Search Engine Marketing Pros

Impression share report is one of the best sources to determine the health of your AdWords PPC campaigns and take proactive actions to optimize your AdWords PPC campaigns. You can use the impression share report to determine

1.    How well your campaigns are performing overall for the keywords you are advertising
2.    If you are losing opportunities to reach target market because of ‘Low advertising budget’ or ‘Low ranking & Low quality score’

The impression share report gives data across Google search, search partners and content network. When you are creating the report choose Ad Distribution and Ad Distribution with search partners. These … Continue Reading » Tips to Optimize AdWords PPC Campaigns Using Impression Share Report

For those of you who are too busy to optimize your campaigns manually, Google offers a useful tool to help you optimize your bids to get the most conversions out of your campaigns: Conversion Optimizer

To start off, let’s just review what Conversion Optimizer is, here’s Google’s definition:

The Conversion Optimizer is an AdWords feature that uses your AdWords Conversion Tracking data to get you more conversions at a lower cost. It optimizes your placement in each ad auction to avoid unprofitable clicks and gets you as many profitable clicks as possible.

How it works:

With the Conversion Optimizer, you bid using … Continue Reading » AdWords Conversion Optimizer Tips

What to do

Submit your products list to CSE (comparison shopping engines)

What to measure

The quantity and the quality of the traffic you receive

Why submitting to CSE

You should diversify your traffic sources as much as possible. Relying your business on a couple of search engines like Google or Yahoo! means putting you, your employees and investors at risk. Have you ever thought how your business will do if  you get banned on Google? Also, you want to grow the traffic to your website, isn’t it? And shopzilla.com and others like it can bring you some decent, converting traffic.

Different sources of traffic have … Continue Reading » Submit Feeds to Comparison Shopping Engines

Last week I started talking about what AdWords beginners should look out for when first setting up their campaigns and mentioned that targeting both search and display network is a very bad idea. This time, I will move on to another common mistake: targeting all countries & regions using a single campaign.

It’s logical to want to expose your ads to as many regions as possible, and by all means, you should do that. But the proper way of doing it is to target each region or country with separate campaigns. For example, if your target market is North America, it’s … Continue Reading » AdWords Tips for Beginners – Part 02

There is no doubt that AdWords (pay per click) has become a very popular advertising medium over the past few years. It’s easy to setup, manage, and track your performance. This advertising model fits business of all sizes ranging from national chains such as Best Buy to small business like my local music shop. But because AdWords is so accessible to everyone, it also tricks advertisers who are new to the system to think that they can easily manage the accounts on their own without putting in too much effort.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to talk about some … Continue Reading » AdWords Tips for Beginners – Part 01

This post describes a method to identify mismatches between the number of clicks on your AdWords ads and the number of visits you get to the websites. Ideally, for each 100 clicks on your ads you should get 100 visits to the website. However, this is not the case and there are more reasons for that: multiple clicks on your ads within 30 minutes from the same person, 301 redirects and mistakes and errors in Analytics/AdWords.

If you have a campaign that gets 1000 clicks but only 600 visits to the website, it is most likely that you have a problem, … Continue Reading » Identify AdWords Mistakes with Google Analytics Visualizer

When analyzing PPC campaign data, have you come across difficulties in analyzing the data to

1. determine if the data has seasonality and external factors
2. how to adjust the data for seasonality and external factors

Often when we analyze Adwords PPC campaign data, we have to ensure that the data is free from seasonality and other external factors before we determine how we can improve the performance of PPC campaigns. I will try to share the simple methods i use which you use to analyze the data.

Always start by understanding your client business, the products/services, their target market, any new products they … Continue Reading » PPC Data Analysis For Seasonality And Externalities

As I’ve mentioned before, Google and Yahoo have both updated its policy regarding online pharmacies advertising in North America through AdWords. If you don’t already know, here are the new policies (and it applies to Yahoo Search Marketing as well):

Only VIPPS and CIPA certified pharmacies will be allowed to advertise
We’ve made the decision to further restrict the ads we accept for online pharmacy sites in the U.S. and Canada. Starting at the end of this month, Google AdWords will only accept ads from online pharmacies in the U.S. that are accredited by the National Association Boards of Pharmacy VIPPS program, … Continue Reading » Yahoo Still Leaves Room for Canadian Pharmacy Ads to Show Up in the US

As you might already know, Google is very secretive about its algorithm on how Quality Score is calculated. Every now and then, there will be blog articles trying to speculate what factors actually affects quality score (and yes, this article is one of them, sadly), and they usually revolves around the keywords’ click through rate or relevance to the ads.

Just to refresh your memory, here is how Google defines quality score:

A Quality Score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query — that is, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad. Quality Score is … Continue Reading » Another Factor to Quality Score

We just got a new potential client this week (hooray!). While I was going through his account, I realized he’s got low impression share across all campaigns. This prompted me to dig deeper into the account.

Google defines Impression Share as:

Impression share is a metric that represents the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting.

For example, if your keyword has been searched for 1000 times, but your ad only showed  up for 600 out of the 1000 times, then the keyword’s impression share will be 60%, and the … Continue Reading » AdWords Lost Impression Share