Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Author: Atlantic BT

  • Pay Per Click Management for Companies | 3 questions to ask when seeking help

    Good “pay per click” management is difficult to find, and even more difficult to understand. So when should you make the investment into this new and potentially extremely profitable service?

    What is “pay per click”?

    “Pay per click” is an advertising service where you only pay for your advertisement if a customer clicks on the ad. The innovative “pay per click” service allows you to compete for customers in your target market on the Web. How much you are willing to put into your “pay per click” budget directly impacts how much your advertisements relate to your prospective customers. But, remember – while pay-per click advertisements may increase the number of customers clicking into your website, it does not guarantee sales.

    When should I purchase “pay per click” services from a management team?

    During my experiences as a part of Atlantic BT’s internet marketing team, I have identified three key questions to consider when considering pay per click as a marketing channel: 1) Are you investing for the long term? 2) Are the website designers flexible?, and 3) Are you familiar with basic pay per click terminology?

    I will discuss the importance of each question below.

    Question 1: Are you in it for the long haul?

    Many companies think that online or web-based advertisements produce instantaneous results. (After all, the customers are just clicking a link!). While this may happen sometimes, in most pay per click advertising campaigns, this just doesn’t happen.

    Even great “pay per click” management companies will only create truly effective advertisements after they figure out the following details about your firm:

    • What are the goals with this businesses website?
    • Are we tracking website user behavior with Web Analytics software?
    • How can we track return on investment with their current website?
    • What different products and services exist within the business?
    • What keywords are important to these products and/or services?
    • What advertisements sell these products and/or services best?
    • What landing pages are important to these products and/or services?
    • How much should we be spending per sale?

    These questions cannot be answered instantaneously. The management team must adjust their actions according to the answers they discover through trial-and-error. In order to get things moving quickly, I recommend increasing your “pay per click” budget during the initial few months of working with a “pay per click” management team. With a higher pay per click budget, you are giving the pay per click company the ability to pull in larger sample sizes of data. This allows the team to use statistics and data analytical tools to make better choices regarding the type of advertisements, effective keywords, landing pages and products.

    This initial process of collecting data may not generate a profit for you for a few months, but will help create more effective advertisements in the long term. So, if you’re in it for the long term – pay per click advertising may be more up your alley. But if you want short term results (say, for a promotion of a sale good), some other type of advertising might be more effective.

    Question 2: Are the people in charge of the website open-minded, quick-moving team players?

    When you invest into pay per click advertising, it is very likely that changes to the website will need to be made.

    There are two types of relationships at work here: in the first type, you have a business that works with two separate companies for web development and internet marketing, and in the second type, you have a business that works with one company for both web development and internet marketing.
    First type of relationship: Business works with both a Web Development company and pay per click company
    In this type of relationship, I have found that marketing time and budget is wasted due to lost-in-translation, stubbornness and slow development changes. For this type of relationship, you the business owner needs to establish trust with both companies as well as establish trust between the two companies.

    The three items that I commonly see happen in this type of relationship:

    Lost-in-translation

    If you plan on working with two distinct companies for these two services, allow both parties to discuss strategy with one another. You do not want to find yourself in the position of playing, “he said” – “she said” about topics which you may not be comfortable re-explaining. Think back to grade school with the “the telephone game”. Instead of whispering one sentence, you are whispering an online marketing strategy. Mistakes will be made, and budgets will be wasted.
    Stubbornness

    A web development company will have made suggestions and recommendations during the website creation phase which they may not wish to retract. Sometimes a web development company will try to refute a change, as a good web development company will be proud of what they have already done for your website. This hesitancy to implement a change can lead to wasted marketing time and therefore wasted money. You need to review the evidence that your internet marketing company has provided and weigh that against the cost / time frame for the web development change. You are only collecting cost / time frame from the web development company and the strategy / research from the internet marketing company. It is generally a bad idea to let either party dabble with the other’s expertise.
    Slow development

    It is understandable that a web development company cannot work exclusively with your business. So, in most cases the developers at the company have other business websites to work on and not just yours. However, if you find yourself waiting a month or two for changes that the internet marketing company recommended do realize that this directly affects the strategy that the internet marketing company has set out for you.

    Second type of relationship: Business works with one all-in-one company such as AtlanticBT

    Here at Atlantic BT, we have the luxury of having web development, internet marketing (pay per click management as well), web hosting and web design all under one roof so our clients need only to speak with one company about the different services. In this case, “lost in translation”, stubbornness and slow development are less of an issue. These types of relationships generally work better, because things are done quicker due to the departments trusting one another and knowing their capabilities.
    For this type of relationship, it is important that you, the business owner, trust this business’s strategy as well as its web development capabilities and design work.

    Question 3: Are you familiar with basic pay per click terms?

    The last thing you want is to be nodding your head at something you do not understand. Now, you should be in the position to freely ask your pay per click management company questions. However, most of these relationships are hourly – make sure that you don’t a question which you can answer yourself with a simple Google search.

    Here is a crash course on some important acronyms and pay per click lingo: (my personal definitions)

    • Ad Campaign- An overarching category that contains multiple ad groups.
    • Ad Group- Contains multiple keywords and advertisements within a group. Advertisements will only display for keyword that are found within the Ad group.
    • Keyword- The search query or phrase that the marketing team anticipates your potential customers will type.
    • Text Ad- Multiple text ads can be placed at the Ad Group level and displays when keywords within the Ad Group are typed.
    • Impressions-The number of times the search network has displayed your advertisement. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account level.
    • Clicks- The number of times consumers have clicked on your advertisement. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account level.
    • CTR- Click-through-rate is a percentage derived from clicks on a specific advertisement divided by the amount of impressions which the advertisement had. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account levels.
    • CPC- Cost-per-click is the rate which is paid for a click on a specific keyword.
    • CPM- Cost-per-thousand-impressions is a less common payment model. It is the rate which is paid for every thousand impressions for a specific keyword.
    • Avg. CPC- The average cost-per-click across an arbitrary time period. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account level.
    • Avg. CPM- The average cost-per-impression across an arbitrary time period. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account level.
    • Conversion Rate- A metric that is tracked only if your pay per click management company implements conversion code on a page that is considered a successful transaction. A successful transaction can be defined as a newsletter sign up, blog sign up, purchase on the site, etc. This percentage is derived from number of conversions divided by number of clicks. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account levels.
    • Cost per Conversion- The rate which you are paying for each conversion. This dollar value is determined by cost divided by number of conversions. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account levels.

    Now that you have a taste of what you are getting into, do you have any questions for us? If you do, feel free to post a comment. If it is a more sensitive topic, feel free to contact us privately.

  • How to send an iCal to Gmail with C# and SQL Server 2005

    We had the need to forward meeting notices to mobile devices.  Since we use Goldmine as our CRM all entries are simply database entries which are rendered by the application.

    The solution was to create a trigger that sends out an email after insert.  We explored DBMail, but you don’ really have much control over the email header which is the key to creating an iCal entry from scratch.

    Enter CLR Stored Procedures! I have known that these existed for some time, but never really had a use for them and mostly it was because I always thought embedding business logic in your stored procedures was a bad idea, but in this case it seemed like an easy enough approach…but we got it working, but it of course was not as easy as it sounds.

    Show us the code you say?  Well all right then…

    1.) Create a class library project with a class named Stored Procedures, and pay attention to your namespace:

    namespace AtlanticBT.Utilities
{
public partial class StoredProcedures
{
[SqlProcedure]
public static void SendiCal(DateTime startDateTime, DateTime endDateTime, string emailSubject,
   string userEmailAddress, string companyName, DateTime createdOn, string notes, string lanId )
{
string iCal = CreateiCalFormat(startDateTime, endDateTime, emailSubject, userEmailAddress,
companyName, createdOn, lanId, notes);

var calendarType = new ContentType("text/calendar");
calendarType.Parameters.Add("method", "request");

AlternateView caledarView = AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString(iCal, calendarType);
caledarView.TransferEncoding = TransferEncoding.SevenBit;
var client = new SmtpClient("mail.myspamomaticsmtpserver.com", 25);
var mailMesage = new MailMessage();
mailMesage.From = new MailAddress("goldmineforward@atlanticbt.com");
mailMesage.To.Add(new MailAddress(userEmailAddress));
mailMesage.Subject = emailSubject;
mailMesage.AlternateViews.Add(caledarView);
client.Send(mailMesage);
}

    Here is the private method to create the iCal entry:

    private static string _dateFormat = "yyyyMMddTHHmmssZ";
private static string CreateiCalFormat(DateTime startDateTime, DateTime endDateTime,
string emailSubject, string userEmailAddress, string companyName, DateTime createdOn, string lanId,
string notes)
{
string iCal =

"BEGIN:VCALENDAR" +

"nPRODID:-//FrontRange Solutions//GoldMine 8.0//EN" +

"nVERSION:2.0" +

"nMETHOD:REQUEST" +

"nBEGIN:VEVENT" +

"nORGANIZER:MAILTO:goldmine@abt.com" +

"nATTENDEE;CN='" + lanId + "'" +

";ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=TRUE:" + userEmailAddress +

"nDTSTART:" + startDateTime.ToUniversalTime().ToString(_dateFormat) +

"nDTEND:" + endDateTime.ToUniversalTime().ToString(_dateFormat) +

"nTRANSP:OPAQUE" +

"nSEQUENCE:0" +

"nUID:" + Guid.NewGuid()  + "@ATLANTICBT.COM" +

"nDTSTAMP:" + createdOn.ToUniversalTime().ToString(_dateFormat) +

"nDESCRIPTION:" + notes +

"nSUMMARY:" + companyName + " " + emailSubject +

"nPRIORITY:5" +

"nCLASS:PUBLIC" +

"nX-FRS-EXT-BUILDNO;X-FRS-SEND=SEND:8.03.80716" +

"nX-FRS-EXT-OPLINK;X-FRS-SEND=SEND:205A5936304D412A315F4B3026512E" +

"nX-FRS-EXT-RECTYPE;X-FRS-SEND=SEND:A" +

"nBEGIN:VALARM" +

"nTRIGGER:PT10M" +

"nACTION:DISPLAY" +

"nDESCRIPTION:Reminder" +

"nEND:VALARM" +

"nEND:VEVENT" +

"nEND:VCALENDAR";

return iCal;
}

    2.) Now remember this stored procedure is being called from a trigger in our our GoldMine store, but it can be called like any stored procedure.  Deploy the assembly that is created in Step 1 to your SQL Server.

    3.) Configure the stored procedure on your SQL Server.  Here is the T-SQL:

    sp_configure 'clr enabled', 1
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO
    ALTER DATABASE Goldmine SET TRUSTWORTHY ON
    CREATE ASSEMBLY GoldmineiCalForward
FROM 'C:mypathtotheassemblyAtlanticBT.Utilities.dll'
WITH PERMISSION_SET = UNSAFE;
GO
    CREATE PROCEDURE SendiCal(@startDate DateTime, @endDate DateTime, @emailSubject nvarchar(255),
@userEmailAddress nvarchar(255),
@companyName nvarchar(255), @createdOn DateTime, @notes nvarchar(max), @landId nvarchar(255))AS
EXTERNAL NAME GoldmineiCalForward.[AtlanticBT.Utilities.StoredProcedures].SendiCal
GO

    4. Then create the Goldmine trigger upon every calendar create to look up your user’s email account that accepts iCal entries (Gmail for Android phones is working cool for us).

    5. Shazam!

    Thanks to these other bloggers whom I used while trying to figure out how to configure this thing:

    Writing CLR Stored Procedures

  • Internet Marketing For Businesses and Their Websites

    I recently had the opportunity to speak to two founders of venture-backed start up businesses about their business story and how they went from a napkin idea to a full-fledged product.  Since both companies are in the development phases, they have yet to start marketing their respective products.  Therefore, one of the big questions we got stuck on was – how do you market a product that people may not be shopping for yet?   As we discussed this topic, I was happy to hear that one solution involved using pay-per-click as a means to expose their product to the public.

    This blog post will talk about benefits I have identified when working with PPC as well as an example of how one small business used Google Adwords to market their new product.  This “small business” is now ranked #104 on the Fortune 500 list.

    ShareFile.com : From small business to INC 500

    Last year, I participated in a challenge called “Duke Start-up Challenge” which is an annual competition sponsored by Duke’s MBA program that allows its participants to present executive summaries, business plans and elevator pitches to a panel of successful entrepreneurs.  During the introduction of the panelists, they told us their story about their business.  One of the stories was told by Jesse Lipson who is the founder and president of ShareFile.com.  Jesse’s story of creating a product from scratch was an amazing one to begin with.  However, what really amazed me was his ability to market the product through Google Adwords.

    Two things to note here :

    1. Jesse had allocated a budget for marketing the completed product.
    2. Jesse relied on Google Adwords to initially market the product.

    I was floored by the amount that Jesse had spent on initially marketing his product. After his speech, I approached him and curiously asked him how much he is spending on Google Adwords  for the current state of his business?  His response, they had ramped up the Google Adwords spend since its initial success when first promoting Sharefile.com.

    The beauty of pay-per-click is not only do you get to see return on investment quickly, but you also get to see if the increase in advertising spend suffers from diminishing marginal returns.

    If you are unfamiliar with diminishing marginal returns, what it means in this situation is:

    1. Owner Bob spends $100 on advertising and brings in $1,000 in profit.
    2. Bob then thinks to himself, “Let me spend $1,000 on advertising and bring in $10,000 in profit.”
    3. Bob invests $1,000 on advertising and only brings in $5,000 in profit.
    4. Instead of getting $10 for every advertising dollar, he is now getting $5 dollars.

    This is an example of diminishing marginal return where you have increased advertising spend but reduced the rate of return per advertising dollar.

    However, in some cases with pay-per-click Bob could have brought in $15,000 in profit when investing $1,000 into advertising.  Meaning, the additional advertisement exposure increased the ROI per advertising dollar by $5 dollars!  Instead of making only $10 per advertising dollar, he is making $15.
    Benefits of Google Adwords as a PPC tool : Quick Analytics Integration & Measured Success!

    The beauty of Google Adwords as a pay-per-click medium is that it integrates with Google Analytics quickly and easily.  For any site that is signed up with us to do internet marketing and ppc management we install Google Analytics onto their website as the absolute first step.

    Unlike most offline marketing channels we have the ability to leverage a tool like Google Analytics to quickly collect data on our online marketing efforts.

    Google Adwords and Google Analytics allow us to see how well our pay-per-click click campaigns are currently doing with only a day of delay (if that).  When running an Adwords campaign we are able to see how many people came across our advertisement, engaged with our advertisement and even how many people from that advertisement have entered into our lead generation process.   All this beautiful data with a relatively low margin of error.  Not only are we able to see these different metrics (and much more), but we are able to see the results as they come in which allows us to quickly adapt our online marketing strategy.

    Benefits of PPC: A/B Testing!

    My last point for this blog post about PPC for small businesses is that PPC allows for simple A/B Testing.  As we saw in the paragraph above, we are able to constantly measure the success of our advertisements daily if not hourly (based on how much traffic you are paying for which is directly based off of your advertising budget).

    For clients with a higher advertising budget, we are able to compare keywords we are bidding on side-by-side.  For instance, we can see that advertisement A versus advertisement B (both advertisements pertain to the same product) have a conversion rate of 5% versus 0.5% respectively.  Let us just assume that we have taken chance out of this equation and have a large enough sample set to make the conclusion that advertisement A is a better ad to bet on than advertisement B.

    From there, we can immediately throttle spend on advertisement B and divert the funds to the advertisement that converted at a higher rate.  The above scenario can also be applied to the keywords you are bidding on, the landing page you are bringing individuals to, what time you are showing the advertisements and much more.

    Google Adwords also has a built-in feature that applies statistics to the advertisement engagement metrics for any given advertisement set and automatically decides which ad variation it should show more often based off of the advertisements past performance.

    Please feel free to comment with any questions and I will answer as soon as possible.  A question for the business owners out there, when creating your business – did you allocate a budget for marketing?  If so, did you invest any of it for the online medium and was it successful?

  • Picture This: Getting the Most Out of Product Shots on Your Website

    Usually, when we are asking clients to send over product shots for their new web design, it’s a pretty straightforward request. Most businesses have lots of photos on hand, and so they e-mail their favorites and don’t think too much about it.

    But, given that the photographs on your website can play such an important role in a customer’s decision whether to buy or to move on – as much as the layout and text itself – it makes sense to take a closer look at the best ways to use them.

    Here are five ways to get the most out of the product shots on your website:

    Sell with pictures. It goes without saying that if you can show a picture of what you sell, you should include quality photographs. Studies show that an overwhelming number of people think, learn, and even buy visually. In other words, they are more moved by photos and videos than they are by text or audio, so using pictures can dramatically improve sales right away.

    Remember that higher production equals higher sales. It’s simple: the better your pictures, the more you are going to sell from your website. This principle holds true because the more of your products visitors can see, the more comfortable they are purchasing them. There’s also a more subtle effect. Customers perceive better looking websites and photos with higher quality; they assume that a business that has gone through the time and trouble of having their merchandise professionally photographed is likely to be more reliable – and they are usually right.

    If you don’t have high-quality photos of your products available, then why not take advantage of the opportunity that a new website provides and have your design team either take new photographs, or refer you to someone who can? Compared to the investment of a new site or extensive redesign, the cost of updated product shots is pretty low… especially when you consider how much it can help your future online sales.

    Dream in color. If the products offered on your website are available in different colors and sizes, then try to feature each of them. Although it makes sense to assume your customers can imagine what they want in a different hue, that’s no substitute for actually tempting them with it right before their very eyes. Don’t count on their mind’s eye – provide high-quality product shots for every color you have available.

    As an added benefit, the more colors you show online, the greater your sales will be, and the fewer your returns. That’s because, when people don’t see a sample of their color provided, they are forced to make a guess as to exactly what kind of red, blue, or other color you are going to provide. Some of the time, that means they’ll skip buying altogether; on other occasions, it might mean they’ll purchase something they end up not wanting – which costs you money in customer service, restocking expenses, and other small cuts to the bottom line.

    Get with the times. One thing you’ll definitely want to avoid is outdated pictures. If you no longer sell what’s being shown, or offer a different version, color, or variation, get a new picture as quickly as possible. At best, a photo that isn’t current can be an annoyance to customers and employees alike; at worst, it can put your business in violation of advertising laws, since it could paint an inaccurate picture of what customers are getting for their money.

    Build your brand. If you’re going to do the hard work of finding and producing high quality photographs your website, then take the action step and make sure visitors know where they’re coming from. Unfortunately, piracy remains an enormous problem online, and the last thing you want is your competitors treating your product shots as their own. If what you sell is also offered on different websites, be sure to watermark your images or otherwise designate them in a way that leads people back to you. It might not stop people from trying to steal them altogether, but it is better than simply giving them away.

    For all of the thought and planning that goes into different web layouts and platforms, getting the most out of product photographs is often an afterthought. Follow these tips, though, and you might begin to see how a small change in an area lots of marketers take for granted can lead to enormous results.

  • Google Instant Search SEO and PPC Thoughts

    On September 8, 2010 – Google Instant was released to the public and SEO gurus around the world were up-in-arms with Google’s innovative way to browse search results.

    If you travel around the circle of internet marketing blogs, you most likely have come across Google Instant blog posts that claim “SEO is dead”.  Humans are uncomfortable with change and Google Instant changes the way SEO & PPC specialists need to work for their clients.  Of course, we are going to see a demographic that chooses to shun the change opposed to embrace it.  As Matt Cutts says in his latest blog post about Google Instant, “The best SEOs recognize, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen.”

    Keith Stojka our Senior Internet Marketing specialist has a knack for saying, “In PPC and SEO, the hardest route usually reap the best rewards and that is why we cannot shy away from the hardest routes.”  The hardest route here is trying to devise a SEO and PPC strategy that leverages Google’s newest product to hit the shelves.

    Google Instant is good for the business and internet marketing professionals alike…

    –More search results per search

    Google Instant turns one search query into multiple search queries by giving you a preview of predicted search results as you type.  Therefore, instead of seeing X amount of search results per search you are going to see (X * amount of predicted search previews) search results.  The only thing is, you will be seeing those additional search previews for a lot shorter periods of time but more of them.  Sound familiar?

    In the 1950s and 1960s, the average TV advertisement was one minute.  As time progressed, the average length of these advertisements shrank to 30 seconds.  Today, the majority of the advertisements run in 15-second increments which we call “hooks”.   So, instead of 1-2 advertisements during a commercial break in the 1950s and 1960s we have to sit through 4-8 advertisements during any given commercial break.  How did these marketing agencies adapt?

    • Concise messaging
    • BRANDING….. BRANDING… AND MORE BRANDING.
    • Purchase more advertising slots

    So, it is our job as internet marketing professionals to adapt like the agencies who had to make “hooks” instead of lengthy 1 minute advertisements.

    • We need to make an impact quickly and efficiently.
    • We need to consider Google Instant’s search prediction functionality with every keyword we bid on or optimize for.

    –The more results an individual is exposed to, the more qualified that individual is when they finally visit your website.

    From a pay-per-click standpoint, qualified visits is a good thing.  Not only are our ads going to receive more impressions with the latest implementation of Google Instant but the influx of search results will hopefully increase the conversion rate of individuals who actually click (which is what we pay for in Google Adwords) on the ad.   As advertisers, we want our prospective customers to have a better idea of what they want before we pay to have them on our website.

    It’s too soon to say Google Instant is bad or even good….

    Why start on the footing that this new product release is bad for internet marketing?  As an internet marketing specialist you are immersed in an industry that constantly changes, it is up to you to evolve and devise new strategies to utilize changes that are inevitably out of your control.   Set your mindset to why this product can be good – and I can guarantee that it will be easier for you to adapt to the change.  Whether or not this product stays on is up to the searcher or the guru’s at Google.

  • How Old is Too Old? Knowing When to Redesign a Profitable Website

    We’ve all heard at one time or another that there’s no use “fixing something that isn’t broken,” and generally speaking, that’s good advice. When it comes to doing business online, however, it sometimes makes sense to do exactly that. That’s because it isn’t always about what’s working, but whether it’s working as well as it should.

    In other words, there are times you should consider redesigning or relaunching any website… even one that’s still making money for you. (more…)