This blog post is a bit of fun that might give you some idea of the sorts of  thing that cannot be tracked by your web analytics system…

1. Odysseus Off-Site

Image from Litmuse on Flickr

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I don’t have an iPhone. Most of the SEM community are early adopters so many of you will already be using smart phones and many of you will already be aware of what I am about to tell you. I’ll put the important information in bold just here so that it is easy to spot:

When searching on Google using the iPhone…

• There are only 2 sponsored results above the organic listings
• The remaining results appear right at the bottom of the page NOT to the side
• There are only 5 ad slots available

Google results on the iPhone - Top of the page

A few weeks ago I did a training course for a client who is running their own lead generation campaign in AdWords. In my experience, clients want two things from lead generation campaigns:

1. More leads
2. A lower cost per lead.

AdWords makes it very easy to report on these metrics but what AdWords beginners often struggle with is how to change them. I made them a flow chart to show what changes they could make, and how these changes effect the other metrics:

Click the picture for a bigger version

I’m sure that if you are an AdWords guru then you’ll be able to draw a lot more lines on the chart but I think I’ve covered the most important stuff.

Usage Example

• Suppose you want to improve (reduce) the cost per conversion.
• Following the arrows backwards shows that you can either improve the conversion rate or reduce the average CPC.
• Going back another level tells you that the landing page and the ad text influence the conversion rate so you can change one or both of these.
• Alternatively you can reduce the average CPC either by reducing the CPC bid or by improving the quality score black box.

We recently took over managing a large PPC account. After checking the changes I was making Google kept giving me disapproving looks because of landing page errors. I wasn’t changing landing pages; I was trying to improve the account structure.

How could I easily and quickly find all the pages that were 404ing?

1. Download Xenu Link Sleuth

SEOs love Xenu link for finding broken links by asking it to crawl the whole site. We won’t need to visit every page on a site but we do want an automated way to check if a page exists or not. Download Xenu here. Continue Reading »

Google are now including a 4th match type in their search query reports: “Broad Match (Session Based)”. I think it is great to have some reporting about the search history issue so I quickly got to work to see how this match type performed.

A Broad Toad by Pixieslayer on Flickr

I ran a search query report for one of our accounts and then I compared “Broad Match” with “Broad Match (Session Based). Here are my results:

• Just under 2% of all broad match queries were session based. As speculated in my last post I think this number will depend a lot on your vertical and how much you bid per click.
• Click through rates for session based broad match are ridiculously high. For the account I tested the average CTR is 64%! This illustrates the importance of having an advert that is different from the competition.
• The average cost per click is about 10% higher. I think this will be another thing that varies quite a lot depending on the account. For the account I checked the average CPC is normally very close to the CPC bid; I think the cost per click for Session Based Broad Match would be propotionally higher if you have a larger gap between average CPC and max CPC.
• The conversion rate is 14% lower. O’ dear. And I was going to say that things weren’t as bad as I thought.
• Because of the higher CPC and the lower conversion rate the cost per conversion is nearly 30% higher. Cost per conversion is a major KPI for this account. For standard broad match keywords it is just under the target figure. For session based broad match it is well over.

Hello, Google? Richard Fergie here. Can I have my account back?

I saw a tweet from @bgtheory with a link to his article about an email he got saying that one of his clients will be forced to use  the new AdWords interface in 30 days. According to seroundtable 56% of advertisers prefer the old interface and I’d count myself as one of them. People seem to hate it whenever a familiar web interface changes (I’m talking about you, Facebook) so, rather than dislike it because it is new and unfamiliar I thought I’d try and think of some more rational reasons to hate it. Continue Reading »

Everyone agrees that getting the account structure right can improve PPC performance and make management a lot easier. When setting up a new account the structure is one of the first things I think about but what is the best way to change the structure of an existing account?

Image by Elsie Esq.

I’ve read a lot about how account structure is important when setting up an account but I haven’t seen anything about the best way to modify and adapt the account structure of an exisiting account. Continue Reading »

Last week I asked on Twitter if anyone had any good ideas for a PPC related blog post. @bhartzer replied suggesting I do one about PPC mistakes using his post as inspiration. In the post he shows how many businesses that shouldn’t be were bidding on the keyword “keyword”

I did my own search on the word “keyword” to see if this also occurred in the UK. It does, as you can see from the adverts that were returned. So far, so much a duplication of Bill Hartzer’s post. Then I clicked the Renault advert and was taken straight to the homepage without even being sent to a specific landing page; given the ad text I’d expected to find more information about the £2000 scrap scheme and how to use it to buy a Renault. Continue Reading »

Paid search rocks. Despite the endless debate about which is best, organic search engine optimisation (SEO) or paid search, both are hugely important aspects of online promotion.

Image credit: Flickr

Despite this, a survey conducted by Microsoft at the end of last year showed 59 per cent of small businesses which have a website do not have a current paid search campaign. That is incredible. For controlled bursts of marketing and the building of brand awareness, paid search can be a powerful tool. Continue Reading »

My post about Google Analytics filters went down pretty well so I thought I’d keep the analytics bandwagon rolling and talk about how to use the new Advanced Segmentation feature to get useful data for setting advanced ad scheduling options.

For those of you who don’t know, AdWords has a feature where bids can be increased or decreased by a set multiplier based on the time and day of the week. This is really useful since for most accounts traffic at certain times and on certain days is more likely to convert so it is more valuable. Continue Reading »