Yeah, but hopefully CPC's won't spiral out of control once they're officially public and have to report to shareholders. Is it anything less than inevitable?Originally Posted by mmtprofile
Here's another ad we're running...
This ad targets 51,080 users:
who live in the United States
between the ages of 25 and 49 inclusive
who like #Skype or skype
who are in a relationship, engaged or married
This ad is more broad as we're looking nationwide for Skype users that would be interested in video tax consultation via Skype. Something we've been doing since Jan '11, unlike one of our competitors who just started doing it this year
In addition, we have officially serviced clients from VA to WA with Skype tax consultations, so hopefully we can get more of the "in-between".
I took my cues on this ad from that same competitor whose ad showed up on my FB wall...
Our "squeeze" page is the Contact page on our site, since we're in the heat of the tax seasoon our goal is to get calls or emails either requesting more info or to setup an appointment, however, we haven't gotten any calls yet
Thankfully it's set to CPM(which is very low) and we're using free advertising credit.
"Not trying is the only way not to succeed"
|--Accounting and Tax Services | Professional Tax Preparation | Tax Preparation Phoenix--|--Facebook --|
Hi Rod, facebook ads are a fantastic way of increasing your business BUT you are wise in making sure you get the right information before charging ahead. I have had some very good results with a brilliant pdf free download. I cannot recall the link etc right now but if you message me I am happy to give you a copy of the pdf. Its a step by step on how to do an ad and it will also give you the website details of where I got it and you may get more help on there as well.
your efficiency (cost to conversion) is almost always depended on your target audience. Creative & copy do make a small difference, but its mostly the audience. General audiences typically perform very poorly. Niche audiences kill it in performance. Choose your target wisely.
Also, the reason most of the ads you see have women in the creative, is because frankly, having women in the creative is one of the only real guaranteed success ingredients for running a facebook ad. Sad but true.
TaxGuy (Feb 6th, 2012)
The irony with women is MJ showed an example at the B&P where the "hot woman"(AJGlobal's gf) had a high click-through, but didn't convert as well as "baby flicking you off" or "frustrated George Washington on the dollar bill".
I'm thinking on doing something "goofy" to get more click-through and hopefully conversions as well, but here's an update to the one with the "hard to see" picture and a new ad...
Updated Ad(changed the copy a little too):
This ad targets 26,440 users:
who live in the United States
who live within 50 miles of Goodyear, AZ
between the ages of 30 and 49 inclusive
who are in a relationship, engaged or married
who are in the category Small Business Owners
Here's the new ad...
This ad targets 42,720 users:
who live in the United States
who live within 50 miles of Goodyear, AZ
between the ages of 30 and 49 inclusive
who are in the category Small Business Owners
"Not trying is the only way not to succeed"
|--Accounting and Tax Services | Professional Tax Preparation | Tax Preparation Phoenix--|--Facebook --|
puckman (Feb 11th, 2012)
I'd like to hear more about this too =)
Hear more about what?
Looks like a lot of your posts are the "I agree" type. Please be more specific.
Anyone else, "Buehler?" - I'm about 2/3 of the way through my credit and the numbers don't look too good, if I don't get any response soon I'm probably gonna cut this off. The referral network we're building is so much more effective than any of our online efforts, none of which aside from Craigslist, Yelp and Facebook Marketplace have gotten us any response.
PS- MJ before you refer to the picture above of the homeless guy, realize I'm not expecting to get clients out of the initial $150 investment, just responses. If I get even 3-5 leads it'll be worth it to invest more
If only there was a lead-gen source for OUR business.... **hint, hint... wink, wink** to all of you Lead-Gen developers here. As much as I'd like to do that I don't want to Tekel myself by focusing on too many avenues at once
"Not trying is the only way not to succeed"
|--Accounting and Tax Services | Professional Tax Preparation | Tax Preparation Phoenix--|--Facebook --|
Is there a "google local" or whatever it's called (with the map display) when you type in Phoenix taxes or something related? If so, is your business listed?
Another suggestion (although it won't help this year): After tax season start working on SEO'ing your website. I haven't looked at the competition, but would imagine it would be pretty easy to rank your site for local keywords.
"If you want to be rich, add VALUE to people's lives."
- Brian Sher
Kudos on having your phone number. You can actually "convert" business by having people call via telephone, and not pay for the lead/click. Just make sure you are using CPC.The irony with women is MJ showed an example at the B&P where the "hot woman"(AJGlobal's gf
I'm thinking on doing something "goofy" to get more click-through and hopefully conversions as well, but here's an update to the one with the "hard to see" picture and a new ad...
Updated Ad(changed the copy a little too):
This ad targets 26,440 users:
who live in the United States
who live within 50 miles of Goodyear, AZ
between the ages of 30 and 49 inclusive
who are in a relationship, engaged or married
who are in the category Small Business Owners
Here's the new ad...
This ad targets 42,720 users:
who live in the United States
who live within 50 miles of Goodyear, AZ
between the ages of 30 and 49 inclusive
who are in the category Small Business Owners
We used to heavily advertise my toll-free # on all CPC stuff -- the impressions are FREE and can convert via telephone calls/leads.
So if your FB ad has 50,000 impressions, you might actually get no clicks, but phone calls, and still pay nothing.
So show the numbers. SEM/Search always outperforms anything on Facebook. Even retargeted display ads in AdWords do better than Facebook ads. When/IF the day ever comes when Facebook ads are better than search, FB will outpace Googles $20B revenue. Facebook will never be as big or bigger than Google until they come up with a product comparable to AdWords.
I'm going to use fb ads soon. Looks like fb ads better than google ads.
Yea Google Places. I just setup a listing w/ the $100 free ad-words credit we got(lol, by setting up a 2nd account). Only downside is it could take 2-3 weeks to get the post-card. For now we're on the Yahoo! Directory, Merchant Circle, Yelp(although the address is wrong), YP.com and a few others.
I put a bunch in the other day. Loaded our Title, Description and Keyword metas w/ relevant keywords for our services + local search, i.e. Goodyear income tax preparation, Goodyear income tax service, Goodyear income tax planning, Goodyear income tax consultation, Goodyear CPA, Goodyear EA, Goodyear tax office.
The messed up part is that there's a local competitor who doesn't even have their own site and their FB page only has 1 like yet they show up at #1 for most "relevant" local search terms
Now that I think of it, I should probably put in more variations such as "income tax Goodyear" and "tax preparer Goodyear". The top of Google is filled with just directory listings and there's not a single competitor with their website on there. I also have the same keywords but with "West Valley", "Phoenix", "PHX" and "AZ" in front.
The CPM is really cheap and so far none of the clicks have resulted in calls or emails. CPC for these ads are in the $3.50+ range now. Here's the stats...
So it looks like it's coming out to about the same price if I went CPC, now if only I could get a better CPA(no pun intended
But maybe I should do what you did and bid really high on the CPC and just hope that people will call instead of click, especially since I'm sticking to the local area. According to my Adwords stats it looks like my avg position is about 5.7 @ $4.75 CPC.
"Not trying is the only way not to succeed"
|--Accounting and Tax Services | Professional Tax Preparation | Tax Preparation Phoenix--|--Facebook --|
Make sure you do your keyword research FIRST, before commiting to those keywords! There's no sense in targeting keywords that only get 10 searches per month. And there's also no sense in going after keywords unless you can get in the top 3. If you need help with how to do it just PM me.
And your competitor with the Facebook page at #1, that's probably a good thing; sounds like it's going to be easy to beat. =)
"If you want to be rich, add VALUE to people's lives."
- Brian Sher
kwerner, i've always done it the other way around, I'll use CPC to see if the keywords will convert before going after the SEO... then again, I haven't ever done much in either to see enough results to throw too much time effort and money into either.
kwerner (Feb 14th, 2012)
That's definitely the best way to do it, but I'm assuming TaxGuy has already done that step since he's making on-site SEO changes.
Either way, Rep++ for the reminder. =)
"If you want to be rich, add VALUE to people's lives."
- Brian Sher
Kasey- should I use MarketSamurai or is there another good source? My confusion lies in the fact that MS "Golden Nugget Keywords" aren't going to be the same as the local search KW I'm going after, i.e. a "good" local term might be "taxes in Goodyear" which might have an SEOT of <50 but the SEOC is <30k, PBR > 15% and SEOV > $30 while the "golden nugget" words will have SEOT > 80.
"Not trying is the only way not to succeed"
|--Accounting and Tax Services | Professional Tax Preparation | Tax Preparation Phoenix--|--Facebook --|
First use the google adwords tool to see how many exact match searches there are for those keywords a month. Try to choose keywords that get enough searches a month but are also keywords that someone is looking to HIRE someone to do their taxes, not just searching for general information on taxes.
Then you can test out those keywords with adwords to see what's converting, like cilaes mentioned. Once you have that figured out you can start working on the SEO, on page and off. I'm assuming you're at this point.
With judging the competition, sure you can use Market Samurai. But in my opinion, all the SEOT-C-V stuff that they have on there is just gimmicky crap, it has no relevance on how difficult it will be to rank for those keywords. And I'm not familiar with what their "golden nugget keywords" feature is, sounds like more gimmicky crap to me, haha. The only thing that matters is the amount and quality of backlinks and on-page optimization the top 10 have. Well, domain age and and page rank influence it too, but to a lesser degree in my opinion.
Hope this helps.
Last edited by kwerner; Feb 15th, 2012 at 09:23 AM. Reason: Added more
"If you want to be rich, add VALUE to people's lives."
- Brian Sher
Funny you say that since the data is pulled directly from the Adwords Keyword tool
But yea, the "golden nugget keywords" are the ones that meet "The Challenge" criteria which last time I participated was high demand(SEOT > 80 or 2400+ monthly "broad match" searches), low supply(SEOC < 30k... the pages that have the EXACT KW phrase), high relevance(PBR > 15%... phrase to broad match for searches, per Adwords Keyword) and high commercial value(AWCPC X SEOT = approx daily value of KW).
In addition, the competition is analyzed by looking at a matrix that shows all the important off-page(DA, PR, BLP, DMOZ, YAH, .edu/.gov BLP) and on-page(Title, Desc, Header, URL) factors. I posted this in the private forums for review. Looks like the #3 site(the highest ranking non-directory page) is only beating us in DA and having the KW in the Header and URL. Otherwise we're killing them in BLP and even PR.
"Not trying is the only way not to succeed"
|--Accounting and Tax Services | Professional Tax Preparation | Tax Preparation Phoenix--|--Facebook --|
Meh. If people are doing their keyword research using this criteria, they're doing it wrong.
"If you want to be rich, add VALUE to people's lives."
- Brian Sher
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