We took on a new client in the automotive ecommerce space a couple months ago. We were tasked with increasing year-over-year conversions while driving CPA lower or at least keeping it steady. We did a pretty thorough audit of the mid-five-figures per month account, so we were ready to implement our optimizations on a multitude of fronts. A day or two out of the gate, the numbers looked like they *might* be going our way, but each successive day brought less-than-stellar results.

Fast forward a couple weeks, and same status. The numbers didn’t look really bad, but where were the rockstar numbers we were expecting? Even though I’ve been doing PPC optimization for years, I was missing a key piece of data that I shouldn’t have been missing. Fortunately, a quick trip to Search Funnels solved the mystery, giving us and our client more insight into the account and more confidence that we were moving in the right direction.

First introduced in March 2010, AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion. Search Funnels helps answer questions around time lags and attribution. To paraphrase Google: Search Funnel data helps clarify how users search for Advertiser products, and it also gives a more complete picture of the value of your campaigns.

Time Lag

AdWords Search Funnels have been updated in the last few months, and there is great data to be mined. Specifically, Time Lag data showed us that for this specific account, data from ‘yesterday’ would grow an average of 67% over the next 30 days. Data viewed in a ‘last 7 days’ format would grow 42%. This is due to the effects of the AdWords cookie and the way that AdWords records conversions, matching them to the date and time when the last click happened. We had begun to understand there was a significant lag after we took over the account, but we had no idea just how pronounced it was until we looked at time lag data in the right way. Here’s how to do it.

Click on ‘Conversions’ from the ‘Tools and Analysis’ dropdown menu from any page in the AdWords account. Next, click on ‘Search Funnels’, located in the left-hand column of the ‘Conversions’ page. Once there, you will want to click on the ‘Only show complete conversion paths’ option, located in the ‘All Paths’ dropdown on the upper right-hand side of the page (see screenshot below). This will ensure you are only looking at data where Google know the whole story. Because AdWords gathers conversion data over a 30 day period, you may want to choose a date range where the ending date is 30 days ago, which may give you a greater volume of ‘complete conversion path’ data to analyze.

Now, click on ‘Time Lag’ in the sub-navigation on the left-hand side of the page (see screenshot). Very importantly, for most situations you will likely want to look at ‘From last click’ data, rather than the default setting, which is ‘From first impression.’ Since the AdWords interface presents ‘last click’ performance data, it makes sense to analyze things from the same standpoint, for consistency. If you forget this step, the data may look much different and it may mislead you. Note the yellow highlighted text in the screenshot below, telling the user that they are looking only at complete conversion paths.

In order to understand by what percentage ‘yesterday’ data will increase over time, take the ‘conversions’ percentage of total in the first row.

In the screenshot above, the number is very close to 40%*. Since we are dealing with percentages, we can divide 100 by 40 and then subtract 1 to get our expected percentage increase of 150% (100/40 = 2.5; then, 2.5 – 1 = 1.5, or 150%).

Note, with each passing hour after midnight, these numbers will get smaller. If you waited till 11pm on the follow day to look at ‘yesterday’ data, you are almost into day #2, and so you must adjust accordingly. In order to understand by what percentage ‘last 7 days’ data will increase during the 30 day cookie window, you have to look at each day individually.

To illustrate, a ‘last 7 days’ view includes yesterday, which, using the example above will grow conversions by 150%. But ‘last 7 days’ also includes the day that happened 7 days ago. This day has already had the benefit of 6 to 7 days of conversion ‘cookie credit’, and so this day will show much less growth than will the day that was yesterday. One way to do the math is to list days 1 to 7 with their cumulative ‘percentage of total conversions’. Then, take the average of those cumulative totals. Now, divide this average into 100 and subtract 1, and you have the estimated growth percentage for any ‘last 7 days’ lookback. Below is a screenshot of what the Excel spreadsheet might look like.

Once we were able to point to actual Search Funnels data around time lags, we were easily able to communicate our true progress to date. Additionally, Search Funnels contributed both to our and our client’s understanding of user behavior.

There are also great attribution reports in Search Funnels, but that’s for another post!

* Note: the screenshot was taken *before* I clicked on ‘from last click’, so the data here is actually wrong. Don’t forget this step, as I seem to have done in my screenshot!

 
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.

Use AdWords Search Funnels to Gain Deeper Insights is a post from: Certified Knowledge

However, if you have thousands or millions of keywords, then trying to find the best areas to improve quality score can be overly time consuming.

By using a single AdWords report and a few pivot tables (which are very easy to create) you can identify:

• How healthy your account is based upon quality score
• Where you have the greatest financial benefits to increasing quality score
• Where you have the more impression improvement potential by increasing quality scores

I put together a video that walks you though exactly how to run these reports and do the analysis which you can see below (if you are reading this via email or an RSS reader, you may need to click through to the site to see the video).

The video is in 720 HD format; so if you change the quality settings, it also looks good in full screen.

I hope you enjoy the video.

How to Identify Google AdWords Quality Score Problems is a post from: Certified Knowledge

SMX Advanced is completely sold out; but there are plenty of learning opportunities left.

On Thursday, June 7th, I’ll be conducting a full day workshop on AdWords.

The basics of the agenda can be seen below; but I try to leave a bit of ‘wiggle room’ for in-depth Q&A and/or to add a topic at the end of the day (favorites so far have been Remarketing, pivot tables, large scale organization, and team organization).

The Workshop Agenda

Comprehensive Keyword Research: The absolute center of every PPC campaign is keywords. Learn the effective methods to discover and research keywords. While keywords are the lifeblood of PPC, perfecting your match types usage while controlling your negative keywords can drastically increase your overall revenue.

Writing Compelling Ad Copy: You will learn how to sync your ad copy with both your keywords and buying cycle stages. Testing ad copy is essential to any AdWords account’s success. You will takeaway several ideas for ads to test by the time you leave the session.

Demystifying Quality Score: Quality Score has a larger effect on your account’s visibility than any other setting inside of AdWords. Quality Score can be a challenge to increase. Receive step-by-step instructions in how to prioritize Quality Score improvement, and what actions to take to increase your Quality Scores.

Increase your Reach Through the Google Display Network: Consumers spend about 5% of their time with the search network. The rest of their time is spent on content sites. Learn how to effectively reach users beyond search with contextual ads, placements, and enhanced campaigns.

Control Your Ad Display with Location Targeting: Do you think that geographic targeting isn’t relevant to a national business? Think again! Whether you are a brick and mortar local business, or a global e-commerce site, learn how geographically targeted campaigns can create additional connections with searchers.

Increase Your Landing Page Conversions: The first impression to a potential customer is the landing page. With only a few seconds to engage the buyer this may be more important in your conversion funnel than anything else. This section of the course will not only go into best practices and usability, but how to test landing pages in a simple and effective method.

More Info

Lunch will be included. The presentations will be available for download during and after the presentation. The WiFi should work (you can never make 100% guarantees when you don’t own the venue). As I’m flying out the next day, I’ll be around for a while after the session ends for any wrap-up Q&A, discussions, etc.

You can register here: SMX Advanced Registration

Learn more about advanced here: SMX Advanced Homepage

See the full workshop page here: SMX Advanced Google AdWords Training

I hope to see you in Seattle.

Attend SMX Advanced Google AdWords Training is a post from: Certified Knowledge

How Much Does Landing Page Matter?

First off, landing page speed is no longer being displayed. That’s not really a huge issue as I’ve never seen a problem with landing page speed. They instead rolled the landing page issues into one single ‘landing page relevance’ score.

For years, if your landing page was dinged by quality score, you were in trouble. Rarely would you ever see a quality score above 3 or 4 if you had landing page issues. That no longer seems to be the case.

Now, when I see a 10; this is what I was expecting:

But this is what I was seeing across several accounts as 10s as well:

I was floored when I saw this keyword. A below average landing page experience, and yet the quality score was a 10. It didn’t take me long to find dozens of examples where this was occurring.

The problem with relative data is that Google doesn’t tell you what fits into above or below average. For example, if average is 1, is below average 0.99 or 0.9 or 0.8. If average was a .8 to 1.2 range; then below average is meaningful. If below average is 0.99; then below average might not mean that much.

It is Mostly CTR

For a long time, landing page was more of a negative than a positive to your quality score; and it was all about CTRs. That seems to be the case. In this example, everything is average or above average; yet the QS is still a 4:

So, in example 1, the landing page was below average, but the CTR was good enough to get a 10. In this case, having an expected CTR above average, and everything else as average meant the QS was a 4. That seems quite counterintuitive; especially when you see this keyword which is also a 4:

There’s no way that both of these keywords should be a 4. The first one is all above average or average. This one is below average. This should probably be a 4; but not the first one.

‘Relevance’ Still Matters

While relevance is technically another set of CTRs, its usually best to think of this as semantics. And they matter:

The majority of quality scores I saw at a 2 had issues with relevance, not CTR.

‘Average Ads’ Can be 3s to 10s

Google has made enough claims over the years about 7s being good and 6s needing a bit of help; but what is average?

I’m seeing words from Quality Scores 3 to 8 where everything is ‘average’.

I’m seeing quality score 7 words that are all average, or 1-2 items is ‘above average’.

I’m seeing quality score 9 words that that have less above average items than quality score 5 & 6 words:

You Can’t Diagnose Paused Words

If a word is paused; the metrics will all be below average. This does lead credence to the theory (that I subscribe to) that a paused word can’t hurt you. Google isn’t collecting metrics; therefore it’s below average as there’s no data coming in. A better error message here would be a good idea instead of just ‘below average’.

So, What Can You Takeaway?

A good landing page is necessary for conversions. A bad landing page (in Google’s eyes – not the searchers) could have a negative quality score affect; or it could not.

An ad with ‘below average’ expected CTR can have a quality score of 1 to 6. I didn’t see any quality score 7 or higher words with below average expected CTR.

Ad relevancy matters. You can have a 10 with a high relevance, but average everything else. I didn’t see any higher quality score keywords with below average relevancy.

The ‘average’ benchmarks seem to be different for each of the displayed data sets. The fact that landing page can be below average and get a 10; yet relevancy and expected CTR can be average and be anywhere from a 4 to a 10 is either an error in the quality score algo; or the ‘average’ range is quite large.

In the end; while these numbers are relative; I think we need a better scale than average, above average, below average. A 1-5 range (if you want to make it semantic with bad, poor, average, good, excellent – that will also work, Google) would be much more insightful.

The quality scores I’m seeing don’t make sense in many cases (and I only spent 10 minutes looking for these examples, they aren’t the strange ones – they are the norm); and I think it’s a range issue.

So, kudos to Google for showing some relative data; however, my hope is that Google goes much further with the ranges. The new quality score transparency is not that useful and will raise more questions that it answers.

Does Quality Score Transparency Just Show More AdWords Data Problems? is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Broad Match Reduction

Advertisers have long struggled with the limitations of phrase and exact match vs. the unpredictability of broad match. While exact match is always the advertiser’s goal match type, broad match was a necessary evil, fishing for keywords that weren’t known to us yet but that could be potential gold mines. Along the way, though, a lot of money was wasted on trying to find these hidden gems. Modified broad match came along and has been able to take away some of the power of old broad match.

And now, by taking queries that are closely related to our phrase and exact match keywords out of the broad match realm, we can reduce the budget for broad match and re-invest it.

Currently, your account might look like this:

Match Type	Budget	Clicks	CPC	Conversion Rate	Conversions
Broad	$ 1,000.00	500	$ 2.00	2%	10
Phrase	$ 1,000.00	333	$ 3.00	5%	17
Exact	$ 1,000.00	250	$ 4.00	10%	25

Re-Invest in Exact Match

So then, if your account is structured in a way that you’re bidding most for exact match, second most for phrase and least for broad, then these new match types can really help you. By re-routing these near phrase and near exact queries to actual phrase and actual exact match types, an advertiser will be able to utilize a higher bid and attain traffic for possibly better converting keywords than if they showed up under broad match. Think about it this way: prior to the change, if you bid $2 on broad, $3 on phrase and $4 on exact, the $2 bid would be used for the near match type queries. Now those queries would fall under either a $3 or $4 bid giving you an opportunity for a higher ad position and more impression share.

Again this could lead to a reduction in your broad match strategy and expansion into your exact match, which is what you really want!

Here is what your account could look like when moving budget away from broad match:

Match Type	Budget	Clicks	CPC	Conversion Rate	Conversions
Broad	$ 500.00	250	$ 2.00	2%	5
Phrase	$ 1,000.00	333	$ 3.00	5%	17
Exact	$ 1,500.00	375	$ 4.00	10%	38

The same $3000 budget garnered 7 more conversions by investing more into exact match!

Tying It All Together

It is very possible that you have accounts where showing your ad for a simple misspell or plural version of a keyword could be very detrimental. In my experience, however, misspellings most often convert pretty well especially if it is a brand term. And if a plural or singular version could hurt you that much you could always negative match it out. The rest of the additions, including stemmings, accents and abbreviations, I would want to test anyway.

That aside, imagine your account with a lot less reliance on broad match and a ton more emphasis on phrase and exact match due to these changes. Bidding would be a lot more straightforward. Ad to keyword relevance would be a lot easier to attain which equals higher initial Quality Score and should lead to a higher CTR and a secondary bump in QS. This causes a rise in Ad Position and reduction in CPC’s. Profits should then increase as well as number of conversions. Just imagine!

 
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.
 
Related Entries: Google launches near match, should you use it?
 

How Google’s New Match Types Can Actually Help You is a post from: Certified Knowledge

If you’re managing an account with an overall CPA target and you’re also advertising on brand terms you’ll probably see two types of keywords in your account: brand terms with very low CPA’s (and CPC’s) and non-brand keywords with much higher CPA’s (often 10 to 20 times higher). Both CPA’s are usually not even close to the overall target, nor will they be for most keywords, even if you tried.

However, your boss or client is still mostly interested in the overall target. So if you consider your branded conversions as a given, what should the target CPA be for the non-branded keywords?

Let’s start by saying that this is not an ideal situation. Far from it. George Michie even calls it ‘the cardinal sin of paid search’ and gives 4 good reasons not to mix brand with non-brand results in his excellent article. Please tell your boss or client about these 4 reasons and hopefully you can switch to working with a non-branded target. That would be in everyone’s best interest.

Working with a non-branded target would indeed mean you’ll no longer get credits for the branded conversions. But neither will you be blamed if they drop.

If you think your non-branded campaigns often assist branded conversions, you might be right, but I’d say the burden of proof is on you. Analyze Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, Search Funnels in AdWords or even request a Campaign Insights report at Google if you’ve been very active on the Google Display Network. Then take credit for the additional branded conversions you find in these reports. Those would be the ones that are preceded by a non-branded click with the subtraction of the conversions that started with a branded click and ended with a non-branded click (this also happens).

So let’s hope this article will become obsolete sooner rather than later. In the meantime, if the overall target is the situation you have to work with, I’d like to show you how to create your non-branded target based on existing conversion data in your account. This will help you evaluate the performance of your non-branded keywords and give you a more realistic target for them.

Especially if branded conversions are significant in your account (or maybe even make up the majority of the conversions) the overall target will not be suitable for your non-branded keywords, so you’ll need a target that will work together with your branded conversions to reach the overall target.

I’ll use Google AdWords in the examples below, but if you get your conversion data from another source, the calculation works just as well, as long as you’re able to distinct brand from non-brand terms. Calculating your non-branded target works best with mature and stable accounts, but if your account isn’t, you’ll just have to recalculate more often to make sure the calculation holds true.

I will provide you with the steps to calculate your non-branded target for both of the following situations:

1. You have clearly labeled and completely separated your branded campaigns from the other campaigns, and added your brand terms (including misspellings) as negatives to all the other campaigns (for the past year).
2. You’re not 100% sure all branded search queries were only triggered by branded campaigns (for the past year).

1. The steps for the first (and ideal) situation in which you have completely separated branded from non-branded are as following:

1. Log in to your AdWords account and select the past 12 months as the date range:
   
   The reason for choosing a full year is to prevent a possible seasonal bias when choosing a shorter period. If your account is running for less than a year, select ‘All time’ in the date range field.
2. I assume all your branded campaigns contain the word ‘brand’ or another common and unique combination of letters you can filter on. Search for this in the search field:
   
3. Now scroll to the bottom of the page, you will find the aggregate statistics for your brand campaigns in the yellow row:
   
4. From the image above, we just need 3 metrics (highlighted in red): the number of branded conversions, the number of total conversions and the branded CPA.
5. Now divide the number of branded conversions by the total conversions, in the example above that would be 23,886 / 34,488 = 69%
6. Now let’s say our overall target CPA is $40. Given the metrics above, what should be our target for the non-branded keywords?
7. If our target CPA is $40, then 100 conversions can cost us $4,000. Now we know that out of every 100 conversions, we get 69 conversions for $2.19 apiece. So we get 69 conversions for $151.
   That leaves us with $4,000 – $151 = $3,849 to spend for the remaining 31 non-branded conversions. Therefore their target CPA would be $3,849 / 31 = $124
8. To make it easier for you, just fill in your overall target CPA, your amount of branded conversions and their CPA and the total number of conversions and this Excel file  will calculate your non-branded target.

2. The steps for the second situation in which you’re not 100% sure to have completely separated branded from non-branded take a bit more time, but at least you will be sure to get the right numbers by separating on the search query level:

1. Go to the Dimensions tab of your account and select the past 12 months as the date range
2. Select ‘Search terms’ in the view menu.
3. Customize the columns and only select Clicks, Conversions and Cost. Remove all the other columns.
4. Create a filter to show only search terms with at least 1 click:
   
5. Download this report and open it with Excel (if it gets too big, use a higher number of clicks in the filter).
6. Delete the first and last row of this report (title and totals)
7. Name column E (the first empty column) ‘Keyword Type’
8. Set a filter on the first row
9. Apply a filter on the first column (Search term) to contain your brand name
10. Fill in ‘Branded’ in the new Keyword Type column for all these keywords (make sure they all really are branded)
11. Remove the filter from the Search term column
12. Select the empty cells from the Keyword Type column
13. Now you should see all your non branded queries.
14. Now fill in ‘Non-branded’ in the Keyword Type column for these queries.
15. If all went well, all your queries are now labeled as branded or non-branded.
16. Create a Pivot Table based on this data. If you need to learn (more) about Pivot Tables for PPC analysis I can highly recommend reading Master Pivot Tables by Josh Dreller.
17. In this Pivot Table use Keyword Type as Row Label and the sum of conversions as Values.
18. Create a Calculated Field called CPA that divides Cost by Conversions
    
    and add this to the Values field
19. Create a Calculated Field called Conv. Rate that divides Conversions by Clicks.
    
    and add this to the Values field
20. Now you should have an Excel file similar to this one.
    
    Now you have all the data you need to calculate your non-branded target. Just fill in the numbers in this Excel file and it will calculate it for you.
21. In the Pivot Table you’ve also calculated your branded and non-branded conversion rate. Though you don’t need these metrics for your non-branded target, they’re quite useful to know for the following reasons:
• When you add a new non-branded keyword, you can use the average non-branded conversion rate as a benchmark for when to expect the first conversion. If your non-branded conversion rate is 1%, your non-branded keywords need 100 clicks to convert (on average). So you can optimize accordingly.
• By regularly comparing your branded and non-branded conversion rates you can look for interesting trends in these metrics, for example: if one rises, does the other rise with the same relative amount? If not, why not?

It goes without saying that your calculated non-branded target holds true as long as the proportion of branded conversions and its CPA does not change in your account. But it probably will, so it would be wise to recalculate it regularly (at least once every 3 months I would say).

And if you’re not sure your current CPA (non-branded or overall) is realistic and want to reevaluate it, this guideline explains how a target CPA can be calculated. If you just want to estimate your CPA based on metrics like CPC and Conversion Rate, you can use this calculator.

I hope this guide is helpful for all of you working with an overall CPA target. I also hope this will be a temporary situation for you

 
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.
 

Working with an overall CPA target: how to calculate your non-branded target is a post from: Certified Knowledge

The reason for the disconnect between the account manager and the decision-makers is lack of clear narrative (defined as “what we do, why we do it, and why it’s optimal”) concerning the paid search approach. To make the best use of the time we do get with C-levels, it’s imperative that paid search account managers….

Develop a clear narrative that supports the CEO’s goals.

At a high level, all CEOs have one objective: grow the business. In some instances, this means improving profit margins; in others, you need to increase revenue or some other growth metric. It’s imperative that everything done in the SEM account supports this objective, so you need intimate knowledge of every client’s top-level paid search goal. When the time comes to support the decisions made in the paid search account, it’s important for you to have the ability to tie an action back to the ultimate objective. With that being said, it’s best to be proactive about addressing these items, as opposed to waiting around for C-levels to ask these questions themselves, which is where the narrative comes into place.

The narrative is easier to create if the account is structured in a way that allows reliable, clearly validated reporting of metrics. So, in order to support the narrative with more reliable data, you must…

Structure the account in a manner that results in the most reliable data.

Just how to do this varies from account to account, but one commonality I believe that they should generally share is forced mappings to high-volume queries. If you are able to also create single-keyword exact match ad groups, Google’s “ad group impression share” will actually provide query-level impression share. This clean data really helps show the true reach of the account’s known high-volume queries, and it allows you to create an ‘opportunity report.’ At that point, the C-levels should have a pretty good understanding that economics (budget) have resulted in the ad positions they’re seeing on the SERPs. And, since that is now rather clear, the only two variables remaining to optimize/sculpt known high-volume queries are:

1)      Ad copy testing

2)      Conversion rate improvement (landing page and funnel optimization)

Not coincidently, these two variables are mostly tied to user behavior – which is why they require ongoing testing.

When the structure results in enough data to really reduce the variables down to these two, you’re in the catbird seat!

The ‘opportunity report’ should appease just about every C-level executive, but the required structure isn’t incredibly scalable. And though it addresses the question of ‘query optimization and sculpting,’ it doesn’t give you ‘query capture.’ So, your narrative must also address this question:

Are you capturing all the relevant queries?

It should be rather simple to show whether an account is optimizing the high-volume queries that have some record in the Search Query Report, but this doesn’t answer the question of query capture itself. As far as you’re concerned, this primarily equates to keyword coverage.

Unfortunately, there aren’t nearly as many tools and/or metrics to prove keyword coverage as would be ideal, but the Google keyword tool, SpyFu, and SEMRush are some of the tools available to help build out robust keywords lists.

None of this, however, should be the crux of the narrative’s portion concerning query capturing/keyword building. Instead, I think it’s important to establish that Google’s objective of late has been to minimize the number of auctions. What this means is that the vehicles for query capture (keywords) are doing their job pretty well! So, if we’re selling ‘+widgets’, the cream will rather quickly rise to the top as seen in the Search Query Report (or, at least, high-volume queries would become known). So, with the SQR, our broad match and modified broad match keywords would do the heavy lifting for us to find the high- volume queries with a relatively small set of keywords. At that point, it’s your job to get the most volume out of these queries via precise bidding, customization of ads, and landing page optimization.

This is, of course, arguing that the long tail is dead. Now, this doesn’t mean that people don’t still search with multi-token phrases; it’s just that getting into the long-tail auctions isn’t all that hard any longer.  Google has made it easier for advertisers to get into every auction that’s relevant to their business by introducing ‘fuzzy’ match types for exact and phrase keywords and modified broad match and greatly improving the reach of regular broad match over the years.

So, what does my CEO need to know again?

Overall, proving to a C-level that an account is best of breed is done with a robust narrative that is simple enough that a non-expert can follow the PPC logic clearly. This narrative must….

1)      Create consensus on an initial query capture strategy that is finite. This keeps ‘keyword expansion’ from becoming a never-ending series of questions that start with “Did we buy the keyword….?” All people involved should feel comfortable with the account’s keyword reach. Keyword expansion can also be done as a recurring task, but it needs to be created as a calendar item so that it does not continue indefinitely.

2)      Focus on query (exact match keyword) sculpting for known high-volume queries. Once high volume queries are identified, structure them in a way that reduces the optimization variables to only ad copy and landing page testing. The structure should support the idea that the bid isn’t necessarily a paid search skill, it’s a result of the profitability constraint, and is simply mathematics. The structure should lead to each and every metric being valid and precise.

3)      Set up processes that proactively reduce unnecessary spending. This primarily means addressing the question of negative keywords. (My preferred thoughts on this approach can be found here.)

Again, what you want to do with your narrative is simplify and limit the variables (i.e. questions that a CEO would have) to ad copy testing and conversion rate improvements. Bids are a function of goals, and goals are set by C-levels with your guidance and input, so they should not be under scrutiny. If they are, Google provides plenty of data that can do the talking.

For the most part, the narrative is rather simple and doesn’t address things like Quality Score. However, all of these questions will eventually be either bucketed into ‘query capture’ or ‘query sculpting.’ For example, if the question of Quality Score improvement arises, the answer is very tidy: “CTR is the main influencer of QS. Improving CTR is also a primary goal of query sculpting, which means we should do quite a bit of ad testing. Other factors of Quality Score include landing page relevancy, which aligns with a conversion rate best practice, something we also work on with diligence.”

This begs the question of whether creating such a simple narrative trivializes paid search and commoditizes PPC management. In general, I would argue that it does, BUT that in order to ensure job security you need to live outside the AdWords UI. This means you need knowledge of landing page optimization, multiple channels (i.e. ability to manage the “wide tail”), and tracking to tie all these channels together. Additionally, the question of ‘query capture’ is dynamic in that Google is always coming out with new enhancements. So, keeping abreast of these updates, and creating the logic of how to integrate the new enhancements into PPC narrative, is plenty to keep you occupied. Lastly, as most of us know, the act of ad copy testing is infinite, so there is always more to be done on that front!

So, the next time your CEO says something like “Are we getting the most out of paid search?”, hopefully the answer is “Absolutely, we did 10 landing page tests and 20 ad copy tests last month!”, which completely answers the question.

 
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.
 

What your CEO Needs to Know about Paid Search: Creating a Narrative is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Mike Blumenthal is a Google Places Gourmand. He has been around the local advertising space for several years and maintains a wonderful blog on local marketing.

I had known about Mike for several years and had even exchanged a few emails with him; but it wasn’t until last month when we were both in Germany for SMX Munich that I finally had the pleasure to talk local with Mike. After chatting with him for a bit (he really knows his stuff), I invited him to be on my radio show, Marketing Nirvana, and Mike gracefully accepted.

During the show, we chat about a variety of subjects:

• Local marketing
• Google places
• How local companies should build their web presence
• The top things local companies should do to success
• AdWords Express vs AdWords
• And more…

You can connect with Mike on:

• @mblumenthal on Twitter
• LinkedIN
• And be sure to check out his blog

If you are involved with local at all, you should listen to the show. There are a lot of very useful tips scattered throughout the episode.

The show will air on Monday, May 7th at 12 EST / 9am PST on Webmaster Radio.

While you’re waiting for this show to air, please check out some of our past episodes. The most recent past episodes include:

• Automated bid management with James Zolman
• YouTube marketing success with Manny Rivas
• Phone call tracking with David Szetela
• And many more still highly relevant episodes

You can find older episodes on iTunes or the archived show page.

I hope you enjoy the show.

Listen to Mike Blumenthal Talk Local Marketing is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Google just announced they are taking near match out of beta and rolling it out to everyone.

What this does is match you to close variations of search queries. It’s pretty similar to modified broad match, only it works for phrase and exact match.

What Near Match Does

For instance, if you are advertising on the keyword: “buy plasma TV”; you will NOT show for these queries:

• buying plasma TV (stemming)
• buy plasma TVs (plural)
• buy plasa TV (misspelling)

With the near match options, you will show for those keywords.

Dartboard Image credit: Velo Steve

Google Does It Again – Auto Opts You In – You Have to Opt Out

I really don’t like when Google does this – they opt you into something instead of leaving existing campaigns alone. I logged into an account today and all the campaigns were changed to the new match type by default.

So, if you don’t want to use it, you need to go through every campaign and disable it. It’s not in the AdWords editor yet, so you have to do this campaign by campaign. You do have until mid-May (supposedly) to change this.

To change the settings; just go to the campaign settings, and near the bottom of the page you’ll see the Exact and phrase matching options:

From there you can turn it off (or enable it if you turned it off earlier).

Update:  Various readers are seeing a large variety of things going on in their accounts. Some are seeing that all campaigns were opted in, and now only half are opted in. Others are seeing that they are completely opted in, yet others are changing the setting only to have it changed again after a couple hours (without them doing anything).

It seems that Google should not have launched a setting that wasn’t in use this far in advance of it going live. It’s only making people more confused and annoyed.

Will Exact Match Trump Near Exact Match?

I’ve talked to several people at Google about the near match ad rank issues to see what will trump what. I don’t have a clear answer. This is what I hear:

• Google always uses the most precise matching option, so if you have the exact match version of the word and the near exact match version of the word; then the exact match will be displayed
  • This isn’t true to begin with (always uses most precise match); so the extrapolated answer seems incorrect; but it could be correct
• Ad Rank is max CPC x QS. Since QS will be the same, then if your near exact match bid keyword is much higher than the exact match version of the word, then the near exact match will show and not the exact match
  • I’m guessing this is correct; and it could mess up stats.

How Stats Can Become Corrupted

Let’s say you have these two words:

• [Restaurant waiter clog]
• [Restaurant waiter clogs]

There are usually less ads on the ‘clog’ version of this keyword, and the CPC is generally lower than the ‘clogs’ version. However, it also has a lower conversion rate. Therefore, you bid the ‘clog’ version down a little bit, but as there are so few ads, it doesn’t matter.

Now, with everyone being opted in by default into this option, the ‘clog’ version is going to get a lot more competitive; so the CPCs will go up. As the ‘clog’ version has a lower conversion rate, you just accept the fact that you’ll get fewer conversions from this word and bid the word based upon ROAS.

However, the bid is so low for the ‘clog’ version that when someone searches for ‘restaurant waiter clog’ Google no longer triggers the exact match version; they trigger the ‘clogs’ version as it is a ‘near exact match’.

Now, the search query report should show that the ‘clog’ version received the click; but you can’t bid on a search query. You have to add it as a match type first. But, this keyword is already a match type with a lower CPC. So, you’ve now lost ad serving control.

How Often Do “Near Exacts” Have Different Conversion Rates?

That really depends (yeah, I hate the answer too).

I’ve dealt with accounts where the singular and plural versions sold different products, or used different pages.

I’ve dealt with accounts where everything similar behaves the exact same way.

Only you can find out this data for yourself. Take a look through the search query report and see if there are any commonalities amount singular words, plural words, misspellings, and stemmings.

It’s the stemmings I’m more concerned with that the plurals or misspellings.

What will this be matched to (note: phrase match): “Cleveland Driver”

• Cleveland driver (brand of golf club)
• Cleveland drive (the 1987 John Elway Game ‘The Drive’) or a street name
• Cleveland driving school
• Cleveland drivers license (drivers vs driver is a huge difference here)

And I’m sure there are much better examples that will come to those who have had more coffee than myself.

Can You Test It?

You can test almost anything; but this will be really hard to test. Cross campaign ACE (AdWords campaign experiments) would be really useful. That is among my top 5 wish list items for AdWords.

From a conceptual standpoint, there seem to be two ways to test it.

Exact Match Positive & Negative Keywords

Sometimes, Google won’t show you when you have the same word as a positive and negative in the same ad group or campaign – so this might not work.

• Copy/paste your exact match keywords to a new campaign
• Copy/paste those same keywords as negative exact match keywords
• Enable the setting
• See if you get traffic (uncertain if you will)

Since the new campaign’s keywords say show me for this, but don’t show me for the exact same item – then only if it’s a near match should the keyword be displayed.

In the old campaign, leave the ‘near match’ setting off so that it will capture the true exact match data.

Collect some info and compare the two campaigns.

Duplicate Campaigns w/ Lower Bids

This method is how you use to control search partners:

• Duplicate the campaign
• Change the setting to ‘near match’
• Lower the bids by 10%-20%
• Collect the data
• Examine the results

Now, this method is not as good as the other one. As the bids are lower, you will receive fewer clicks. And as you’re not controlling the info with negatives, you’ll get some corrupted data. However, it’s much faster than trying to match up all the negatives.

Should You Use It?

I have very mixed feelings about near match.

I work with some accounts that have loaded up on so many exact match and phrase match variations of words for their auto-bidding system; that the setting really isn’t that useful. In this case test it or leave it off.

I work with some accounts that have loaded up on exacts and phrases when it seemed useful, but they don’t spent enough time really controlling all of the display and they prefer to let the bidding system handle it. In this case, test out the setting to see how it performs.

In some accounts modified broad match is doing great, and when there’s a lot of traffic they also add the keyword as an exact match. For these accounts, it might be more useful to let the modified broad catch the ‘near match’ impressions and then use search queries, negatives, and true exacts to manage the bids – when there is a lot of traffic.

I think that might be the difference, the above management method is great for medium to large accounts. It is very difficult for accounts with little traffic.

So… are you a control freak? Then leave it off or split it out into another campaign.

Do you want the most exposure for the least amount of work, or do you have a small data set? If so, turn it on.

Are you in the medical jargon industry where misspellings outnumber correct ones? If so, turn it on.

Time vs Control

With these new betas, such as Display Campaign Optimizer, it comes down to control vs time. If you want lots of control, then it’ll take you longer, but you have control.

If you don’t want a lot of control, or have very little time, turn them on, benchmark how they do, and then decide to keep or turn off the setting.

As Google tries to make AdWords more appealing to the masses who don’t have lots of time, or sophistication; expect to see even more features that offer time saving methods, but at the cost of losing some control.

Google Launches Near Match – Should You Use It? is a post from: Certified Knowledge

 
In 2009, Alex Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, gave a short talk on Ted.com titled, Alexis Ohanian: How to Make a Splash in Social Media. In just four minutes, Ohanian shared the story of a humpback whale that Greenpeace wanted to save from whalers. In short, Greenpeace attached a tracking device to the whale and challenged the Internet community to come up with an endearing name for the whale. It offered users a choice of three names. Two of those names were inspired and one was a joke, Mr. Splashy Pants.

The Internet community overwhelmingly fell in love with the name Mr. Splashy Pants, but Greenpeace wasn’t thrilled with the choice. As Greenpeace pulled back, the Internet community continued to make its case. Users created Facebook pages, shared links, and encouraged others to vote for Mr. Splashy Pants. The more passionate users became, the more involved other users became. The name Mr. Splashy Pants won with 119,357 votes (78 percent). The next highest name received just 4,329 votes (3 percent).

Recognizing that the Internet had spoken, Greenpeace embraced the quirky name and created an entire campaign around it. It sold Mr. Splashy Pants t-shirts, buttons, and other goodies – and it accomplished its mission of pressuring the whalers out of the hunt. Mr. Splashy Pants was saved thanks in large part to the millions of social media users who got involved.

Ohanian made several interesting points about the power of social media. For example, the bulk of the voters got involved not so much because they’re passionate about saving whales, but rather out of an “interest for doing something cool.” He said that the Internet levels the playing field – and it costs nothing.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the story of Mr. Splashy Pants is this: When you engage in social media, be prepared to lose control. The playing field has indeed been leveled. Ohanian went on to say that “It’s okay to lose control; it’s okay to take yourself a little less seriously… You no longer control the message. And that’s okay… If you want to succeed, you’ve got to be okay to just lose control.”

If that thought scares you, social media may not be the best choice for you. However, if you’re okay with losing control and taking yourself a little less seriously, you may be able to accomplish your goals just as Greenpeace did through the power of social media.

Ohanian recommends that whatever you do, be genuine. Can you give up a little control over your message, take yourself a little less seriously, and be genuine? If so, you are ready to leverage the power of social media. Whether your ultimate goal is to raise awareness for a cause or sell more widgets, social media is a powerful tool that can take your message beyond expectations. But where should you start?

Start by:

• Committing to social media – It’s here to stay, so get involved. Commit to spending at least 15 minutes per day engaging in social media and responding to your followers.
• Sharing relevant, interesting information – While you may be tempted to use social media pages to showcase your products and services, you’ll need a balance between providing engaging content and sales pitches.
• Being genuine – People don’t want to follow corporations, they want to follow people. Be yourself, yet stay true to the corporate identity or your personal brand at the same time.
• Encouraging interaction – The more followers interact with you and share links, the more powerful social media becomes. Your message then extends beyond your social media circles and into those of your followers.

Social media is powerful, and it’s here to stay. Are you ready to make a splash?

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.

Understanding the Power of Social Media is a post from: Certified Knowledge