This campaign was set up by another company and we are just taking over their website’s PPC to try and optimise its performance. The first item for improvement we noticed was that their Quality Score (QS) for their keywords was very low! Quality scores are given out of ten, and some of their keywords had quality scores of just three or four! In such a competitive industry this is a big issue, meaning their CPC will be a lot higher than it needs to be. To check the quality score of keywords in Google Adwords you need to click into the Campaign, then click “Keywords” and in the “Columns” section make sure “Qual Score” is ticked. When it is, a column will appear in your keyword summary page showing the QS.

So, that’s the first on the agenda to tackle. As a quick suggestion, all of the following will probably be worth looking into:

• Relevance of Ads to keyword phrases
• Keyword Phrase matching – ie: are they using the best keyword matching in terms of  ‘exact’, ‘broad’ and ‘phrase’
• Negative keywords – add negative keywords to filter out irrelevant clicks
• Landing pages – are the landing pages optimised for the keyword / ad combination? If not then get your web design company to make sure that each advert has a carefully targetted landing page with specific calls-to-action.
• Position Preferences – whilst this won’t affect your quality score, setting a position preference may prevent your ad from showing if the Ad Rank is not high enough to beat the competition in your position preference range.

That’s just a quick summary, you might be wondering why all the detail in the above when the title of this blog post is about Adwords ‘impression share’. Well, the quality score impacts how many times your ad is shown. In general terms, the impression share (IS) is how many times your Ad was shown for relevant searches. A 100% impression share would mean that your advert was shown each time a relevant search was made. A 50% impression share would mean that your advert was only shown 50% of the times it could have been.

So why is this relevant? You can drill-down to find out whether a low daily budget limited the amount of times that Google showed your advert, or whether it was due to ‘Ad Rank’. If you’re not reaching your daily budget yet the Impression Share is still low, that probably means your Ad Rank is low. This is a formula of Cost Per Click (CPC) and the quality score.  Increasing CPC (the costly method) or improving your Quality Score will help to improve your Ad’s Impression Share.

Tags: impression share, google adwords, ppc management, cpc, quality score, increase impression share, adrank

If you’re familiar with Skype, then you’ll probably recognise the VoipCheapCom interface, as it’s quite similar. Even the ‘options’ menu seems to use the same or at least very similar icons to Skype. It features tabs for the dialpad, history, contacts, ‘direct call’ and SMS. Sending an SMS is also very good value, at 5 eurocents per text (that’s roughly 3pence).

The only caveat is that you’re limited to 300 minutes per week of free calls, and mobile phone calls aren’t included (except to mobiles in the US). Whilst we haven’t conducted extensive tests of the service, we have tested it for a short while, and our initial reaction is that local and national calls are quite high quality, however international calls can break up a bit every know and again. I haven’t got to the 300 minute limit, and I wonder what happens whether you do – does it warn you as you approach the limit or do you just get cut off mid-conversation? Hopefully not, as that wouldn’t be very good for business!

Despite not undertaking extensive tests, with free calls and no setup costs, VoipCheap .com is definitely worth a try!

Tags: free voip telephone calls, voipcheapcom, aerodesigns, free call costs

Unlike a regular phone service, so long as you have Broadband internet you don’t have to pay any extra line rental for using VoIP, as the voice communication data is sent via the Internet. Although there are a few major VoIP providers, Skype is the one with which I have had the most experience, and in my opinion the service provides many benefits to cost-conscious businesses and hence to improving cost efficiency. Firstly, for intra-company communication, if all your colleagues and employees have Skype installed then you can call them for as long as you want with Skype and not pay a single thing. In addition, if your employees are on business in far-away places you can communicate with them over VoIP once again for nothing! Gone are the days of long-distance call charges, if you both have a high-speed internet connection and the required software installed then your call costs will be zero. It seems too good to be true, right? Well in principle it’s a perfect solution, but there are a few limitations which you should be aware of:

Firstly, you may have worries about call quality issues or reliability of service. Well personally I have used Skype for about a year now and not experienced any problems beyond a few initial headaches whilst figuring out how to configure the headset microphone and sound card. For over 95% of the time call quality has been as good as over a normal landline, however if communicating with distant places half way around the world, then obviously the quality of the call depends on the speed of both party’s internet connection, and also the state of the telephone infrastructure in the other country. Secondly, for you to receive or place a call using VoIP, your computer must be switched on and you must be logged into Skype.

Going one step further, VoIP can also be used as a full scale replacement of your existing phone network. The first solution offered by Skype is SkypeOut, in which you can top-up your balance online on their website using your credit card, and this enables you to call regular phone numbers for extremely discounted prices. Currently, the call rate is roughly 1p per minute to call a UK landline from within the UK, and is only about 3p per minute to call the USA! How this works is that imagine you are calling Florida from your computer in the UK – you dial the number into Skype and it travels via VOIP over the Internet and your call pops out at the telephone exchange in Florida – hence the only call charges you pay are a local call charge between the telephone exchange in Florida and the person you are calling.

Another useful product is SkypeIn, whereby you can buy (and even choose) a telephone number in any one of about 15 countries. Anybody can then call this number, and so long as you are logged into Skype your call will be put through to you on your computer, wherever you are in the world. The only fees you pay are the annual fee for keeping that number (which is currently a small fee of about £20 per year), and you don’t pay any fees for people calling this number. This has the obvious benefits that you can take your phone with you wherever you go around the world, as long as you have access to high speed internet (even 512Kbs should be sufficient though to make high quality calls). Don’t worry about not having your computer switched on 24/7 – there is also a voicemail service provided free with SkypeIn for all those times when you just want to ‘switch off’.

With more and more businesses jumping on the VoIP bandwagon, it’s definitely worth considering to reduce costs and even increase flexibility!

Tags: voip, business cost savings, business telephony, small business, skype