May 12

How To Improve Your AdWords CTR For Free

By Caelen King Stuff we've learned 5 Comments »

At ReavHealth.com we have spent a lot of time working on CPC campaigns and we are always looking for ways to increase our click-through rates without increasing our costs. The bulk of what we do involves tweaking ad text and adjusting bids to reflect the revenue potential of the keywords. However, there is one method that we have found to be an effective means of increasing CTR that requires remarkably little effort, and that is to maximise the physical presence of your advert on the page.

Advertising pricing is normally based on two factors: size and placement. Both of these factors attempt to price ads based on potential viewer attention – the more attention a placement is likely the get the more it costs. Size is simple, the bigger the advert the more it costs. Placement is slightly more complicated but works on the same principle. In traditional print advertising we tend to see the following pattern:

  • Front of the publication is more expensive than the back
  • Right page is more expensive than left
  • Top is more expensive than bottom

In creating an effective advertising bidding market place, Google and the other search engines have tried to simplify this by eliminating the size variable. They give advertisers very prescriptive maximum lengths for their adverts which ostensibly create an even playing field for a position only pricing model.

This creates the illusion to advertisers starting a PPC campaign that the ad size is fixed and is not a factor to be taken into consideration. However, at RevaHealth.com we have come to realize that spending some time focusing on the size of the ad is one of the easiest ways to increase CTR without increasing our bids.

How to Maximise your use of Space

  1. Line Length. Google gives you 25 characters for your title, 70 characters for the body and 35 characters for the URL. USE THEM ALL! Every character you use increases the size of your ad and therefore attracts more attention than if you don’t use all of the available space. This is particularly important if your ad is going to appear in the premium sponsored positions above Google’s search results rather than in the right hand column.
  2. Bolding. If the keywords a user is searching for are repeated in your ad, then they will automatically be bolded when Google displays it. Bolded words attract more attention than normal words, and increased attention equals increased CTR. Our internal guidelines look to repeat the keywords at least once in the title, once in the body and once in the display URL.
  3. Use Capitals. Each capital letter you use increases visitor attention. Google does not allow you to use capitals letters for everything, but they do allow you to start each word with one, and this is our policy.

Worked Example

The following three sponsored listings were returned when I searched for ‘Dentists Hungary’ in Google. Our advert appears in 3rd position, however because of its effective use of the allowed real estate it achieves a higher CTR than its position would normally merit.

Dentists in Hungary
www.Access-Smile.ie/Hungary Irish Company, Consultation Ireland Full no quibble treatment guarantee

Dentists in Budapest
www.dacadia.eu Save up to 60% on you dental treatment and enjoy the vacation

Find Dentists In Hungary
Dentists.RevaHealth.com/Hungary Huge Choice Of Dentists In Hungary New Pics, Prices, Maps, Free Quotes

Analysis

When you analyse each ad the objective differences become obvious. Our Advert uses more of the available space in each metric.

  Access Smile Dacadia RevaHealth.com
# Characters in Title 19 20 24
# Characters in Body 70 61 70
# Characters in URL 28 14 31
# Bolded Words 3 1 6
# Of Capital Letters 10 3 20

A word of warning – while it is important to effectively use the space provided you must never take your eye off of your messaging. You use of the space and bolding keywords may attract the visitors attention, however if your call to action is poor they will never click on the advert.

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May 07

How to make your Web App faster

By Caelen King Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech 2 Comments »

How To Speed Up Your Web Application from RevaHealth.com on Vimeo.

Web page render time is a critically important metric for any web app. It directly affects a site’s bounce rate because visitors can lose patience and hit the back button. It also affects a site’s conversion rate as visitors who do start browsing can get frustrated and give up. Page render time is a metric that anyone who is developing a web application needs to monitor closely and constantly.

At RevaHealth.com we have always made an effort to keep our page render times fast. We look at our initial page render times and page weight with each build and we try and make effective use of Ajax to speed up our internal page rendering time. However, as with nearly all web application development some non-error metrics gradually slipped until eventually we noticed that our page render time had become unacceptably long. We decided to take a couple of days off from coding new features and cleaned up the code. Here’s what we did.

Before we started, our page render time was about 8 seconds including the calls to Google AdSense, which added 2 seconds. (See the Pingdom trace at Note 2). We tackled 4 key areas to reduce the page load time.

Pingdom 1 - Click for full size

Pingdom 1 - Click for full size

  1. AdSense Optimisation – Two Second Improvement. The most obvious problem was the time it was taking to get the Adwords to load and render. We had up to three sets per page and this was adding about 2 seconds. There seems to be no way to speed this process up. The bulk of our users are interested in our content rather than our ads, so we put the ad units into their own iFrame and let them load after our content had loaded. You can see the effect on our dentists in Dublin page. (See Note 3)
  2. Combining Files – One Second Improvement. In most cases the number of files that a page forces the browser to download is more important to the actual weight of the page. This is because browsers are limited in the number of files that they can simultaneously download, and each file has a latency and bandwidth overhead. Reducing the number of files is frequently the easiest way to improve render time. We were already using a CSS sprite for images, but we had let a few get loose. We tidied this up and combined 5 more images into the sprite. We also got rid of one CSS file and combined 4 JavaScript files into one. The reduction of these 9 files cuts about one second off of render time.
  3. More effective use of simultaneous downloading – Half a Second Improvement. As mentioned above we use a CSS sprite to reduce the number of image files. This sprite was only referenced in the CSS and not in the HTML. This resulted in the HTML being downloaded, then the CSS, and then the sprite in that order. We changed this so that the sprite gets loaded in parallel to the CSS file by calling it in the HTML.
  4. Code Tidy up – Half a Second Improvement. This was never going to give us much of an improvement because we use compression on our web server which reduces the size of our HTML, CSS and JavaScript by about 70% – so despite the fact that the files are relatively large the actual bandwidth overhead is low. Still we managed to cut an uncompressed 30KB off of the HTML, 40KB off the CSS and 40KB off the JavaScript.
Pingdom 2 - Click for full size

Pingdom 2 - Click for full size

So what do we still have to do? By no means have we completed our page optimization and we have plans to knock a further second off of the page load time by:

  1. Dynamic image caching and potentially creating a sprite on the fly
  2. Using a content delivery network for our static images, JavaScript and CSS files
  3. Further optimized JavaScript

Notes

  1. I use the metric render time rather than page load time because what we are trying to measure is user experience – not the time it takes for bits to go down a pipe. Many web 2.0 applications rely on JavaScript to be downloaded and run in the browser before anything of value is displayed to the user. In older browsers this can frequently add a second or more on top of page load until the user is presented with the page.
  2. The trace does not include the dynamic thumbnail images that we pull in for each clinic. There are typically 3 of these images but there may be as many as 12. It also does not include the Google Adsense or Google Analytic calls.

    3. Pingdom

  3. Strictly speaking putting you Google Adsense Ad units into an iframe is against the Google Terms of Service, however Google has provided guidance that as long as you don’t deceive the visitor that the practice is acceptable.

Useful Tools

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May 06

Bizcamp Belfast

By Caelen King Start ups 1 Comment »

BizCamp Belfast is a user-generated business unconference for entrepreneurs, innovators and startups to share and learn in an open environment. It's taking place on the 16th May 2009 at the The Black Box, Belfast.

I will be presenting with James Kennedy of Piehole about our very different experiences in setting up and running niche online directories. For those of you that don't know Piehole, it is a directory of voice-over artists that is managed, developed and operated by James.

We hope to be able to present on the multitude opportunities that still exist in niche directories and give people a feel for the different approaches including:

  1. Finding your niche 
  2. Funding 
  3. Development 
  4. Data sourcing and cleaning 
  5. Marketing & Sales 
May 05

How the Long Tail works for us

By Marta Sawicka Stuff we've learned 1 Comment »

RevaHealth SEO expert Marta is back with an article about Long Tail keywords.

Do you know how many unique queries are bringing your site visitors? Last week for RevaHealth.com the number was 17,181! It shows that the long tail is working. When applied to search engine traffic, this simply means that a website receives most of its visitors through a collection of low-volume search queries rather than a handful of major keywords. <

There are a few reasons why we optimise RevaHealth.com for long tail key phrases. Firstly, it’s much easier for us to rank well on search engines for rare key phrases because of the lack of competition. For example, our site isn’t listed within the Top 10 Google SERPs for ‘dentists’, while for ‘dentists dublin’ we are in position one. Being able to rank so well for these long tail keywords guarantees us a large slice of the traffic these keywords generate.

Secondly, in order to target the long tail, we have created a lot of pages, which means we end up with a lot of pages indexed (39,900 so far), which gives us great visibility. What’s more, this increased visibility is very valuable, growing our audience and earning potential revenue. What’s more targeted visitors seeking very specific information tend to useg long tail keywords and as a results are more likely to convert or click on contextual ads, increasing our revenue per visitor.>

Discovering which long tail key phrases are relevant to your business isn’t difficult but it is time consuming. There are a number of great free tools available from Google : Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights For Search, Google Trends. Sometimes however the simplest way to get good information is to actually publish pages with unique sets of keywords and see whats gets traffic. We rely on this method of generating content as we continue to add new treatment categories and destinations on a regular basis.

A recent Google study on search engine users’ behaviour provides more evidence that back up the theory of the long tail. According to the research, as time passes, people are using longer and longer phrases in the search box.

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The 2008 average is 2.2 words for query, while in 1994 it was only 1.2 words. Some sources mention even higher numbers, for example, the Nielsen Norman Group cite 3.1 words per query. And this number still grows.

These are examples our search terms that have directed traffic to RevaHealth.com:

  • how much does braces cost in mexico
  • anyone had liposculpture with dr robin van look?
  • board-certified plastic surgeon in poland
  • list of dentists in singapore dental clinics
  • effective face lift in the philippines

The long tail is, then, an undeniable opportunity to attract more visitors. Targeting multi-word search queries, optimising a website and creating content to match the long tail, allows us to win potential users and buyers. The down side is you need to create a lot of pages with unique and valuable content so that the search engines index them.

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