Luna TV Ep. 04 ‑ PPC ‑ Why Are Ads In GA, Organic Vs Paid Trust, International PPC Campaign Structure

This week’s topic is PPC. In this episode we answer:

– What are the best books to learn about PPC?

– Are Organic search results more trustworthy than Paid?

– How should I structure a multi-national PPC ad campaign?

– Why am I seeing PPC data in my Analytics when I’m not running an ad campaign?

LunaTV is a weekly segment where LunaMetrics team members answer your questions from across the web. Got a question you want answered? Tweet at us at @LunaMetrics with #lunaTV and we’ll answer your question!

Transcript:

Phil:
Hi I’m Phil Anderson, Director of Analytics at LunaMetrics.

Brittany:
And I’m Brittany Baeslack PPC Manager at LunaMetrics, and you’re watching LunaTV, where we answer your questions from around the web.

Phil:
If you have any more questions after today’s session feel free to visit our industry blog. We publish 3 times a week and if that isn’t enough we do trainings all around the country. So Brittany, I hear you have some questions for us today

Brittany:
I Do! Our first question is,

“What are the best books on paid search and SEM and why?”

In my opinion I think that the Entrepreneur magazine publishes a lot of great books called their Ultimate Guides ; they have the ultimate guide to Google AdWords, which is obviously just specific to Google, but then they also have the Ultimate Guide to Pay Per Click Marketing, Ultimate Guide to Facebook Adverting , etcetera. I think that the best route to go in terms of getting all the information you want, in terms of  varying degrees of SEM, because the books are very in-depth, they cover a lot of information rather than trying to squeeze in all the information together. One more recommendation is actually the Google AdWords for Dummies, I hear from a lot of people in our seminars that is a great starting point, especially for those people who don’t have any experience.

Phil:
Great! I had a question that I found on Quora, which is,

“Are organic search results more trustworthy then paid search results, and do people know the difference between those?”

The fact is that a lot of research has been done on this topic and you know some people are of the belief that people can’t tell the difference between paid and organic, but really most people can tell the difference, and the click trough rate on organic search results is a lot higher than paid search results, which is all the more reason you need to write really compelling ad content for your paid search results.

Brittany:
Ok, another question from Quora was

“What is the best way to structure an international multimarket PPC Campaign? Should it be centralized or decentralized to local teams?”

This is a great question, it comes up a lot. You definitely want to start with having separate campaigns, absolutely want to have separate so  that you can target separately for location and language, remember those are two campaign level settings those are not things that can be done at the ad group level. You want to make sure then that your ad copy is obviously relevant to what the person is searching and what language they’re searching in, obviously that would make us believe that this is an ad group setting but since that this is something we cannot change at the campaign level in terms of what language and what location we’re targeting we need to have separate campaigns so that someone who’s searching in Spanish say is not seeing an English ad and vice versa. In terms of whether or not they should be centralized or decentralized in my experience I would definitely recommend making these centralized have the teams work together since it is one account regardless of where the account is showing and what sort of markets we’re in. They do normally have one goal, so you want the team to be working together so there is better communication.

Phil:
Our last question was, this is real common to get in analytics,

“What if I’m seeing paid search in my analytics but I’m not paying for paid ads?”

Well, first thing is really make sure there’s not some AdWords out there somewhere, that somethings that’s not running, that you’re not aware of. The most likely reasons this occurring is the tagging that is on the links; essentially if you tag something with a sourcing medium of Google CPC it’s going to show up as paid search in analytics so you want to be careful to make sure people aren’t just copying links around and otherwise make sure you don’t have your AdWords out there running rogue

If you have any more questions feel free to visit our website and register for training, it is LunaMetrics.com/training, you’ll see the link below.

Brittany:
Bye!