All posts by Tamsin Mehew

Excel Hints for PPC


By On February 16, 2012 In ppc, tools With 4 Comments

Excel is one of the best tools for PPC. Downloading your data into Excel gives much more scope for analysis and complex change than using a browser interface or AdWords Editor.

I *Heart* Excel

You may have already read Distilled’s Excel for SEO or some of PPCHero’s Excel tips, but here are my own hints.

Concatenation

If there’s one thing you can put into practice from this post, it is this: you can use ampersands instead of CONCATENATE().

A1&A2 is the same as CONCATENATE(A1,A2), except for being far fewer characters and not adding to the oft inevitable nightmare of nested brackets.

Earlier in the week Google announced changes to its privacy policies. The main changes are that:

  1. Now nearly all Google products are covered by one privacy policy.
  2. Information you give Google’s various different services can be combined.

Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn’t announced that it’s collecting information it wasn’t before, just that it’s combining what it has differently. You can preview the new policy here.

According to Forbes, combining information between Google services has been allowed by the privacy policies since 2005. But this didn’t stop the FTC complaining of privacy policy violations when Google used data from Gmail accounts when launching Google Buzz in 2010 – Google’s policy at the time also said “If we use this [personal] information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” The new policy instead says “We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.” Still, the FTC complaint may be a factor in why Google is trying to be very clear to its users about what it’s doing with their data, as it starts to treat all of its products as parts of a single unified service.

And now, some speculation on what this may or may not mean for PPC and SEO:

So you’re advertising on Google, but you want to branch out to Bing? There’s a new audience for you there, with less competition and less cost!

Microsoft adCenter is in many ways similar to AdWords. Your ads appear on searches that match your positive keywords but not your negative keywords. Your account contains campaigns, which contain ad groups, which contain keywords and ads. Your ad’s position and the price of a click are determined by your bid and previous performance. But there are many differences – here are some of the most important ones for when you’re starting out.

Markets and Locations

In adCenter, there are separate options for Market and for Location. The Market determines what language you can use and which websites your ads appear on. Location determines where the users are.

So if your Market is ‘UK – English’, and you target all Locations, then your ads will appear on English websites like uk.msn.com to visitors from anywhere in the world. If the Market is ‘UK – English’ and the Location is United Kingdom, the ads will be on the same websites, but only visitors from the UK will see your ads.

The current Markets are USA (in English or Spanish), Canada (French or English), UK (English), France (English) and Singapore (English). You choose a campaign’s Market when you create the campaign, and it can’t be changed afterwards. Location can be set at campaign or ad group level, and can be changed at any time.

Read the First 58 Takeaways from Conversion Conference London? Here are the next 65, from the afternoon of the first day.

Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser

The afternoon kicked off with a keynote by Bryan Eisenberg, who has been in the conversion optimisation business since 1998.

There were many great tips at Conversion Conference London last week – too many to fit into one blog post. Here are the first 58 takeaways from the first day. More to come soon!

Mobile and Real Time Optimisation

The conference started with Amy Africa, CEO of Eight By Eight, packing many tips for mobile conversion optimisation into her forty-five minute keynote.

  1. Three things matter for mobile:
    • You have to have some mobile presence (even if it’s not a full mobile site)
    • Optimise speed. A page should have a size around 50k.
    • Navigation.
  2. Mobile has a half to a third the number of conversions of a traditional site.
  3. You have to concentrate on only one goal.
  4. Get users’ email addresses or phone numbers so you can profile them.
  5. Pay attention to the user’s context, and use diversions to show them appropriate content.
    • Where have they entered the site from? Different sources convert differently, or will want different information. Twitter converts well on the phone. People from shopping sites will want prices. Concentrate on your top referring sources.
    • Where are they? You may want to show them a different page if they are looking at your site while in your store.
  6. Apps are not mobile sites. Concentrate on your mobile site rather than on making an app, unless you have a very good idea for the app.
  7. Treat users on tablets separately to those on mobile.
    • Tablet traffic convert around twice as much as desktop.
    • Mobile traffic convert a third or less.

If your ads display on irrelevant searches, then either you get clicks and waste money (as the searchers are very unlikely to convert), or you don’t get clicks and CTR drops (which affects Quality Score and therefore your CPC).

So how do you stop this? Part of the answer is choosing keywords carefully – be careful with general terms and use modified broad-match where appropriate – but for the best performance possible you need negative keywords to target your traffic properly.

1. Search Query Reports
The most obvious way, but also the most important. Look at your search query report and see what terms your ad is actually displaying for.

If you’re already using paid search marketing, how can you improve your results? Here are nine tips for sharpening up your campaigns.

Use conversion tracking & Google Analytics
Which keywords produce what results? Which cause people to make purchases, which result in newsletter sign-ups, which drive traffic to your forum or blog? You need tracking to answer these questions. AdWords (or AdCenter) will tell you what ads searchers click, but it won’t say what they do when they get to your site.

If you don’t have any conversion tracking installed yet, then install it. AdWords and AdCenter have their own conversion tracking, which records a conversion when someone who clicked on an ad subsequently visits a page on your site with conversion tracking code. This is usually a ‘thank you’ page for a sign up, or a receipt page after a purchase – it depends on your website’s goals.

One of our clients’ sites had a sudden drop in traffic from London. After the 25th of February, all London traffic – paid, organic and direct – had dropped by nearly 45%. There wasn’t an obvious reason. There hadn’t been any changes to the PPC campaigns or search rankings. It didn’t look seasonal; there was nothing similar in previous years.  Google announced that it was updating location targeting in AdWords earlier in February, but the list of affected locations didn’t include London.  The site’s total traffic had increased slightly, so why would London’s be down?

After a little while cross-referencing half-term dates and glaring at search term reports, I looked to see if any other towns or cities had been similarly affected. And while London’s traffic had nearly halved, that Kensington’s traffic had increased by over 20,000%. Lambeth was up by over 140,000%.