All posts by Tamsin Mehew

Tamsin looks after PPC at SEOptimise, and is qualified in Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Bing Ads. She knows her way around an Excel vlookup.

Last Thursday was the first Search Firestarters event, hosted by Google and Only Dead Fish – and we were lucky enough to get an invitation. Here are our top takeaways!

Martin McNulty, from Forward3D

  • Don’t try to attribute your way out of a rubbish marketing campaign. If your marketing is rubbish no attribution model will fix that.
  • Modelling is not measuring – it’s about statistics and odds.
  • Concentrate on what you can control – it’s all very well finding out the volume of search depends on cloud cover, but you can’t control the weather so you can’t do anything about it.
  • Some companies will get most conversions from just one click – there’s not much point doing attribution modelling if it’s only for a couple of conversions.

Google announced new matching behaviour just over a week ago, nicknamed ‘near exact and phrase’: exact keywords will match misspellings and ‘close variants’, and phrase keywords will cover searches containing misspellings or close variants of the phrase. It’s not live yet (and won’t be until mid-May) but the setting for the new behaviour is already available in all campaigns and is switched on by default.

So, should you opt in or out? Here are my thoughts:

What will the effects be?

Even if you turn the setting off, you can still be affected.

As campaigns are opted in by default, it seems likely that the majority of advertisers will be using this new match behaviour. So there may well be a sudden increase in competition on misspellings and close variants – clearly this will affect you if you already bid on them.

Continuing our coverage of April’s BrightonSEO, here’s a write-up of ‘Microformats and SEO’: a talk given by Glenn Jones, a founder and director of Madgex. His slides are available here.

Glenn Jones presenting on Microformats and SEO at BrightonSEO 2012

Search engines are interested in getting structured data from websites for better user experience in searching. Google uses them for rich snippets in the search results, to show things like ratings and author pictures.

Full-blown bid automation tools are available, but they can cost too much for many businesses. But there are forms of automation available for free in AdWords. These could save you money on your advertising – but only if used correctly!

Conversion Optimiser

You specify a target CPA (cost per action) or a maximum CPA. AdWords then uses the CPA to calculate appropriate bids for each search auction depending on how likely it thinks a conversion is. The CPA you give may not be the actual cost per conversion, because in actual fact you are still paying per click.

To turn this on, go to ‘Bidding option’ in your campaign’s settings and select ‘Focus on conversions (Conversion Optimiser)’.

Google keeps making updates to the Display Network – so what’s going on?

Display Network Tab

The main change is that AdWords is collecting Display targeting options under one new Display Network tab

Previously targeting information was scattered between four tabs (Campaigns, Networks, Audiences and Topics), so the change should simplify management greatly. Although you can only edit keywords on the new tab if you have a Display Network-only campaign (as you should have!) and don’t have a Display Network bid.

Google also promises “a diagram that shows how your targeting methods, like keywords and placements, interact” – which is certainly an improvement from having to dig out the right help page to make sense of it. There will also be reach estimates (although their accuracy remains to be seen).

The most important part of this change is the addition of keyword level statistics – previously you could only see performance at ad or ad group level, but now you can see which individual keywords push traffic and conversions.

Is this helpful? Obviously access to more data is a good thing, but the Display Network’s keyword targeting is in my experience broader than the Search Network’s, so I’m not sure how much difference it would make having (say) different bids on ‘red widgets’ and ‘widgets’. Time (and experimentation) will tell. Still, the change means you could start with broader ad groups and split out the keywords with the most impressions or cost.

Excel Hints for PPC


By On February 16, 2012 In ppc, tools With 5 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.

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