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As shown in my last blog post, now that Google are using expanded broad match to trigger ads from “travel ppc” for a search query on “shooting holidays USA”, getting a comprehensive list of negative keywords is a good idea. In this post I list five good resources for finding negative keywords; some of them are not intended to be used in this way but they still give useful information about possible negative keywords.

1. SEO Book Forums
Most campaigns will want a generic list of negative keywords. Things like “free” or “reviews” are good examples of negative keywords for any sort of campaign that sells a service or product online. The SEO Book has a huge list of negative keywords on their SEO Community Forums. You need a subscription to access the forum; I don’t think it’s worth getting one just for this but if you have one already then make use of this resource which is a great negative keyword starting point.

2. Google Keyword Tool
This is an obvious one but it’s still worth mentioning. When you’re using the tool to look for keyword ideas and you see something that isn’t relevant to your ad group then select “negative” from the drop down menu and prevent your ads from showing.  You can also use any other keyword tool in a similar way.

3. Google Analytics
Once you’ve implemented the Google Analytics filters I talked about last week you’ll have a list of the search queries people used when they clicked your ads. Not only is this a great for finding new keyword variants it’s also a good source of possible negative keywords.

4. SpyFu
Get a SpyFu report on your own domain name. SpyFu works by doings its own Google searches and scraping the results. If it says you’re bidding on “Price searches” then an ad with your domain as a display URL is showing an ad for that term. You can also have fun trying to guess what broad match terms your competitors are using based on their paid keywords.

5. The Google SERPs
Everyone knows that when you do a Google search the search query appears in bold whenever it is written on the results page. What people may not have noticed is that Google also emboldens (is that even a word?) related terms that it thinks are semantically linked to the search query. For example if you search “SEO” then “search engine optimisation” also appears in bold. If you see something in bold that isn’t relevant then add it as a negative.

6. Google Search Based Keyword Tool
As you’ve probably read yesterday, the new Google Search Based Keyword Tool is designed to help you spot missed opportunities in your AdWords campaign. Like most keyword tools it can also be used to find good negative keywords. This one is worth mentioning in its own point because it also gives you suggested landing pages for each new keyword. If one of your existing PPC landing pages is appearing as a suggestion for a lot of negative keywords then this suggests that the page should be more tightly optimised to prevent Google matching it with other PPC search terms.

Another useful thing to remember is to keep thinking in terms of your ad groups when adding negative keywords; if you have an ad group for “red cars” and an ad group for “blue cars” you should add “blue” as a negative in the “red cars” ad group. Otherwise expanded broad match might decide that since your “red cars” ad group has such a great quality score it might display that ad on the query “blue cars” even if you have [blue cars] as an exact match in your other ad group.

There is also a useful summary of a discussion on how negative keywords are matched over at seroundtable which is definately worth a look if you’re adding negative key phrases rather than just keywords.

It can be very difficult at times to find the actual search terms your PPC traffic arrives from, so this is a Google Analytics trick all advertisers should know. Google’s search query report can be useful but for high-traffic phrase or broad match keywords being told that 8 of your clicks arrived on “85 unique queries” doesn’t really give you the complete picture!

Since the introduction of expanded broad match Google can (and does) match your broad match keywords to just about anything vaguely relevant; knowing these queries is important, either to negative match them or to reduce CPCs by using an exact match. The image below really does highlight this point, notice the extremely irrelevant term “shooting holidays USA” was triggered by a broad match of travel PPC!

This report was setup last week and shows the AdWords keywords (either exact, phrase or broad match) followed by the actual search term which triggered the clickthrough in brackets:

(Click for full-size image)

Step by step guide on how to setup a Search Query report in Google Analytics
This information can easily be found in Google Analytics but, although the method is simple, it is not obvious; to be able to access this PPC goldmine you have to use filters. Until last week I didn’t even know the filters feature existed and even if I had I wouldn’t have been able to do the regular expressions stuff that our filters will need. For this reason I’d like to thank the Google Analytics Experts and the linklove blog for giving me some simple step by step instructions.

• In the above case we’ve set up a new profile before messing around, just to ensure that if a mistake was made none of the data is affected. There’s an “Add a Website Profile” option on the Analytics settings page; you want to add a profile for an existing site and then name it.
• Then you want to write the two filters; click the “Filter Manager” button and then add a filter.
• This first filter will get the search query and place it in a user defined field. I call it “Get Search Query” but you can name it whatever you want to. Select “Custom Filter” from the filter type drop down menu and select the “Advanced” radio button. You should see some input fields named “Field A -> Extract A” and similar.
• In the “Field A -> Extract A” drop down menu select “Referral”; this will pull out the SERP’s URL on which the ad was shown. In the box to the left on the drop down menu write “(\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*)” without the quotation marks. This is a regular expression which extracts the search query from the SERP’s URL.
• In the “Field B -> Extract B” drop down menu select “Campaign Medium” and write “ppc|cpc” in the box. This filters out all the organic clicks.
• In the “Output To -> Constructor” drop down choose “Customized Field 1” and enter “$A3” in the box. This just tells Google Analytics where to store the data. Finally you need to click the button to make field B required and the one to turn off case sensitivity. Then apply the filter to your new profile.
• The 2nd filter includes this new data in the keyword report. Again, you want to set up an advanced custom filter but this time choose “Customized Field 1” from the “Field A -> Extract A” drop down. In the box write “(.*)”
• For “Field B -> Extract B” select “Campaign Term” to find out which of your keywords the search query matched and enter “(.*)” again in the box.
• Finally in the “Output To -> Constructor” menu choose “Campaign Term” or wherever you want your data to go and then enter “$B1, $A1” The space after the comma means that you can export your data to a .csv and have a separate field for the actual search term.
• If you’ve followed the steps as I’ve laid them out then the filters should be applied in the right order; if you want to check the information is there when you click to edit the new profile from the “Analytics Settings” page.

As always, it’ll be a little while before Google Analytics starts to register the new data so don’t be too impatient. Unfortunately the filters can’t be applied retrospectively so you can’t start using them on all your old data but as far as I’m concerned this is the only downside. Set up the filters and start refining your AdWords campaigns!

In my ppc for travel post from a couple of weeks ago I recommended splittester for testing ad variations. I got a bit fed up with only being able to test two ads at once and having to type the information in for each test. I though it would be a lot easier if I could do the same thing on a spreadsheet. I emailed Brian Teasley the creator of splittester, to find out what sort of statistical test he used so that I could implement it in my own spreadsheet. He offered to sell me his own spreadsheet for $950. NINE hundred and fifty dollars! Nine HUNDRED and fifty dollars! Nine hundred and FIFTY! For a spreadsheet! Brian, I could buy a bank for that.

I wasn’t going to pay $950 for a spreadsheet so I began to do my own research about statistical testing with the aim of using it for our own ads. Having read quite a few SEO blog posts on the subject I think that quite a lot of people don’t really know what they’re talking about when it comes to ad testing. Throughout this article I’m talking as if you’re optimising for CTR. The procedure for optimising for conversion rate is very similar; for impressions read clicks, and for clicks read conversions. Here are 5 of the most insidious errors:

1. You must have x clicks (mistake 1).
It isn’t a higher number of clicks that makes a result more statistically significant; the important thing, your sample size, is the number of impressions. Think of it this way; if you had an ad with 1,000,000 impressions and no clicks you wouldn’t wait for it to get a certain number (30 seems popular for some reason) of clicks before deciding it was a bad ad. In my own model I treat each impression as a Bernoulli trial with a click being a success. Then I estimate the binomial parameter p, the variance of which gets smaller as the number of impressions increases.

2. You must test two ads.
People only talk about A/B testing of adverts. You can still get valid results if you’re testing 1000 ad variations at the same time. The main problem with this is that your test would have to run for a long time to get significant results. It is also hard to say why the best ad might be best which makes it difficult to write your next ad variation.

3. Use a two-tailed test.
Some of you might not know what a two tailed test is. Imagine you have two ads called A and B that you’re testing for CTR. To test the hypothesis “A and B have different CTRs” you’d use a two tailed test to sum the probabilities that A was better than B and that B was better then A. If the test tells you your hypothesis is true what do you do? You’re no further forward because you already thought the ads would have a different CTR otherwise you wouldn’t be testing them.  To establish how sure you can be that ad A is better than ad B you must use a one tailed test. Telling someone that “You are approximately 99% confident that the ads will have different long term response rates” is useless.

4. You must have x clicks (mistake 2).
It is true that if the test runs for long enough then it will be obvious which ad is actually the best. But how long is long enough? Waiting 6 months to see if an ad with an apparent CTR of 0.5% is going to have a late surge to beat one with a CTR of 4.5% just causes your business to miss out on clicks. To solve this problem and know when a split test has been running long enough you must use a statistical test. I’d say there are three possibilities to choose from:

• The simplest test to use is known as a z-test. To use a z-test you must assume that CTR is normally distributed and your sample size must be big enough so that the sample CTR variance is a close approximation to the true variance.
• For small sample sizes use a t-test. Or more specifically, Welch’s t-test. This test does not assume that you know the population variance so it is a better test than the z-test. For large sample sizes the t-distribution matches the normal distribution (used in the z-test) so for large samples, since the t-test is more complicated to use, I’d use the z-test.
• For the above two tests there is an implicit assumption that CTR is normally distributed (on a bell curve). I think this is actually the case but if you disagree let me know why on the comments below and then start using the Mann-Whitney U test. Wikipedia says that for normally distributed data a Mann-Whitney U test is 95% as good as a t-test and it is less likely to give spurious results based on outliers. I would consider using this test when the CTR is small since then anyone who clicked the ad could be considered an outlier.

5. Any difference in CTR is because of the Ad.
I haven’t seen this view all that much but its one I believed myself until quite recently. I thought that any difference between the CTR of the ads being tested must be due entirely to the difference between the ad texts. I didn’t think that one ad might’ve been shown on slightly more relevant keywords or at a time of day when it was more likely to get clicked. How do you compensate for this when you’re testing? For a useful campaign ‘in the wild’ I don’t think it is possible to completely avoid this problem; it is impractical to have only one exact matched keyword per ad group. Instead do the best you can by following AdWords best practice and using tightly grouped keywords in each ad group.

I hope to blog a bit more about ad variations and statistical testing; I’ve had some pretty weird things come up as being statistically significant. Put any questions or comments in the form below and I’ll try to address them in my next post.

It is a PPC truism the ads in the top two positions get too many “curiosity clicks” and tend to convert poorly in comparison to ads lower down the page. I guess the thinking is that people who bother to read past the first couple of lines on the SERP are serious buyers. (So much of a truism that I can’t seem to find one blog post to link to that deals with this. Maybe it is a Richard Fergie truism rather than an industry wide one).
This all seemed to make sense so I introduced position preference bidding for one of our clients last week. There was no lower limit on ad position but the ads should not have appeared higher than position 3.  In the clients own words the results were “a little grim to say the least.” Conversion rates dropped over 10%. O dear.

I should’ve used my head and done some number crunching beforehand. Instead I’ll do it now and share the results with you. I know how much you love graphs, so I’ll even throw in one of them. Just for you.
The data comes from clients that use conversion tracking and for whom I also had last months data already cached in AdWords editor. For each ad group (over 2000 in total) I’ve plotted its average ad position against its conversion rate. Conversion rates can be very different across different verticals so this figure has been expressed as a percentage of the account average. A logarithmic scale has been used for the conversion rate percentage to try and space the data points out a bit.

Kevin’s comment when he saw this was “that looks like a bit of a mess” and I think he’s right. The graph is dominated by travel pay per click campaigns and recruitment accounts which make a big cloud in the middle. There seems to be a dramatic tail off in conversion rates for the DNA testing vertical about position 5.2 but this data is from only one small account so it may not be that accurate.

So what does this mean in terms of position preference bidding? It all depends on how much you have to pay for the top spot.  As this next graph shows, there is a definite increase in traffic associated with the top ad positions (the trend is exaggerated when a logarithmic scale is not used) so the higher placed your ad the more conversions you’ll get. The trend is not as pronounced as I thought it would be, but there is a correlation there.

If the cost/conversion is low enough you stand to make a lot of money, but if the CPC pushes your cost/conversion too high then it might not be worth bidding for the top spot.

To calculate if bidding for the top spot is worthwhile you need to decide if the tighter margins you’ll get as a result of increased ad spend is worth the extra sales. In some cases it will be, in some cases it won’t. I think my first graph shows that, at least in the verticals tested, there is no sweet spot for ads where conversion rates are high and prices are cheap. It comes down to a quite simple equation; make more on a tighter margin with a higher CPC or make less but have more profit on each transaction.

My own placement preference bidding experiment was a failure; let me know if you’ve had any successful ones.

Do you do any sort of pay-per-click management for the online travel vertical? I recently attended a Google AdWords Webinar about online travel trends which they based on a ComScore study of 50,000 UK web users. Our Google rep sent me a copy of the ComScore study which I have used to bring you my top ten useful tips for running a travel PPC campaign.

• Nearly half of all travel searches are brand related; can you afford to miss out on all this traffic? 36% of people who buy holidays use a brand search first and use a brand search immediately before purchasing so bid on branded keywords in your PPC campaigns
• Use day parting for PPC; people are 30% more likely to purchase a holiday on a Monday or Tuesday. Increase your bids then to capture this traffic and lower them at the weekend. Only 7% of purchasers buy a holiday on a Saturday.
• Get them early; 15.9% of purchasers buy their holiday from the first site they visit. Only 1.6% will buy immediately, but around 14.3% will return at some point for a conversion. Forget what you’ve learnt about the buying cycle; bidding on keywords that customers use in the research phase can get you a 15.9% conversion rate!
• Make sure your URL’s are memorable; 35% of transactions occur without a search on the same day. These people must’ve seen something they liked then gone away to think about it. Make sure they can remember where they were.
• Destinations aren’t as important as you think. 45% of online travel purchases are made without a destination search. Of course this means that 55% do use a destination related search term but I used to think that just about everybody would search for their destination at some point.
• Save some money for January. For the last few years there has been a massive peak in travel searches every January. Look on Google Trends with the travel query of your choice. Or don’t; trust me, there will be a peak in January.
• Ad variations are always a bit of a mystery. Test everything. Once I misspelled “hotels” as “hotsel” is an ad which turned out to have a (statistically) significantly better CTR. I thought I’d found something great so I rolled similar variations out across other ad groups. A few weeks later I checked to see what was going on, using splittester to judge which results were significant. Some ad groups it was better, some ad groups it was worse. I have no idea why. Test everything all the time.
• Most purchasers will visit your site at least twice before purchasing; make repeat visits more likely by including new and interesting content for them.
• Be patient. You’ve made all these changes, but on average it takes 29 days between first search and transaction for a holiday buyer. 30% of purchases occur more than 6 weeks after the initial search.
• Don’t want to be patient? Want to get the 17% of users who purchase after only one search? Then ideally you’re from easyjet, ryanair or some other well known airline. Branded searches tend to convert quicker (63% of single search transactions are branded) so build your brand if you want the shortest gap between click and conversion

I only got to look at the study this week so there hasn’t been time to see if all of these tips really work. I’ll let you know if any big surprises come along as I collect more data.

Update: We have now published a travel SEO article which looks at how to target searchers at the right stage of the buying cycle.

Its Friday afternoon, no one’s blogged on here for a while and I’ve been asked to step up to the plate without mentioning SpyFu! I should’ve been thinking of what to post for a few days now but I’m afraid I’ve been a bit distracted…

So, I’m sitting in a bar with a nice cool pint. I lean back in my chair and look around; what do I see?

That guy over there, he’s got one friend opposite him but he’s talking so the whole room can hear.”He’s not targeting his efforts” I think to myself, “expensive strategy but I guess he’s making a lot of impressions. I suppose his CTR can be quite low and he can still have a lot of success.” At this point I realise that AdWords has ruined my life but I can’t stop myself…

Thin skinny guy, black coat, black hair, band t-shirt. Leaning against the bar, nearly finished his drink. Looks like he’s watching the girls in the booth by the window.But he’s too slow, they’re leaving. Hang on, they’re not, some of them are just going to the toilet. But not all of them. Black haired guy finishes his drink and walks nervously over. There are two girls left, one them’s wearing a band t-shirt. I can’t hear what he says but I think “That’s more like it. He’s targeting his market”

Now who’s that? One guy, group of girls. The leggy blond doesn’t look particularly interested but one of her friends is flicking her hair and touching his arm. The guy is slowly ignoring the rest of the group and turning to face her. “Bidding too low” I remark, “he can’t keep his position with blondie.” Then I give him the benefit of the doubt; “placement targeting; he knows what converts best for him.”

Back to the skinny guy. He’s sitting on his own now; “high bounce rate?” I think as he gets up to go to the bar. But maybe not; band girl is coming out of the toilets, she looks at the booth where her friends are and then scans the rest of the bar. “Rookie error, he should’ve 301′d to his new location.” The girl pauses, lonely by the toilet door but not for long; “Are you looking for someone?” I hear. “Is that bidding on a competitors keyword?” I think. Skinny guy comes back around the bar with two drinks, his new friend smiles and walks over. “Brand recognition in action. And he gave her an incentive for a repeat visit.”

I see my own date in the door so I stand up and wave. I’m unusually tall, so my ad copy stands out from the crowd. I know she like this place, one of her friends told me, I hope just being here is good enough landing page optimisation. How forward should I be? Calls to action are good right? Perhaps it is at this point that my analogy breaks down, I don’t want to be too forward. Still, I hope I get a conversion.

I was doing some keyword maintenance today and noticed something new when I hovered over the magnifying glass tool beside a keyword:

It looks like Google are being more explicit with their quality scores. I haven’t noticed this before but rather than being an accidental leak this time it’s been integrated into Google’s changes to make quality score more transparent.

I’m not sure how much this will change advertiser behaviour. Perhaps knowing that a keyword is nearly “Ok” will encourage people to optimise their landing pages and ad descriptions further, rather than just pausing.

More information is also given for keywords with poor quality scores:

In this case we are told that no ad will be run on broad match, but that the ad can be triggered on a phrase match.

How will this new information affect the way you run your AdWords campaigns?

Following XL Airways going into administration last week and yesterday’s announcement that Lehman Brothers are filing for bankruptcy, many competitors have quickly setup PPC ads targeting brand queries to take advantage of this.

Below are the ads appearing on Google for XL and ads have quickly started appearing today for Lehman Brothers as well:

This obviously wouldn’t have been possible before Google opened up brand bidding, but is this a good thing? Personally I’m quite impressed with how quickly competitors have acted and surely for people searching for alternative flights to XL this has to be useful.

Hi, I’m Richard Fergie, the newest guy at SEOptimise. I’ve been with the company a week now and I’ve just taken (and passed) the Google AdWords exam. I’ve been asked to do a blog post about it so (in the best SEO blog tradition) I decided on doing a top 10 list of things I’ve found useful. Here goes…

1. The Official Resource
The AdWords Learning Centre. If you are a visual or aural learner head straight for the multimedia lessons. If you’re in a hurry, need a quick reference or learn best by reading there are also text lessons. The AdWords learning centre is Google’s own training tool for AdWords so I’d say it is the best resource for presenting information on all of Google’s ad policies in a clear and concise way.
The Learning Centre breaks its course down into short sections (the longest unit is supposed to take 15 minutes) so it is easy to just do a bit at a time and there are also handy quizzes on each subsection.

2. More from the Horse’s Mouth
It’s also worth having a browse through the official AdWords blog to see what’s new in the world of PPC. As Google’s official mouthpiece this blog gives an insight into what Google thinks is important about AdWords. Pretty useful when you remember who sets the exam…

3. O’Reilly Books: Is There Anything They Don’t teach?
Google Advertising Tools published by O’Reilly. Most of this book is aimed at AdSense users; people trying to make money by allowing Google to place PPC ads on their websites. However, the final two sections are entitled “Working with AdWords” and “Using the AdWords APIs.” The APIs section is a lot more detailed than the AdWords Learning Centre and I have to say that most of it went over my head but the “Working with AdWords” section is very good for running you through all the basics of using AdWords.

4. Learning by Doing
I’ve been quite lucky in that I’ve been able to play around with SEOptimise’s own PPC campaign. Messing around like this is a great way of learning so if you do get the chance to even just look at someone else’s already running account I’d jump on it. Expect to see the SEOptimise campaign go from strength to strength now after Kevin actually reviews the ads and keywords for the first time in ages in order to check on my ‘improvements!’

5. Learn. Rank. Dominate. I’ve Got the First Part.
seobook.com turns up sooner or later whenever you are looking for SEO and PPC resources. They have a whole PPC training section of which I think the Pay Per Click 101 video is the most useful.

6. PPC Podcasts
More resources for those of you who are fed up with reading; check out webmasterradio.fm’s PPC-Rockstars which has short podcasts on a variety of PPC issues.

7. A Heroic Resource
The PPC Hero(s) promise “Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management.” Check out their best posts for some great tips and things to watch out for. They also have a very detailed quality score handbook.

8. More on Quality Scores
And speaking of quality score, there is a simple AdWords Quality Scores Factors Chart at the bgtheory.com blog. I had a few of questions on my AdWords exam about what sort of things influence quality scores and what sort of things are influenced by quality scores. This chart clarifies this in a very easy to read way.

9. Even More on Quality Scores
Another good quality score resource is from Redfly Marketing who do a mini case study with 10 Ways to Increase Your AdWords Quality Score. 3 out of 10 posts about quality score might seem excessive, but I think it’s fair to say that any aspect of AdWords that does not affect the quality score is affected by the quality score so getting your head around all the interlinked factors is good exam preparation.

10. And Finally…
I’ve got to mention ppcblog.co.uk, mainly because straight after my test I visited their trademark policy change post. I think the exam was slightly out of date in that it did not group the UK and Ireland in with the US and Canada with regard to trademark policy and after reading their blog post I know that I was right in thinking that the rules about bidding on restricted trademarks are the same in all four countries. Unfortunately I don’t know if I got the question right (by assuming the test just wasn’t up to date) or if I was barking up the wrong tree or even being led astray by a tricky examiner.

That’s all for now folks. Let me know what you think or if you have any other good resources for me to learn from.

The big talking point over the last week has been about Google’s decision to allow trademark bidding in the UK.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about whether allowing trademark bidding is a good or bad idea, I understand why Google would want to keep a good relationship with advertisers by preventing competitors bidding for their brand, like they did with Marks and Spencers in February. But from the perspective of an online retailer like Argos who previously had to sell products without being able to use trademarked terms such as iPod or Sony in their ad copy the new rule does make sense. Just imagine how difficult it would be to avoid using these terms in offline print advertising!

But despite what anyone else thinks it is Google’s policy, so whether advertisers and brands agree with this or not they will need consider the implications this has upon themselves or risk losing sales and traffic. The decision now lies with advertisers as to whether they choose to bid upon their competitors, but what can you do to protect your own brand?

SEO
You obviously should be ranking #1 organically for your brand name, but if in addition you can build the strength of your site so that it displays Google Sitelinks this is going to take up more valuable on-page real estate and distract users from clicking competitor ads.

Online Reputation Management
Online reputation management is possibly even more important now, if you can the control the top 10 natural listings with interesting content about your brand you can potentially reduce the clickthrough rates to competitors ads.

Bid for your own brand
If you didn’t previously bid on your own brand you probably should be now. As soon as you notice competitor ads appearing it’s important users find the brand they are looking for, clearly labelling the ad text as “Official Website” should also help to increase the CTR of your ad.

Set your own affiliate brand bidding rules
Affiliate websites generally don’t pay out on brand search referrals, this is because the likelihood of this leading to a sale is much higher. They now face the dilemma about how to deal with brand bidding on Google AdWords themselves, for example gadget website iwoot have taken an early step to announce they won’t payout on brand traffic.

Bid on your competitors
Many brands will take the stance “if their bidding on us, we’re going to bid on them!”. With the new rules there’s no reason you can’t do this, but perhaps if no-one is bidding on your brand you should be careful about who you annoy before bidding on popular brands as it may backfire.

So are you planning ahead for the trademark policy update? Are there any other strategies I’ve missed which can help a brand protect themselves or take advantage of the rule change?