You can enable this for both CPC and CPM (site-targeted) campaigns.

This is very useful in three different scenarios:

1. You know your value per keyword. If you have the data that says keyword 1 is worth $4.23, and keyword 2 is worth $3.56, then instead of ‘guessing’ what the max CPC should be, you can set your preferred cost at those actual prices.

2. You want more control over expenditures. When setting max CPC, your click cost can vary widely from day-to-day. With preferred bidding, you have much more control over how much you actually pay for keyword. This makes it so your average spend per keyword should be much more consistent.

3. You don’t want to spend all day reconfiguring bids. Since preferred bidding changes your max CPC behind the scenes to reach your actual bid price, there’s a lot less work in adjusting bids with preferred cost bidding.

How does it actually work?

With preferred cost bidding, you can set your preferred click cost at the keyword or ad group level. Behind the scenes, Google then adjusts what your max CPC should be so that your actual click cost comes out to be in your preferred cost bidding range. (More on quality score and ad rank)

So, the same ad rank formula (ad rank = quality score X max CPC) still applies, just Google is doing an addition algo behind the scenes to determine your max CPC.

Incompatibilities

Since Google needs control over your max CPC in preferred cost bidding, it’s not compatible with a couple of AdWords features:

Ad Scheduling advanced features. Preferred cost bidding works with the normal ad scheduling (which is essentially day parting or showing your ads at specific times of the day and days of the week). However, the advanced version of ad scheduling allows you to automatically change your max CPC at various times by a percentage. This advanced feature is not compatible with preferred cost bidding.

Position Preference. This feature allows you to control which range of positions you wish your ad to show. Since Google is changing the max CPC behind the scenes in position preference to determine your ad rank, this is incompatible with preferred cost bidding which is also trying to change your max CPC.

Will you overpay?

The first negative reactions I heard about this feature is that since you are setting a preferred cost, in times when you could pay less for the top positions, you could easily end up overpaying for ads (i.e. if your bid was $3, and it required you to pay $1 to be in the number one spot, the rumor was Google would charge you $3).

This isn’t true.

Google is still running the ad rank formula for all companies involved in the auction for a single keyword, and the ad discounter still applies as well. Essentially, the ad discounter calculates the values for all companies in the auction process and reduces your actual CPC to the lowest possible CPC you could pay to be in that ad position.

Enabling Preferred Cost Bidding

Preferred cost bidding is another bidding option. In the campaign settings, you’ll first want to ‘view and edit options’ under bidding.

Next, choose from one of the three bidding options:

• Set max limits – default bidding
• Set preferred bids – preferred cost bidding
• Budget optimizer – maximize traffic

Finally, choose how to change your current max CPCs to your preferred cost bids.

Preferred Cost Bidding can be very useful for controlling your ad spend, or for those who really understand the best bid by keyword or ad group.

I’ve been playing with it in a few accounts (it’s still in beta), and have been quite happy with the results so far.

It won’t be for everyone (the advanced ad scheduling being the one incompatibility I hope they fix), however, if you want more control over what you pay per click instead of what you bid per click, then it’s worth taking preferred cost bidding for a spin.

Everything You Need to Know about AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Action words

• Find
• Search

Solving words

• Cure
• Help

Words that increase conversion rate:

Call to action

• Learn more
• Subscribe today

Words that do both:

Credibility words:

• Guaranteed
• Authorized reseller

What do you want from your 95 character ads?

Ad Copy that Increases Conversion or Click Through Rate is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Generate new businesses only when you want more business

Stop wasting your internet marketing dollars by showing your ad 24/7. Is your businesses open 24/7? If yes, then by all means show your ad 24/7. However, are there times of the day or week when businesses is slower than normal? Are you a business with regular 9-6 hours, but late Thursday night and Friday afternoon the phone just stops ringing? There is a solution…

Time sensitive offers.

PPC is often thought of as a direct marketing vehicle used to reach consumers when they are searching for your business, products or services. For many small businesses, their PPC campaign runs all day, all night, and all weekend. The dollars tick by as visitors come their website, and hopefully call.

There is a solution to only showing your ad when you want business. In Google AdWords, this is called Ad Scheduling. In Microsoft adCenter, it’s called day parting. Basically, you choose what hours you want to display your ad, and it’s only shown during those hours.

Implementing this can be either a one or two step process depending on how complicated you wish your marketing campaign to be.

The simple solution is to change the campaign settings so that your ad is only shown during your business hours.

For Google AdWords, this is a quick process.

However, first check you time zone settings. The time zone your ad campaign is in determines the time that is used to show your ads. So, if you’re time zone is in reality CST, however, your account is in PST, you will need to take that into account when you choose what hours to run your ads.

• Log into your AdWords account
• Check your time zone settings: This can be found under My Account > Account Preferences
• Next, navigate to the campaign settings page
• Click ‘Turn on Ad Scheduling’ and follow the link to the set up page.
• For each day, you can choose to pause your ad, or only run it during select times
• Edit each day you don’t want the campaign to run for 24 hours
• Save the new settings – quick and easy.

Google AdWords Ad Scheduling Screen shot

For Microsoft adCenter, please follow this process:

• Log into your Microsoft adCenter account
• Navigate to the order settings page (equivalent to an AdGroup)
• Go to the ‘order settings’ tab
• You will want to expand the days of the week and hours of the day forms (the last two on the page before the save button)
• Add your desired days and times to the right column
• Save your settings

While the above is the simplified way of ensuring your phone is only ringing while there is someone at the office to answer it – one can also implement time based offers.

Time Based Offers

If there are times of the week/day that your phone doesn’t ring very often and you wish to help incentive the audience to click and call you during these time period, there are some simple steps to follow.

First, determine an offer that is unique from the rest of the field. Second, determine the time frame you wish to include in your ad copy.

Next, create ads based upon the above parameters.

For example, if you are a plumber who doesn’t have much business on Friday’s between 12p-5p on Friday, you could use an ad such as:

25% Off Plumbing Services
If you call between 12-5p on Friday
Serving the Greater Chicago Area.

While your services may be discounted during this time period – discounted business is better than no business. Of course, offers are only limited by your imagination. The next step is seeing if the phone actually rings (or people click on your ad). Based upon performance, you can change offers as often as you desire.

Next, follow these steps to create the time based offer:

• Create a new campaign
• Duplicate the AdGroups, keywords, and campaign settings into this new campaign (you may wish to change the budget since this is a small campaign)
• Use the new time sensitive ad copies with the just moved keywords in the new campaign
• Enable Ad Scheduling and follow the above steps for either adCenter or AdWords to schedule the new campaign to run during the times specified in the just created ad copy
• Change the original campaign to not show during the time of the newly created campaign (i.e. We don’t want both ads to run simultaneously)
• All done.

The above steps should result in two campaigns running:

1. The first campaign is running when there is someone to answer the phone – call a typical day parting campaign
2. The Time Based Offer campaign is running when business is slow, or when you want to run time sensitive ad copy to bolster your business

Take control of your pay per click marketing and your business by utilizing time sensitive offers.

Use Day Parting to Increase Your Business is a post from: Certified Knowledge

If you play in the PPC (pay per click) arena, these are the types of keywords that will help you take advantage of the “long tail” and drill down into very specific geographic queries. First, lets take a look at the geographic keywords, and then we’ll examine the implementation techniques.

State (California) State based keywords are most appropriate when attempting to reach an entire state. Often these keywords apply to someone licensed within a state (such as a lawyer), or for a national company looking to bring their presence into a more local level (i.e. Bestbuy). Within PPC, these keywords have a higher search volume than the majority of other keywords mentioned below, however, ensure that you can serve an entire state before bidding on them.

State Abbreviations (CA) Essentially the same notes as above. However, there are a few warning labels here. Oregon’s abbreviation is “or”. This is one of those short and not included in your search result keywords, and therefore will not help you target geographically. The purpose of using geographically qualified keywords is to reach searchers who are using these keywords to identify a region. The other abbreviation to stay clear from is Maryland’s which translates to “MD”. I’ve seen many
doctor real estate agents. And don’t forget IN (Indiana). I doubt their getting their money’s worth on PPC.

Cities (San Jose) – Cities are the second most commonly used search qualifier (behind states). However, if you were to add up all of the city search volume versus all of the state search volume, cities would win. At present, this is the most common permutation searchers employ when looking for local services. Hence, real estate, restaurants, plumbers, events, etc should be focused around this keyword. If you live in a rather large city, it may behoove your marketing efforts to define your service
or delivery area within your ad copy.

Neighborhoods (Lincoln Park) – Generally, this is only appropriate for larger cities or neighborhoods where there is a deep identification with those who visit/live within its boundaries. For large cities, this is the most targeted keyword for service and hospitality industries. When someone is searching for a neighborhood restaurant, they are looking for someone place nearby that either delivers or is a short car ride away. This is also a great set of keywords for real estate agents as those
searching for neighborhood real estate know exactly what area they’re looking to buy their next house.

Zip Codes (60606) – While the search volume on these keywords is still low, it is steadily growing. For some states, this can be a terrible keyword as the state may be divided into a scant number of zip codes. For more density populated areas, it can be a nice identifier as to a specific region. Zip code permutations are common to see from those who are just visiting or new to a geographic region and only have limited data (i.e. their hotel’s address) to work from. To someone in this condition,
a zip code usually infers that their search result is nearby.

Area Codes (773) – Quite simply, read zip codes above. Usually, the conditions of the searcher and area are strikingly similar.

Counties (Orange County) – Some states just seem to prefer county searches to cities. I’m not quite sure why this phenomena exists, but there is clearly a pattern within certain states. Therefore, this particular keyword seems to have two distinct users. The first is those who identify with their geographic area at the county instead of at the zip level. The other is when this is a more appropriate qualifier. For county government, ordinances, licenses, etc, there can be a high level of county
identification as to where their local information should lie.

Airport Codes (SFO) – Are you doing marketing for an airport hotel? Is your restaurant near the airport? Offer car rental services? These keywords are for you. High converting, very targeted traffic. I travel a lot, and if I’m stuck in a foreign city, this is my geographic qualifier of choice. There is little optimization at either the SEO or PPC level for these keywords (which could be because it is so targeted of a geographic area), and if your services fall into this region, ensure that your
website is showing for these keywords.

Regional Lingo (Bay Area) – The most difficult keywords for foreigners to identify. The ‘bay area’, ‘twin cities’, ‘triangle’, and ‘loop; are very distinctive geographic qualifiers for the correct area (San Jose/SF, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Pittsburgh, Chicago for the above terms). Because they are keywords for local, there is often little national competition as one can’t just mix a DMA and keyword database to populate these particular keywords. Identify the local lingo of your target market and
use it to your advantage.

For PPC, the first exercise would be to create a list of the appropriate geographic keywords from the above list.

Next, create an IP targeted campaign with your major keywords in it. This campaign will not have geographic qualified keywords. Then, you’ll want take the keywords from the above (IP targeted) campaign and mix the with the recently created geographic keyword list. Finally, create a national campaign (shown to the entire country) and then use the geographic qualified keywords.

By leveraging both IP targeting and geographic qualified keywords, you can drill down on all of the keyword variations to reach your audience when they’re searching for services in very specific geographic areas.

Drilling Down into Geographic Keywords is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Just Keywords:

AdWords Sandbox
Overture Suggestion Tool
7Search Tool – (like overture for 7search)
iotaweb
Miva Tool(like Overture for Miva)

Multiple purposes or engines:

Webmaster Toolkit
Nichebot

Overture/Wordtracker Info:

Pixelfast – framed overture suggestion & bids
Digital Point overture/wordtracker comparison

Similar:

Keyword Map – similar & kw maps
Lycos – has a ‘narrow results’ – related keywords
Ask- has a ‘narrow results’ – related keywords
Alta Vista – has a ‘narrow results’ – related keywords
Thesaurus – one of my favorites still

Competition Watcher:

Google Spy

Keyword Research Tools is a post from: Certified Knowledge

• Titles: Creating PPC Titles
• Titles: Branding
• Titles: Branding and Visitors – I want it all
• Titles: Visitors over Branding – Higher Click Through Rate

PPC Descriptions – What’s the Ad’s Purpose?

• Description Writing: Branding Descriptions
• Description Writing: CTR & Branding
• Description Writing: High CTR Descriptions

PPC Description Length:

• Writing: Description Length
• Writing: Long Descriptions
• Writing: Short Descriptions

PPC Title & Description Writing is a post from: Certified Knowledge

You can specify one other website, and when your pay per click manager makes bid updates, this other site will be specifically looked for, and if found, will create your bid either directly above or below theirs.

If you are having a price war (not pay per click bid prices, but merchandise price) or other direct competition procedures, this can be a useful technique to be found just before your competitor.

It should only be used in specific instances as there are other bidding techniques that will get you more exposure or lower bid prices without worrying about your competition.

Pay Per Click Bidding – Relative Links is a post from: Certified Knowledge

This is where pay per click marketing can help you. As your website is seen when the user conducts a search, you are targeting potential customers at the search level when they are looking for products.

One of the most overlooked values in determining pay per click ROI is the value of a lifetime customer.
If you measure your pay per click ROI based only on the purchases directly from a search engine, your pay per click accounts will not get credit with these repeat customers.

If your average customer makes three purchases a year, and spends $x amount for each purchase, then to properly calculate your pay per click ROI you need to include the repeat customer values.

It is often profitable, if you have many repeat customers, to run a slightly negative or break even pay per click campaign as only the first time a customer buys from you will you be charged. If they bookmark your site and return directly to you without going through a pay per click search engine, then the initial advertising has earned you additional revenue while not being the direct referrer and being credited with the sale.

By running such campaigns, you can also afford higher bids, which in turns gives you a higher pay per click position, which then leads to more overall customers.
The more customers, the higher internet visibility you will also achieve. Some customers will tell their friends about your site, and they will go directly to your site without having gone through a pay per click search engine. Again, the initial advertising helped you recruit this customer without being the direct referrer.

Lifetime customers can dramatically increase the profitability of a website. Do not overlook recruiting lifetime customers, or getting them from a search engine to your website.

Value of a Lifetime Customer is a post from: Certified Knowledge

When someone has done a search at a pay per click search engine, they inputted several keywords, and that is what they are looking for. Never take someone directly to the front page of your site, unless it’s a very broad keyword which they are searching for, even then, use only with caution.

You want the visitor to see exactly what they are searching for as this will keep them on your site, and make it easier for them to go from a search engine to your shopping cart – the fewer steps the better.

Effective landing pages:

• Show the user the product or information based on the keyword search preformed.

• Product information – many users are looking for information before they buy, educate them and they will remember you.
• One step process to conversion. If its a shipping site, one click to add product to a shopping cart. Highly useful, one click to buy product.
• A listing of highly related or complementary products on that page.
• Price

Effective landing pages should be one click away from:

• Contact information, shows legitimacy of company.
• Shopping cart review and checkout.
• Shipping information.
• Related products.

Many sites already have similar pages built into them, which is useful for people visiting their website through other sources, or wandering around a site reviewing products.

If you do not have structured pay per click landing page on your website, the invested time to make a landing page specific to a keyword can be a valuable investment.

PPC Writing: Creating Keyword Landing Pages is a post from: Certified Knowledge

If you are still learning the basics, please read Creating your own pay per click account). Of course, you are free to continue reading. This is meant as a primer guide of how to run an AdWords account, as there is no substitute for experience and expertise.

Plan Your Pay Per Click Strategy
Think of AdWords as a book. To write a book, first you need an outline of what you want to occur. This is your strategy for plotting out your AdWords success.

Next, examine the meat of your story – your major plotline is what carries the story. Your direct keywords are this plot.

Your broad keywords are what gets you high exposure, this would be the jacket cover, agent, etc. of the book, of course, this comes after you’ve actually written the book and have a story.

The small plot lines which are only carried through sections of the book are your niche keywords. Often, these are carried through in sequels to other books. A sequel can’t occur until you get a contract for a 2nd book – after it’s been published.

You can’t write a book in a day, it’s crafted overtime in small steps. Together these steps bring forth a cohesive story that can be analyzed from many perspectives.

Start Your AdWords Account with a Solid Foundation

When you first make an account, find the direct keywords first. (I define these as: keywords that are directly related to your products or services. They usually include a descriptive term. They are from 2-4 words in length. These keywords make up the bulk of most campaigns, and usually have a positive ROI and high CTR. They are not searched for as often as broad keywords (examples of direct keywords: Mexico city travel, Pennsylvania real estate).

Since these keywords should net you a nice CTR and ROI, get them established first. Let them each get 1k-5k impressions so your account has a nice base CTR and you understand the search volume you’re dealing with.

Check your logs, other ads, and the top SERP results (SERP results are the natural search listings) for these keywords. Every single time you see a result that is not directly related to your site, figure out why, and add that word to your negative keyword list.

Let’s Find Out How Big Google’s Search Volume Really Is

Time for broad keywords. So next, make a new campaign. I would not put these keywords in the same campaign as my direct keywords. I would look at broader keywords. You want keywords that you can keep a 1.5%+ CTR with. There are several reasons for putting them in their own campaign, but one of them is that you want your direct keywords to always be shown. Since these broad keywords can rip your budget apart, you can set a daily budget different for the broad keywords so you can maintain more control of your spend.

Don’t add tons at once. These words get a lot of impressions. Add them slowly, and make 4-6 ads for each one. After a week or so, disable your low performing CTR ads, create some new ones based off your top performing ads (and then repeat as necessary).

Repeat the negative keyword insertions as listed above.

The majority of websites will not have more than 1-10 broad keywords. Some very large sites will have more, some smaller sites may find that 0-2 work.

Fun with Niche Keywords

Note: If you are a pay per click agency, you should get permission from your account holders for this type of strategy. You are spending their money, and should not be randomly trying to find niche keywords without their approval.

Now that our campaign has a healthy CTR from direct keywords, a few broad match keywords that will steady the CTR so that no new word can really lower or raise the campaigns CTR to a great extent, and a steady traffic stream, it’s time to play around with niche keywords.

Make a new campaign. Set your daily budget at a max of 1/3rd-1/4th of your direct keywords daily budget (If any word in here is getting that much exposure that it’s using a lot of this daily budget, its not a niche keyword – its a direct one). You can add tons of these, go ahead, get creative.

Play around, have fun, use lots of spelling permutations, its time to experiment. This is where you can try out new ads that are similar to other keywords, but won’t hurt your campaign as it doesn’t get the exposure and CTR of your normal campaign.

Because our daily budget is low for these words, we can’t kill our overall campaign if we really screw up here. And vice versa, this is where to find hidden ads and keyword gems.

If an ad gets 500 impressions, and 0 clicks, there are possible problems. Either your ad needs serious improvement (sorry), or the keyword just is not targeting what you want. Check the other ads/serps for these words and see if you can make it successful.

Don’t be afraid to just give these keywords the axe – sometimes they aren’t worth the invested time.

Every month, check these words – any that got 0 impressions – just write off, delete, and forget about.

This is also the place to learn search trends. If you have an add that was holding a steady 100 impressions for a couple months, and suddenly jumped to 500-1000 – you may have uncovered a new search trend. Immediately analyze this word, why its getting this traffic, and see if it needs to be moved somewhere where it won’t be constrained by the niche keywords daily budget. If a word gained that much in a month, it could continue to grow and start getting 5k impressions. You could hold a secret keyword that your competitors don’t know about – use secrets wisely.

Niche words can pay off big over time, but until the word has found it’s time – keep it under control.

Crafting an AdWords Account is a post from: Certified Knowledge