimization to PPC.

Earlier this year, I took over the PPC Faculty chair at Market Motive and have had a great time working directly with students in both teaching them Google AdWords marketing; and working with them to improve some of their current accounts.

The new semester will start on January 16th; and runs for three months.

When you take the class, you will get:

• Access to many PPC lessons
• Access to lessons from other disciplines
• Regular homework assignments
• Weekly quizzes
• A graded final exam
• Weekly office hours with Brad Geddes (me)

What’s the Difference between Certified Knowledge and Market Motive?

This might sound odd that I founded a site that is based upon PPC tools and training, and also train at what could be considered a competitor site. However, the value propositions are so different – I thought I’d spell them out for everyone so they can see the difference.

Training

Certified Knowledge has more than 150 lessons from the basics to the advanced on PPC. Our lessons are completely self-guided; so you need self-discipline to get through them all.

Market Motive Master Certification is three month course that has regular check-ins, homework assignments, and due dates. So, if you are not good at self-discipline – Market Motive’s deadlines will help set a three month pace to get through hall of the information.

Community

Both Market Motive and Certified Knowledge offer a way to communicate with other members and ask questions. Market Motive’s ‘ask the experts’ forum will let you gain valuable knowledge from a large variety of sources.

Certified Knowledge has a private members group where I often post findings of tests I’m running, announcements of new features, etc; as well as private Q&A between members.

Cross Disciplines

Certified Knowledge is currently geared just towards PPC (although, we will be launching some new sections in the upcoming months). Market Motive is comprised of the ‘dream team’. The faculty includes Todd ‘Stuntdubl’ Malicoat, Bryan Eisenberg, Avinash Kaushik, among many others and includes information from several disciplines.

Tools

Certified Knowledge contains several time saving tools. Market Motive does not have any tools.

Weekly Office Hours & Monthly Workshops

This is one of the real benefits of Market Motive. We do weekly one hour calls via GoToMeeting to talk about the lessons and any other questions the students have. Considering our rates start at $400/hour; this is an excellent deal. We also do a monthly Market Motive workshop on a variety of  topics.

Advantages to Being Members of Both Sites

I recently ran into some Market Motive students a few weeks ago that work for a large agency. They use Certified Knowledge mostly for the tools and Market Motive mostly for cross discipline training. In fact, they told me that they would pay much more each month for Certified Knowledge just to use our Ad Copy Creation Tool as it saves them 15-20 hours for every new account they build.

Others use Certified Knowledge for the PPC tools and the members forum and Market Motive for the other marketing disciplines.

Of course, there are many members that are just here and others that are just at Market Motive. It depends on your price points and what type of experience you are looking for as to which site (or sites) fit your needs the most.

Learn More

You can start a 7 day free Certified Knowledge trial to see our tools and training in action.

Learn more about the Market Motive PPC Certification Course.

If you have questions, feel free to contact us.

I hope to see you inside one or more of these fantastic sites.

Matt Van Wagner is one of the funniest, and smartest people I know in paid search. In fact, I enjoy Matt so much, he’s doing the technical editing for the 2nd edition of Advanced Google AdWords (Thank you, Matt).  He’s also the President of Find Me Faster and you can find him on twitter.

Matt wrote a controversial article on ad copy testing where you don’t run the typical A/B test. Instead run an A/B vs C/D test. That’s right, test groups of ads against each other as this will help combat over-optimization.

I have mixed feelings about this type of testing. In some ways, it can help put out different messages for long buying cycle items where the same user will see the same ad multiple times.

In other cases, it might decrease conversion rates when your only goal is a click to conversion. Either you get the conversion on the first try or you just don’t ever get it (common in some lead gen industries). You also need a lot of data to run this test, but that’s another story.

Instead of debating the finer points of this type of testing, I invited Matt to be a guest on the latest Marketing Nirvana episode. You can listen to both our theories, comments, and other musings on multi-ad testing and see where we agree or disagree, and get some advice on how to run this test yourself.

You can listen to the show at iTunes or  on Webmaster Radio’s Marketing Nirvana Page.

I hope you enjoy the episode – we had a lot of fun taping it.

The next episode will be January 4th and I don’t have a speaker or a topic yet. If you have any ideas, please let me know.