One of the top findings in the report confirms that “People’s behaviors, needs and preferences in the offline world drive their behaviors and preferences online.”

The most interesting finding to me was the idea that people go to Search to find a certain type of expert. About.com sums it up like this – “The right kind of advertising could be the expertise people are looking for.”

Experts in the study are identified by Searchers as allies – those with topical experience or motivation; credentialed experts – PhDs, MDs, CPAs, etc; and finally, crowds – reviews, votes, and other social evidence from people the Searcher does not know.

Click the graphic below to learn more about the results from this About.com survey:

Embed this infographic on your own blog or website by copying & pasting the code below:

<a href="http://certifiedknowledge.org/blog/is-it-me-youre-looking-for-inside-the-mindset-of-search/"><img src="http://www.qualityscores.com/images/mindsetofsearch-qualityscores-ck.jpg" border="0" alt="psychology of search infographic" width="50%" height="50%" /></a>

Is it me you’re looking for? Inside the Mindset of Search [Infographic] is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Alpha males have the highest Rank. Alpha advertisers have the highest Ad Rank.

Ever heard of the alpha male?

It’s a term used to describe the dominant male among  animals that live in groups. Usually the alpha male has special privileges like eating first, drinking first, being the first to mate or even the ONLY  one to mate.

Wikipedia refers the alpha male as being the animal with the highest  RANK.

What does this have to do with AdWords?

Well, remember how Google ranks ads on search results… Using a mesure called Ad Rank.

Ads with high Ad Rank take high positions while ads with lower Ad rank sink at the bottom.

But that’s just half the story and like social animals, Alpha Advertisers (advertisers with ads of high Ad Rank) get benefits that their competitors don’t. If you can increase your Ad Rank, Google will be generous in terms of traffic, position and cost.

Ad Rank Formula

You can do it.

The formula is very simple…

Ad Rank = MaxCPC  x Quality Score

… and very important to understand.

Anytime you change your bid (maxCPC), Ad Rank goes up or down. Every time your Quality Score (QS) changes, Ad Rank goes up or down.  Every time Ad Rank goes up or down, your ads get preferential treatment… or not.

Where To Find Your Ad Rank

Sorry.

Well, you can’t find it. We know that Ad Rank exists but there’s no place in adwords where you can see exactly what ad rank each of your ad is receiving. However, it is possible for you to find out exactly what you’re missing out with a low Ad Rank using the Impression Share metric.

Impression Share is the percentage of the times your ads where shown out of the times they were eligible to be shown.  By customizing the columns in your Adwords account, at the campaign level, you can see how much impression share your ads have lost due to a lower Ad Rank. That’s one way to tell if you have great Ad Rank or not.

How To Get Higher Ad Rank And Dominate The Jungle

In order to have high Ad Rank, you need the ability to bid high and get high Quality Scores. It’s important to have both and it can be a challenge to obtain them. Although you can work your way up with high QS, it will be much easier and more profitable if you can afford bidding high as well.  Let’s get into more details…

Jungle Rule 1: Earn The Ability To Bid Higher

Yikes!

It’s all about your conversion rate. Every time you increase your conversion rate, you increase your ability to bid high. In fact, you should figure out the bid that yields maximum profitability for your business (yes, there is one) with every conversion rate you achieve.

How to have better conversion rates?

The offer. The copy. The design.

Those are my personal ingredients to high conversions…  in that order.

The offer is by far the most important component and it impacts everything else you do. To have the best offer, you need to know what your potential customers actually want. This is important and most people assume they know and fail to take the extra effort to “really” find out. If you’re interested in having a method to discovering what customers want, I always recommend The Perfection Of Marketing by James Connor, a book that I think every business owner/marketer should own.

Once you know what your prospects want, you need to know how to convey it with powerful copywriting. Spend time crafting a message that resonates  with your target market  in simple words.

Then comes the design. Crappy won’t do it (most of the times). Though some great copy writers can pull it off with crappy web design, you should leverage every tool at your disposal. A clear, clean and simple design wins. And by the way, simple and clear is usually better than beautiful.

Jungle Rule 2: Get The Highest Quality Scores

Yep!

Ah, that little number we love to hate loving over at Tenscores.com. Are you still wondering how to increase Quality Score? Can’t blame you. There seem to be a conspiracy around the web to put people on the wrong track at every turn.

I wonder who started it…

Here’s the ONLY  thing you need to know about QS and it’s not complicated:

If you have low QS… unless the diagnostic bubble tells you otherwise, Quality Score  EQUALS click-through rates. Nothing else.

Let me explain.

The diagnostic bubble is that little place besides keywords that give you some indication about why you have low scores. Take a look at the screenshot on the lower right.

Adwords diagnostic tool

The “keyword relevance” part is key. What they really mean is keyword click-through-rate (CTR). So, unless that bubble tells you of landing page problems or load time problems, all you have to focus on is CTR. That’s it. The tricky part is, the CTR is not necessarily yours, it is sometimes other advertiser’s CTR. But even that is no big deal if you focus on increasing your own CTRs continuously (without sacrificing conversion rates of course).

So unless things change, as of today, November 2011, there’s no such thing as semantic relevance in calculations of quality score. And if there is any at all, it is small enough to simply dismiss it. Since the day I stopped worrying whether my landing page was relelvant or wether my ad had keywords in it and simply sharpened my ad-writing skills for higher CTRs, quality score has become the least of my challenges. All that Google cares about in regards to QS is CTR. Thanks to Craig Danuloff for confirming this in his book on quality: Quality Score  In High Resolution.  Anyone who wishes to disagree should read that book in its entirety first.

So please, will you give more attention to your Adwords ads CTR?! I beg you, for the sake of your business.

And here’s where the circle is closed: the best  way to get higher CTR is to figure out what searchers want and give it to them. Just like increasing conversions.

Once you can afford bidding high because your conversion rates and profit margins are so good and you understand quality score well enough to increase it, the snow ball starts to roll, your ads get more exposure, you get more traffic to your website, your costs are reduced and you become an Alpha Advertiser.

Don’t wait any longer… rule your jungle!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

Ad Rank: What Everyone Ought To Know About The Jungle In Adwords is a post from: Certified Knowledge

A couple years ago, I wrote an article on how to manage the display network so you can spend most of your money on sites that are bringing in quality traffic. This is a quick graphic of the workflow that I still use today.

• The ‘Discovery Campaign’ is one of your lower daily budgets, and its goal is to find good placements where you want to spend more money
• The Placement’s Campaign is one of your higher budgets as it only contains sites that are helping you reach your overall goals

While I find this workflow is very useful, the overall problem is when do you decide to block placements? In your AdWords account, the only data you can see for any placement is conversions and conversion rates. The problem with so little data is that if you wait until you have enough statistically significant data to make a decision, you will never find all of the good placements, and spent too much money on bad ones.

There is another way to gain insight into placements with Google Analytics that you can use to determine if a site is sending you quality traffic.

Evaluating Placements with Google Analytics

To have access of this data you need to link your Google Analytics account to your AdWords account. Next, navigate to the placements information under the AdWords reports (found under traffic sources).

If you have goals setup, then you can sort by the goal completions, conversion rates, and other data points to find the sites that are doing well for you.

While this data is useful for adding placements, it can also be useful for finding placements that you want to block even if you don’t have statistical data.

Sort Placements by Bounce Rates

Instead of trying to find sites that you want to add as placements, examine bounce rates to find sites where the traffic is so poor, you don’t want to wait for statistical data.

In this case, we have a handful of sites that have sent more than 18 visitors and have a 100% bounce rate. No one from any of those sites has even gone to a second page, therefore, we will often block these even though we don’t have statistically significant data.

Please note, you don’t want to just block sites if there bounce rates are 100%. You should also double check the ad copy and landing pages to make sure the offers are relevant for that site. If you consistently see high bounce rates for your display campaigns, then you might need to change the offer and landing page before deciding to block placements.

Just remember, a bounce in Google Analytics is a visitor who only went to a single page and then left your site. If someone gets to your landing page, picks up the phone and calls you, finishes an order over the phone and then leaves your site – they will be counted as a bounce even if they spent twenty minutes on the phone with you.

Create Interaction Goals

A quick way of seeing what sites are bringing in good versus poor traffic is to create interaction goals within Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can create goals based upon time on site or page views per visit.

If you create goals with these types of metrics, then you can easily examine what sites are not meeting your basic minimum interaction and then block those sites that are underperforming.

Conversely, if you find that sites are bringing in visitors that are spending several minutes on your site, you shouldn’t block those sites until you have enough clicks to determine if those visitors will eventually convert.

By using interaction goals, you can gain another level of insight into the placements where you are spending money, so you can make better decisions about block the sites or spending more money on the sites to gather more data.

If you have various types of goals on your site, I would recommend splitting out these types of goals by goal set. You might have one goal set that is all revenue events, and another one that is site interaction. By splitting these different types of goals out by goal set, then you can see one tab of just interaction goals, and another tab of just revenue goals. That way your revenue goal events will not be polluted by site interaction events and vice versa.

Conclusion

Overall, I like Google’s display network. There is a lot of traffic and conversions to be had from managing it correctly. However, if managed incorrectly, the display network can be a money pit. Therefore, you do need a system for managing the display network so it will perform for you.

However, the patience and money required to always have statistically relevant data is beyond what most AdWords advertisers have. Therefore, when you see sites that have several visits and 100% bounce rates, feel free to block them quickly. When you see sites that have some visitors, and those visitors are spending time on your site, then you should be more patient in determining if the site will eventually be a converting one for you.

By using Google Analytics to examine your AdWords data, you can go beyond just examining conversion rates to also determining interaction rates and gaining another viewpoint into the placement sites where you are spending your money, so that you can spend your budget as wisely as possible.

Save Money On Placements With Google Analytics is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Next Wednesday, 9/14/11, I will be conducting a free webinar on the top 11 AdWords Mistakes as part of my Market Motive PPC class.

What I find top mistakes lists are useful for are learning what you don’t know so that you can focus on the areas where you can improve your PPC campaigns.

I often talk to advanced marketers who are unaware of modified broad match or aren’t using the display network properly. The webinar will be geared to all experience levels.

This workshop will cover the top 11 mistakes in about half an hour; and then we’ll leave plenty of time open for Q&A afterwards.

You can register for the webinar here.

I hope to see you there.

Attend the Top 11 AdWords Mistakes Webinar Next Tuesday is a post from: Certified Knowledge

The bids are what they are based upon your Quality Score, level of competition, as well as the historical performance of the keyword across all past advertisers. The Quality Score, the only lever that can really affect it, is based upon the landing page relevancy to it & the speed it loads, the performance (CTR), and bids.

Budgets should not determine the bidding strategy. Instead budgets should be used to determine the scope. If, very budget conscious, go after very specific traffic, looking for pockets of highly qualified searches that also drive volume. This will enable advertising targets to grow and bootstrap future efforts.

The two scenarios below outline how initial bidding approaches can impact your account costs down the road.

Scenario 1: Nickel & Dime to the Top

Many times new advertisers will want to dip their toe in, and set low bids and see how they do. After doing a number of searches after it goes live (and probably not clicking on their ad) they start to wonder why they show up low or not at all. They then go back into AdWords and raise their bids, maybe from $0.15 to $0.25/click.

They do some more searches and see themselves more often, but still at the bottom of the page. So, they go back in and raise it to $0.30, a nice whole number. More searches, but the same story. So they go back and decide to get aggressive, $0.50 – a half dollar every time some clicks on their ad! They are now in the middle of the page and someone even saw them second one down on the right one time (Position 5). With a sense of accomplishment and an eye on their wallet, they relax; brew a cup of coffee, and move on to something else.

A couple hours later they go and check in and see a Below First Page Bid of $0.65 and shake their heads, curse greedy Google and set’s the bid. In a few minutes they see their ad showing up again and leave for the night. The next day another message: Below First Page Bid of $0.75, they see some activity over the night, so decide to raise it to $0.85, hopping over what Google suggests.

Later in the day, they see their average position of 4.8 and with the other metrics encouraging decide to get aggressive, $1.50. This sits for a day and their average position climbs up to 3.2; they do searches and see themselves in #2. They get a number of clicks, with an Average CPC of $0.90.

Then, just before they leave for the weekend they check in and see Below First Page Bid of $1.65. Now they are starting to feel gamed, but want to see what happens over the weekend, so they set it and let it simmer until Monday. Within the course of a week, a bid that started off at $0.15 had increased more than 10-fold! This is the quintessential “Negative Spiral” since the early bidding did not drive the performance that raises a Quality Score.

Scenario 2: Heavy Handed Leverage

The next week the advertiser’s leading competitor saw the new ads when they did searches and decided they had to get into the PPC game. They go after the same keywords, but take a different approach.

They see their competitor’s ads already listed so they want to blow them out of the water. They set $2.00 bids and immediately find their ads in the first two spots. Traffic is flowing and even though the bid is $2.00 they notice that click prices are much lower, around $1.00.

With the high position they enjoy high click through rates giving them a more favorable Quality Score (assuming their landing page’s speed and relevancy to their targets are equal to the competitor in the first scenario). Based upon the positive history that is being built up, bids can be lowered slightly, and over a period of time, the same position can be awarded.

Now, the Caveats

There is certainly a hard floor for each position, and bidding down too aggressively can and will probably see the position drop dramatically. The performance metrics are what drives all of the residual benefits, so if a lot of qualified traffic is attracted, be sure to convert them! Churning and burning is what Google expects with aggressive bidding and they will gladly raise the bids up if you are “wasting space” at the top of the results. This is an aggressive, but subtle tactic to maximize long term investment in proven search channels.

This is not the only bidding tactic that can be successful, and it is usually used after an account has aged for a bit and successful keywords or the potential for success is apparent. Optimizing downstream and will help reinforce the investment. I also suggest launching this in a new campaign, so some of the historical impacts can be limited.

If starting an account and want to find the early opportunities, I suggest reviewing the terms in the landing page title and header tags to convert them in to phrase match keywords. Create ads that highlight specific value props, setting the appropriate expectations. Bid moderately-aggressive and convert the terms to either modified broad match or exact (with appropriate ad group distribution) based up on the level of competition and quality of traffic. This will provide a good lay of the land.

I also recently wrote an article on Optimizing PPC Budgets, which reinforces some of the theories here. Also, every Tuesday at Noon EST Matthew Umbro host’s #PPCChat on Twitter, where PPC experts answer probing questions around a particular aspect of paid search.

If you have some successful bidding strategies, please share them in the comments.

Chris Kostecki is the Search Analyst at Keurig Inc. manufacturer of the revolutionary single cup coffee brewer, part of the Green Mountain Coffee family. All views he expresses are his own and do not necessarily  represent the views of any entities he is associated with. Follow Chris on Twitter to keep up with the latest trends in Search Marketing.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

Bidding Into A Positive Spiral That Builds Long Time Savings is a post from: Certified Knowledge

There is a simple way to determine how to increase an account’s exposure that can be accomplished in less than a minute.

Generally, when looking to increase your exposure you need to know why your exposure is being limited. There are three common reasons why your ads are not being displayed:

• Budget
• Quality score
• Bid prices

In this article, we will look at how to determine what is limiting your exposure, and show how you can do this analysis in less than one minute.  In this analysis, we will assume you have expanded your keywords a few times and that you do not wish to add new keywords.

Impression Share Report

Start by running an impression share report. This is a report that can be run at the campaign level and shows you why you’re ads are not being displayed. If you need help running reports or finding all the features, please see this video that walks you through creating reports.

You will now have a view of why your account is not being displayed, through either budget or rank.

Budget Loss

In this first case (above image), the biggest reason that impressions are being lost is because of the budget.

When you lose impressions due to budget, then raising your budget can help get you more clicks that should have the same quality as your current clicks. When you see that you’re losing clicks due to budget you should be careful. If you cannot raise the budget, then you are probably overpaying for each click.

For example,, if your budget is $100 per day and you are paying $1 per click, then you usually receive 100 clicks per day. If you could lower your CPC to $0.80 and still spend all of your budget then you should get 125 clicks. That’s a nice increase in traffic without doing too much work.

Eventually, lowering your CPCs will put your ad in too low of a position to get enough clicks to fulfill the budget. When that happens, then you need to find other avenues to receive more traffic.

Rank Loss

The other main reason you lose impressions is due to rank. When you lose an impression due to rank, it means that your ad rank was not high enough to be displayed on a page.

Ad rank is comprised of both quality score and bid. Therefore, when you see impressions are lost due to rank, you need to examine the quality scores. There is a simple way to view the quality scores across the account:

• Run a report that contains spend, quality score, keywords, etc
• Download the report to a spreadsheet program
• Create a pivot table that keys off quality score numbers
  • If you need help with pivot tables, please see Josh Dreller’s excellent column on pivot tables.

I added the “percent of keywords by QS” column myself by just dividing the number of keywords in each QS range by the total number of search keywords in the account.

In this case, the vast majority of the keywords are a 5 or lower quality score. Therefore, many of these keywords are not being displayed due to low quality score or low ad rank that is caused due to low quality scores.

You can now be confident that this account needs to increase its quality score to be able to efficiently increase its exposure.

There will be times when most of your keywords have excellent quality scores:

In this case, there is some quality score work that can be done but as the majority of their keywords are a quality score 7 or higher; the main reason the account is lowing impressions is due to bids.

You can now be confident that this account needs to increase its bids to be able to efficiently increase its exposure.

There are many reasons your average position can be less than 3 and you still lose impressions due to ad rank. The two most common are:

• No ads were shown on the page
• Only a limited number of ads were displayed on the page, and you were below that

Usually when your impression share is above 90% – 95%, you are in great shape and you need to find new keywords before you can drive more traffic.

Conclusion

When you want to see account data at a very high level, the impression share report is a fantastic starting place.

It is common for accounts to see increases and decreases in overall traffic due to the natural changes in search patterns. Therefore, looking at overall traffic can sometimes give you an inaccurate picture of your search share. As the impression share report is a relative number, and not absolute, it is a good place to examine your account for changes to trends in your search share.

When examining how to increase your exposure, it comes down to: budget, bids, and/or quality score. What is your weak link? To increase your overall exposure, one (or more) of these items needs to grow larger.

This simple one minute analysis can quickly give you a starting place to determine where you should focus your time.

The One Minute AdWords Account Diagnosis is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Using it is quite straight forward. When you have figured out the main benefit that resonates with your customers, you navigate through the diagram brainstorming new ways to express the same idea – supplying you with an almost endless repository of test ads.

An example would be most suitable to help you fully understand how it works. Let’s say I had a business that sold a tool to help Adwords advertisers lower their adwords costs, here’s how I’d use the diagram to brainstorm new adwords ads to test…

I. Two Different Ways To Express The Same Benefit

We are always trying to go towards something or away from something. Every benefit you find can be written in the form of going towards a solution (gain) or going away from a situation (pain). Tenscores.com, for example, sells the benefit of lower Adwords costs. That can be thought of as getting lower costs or going away from high advertising costs. And here’s how that would translate in 2 different ads:

Going towards a gain or away from a pain

Notice how each variation can be said differently with synonyms. For instance lower costs can be called cheaper traffic and too expensive can be replaced by too pricey (or anything similar) thus creating new ad variations to test. Some words are far more powerful than others, up to you to find them through testing. But we’re just scratching the surface.

II. Compounding It With 7+ Different Ad Themes

Once you’ve decided in which direction you want to phrase your ad (going towards a gain vs going away from a pain), you can put a twist on them by putting the spotlight on what you offer instead of what the searcher gets.

Focus on you vs focus on searcher

In doing so you can then choose where to fall among 5 ad themes that have proven to be effective:

Informational Ad

Informational Ads
Searchers are looking for information – most of the time. Give them information that will lead them to buying your products or services. This theme is for ads that promise to teach about something.

Ad with numbers

Ads With Numbers
People are conscious about details. Numbers that convey specific details about the benefits you can provide can turn clicks and conversions in your favor.

Curiosity ad

Ads That Peek Curiosity
Can you present your product in an unusual way? Is there something uncommon about your product? Even if there isn’t, you can find something that peeks curiosity and makes people want to learn more…

As you can see, these themes can also (actually they should) be mixed together to create multiple variations of ads to test and always keep improving performance.

More curiosity

Talking about curiosity, here’s one you may have seen everywhere on the web, I didn’t come up with it but I have used variations of it and it works impressively well in the weight loss niche.

Testimonial ad

Testimonial Ads
Trust is a major factor in the decision making process. Knowing that someone else has tried what you have to offer and got results helps customers trust that what you have works. It also puts a human being’s voice in the conversation rather than the formal tone of a company.

Review ad

Review Ads
Review ads are almost like testimonials, only they invite users to read other users (or influential individuals) testimonials on the landing page. These might be easily mixed with the other types.

Ad with credentials

Ads With Awards & Credentials
Third party endorsements are very powerful especially at the end of the buying funnel where it matters most for the consumer. So are credentials in certain fields.

Do you have other themes that can be added to the list? Let me know in the comments.

In case you were wondering, I do own a business that sells a tool that does help Adwords advertisers lower their costs and it does bear the name of Tenscores.com. We open the beta platform to the public about once a week, sign up here to be notified next time registrations are open or get the login details to our demo account here.

An Endless Supply Of Adwords Ads For Your Split-Test Experiments is a post from: Certified Knowledge

If you’re buying display ads and don’t know about these lies, you’re wasting a good chunk of your money.

In Vanessa Fox’s recent article about the Food Network vs AllRecipes battle to be the top food portal, she quotes an executive at the Food Network promoting what has often been a “funny-money” metric in ad sales. “Advertisers can trust that when they buy ads from us, they are connecting with Allrecipes’ vibrant, active and engaged community.”

An engaged community… You mean one that spends a lot of time on the site, right? Viewing a number of pages, showing that the content really appeals to them?

Awesome! For the website itself…

Lie #1: Engaged Audiences Are Desirable

It’s no secret in web analytics that, in general, your lowest bounce rates and most engaged visitors come from the direct traffic segment. The problem is that these are the exact visitors that are most likely to ignore banners. I addressed this briefly in Advertising Lies: Engaged Audience.

“Engaged audiences don’t click.

Ask any AdSense publisher who clicks his ads most, and you’ll hear that search engine traffic is great. Heck, Chiticka has an ad product exclusively dedicated to monetizing publishers’ traffic earned from SEO.

Within blackhat SEO, it’s also known that providing a poor user experience – where the item sought for in the search isn’t present on the landing page – generates high AdSense clickthrough rates. The AdSense block is the most relevant thing on the page – it best matches the keywords searched for, and is the best next step for the visitor. So they click.”

I know folks using other traffic generation methods and generating double digit CTRs on AdSense, using this tactic, and that’s been the case for years. To put that into its proper context, Problogger estimates most bloggers get 2-5% CTR.

If you’re a direct marketer being sold display ads by a salesman who boasts of his engaged audience… take a pass.

Lie #2: Engaged Audiences Are Undesirable

The flip side of the coin is that some brand advertisers don’t mind not getting clicks. It’s wasteful since you could build a relationship, but they’re alright with only having their ads displayed, because they’re trying to send a simple message – e.g. a brand positioning statement that doesn’t require elaboration – because by sheer repetition they’ll create demand and preference for their brand… the sales will [hopefully - you're not always tracking this directly] come later.

What matters to these advertisers is having the correct demographic makeup in the audience, to ensure that they’re reaching their market. And one of the most reliable ways to do that is to buy ads targeted to an engaged audience, because it’s predictable who that audience is, demographically. That’s what services like Quantcast are for.

Lie #3: The Whole Audience Is Equally Engaged.

Unless you’re buying ads on a site that is wholly reliant on search traffic, chances are the audience is made up of a mix of traffic from different sources.

There are a few implications:

First, run-of-site ads in big media are almost always a bad idea. If you’re a direct marketer, you’re more interested in the search referred traffic, and don’t want the “engaged audience.” If you’re going for branding, you want the engaged audience and the search traffic – which is often irrelevant to a site’s core topic – is not what you’re really after.

Second, you want to be able to target by referring source. You can agree to sign an NDA and ask for a peak at their analytics, or get a third party to audit the data.

Third, measurements and boasts about the biggest portal are pointless. Yes, both quality and quantity are important. But when a company like ComScore makes a fuss because it appears The Food Network has more traffic in absolute numbers than AllRecipes, the best response is to shrug: “so what?” That doesn’t tell me, the ad buyer who’s supposedly interested in this fact, about the numbers of visitors fitting into the particular segment(s) I care about.

Besides which, there’s another lie that makes this big to do pointless:

Lie #4: Panels Don’t Lie.

Panel data is skewed. If you’ve compared your own site’s numbers to Compete.com’s numbers, you know there’s a significant difference. I’ve confirmed this with other publishers.

That isn’t to pick on Compete specifically, it’s just an example (and their products have other value, like finding what keywords competitors use, not to mention being more reliable than tools that just provide educated guesses, like Quantcast at times).

Similarly, since there’s a cost to recruit a user, you can expect that a large percentage of panels are simply made up of the users whose acquisition cost (CPA) was lowest.

That being said, some panels and comparable services like Quantcast are moving further along in the direction of directly auditing traffic data with their own snippet of code tagging all the sites’ pages.

So the moral of this last bit here is not to buy ads based on panel data unless it’s directly measured.

To conclude

Pay attention to the details of what traffic’s attention you’re buying. Engagement suits some but not others, and anyways there’s a variety of engagement with a site’s audience.

Get as much data you can on the audience, and see if it’s possible to only buy the engaged/non-engaged audiences that suit your goals, or else to negotiate the price on the audiences that are less appealing if you must buy them as a bundle with the others.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

Media Sales & Engagement: The 4 Greatest Lies I’ve Ever Seen is a post from: Certified Knowledge

With the amount of work required for building and managing PPC campaigns, it's easy to forget the importance of optimized targeting.

If I ask you what you need to do in order to increase your ads’ click-through-rates (CTR) for higher quality scores, your immediate answer might be: write a better ad.

And you’d be right.

But it’s not the only way and too often advertisers rely on ad spit-testing when trying to achieve a higher CTR.

If you’ve read a little about quality score (QS), you know that the biggest factor that influences it is CTR. When we plan about increasing CTR, new ads in more focused ad groups come to mind, sometimes we even remember to include and keep expanding a good list of negative keywords (although we know that that has no direct impact on QS).

What we often forget is that ads have varying performances depending on the hour of the day or the geographical region in which they are displayed. Two things that Google takes into account when calculating quality score but are rarely talked about.

If you’ve hit a brick wall and can’t improve your CTR no matter how hard you try, these are the 2 targeting settings that might get you the results you want.

Day-Part Targeting

Ad performance can vary greatly depending on the hour of the day. Although the data above has not reached statistical significance, it may suggest 9pm (21h00) to be bad hour.

You may be getting lots of impressions at 2 in the morning but very little clicks and conversions without even knowing it. If that’s the case, it would be very beneficial to prevent your ads from showing at those times of the day.

To find out how your ads are performing by the hour of the day:

1. Choose a campaign in your adwords account.
2. Click on  the “dimensions” tab (or make the dimensions tab viewable in the sub menu).
3. Click the “view” sub-menu and select “hour of day”.

You should now be able to see at what times of the day your ad group is under performing.

The next thing to do is to exclude your ads from showing at those times  by changing your campaigns settings: Advanced Settings > Ad Scheduling. Make sure your data has reached statistical significance.

When you do that, the average CTR recorded for your keywords will start to increase and your quality scores will slowly rise.

Geo-Targeting

Ad performance may also vary by specific geographical regions. Notice the difference between Texas and Ohio.

If you’re like most advertisers, your adwords campaigns are probably set to show on the whole territory of your chosen country right now (or even many countries at once). If you run a geographic report in adwords, you will find that your ads perform better in some specific regions than others.

You need to find the regions where your ads perform really poorly and exclude your ads from showing there.

To find out how your ads are performing by specific regions in the country you’re targeting:

1. Choose a campaign or an ad group in your adwords account.
2. Go to the “dimensions” tab once again.
3. Click on the “view” sub-menu and select “Geographic”.

Now you can see the specific regions where you might be receiving lots of impressions but low clicks and conversions compared to others.

Exclude those areas in your campaigns settings: Under Locations and Languages>Locations click edit.

A window will pop up, look for the Exclude areas within selected locations link at the bottom of that window and exclude the areas that are poorly performing for you.

If you don’t want to completely exclude those areas, you might consider creating a separate campaign for them.

When you do that, your average CTR will also slowly rise since it won’t be affected by low performing locations and it will result in better scores.

Those are two quick but very rewarding actions that you can take right now to achieve higher CTR’s and better scores.

In case you’re wondering how effective these two little techniques can be, here’s what Brad confided to me in email conversation (don’t tell him that I told you):

“I can’t agree more with your two points – I do it all the time – in fact I have an account that just by changing the geo settings and splitting up the ads by their geo CTRs, the accounts CTR almost doubled.” ~ Brad Geddes

If you want to track how these actions affect your keyword’s quality scores and your first page minimum bids, I’d like to invite to you to try our Quality Score tracking tool… sign up here and I’ll send you a quick email the next time we open doors.

Warning

• Before excluding your ads from showing at a certain time of day, make sure you have enough data to make the right decision. Use splittester.com to see if your data has reached statistical significance.
• DO NOT use CTR as your only measure of performance. Google uses CTR to increase or lower your scores and as a result, increase or lower your CPCs… however, it is not a measure of your profitability. Learn about Profit Per Impression and use it as the final verdict.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

2 Little Known Ways To Increasing CTR And Quality Score is a post from: Certified Knowledge

I had the pleasure of interviewing Shelley for Marketing Nirvana. The episode will air June 6th at noon EST (9am PST). You can hear it live at WebmasterRadio.fm.

While we covered a range of display network topics; we mostly focused on topic targeting.

Topic targeting allows you to serve ads based upon a topic – no keywords or placements are required. Choosing just a topic can bring in more inventory that most companies can handle (and convert). This feature only works across the Google display network.

While most people won’t want to use topic targeting all by itself; it can be a fantastic restrictive marketing technique when used in conjunction with placements, remarketing, or even keywords.

In fact, I so much enjoyed the topic with Shelley that I also wrote my most recent Search Engine Land article on 3 Ways Topic Targeting Can Improve Your Display Advertising.

If you can’t catch the show live, you can always subscribe via iTunes.

Please note, if you’re a premium member, you can watch the Topic Targeting Video Lesson and receive more insights on topic targeting.

If you’d like to learn more about Shelley, you can see her blog or content network insider training site.

Get Valuable Insights into the Google Display Network with Shelley Ellis is a post from: Certified Knowledge