Search Engine Marketing Pros » Internet Marketing Articles Categorized Pay Per Click (PPC)

Advanced Keyword Bidding Strategies for AdWords

Sahaj — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:30:18 +0000

AdWords advertisers are often faced with the challenge of determining whether or not to advertise for their AdWords campaigns keywords which have clicks and costs, but no conversions. Without knowing the value of the keywords, an advertiser can unwittingly:

Overbid on specific keyword terms – Not knowing its value might lead to wasted advertising dollars and unqualified traffic.
Underbid or pause specific keywords – Not knowing its value might lead to limited exposure for advertised keywords, resulting in missed conversions and revenue

This article discusses two options to determine the value of these keywords and better manage your AdWords campaigns, resulting in qualified traffic, conversions and high ROI. The two options are:

Tracking Engagement Metrics goals using Google Analytics and AdWords
AdWords Search Funnel report

Tracking Engagement Metrics goals using Google Analytics and AdWords

Google Analytics has improved its goal tracking, allowing advertisers to track Time On Site and Page/Visit. These metrics highlight the level of user engagement on your website for the keywords you are advertising through AdWords and other search engines. These metrics can be used to determine the value of the keywords you are advertising for.

The advantage of Goals is that they can be imported into Google AdWords. That means that you don’t have to access your analytics data separately to determine the performance of keywords. Secondly, seeing the keywords (along with CPC and other visitor engagement metrics) tracked as goals allows you to more easily determine your keyword performance and to manage bids.

Step 1: Ensure your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts are linked. Check the following link for more info: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55507

Step 2: Determine the base line or reference value to be set as goals for these engagement metrics using:

Your own top performing keywords’ engagement metric values
Website averages
Industry averages (obtained from Google or 3rd party data)

Also, determine the dollar value for the respective goals, based on your business data.

Step 3: Log in to your Google Analytics and select the Goals tab. You will find the various goal types. Google Analytics gives you the option to set up multiple goals, so you can set both Time On Site and Page/Visit, and their goal values as previously determined.

Google Analytics Goals

Step 4: Log into your AdWords account, click on Tools and Analysis, and select Conversions.

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking

Step 5: Under Conversions, select Import from Google Analytics and import the respective goals into AdWords.

Importing Goals in to AdWords

AdWords pulls data from the day you started importing Analytics goal data. This means that you won’t get any previous (historical) data. Now you can use the imported data to determine which keywords brought in qualified traffic by analyzing the engagement goals – Time On Site and Page/Visit.

In general, the higher these metric values, the more valuable the keywords are. But this may not always be the case, depending upon your business and website objectives. So verify them; use this data wisely to determine the value of the keywords with no conversions, and bid effectively.

Search Funnel Report

Google AdWords attributes conversions to the last keyword, and doesn’t attribute any conversion value to other keywords that helped lead to the final conversion. Let’s say you offer B2B lead generation and marketing automation services. Business buyers spend time researching for their needs and finding solutions to their problems, using multiple search queries over a period of time before contacting the vendor.

In the example below, the buyer starts his research with a general search query based on his needs/problems, discovers marketing automation, investigates further, and finally converts for the keyword phrase Marketo Consultant:

lead generation best practices
marketing automation
marketing automation software comparison
marketo marketing automation software
marketo consultant

AdWords attributes the conversion to the last keyword only, which is marketo consultant. As an advertiser, you will tend to bid high on the keyword that converted based on AdWords data. What about keywords that have generated clicks and costs or impressions, but no conversions?

How do you determine their value and bid more effectively?

Search funnel report helps advertisers understand how your target market searches for products and/or services, offering detailed conversion funnel data. You can use this report to determine the value of numerous keywords within your campaigns that didn’t generate a direct conversion, but did assist in the conversion process.

These reports also provide valuable information to help you understand your target market’s buying cycle (not discussed in this article). Following are the steps to download and analyze search funnel reports to help determine whether or not to advertise on non-converting keywords.

Step 1: Click on Tools and Analysis within your AdWords account. Select Conversions, and then click on Search Funnels.

Google AdWords Search Funnel

Step 2: Click on Assisted Conversions within the search funnel navigation.

Google AdWords Search Funnel Assisted Conversions

Step 3: You have two tabs – Click-Assisted Conversions and Impression- Assisted Conversions. Click-Assisted Conversions are keywords with clicks on your ads that assisted in conversions, while Impression-Assisted Conversions are keywords with impressions with views of your ads that assisted in a conversion.

AdWords Search Funnel Click-Assisted Conversions

Set the report detail to display keyword level data, and select the Click-Assisted Conversions tab. Also set your conversion history window to 30, 60 or 90 days, depending upon the buying cycle of your products/services. If you are a B2B advertiser with long buying cycles, then chose the appropriate date range. The report shows:

Keywords, along with their match types.
Last click conversions – The last keyword that a visitor searched for and clicked on your ad prior to converting.
Last click conversion value – The actual value of the conversion generated by the keyword.
Assisted Conversions – The keywords that either initiated or aided in the buying cycle.
Assisted Conversion Value – This is the actual conversion value (set by you or dynamically captured), multiplied by the number of assisted conversions.

Download this report and filter out last click conversions, since you want to determine the value of the keywords that didn’t have any conversions. Sort the keywords by Assisted Conversions. Determine how often these keywords assisted in conversions, and their conversion values.

Determine the keywords’ cost per click (CPC), and compare them with their assisted conversion values to determine if your bids are optimal. Use this as a reference, and decrease or increase your bids accordingly. Repeat the same process, this time selecting Impression Assisted Conversions.

Impression assisted conversions have value, as the keywords were actually searched for by your target market, although they didn’t click on respective ads. Determining why these keywords and their respective ads didn’t get clicked can help you gain insight into the purchasing behavior of your buyer, and to improve your ad copy for the related keyword terms.

Also, use the impression assisted conversion values to bid on keywords that have assisted impression but no clicks, instead of pausing or removing them without a proper analysis.

Please note that search funnel report only includes keywords that aided in a conversion. So if you found keywords missing in your search funnel report that were present in your AdWords account with costs, that means those keywords didn’t aid in any conversion.

Also, ensure that you have already checked these keywords’ engagement metrics for Analytics goals. Now that you have checked your keywords against goals and assisted conversion data, you can remove keywords that are costing you advertising dollars, but not helping to generate conversions.

This approach should enable you to more effectively manage keyword bids, helping realize better returns on the advertising dollars.

Advanced Keyword Bidding Strategies for AdWords is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

How To Track Clicks As Conversions in AdWords Using Google Analytics

Tomatoa — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:00:38 +0000

Not every action that you want visitors to perform on your website (conversions) can be tracked by AdWords’ default conversion tracking. For example, if you don’t have a Contact Us form with a Thank You page on your website, but have an email link that prompts the user’s email client to open when clicked, tracking how many people click on the email link can effectively measure that type of action.

Unfortunately, it cannot be done by AdWords’ conversion tracking. The same thing goes for tracking the direct download of a white paper, demo software (assuming visitors are not required to fill up an information form), etc. In a previous article, we shared another method to track clicks as Adwords conversions using a Javascript code that opens an invisible iframe containing the AdWords (or any other tracking code) at clicks on the tagged links.

Today we’re describing how you can achieve the same goal by setting up Event Tracking as Goals in Google Analytics, and importing the goals into AdWords as conversion. Here are the steps:

1. Add Google Analytics’ onClick event to the link that you wish to track:

CLICK ME

*Note: Replace all caps fields with the appropriate value.

HYPERLINK URL: the actual URL of the hyperlink.

CATEGORIES: Can be anything. Email Click or Download would be good choices from the above examples.

ACTIONS: Can be anything, but since we are tracking clicks as goals, let’s call it Clicks.

CLICK ME: The anchor text of your choice.

2. Log into your Google Analytics account.

3. Click on the profile setting icon on the top right hand corner.

4. Click on the Goals tab.

5. Click on + Goal from any of the available goal sets (if you don’t have any goals set up yet, just use Set 1).

6. Fill out the form as shown below:

7. Set a Name for your goal. It can be anything, as long as it makes sense to you.

8. In Category, fill in the blank with the exact string you used for the CATEGORIES variable in the tagging parameter.

9. In Action, fill in the blank with the exact string you used for the ACTION variable in the tagging parameter.

10. Click on the Save button to save your goal settings.

11. Log into your AdWords account.

12. Click on the Tools and Analysis tab and choose Conversions from the pull down menu.

13. Click on the Import from Google Analytics tab.

14. Select the goals that you would like to import, and you are done!!

If the Import from Google Analytics tab is grayed out, that means there are no goals currently available to be imported – probably because no one has clicked on the hyperlink you wish to track yet.

Pitstop Media offers ROI-based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.

How To Track Clicks As Conversions in AdWords Using Google Analytics is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Analyzing PPC Account Health Using Quality Score Distribution Chart

Tomatoa — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:10:12 +0000

Often it is difficult to tell whether or not there are fundamental issues within your PPC account by just looking at metrics such as Conversions or Cost per Conversions. If you are in a managerial position and not working hands on with the accounts every day, it gets even more difficult.

One way to quickly gauge the health of your account is by looking at the Quality Score of the keywords you are targeting. Low quality scores can sometimes point out certain issues within your account such as a bad landing page, bad ad copies, bad keyword choices, etc. A quick and easy way to overview the keyword quality score within your account is to create a pivot chart in Excel, like this:

Quality Score Distribution Chart

This Quality Score distribution chart can provide a quick overview of the health of your account. Ideally, you want to have all of your keywords in the 7+ range. If you see a lot of 1, 2 and 3s in relation to the rest of the keywords, that usually means there is room for improvement in your account. Realistically, a Quality Score of 6 and above is decent. A Quality Score of 4 can be considered a warning sign. Scores of 3 and below need to be taken seriously.

Here are the steps to create a Quality Score distribution chart:

Download a keyword performance report (in Excel) for the whole account. Make sure the Quality Score column is included in the report. (It can be any date range, since AdWords only shows the most recent quality score.)
Delete all keywords from the report that don’t have an Active status.
Delete all columns from the report, keeping only the Keyword and Quality Score columns.
Select the entire A and B columns, then go to Insert > Pivot Table > Pivot Chart, then click OK.
When the pivot chart is inserted In the new sheet, this is what you will see:
Chart Before Formatting
Check both Keyword and Quality Score boxes in the PivotTable Field List on the top right corner.
Drag Quality Score and Keywordtabs into the desired fields:
This is the initial state

This is what you want
Now you have a Quality Score Distribution Chart that you can use to analyze the health of your account.

To make things easier, you can download a sample Excel template here (2.1Mb). Just paste in your data into the Data Input sheet following the column names, and a chart will automatically be populated in the Chart sheet. Note that the file contains a macro to automatically update the chart, and you have to enable macros to make it work properly. Enjoy.

Pitstop Media offers ROI-based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase their AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.

Analyzing PPC Account Health Using Quality Score Distribution Chart is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

AdWords Location Targeting Update

Tomatoa — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 02:27:44 +0000

If you haven’t noticed, Google has quietly made changes to its location targeting options in AdWords in late October. Actually, I found out about the changes during my AdWords certification renewal exam, so I was quite shocked to see the completely different location targeting interface (and Google can you please update the exam questions?!).

Anyways, the new interface makes it easier to search for locations you wishes to target and also provides “reach numbers” to help you estimate the audience within you selected target (Reach is an estimate of the number of users in a selected location target, based on unique cookies).

So, how easy is it to search for locations now? Very easy!!

Simply type in the name of the city you wish to target (and the built-in auto-suggest function is really handy), and a list of eligible choice will show up. Just click on the “add” button beside the name of the city you wish to target, then you are set. And of course, you can choose to exclude the city as well, just simply by click on “exclude”.

Not going into too much detail here. You can get more info on the new features here from Google’s Adwords blog:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-10-31T08:15:00-07:00&max-results=10

What I’m going to focus here though, are features that Google took out during this makeover which in my opinions, are very disappointing.

Custom shape targeting is gone! Advertisers can no longer draw unique shape on the map to define the boundaries of their targeting areas. At the moment, Google still supports this feature for advertisers who are already using it, but only till the end of the year though. How to work around this? Advertisers are advised to run a geo-targeting report to find out which regions they were getting traffic from and add them back as individual locations.
Bundle targeting is removed as well! It used to be that advertisers could choose to target US & Canada as a bundle or All Countries & Regions as a bundle and now this feature is longer presented. It might not be a big deal for local business, but imagine how annoying it’s going to be for business that targets globally now they have to add all the 100+ countries one by one. You can argue that companies that advertise globally should have separate campaigns for each region or country anyways, so they have to pick out each country one by one regardless (this leads to the third point). Yes, that is the optimal scenario, but there are also small-medium size businesses that just don’t have enough budgets to spread across 100+ campaigns.
Browse function is gone! It used to be that advertisers can browse through the list of available targeting locations and pick out the ones they choose to target and now this is no longer available. Assuming I want to target all countries and regions, but I don’t know all the names of the different countries (be honest, who does?), what am I gonna do?! Sadly, I haven’t figure out a way around this.

I’m not really sure whether it’s just me not being able to find the missing features mentioned above in the new interface or Google had really taken them out, but aside from the newly integrated search function, the revamped location targeting interface feels like a downgrade to me.

Let me know if you guys are able to dig up those features. That would be much appreciated.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.

AdWords Location Targeting Update is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

e-Commerce Landing Page PPC Blooper

Sahaj — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:34:57 +0000

This holiday season I was searching in Google for Jawbone bluetooth headsets on sale. Tigerdirect.ca had an enticing Ad.

TigerDirect.ca PPC ad

Clicked on it expecting sales promotion on Jawbone head sets. But I was directed to home page with nothing related to Jawbone or Bluetooth headset promotions.

TigerDirect Homepage

I tried to search their Bluetooth section and found that they don’t have any Jawbone products at all. Not sure why would they specifically mention Aliph Jawbone, which is an actual product of Jawbone and not have any Jawbone products.

TigerDirect.ca promoted Jawbone headsets but didn't have them on their website

TigerDirect.ca is failing in many areas. Google AdWords policy clearly states that

advertiser should honor the deals and offers promoted on their ads
user should be able to find what the ad promises (discounts/free offers) within 1-2 clicks of the landing page

Further TigerDirect.ca is paying more per click because the ad has very low relevance to the landing page leading to poor quality score. You can check the Google AdWords policies from the below links:

AdWords landing Page policy on finding products within 1-2 clicks

AdWords landing page policy on honoring the offers made on the ads

AdWords Quality score

You can also check the video from Google AdWords on Landing page and site quality:

I hope this helps you understand the importance of selecting the right keywords, ads and landing pages to promote your website. If you are an e-commerce advertiser, ensure that your landing pages are relevant to the keywords and the ads you advertise. Further honor any sales promotions/discounts for you are not just losing advertising dollars but disgruntled buyers, potential new sales, business revenue and brand reputation.

e-Commerce Landing Page PPC Blooper is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

AdWords Tip – Is “Get Recent Changes” Necessary Every Time?

Tomatoa — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:58:27 +0000

Those of you who work with AdWords on a regular basis knows that it’s impossible (or impractical) to manage AdWords accounts by only either using the AdWords Online Interface or AdWords Editor. Most people use the combination of the two.

When working on two separate platforms, making sure data are in sync on both of them becomes very important (on a totally unrelated side note, I’m lovin’ iCloud). The common practice for most people would be making small changes like a campaign budget change or add a few negative keywords that caught your attention using the online interface and use the editor for making bulk changes like updating different ads across campaigns or changing bids for lots of keywords at once.

Since the data and stats you see in AdWords Editor are only stored on your computer and not actually linked Google, any change you made using the online interface won’t be reflected in the editor unless you use the “Get Recent Changes” function on AdWords Editor. Only then, you will be seeing the most updated account information on your editor.

I’m sure the following scenario has happened to the majority of advertisers out there: You made some minor changes to your account using the online interface and a few days (or even a few hours) later, you made some bulk changes using the editor and you uploaded the changes.

AdWords Tip

Pause! What’s missing? You didn’t get recent changes to retrieve the changes you made from using the online interface before uploading the new changes made from the editor. Don’t deny it; you must have done this at least once! What are the consequences? Well, personally, I never noticed any.

I didn’t really look into this until a client told me she started noticing some of the changes she made to the account got revert back to the original (we both have access to the account) and she suspected it was because I didn’t get recent changes before I uploaded the changes I made using editor. I wasn’t sure if that was the case so I called Google and ask about the situation. To my surprise, the representative actually confirmed that uploading changes using the editor without getting recent changes first will override the changes made from the online interface with the current data stored in the editor.

I was shocked at first because I had never encountered any problems like this. Then, being the paranoid and defensive person I am, I ran a test on our agency’s AdWords account (plus, you shouldn’t believe everything that government…wait…I mean Google tells you anyways). I added a negative keyword to the account using the online interface, then made some change using the editor and uploaded the change without getting recent changes.

Get Recent Changes

Result? The negative keyword I added using the online interface was still there! It didn’t get over written.

So what’s the conclusion? Just make it a habit of getting recent changes every time you use the AdWords editor because Google can change its regarding this issue system without us knowing it. But if you realized you forgot to do it, don’t freak out, it most likely didn’t do anything to your account.

I’m interested to see if anyone is getting different results. Let me know!

AdWords Tip – Is “Get Recent Changes” Necessary Every Time? is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Business Owners’ Self-Help Guide to Successful PPC Campaigns

Tomatoa — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:38:39 +0000

Starting this month, I’ll be writing a series of articles on how to create and manage successful pay per click campaigns for small & medium business owners in a step by step fashion. Each article will cover one single area (step) of creating PPC campaigns from scratch. Later in the series, I’ll start talking about how to manage and optimize the campaigns once everything is created and has been running smoothly for a while.

As the title of the series suggests, this is a self-help guide for business owners. At this moment, I haven’t set an amount on how many articles there will be in this series because there are countless things that you can do to improve your account; but I hope those who follow me to the end of the journey can all have a positive ROI from their online marketing effort, or at least have a self-sufficient PPC account in the worst case, without having to pay a cent to anyone for consultation or other kind of help.

I understand that reading manuals can sometimes be very tedious and dry, so I’ll try to keep the articles as entertaining as possible (mostly with my sarcastic humor). If you are easily offended, you might not want to come back (Joke #1).

On a more serious note, even though having successful PPC campaigns is largely based on a lot of planning and strategies, it’s also very technical and there are some key terms and metrics one should familiar themselves with:

Keyword

The keywords you choose are the terms or phrases you want to “trigger” your ad to appear. For example, if you deliver fresh flowers, you can use “fresh flower delivery” as a keyword in your AdWords campaign. When a Google user enters “fresh flower delivery” in a Google search, your ad could appear next to the search results.

Campaign & ad group

AdWords accounts are organized into campaigns and ad groups. You start with one campaign, which has its own daily budget and targeting preferences. As you expand your advertising, you add more campaigns or ad groups, which are sets of related ads and keywords within a campaign. For example, you might choose to create one campaign for each product or service that you want to advertise.

Click

If a customer sees your ad and clicks on it to learn more or to do business with you, it’s recorded in your account as a click. Monitor your clicks to see how many people choose to enter your website from your ad.

Cost-per-click (CPC)

With cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. You can have AdWords manage your CPC automatically, or you can choose to set your maximum CPC bid manually. Your CPC bid helps determine how often your ad can appear and its ranking on the page.

Impression (Impr.)

The number of impressions is the number of times an ad is displayed on Google or the Google Network. Monitor your impressions to see how much exposure your ad is getting.

Clickthrough rate (CTR)

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions). A keyword’s CTR is a strong indicator of its relevance to the user and the overall success of the keyword. The more your keywords and ads relate to each other and to your business, the more likely a user is to click on your ad after searching on your keyword phrase.

Average Position

Average position is a statistic displayed in the “Avg. Pos” column in your AdWords account. It refers to the position on a search results page where your ad appears for each of your keywords. “1″ is the highest position on the first page of search results. There is no “bottom” position. An average position of “1.7″ means your ad usually appears in positions 1 or 2. Average ad positions are not fixed; they may vary depending on various performance factors.

Networks

You can choose where on the Internet your ads will appear. Ads can appear on Google’s Search Network, Display Network, or both. The Search Network includes Google and other search sites. Ads can appear beside or above search results for keywords that you choose. The Display Network includes a collection of websites that have partnered with Google (display partners), YouTube, and specific Google properties that display AdWords ads.

Quality Score

Quality Score is a measure of how relevant your ad, keyword, or webpage is. Quality Scores help ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network.

In the next article, I’ll talk about how to effectively create a keyword list. But at the mean time, get yourself familiar with the terminologies above. It’s very important to have a solid foundation and knowledge before you start the journey. The road ahead might be rocky from time to time, but I promise (hope?) it will be fun!!

Business Owners’ Self-Help Guide to Successful PPC Campaigns is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Why Is It Important to Create New Ads Instead of Overwriting Old Ads in adCenter

Tomatoa — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:00:31 +0000

Have you guys ever heard of the rumor that whenever you create new ads for your PPC campaigns, it’s always better to pause existing underperforming ads then create brand new ads instead of overwriting the existing ads?

Turns out the rumor is true!! (Okay, enough with the sarcastic attitude.)

The primary reason is that the new ad you created might not necessarily perform better than the old ones. There is always a possibility that you’ll want to revert back to the old ads. But for Microsoft adCenter, it is even more important to follow this guideline. Why?!

In Google AdWords, whenever you overwrite an existing ad, the old ad is automatically treated as deleted and the new ad’s stat is reset back to zero. But adCenter is different! If you overwrite an existing ad in adCenter, instead of treating the old ad as deleted, adCenter simply replace the content of the ad with the new ad copy and even the stats from the old ad are carried over to the new ad. You can see how this can create a huge problem.

Imagine you have this very bad ad in your account (no conversion, low CTR, accumulated lots cost, etc) and you want to replace it with a new ad to boost your account performance. If you just overwrite it, the next time you check up on the performance of the new ad copy, you will be seeing the crappy stats from the old ad copy combined with the newly gathered stats from the new ad copy. There is no way you can make an accurate analysis from that.

So, yeah, always create brand new ads instead of overwriting and make it a habit. One day it will save the world!! (or just your PPC account…close enough)

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

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Why Is It Important to Create New Ads Instead of Overwriting Old Ads in adCenter is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Proven AdWords Best Practices to Optimize PPC Campaigns

Sahaj — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:00:56 +0000

Following are the most basic and proven best practices you can use to effectively manage your AdWords PPC campaigns and generate results.

AdWords campaign objectives

The most important component of all successful PPC campaigns is to know clearly the objective/s of the AdWords campaigns. Well defined campaign objectives help measure how effectively the campaigns are being managed and enables advertiser to take necessary actions if required.

Example: You have an e-commerce website and want to sell auto parts online.

Objective: Sell online to buyers, increase sales, revenues and profits.

The above objective really doesn’t provide details of what should be the cost per conversion, the marketing budget, the minimum number of conversions required etc. A better defined objective compared to the above one:

$25,000 advertising budget requiring 500 conversions per month at maximum cost per conversion of $50.

Flesh out in detail what you want to achieve and for how much. It should have the details of how much you are willing to spend per conversion, how many conversions you require per month minimum, what is your monthly marketing spend etc.

Tracking conversions

Use AdWords tracking code to measure and track conversions. Without proper conversion tracking system in place you won’t be able to determine the actual value of your PPC advertising spend which means you are prone to make poor decisions. AdWords also allows advertisers to track revenues as well as offers different conversion tracking codes for measuring different user actions.

Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics, a free analytics tool which will help you understand how visitors behave on your website. This information can be used to make effective business decisions helping you achieve online marketing objectives. Click here for more details: Linking AdWords and Google Analytics

Further Google enables you to link AdWords and Google Analytics account allowing for import of PPC data in to analytics offering great insights in to visitor behavior. For importing other vendor PPC campaign data check this link on how to tag your urls: Google Analytics URL tagging

Keyword match types

AdWords provides different keyword match types allowing advertisers to determine who sees their ads and for what types of search queries. Click here to learn about AdWords keyword match types. Also AdWords lately introduced modified broad match resting more control with advertisers as to how they want to reach potential buyers for misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings.

Click here to read more about modified broad match. The use of various match types depends upon your target market, campaign objectives, budget, geographic regions you want to target etc. Hence understand their application and use them prudently to get the maximum ROI.

Negative keywords

Another feature of AdWords that’s often not utilized effectively is the negative keywords feature. Negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want your ads to show up for and the best part is you can add them at your campaign and ad group level. You can reduce costs, unqualified traffic and improve your campaign performance by having a well researched Negative keyword list. Another advantage is having your ads show up for only relevant search queries leading to improved click through rate which influences your quality score and helps reduce cost per click.

Site links

AdWords introduced a new feature called sitelinks. You can add up to 10 different pages of your website at your campaign level. If you ad qualifies to show up in the top 3 positions then these site links will show up. AdWords states that advertisers using sitelinks have increased their click through rate by 30% on average. All it takes is 5 minutes to add these urls and viola, you get more clicks.

Click here to read more about AdWords Sitelinks

Testing ads

One of the features at the campaign level is ad testing feature. You can set your ads to show evenly or can chose to show the top performing ads. If you don’t have budget then I suggest choosing to show your top performing ads allowing AdWords to choose the better performing ad. If you are testing then I recommend choosing to show your ads evenly and select the better performing ad with little more accurate statistical data.

Repeat

In order to have your PPC campaigns perform continuously, you as an advertiser need to continuously test and analyze data, make changes and use best practices to improve the campaigns on periodic basis. This ensures that you aren’t in for any surprises and allowing your campaigns to perform.

So start optimizing your PPC campaigns and get results.

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Proven AdWords Best Practices to Optimize PPC Campaigns is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

How to Quickly Update Bids to First Page Bid Estimate in AdWords

Tomatoa — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:33:26 +0000

Let me take a wild guess here: “all of you who advertise on AdWords want your ads to have as much exposure as possible. Even if not on the top three positions, but at least on the first page.” True?

Well, I actually don’t really care what your answers are, it was just a stupid opening phrase anyways. But on a more serious note, being on the first page of the Google SERP does bring you a lot more clicks compares to being on the second or third page. Especially with a brand new account, a lot of keywords might be below the “first page bid estimate”. You want to bid high enough to have your keywords at least on the first page to either gather more data for further analysis or build good AdWords history.

So, yeah, “first page bid estimate”. As the name suggests, first page bid estimate is Google’s estimate on how you should bid on your keywords in order for them to show up on the first page of Google SERP. It’s not always accurate. Sometimes you can bid lower than the estimate and still have your ads show up on the first page, but for most of the time the estimate is a very useful guideline.

Google’s AdWords interface has this function that lets you automatically adjust keyword bid to the first page bid estimate in a batch. This is very useful when you have a lot of keywords that are under the first page estimate (this usually happens with brand new accounts), so you don’t have to manually change the bid one by one for each individual keyword.

Prefill All CPCs to First Page Bid Button

There’s one thing to watch out for though! Sometimes the first page bid estimate can be ridiculously high, and if you are unaware of it you might end up draining your entire budget in a matter of only a few clicks.

Really High First Page Bid Estimate

It’s best to review the first page bid estimates first before applying the changes. If the estimates are too high, it might also means there’s either problems with your landing page or with your ads.

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How to Quickly Update Bids to First Page Bid Estimate in AdWords is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!