SEOptimise » google adwords

8 Best Ways to Find Negative PPC Keywords

Tamsin Mehew — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:28:05 +0000

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.

Look for patterns. See if there are repeated words or themes that are irrelevant. For example, say you sell red shoes, and as such have ‘buy red shoes’ as a keyword on broad match. If phrases like ‘buy blue shoes’ and ‘blue shoes for sale’ appear in your search query report then adding ‘blue’ on broad-match negative rather than excluding the searches individually with exact match is preferable: not only will it exclude the searches you’ve noticed, but it also excludes long tail searches you haven’t seen.

This may be a simplistic example, but you might spot a trend in your search queries that leads to other new negative keywords. Seeing ‘blue’ may make you think to exclude other colours. Seeing ‘jobs’ may make you think to exclude ‘recruitment’.

Also try to think about what the searcher is looking for with their query. Is the search term actually the name of a book or film? You may want to search for stranger terms on Google yourself to make sense of them.

2. Use Someone Else’s List
Some negatives come up all the time, so it can help to look at something like KoMarketing Associates’s list of negative keywords for inspiration. Don’t add terms to your account without thinking – some might be relevant for you! – but it is a good starting point.

3. Use Keyword Research Tools
Google’s Keyword Tool shows you what Google thinks is relevant to your keywords, so if someone searches for a term it suggests it’s likely to display your ad. So see if you think the highest traffic suggestions are actually relevant, and if they aren’t then exclude them.

Something that scrapes Google Instant suggestions (like Über Suggest) can also give you ideas of popular searches that start with your keywords, to include or exclude as you see fit.

4. Your Positive Keywords
You’ve worked hard to structure your account, sort keywords into the best possible ad groups, and write adverts specially tailored to those groups. You don’t want to lose this work by having searches display the wrong ads.

If you’ve got a general ad group for ‘red shoes’ and a more specific ad group for ‘shiny red shoes’ you’ll want to exclude ‘shiny’ from the former so that it doesn’t steal the latter’s traffic. Making sure searches go to the most specific ad group possible means that they see the most specific ad possible. Also, it’s easier to track performance – you can’t as easily tell how well ‘shiny red shoes’ searches perform if they are split over multiple ad groups and mixed up with other terms.

5. Competitor Research
Whether you should bid on competitor terms is beyond the scope of this post, but even if you do then you should keep them separated from your other keywords (as searches with a brand attached will behave differently to searches with no brand at all), and so competitor terms should be used as negative keywords. Don’t just think of the brand name: think of their product names as well.

If you know of brands who have a similar but different market you could exclude them as their audience will be uninterested in your product: for instance if you sell women’s clothing you could use as negative keywords brands who specialise in men’s clothing.

6. Analytics
Looking at Analytics gives you behavioural information on searchers for some keywords, although this is limited to keywords you already rank for organically and people who found your site relevant enough to visit (and soon it will exclude people who search Google while logged in). If there is a keyword with high traffic and no conversions, then it could be a good negative keyword.

7. Monitor the Media
Using social media monitoring or Google alerts can show if your brand terms have uses unrelated to you which you didn’t previously know about.

Another thing to bear in mind is that you never know when there will be news or a trend that’s related to your keywords but not your business – and that could be expensive if there’s a sudden explosion of searches that your advert appears on. If you advertise in the travel vertical, for example, then you may need to react to disasters and current events in destination countries, either by adding negative keywords or (in extreme cases) pausing ad groups.

8. Misspelings adn Typiong Mistaakes
People don’t have to type carefully into search engines or use precise spellings – they may even be searching to find the right spelling! So you should expect there to be searches with misspellings and typos. If you have ‘cheap’ as a negative keyword, even on broad-match, you can still find your ads appearing on searches for things that are ‘chep’ or ‘ceap’ or ‘chap’. So when you’ve found an important negative keyword you may want to think of its misspellings too. Typo generators can help.

59% Say ROI from Google AdWords Remarketing Outweighs its Annoyance

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:41:10 +0000

Earlier in the week I ran a poll to ask if people thought Google AdWords remarketing was a great marketing tactic, or just annoying.

There’s often many mixed opinions when talking about this, which fall into two groups:

People who find that they are constantly being re-marketed to and almost stalked across the web, often to the point that it puts them off making a future purchase from a brand because the ads are so annoying.
Advertisers who find that AdWords remarketing yields a positive ROI and is a great marketing tactic to re-connect with potential customers, who didn’t quite make a purchase last time they visited your site – but are likely to in the future.

So I thought it would be useful to run a quick poll to see how these opinions are divided, here are the results:

Your browser doesn’t support iFrames :( Vote for this poll here.

So it’s pretty split (exactly 50/50 if you only look at UK results) – but based on this, it’s clear that despite many people finding the ads annoying – most appreciate that it is a very useful and effective method of advertising towards potential customers.

Some of the replies I received on Twitter do a great job of summing this up:

@kevgibbo Why the dichotomy? They are annoying AND effective.

October 4, 2011 8:53 am via Twitter for Mac ReplyRetweetFavorite

@benjaminellis

Benjamin Ellis

@seoptimise @kevgibbo I think the annoyance level of remarketing depends on how frequent you let the ads be shown - http://t.co/DOQE2GfU

October 3, 2011 4:21 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@BrionyGunson

Briony Gunson

@kevgibbo I imagine it's like this: Surprise > novelty > complacency > irritation > annoyance > fear > death #remarketing #ppc

October 3, 2011 4:28 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@BrionyGunson

Briony Gunson

@kevgibbo its like most things in SEM; done badly is harmful, done well is profitable

October 4, 2011 9:01 am via Ada ReplyRetweetFavorite

@RichardFergie

Richard Fergie

So while remarketing can be annoying, it depends largely on how you manage your campaign – and in some cases we just have to accept it’s both useful and annoying!

9 Ways to Sharpen Up Your Paid Search

Tamsin Mehew — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:16:56 +0000

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.

Having Google Analytics is in some ways better than just conversion tracking, as it can tell you about the behaviour of visitors who didn’t convert. Analytics tells you which keywords result in bounces, which pages searchers visit and how long they stay on site. If you’ve got an e-commerce site, you want Analytics for its e-commerce tracking – then you can link keywords to the revenue they generate (and so calculate their ROI).

If you’re not using Google AdWords, you can still use Google Analytics: use URL tagging to pass along information on keywords and ads.

It doesn’t matter what quality score, CPC or CTR a keyword has if nothing happens when the searchers reach your website. With conversion tracking you can tell if keywords give results – and then all the other metrics matter, as they help you maximise the results and minimise the cost.

Use a trail of keywords
Your mission is to make it easy for the searcher to click, land and convert. The searcher’s intent is shown in their search term, so you want to use that same term both in your ad copy and on the landing page. That makes it simple for the searcher to see how relevant your website is, and avoids getting them frustrated and clicking away. Also the call-to-action in your ad should reflect the language on the landing page, to reinforce the message of what the searcher should do.

Highlight your best deal
You only have a small space in your ad in which to get searchers’ notice, so make sure you really hook their attention. Lead with your unique selling point or a special offer. If you have a great price for the product they’ve searched for then include it (and make sure this product and price is prominent in the ad’s landing page). This will encourage them to spend time looking around your website.

Test your copy
It’s not just the success of your keywords you should be continuously assessing. The ad copy dictates whether or not someone will click on it, and also sets the tone for the visit to your website. Test different ad copy for your keywords and make sure your words are working for you. You can also try to save costs by prequalifying traffic with your ad text: mention price information or the intended audience (e.g. “for small business”) to avoid clicks from people who will not convert.

Improve your quality score and relevance
If you’re using Google AdWords, then a higher quality score will give you a higher ad rank, which means that you’ll get better ad position or cheaper clicks. Of course, improving quality score isn’t straightforward. Google does not say precisely how they calculate it, nor how they measure ‘relevance’. The column labelled ‘Quality Score’ in AdWords isn’t true quality score – that depends on the combination of keyword, ad and search term and is recalculated at every search – but it does give an indication of which keywords need attention. The main factor of Google’s quality score is click through rate.

(If you’re using Microsoft AdCenter, quality score doesn’t affect ad position, but if it’s too low it will limit the eligibility of your ads to be served. Again, CTR is one of the main factors.)

Improve CTR by making sure your keywords are as relevant as possible to your website. Check search query reports and use negative keywords to get rid of irrelevant searches. Try splitting bigger ad groups into smaller, more tightly targeted ad groups with highly tailored ad text.

Use niche keywords
The obvious keywords may have large search volumes, but they also have high competition and high CPC. By advertising around more niche keywords and phrases, you can drive far more relevant traffic to your pages and often pay less. There are several tools to help if you’re stuck for words to start testing: WordStream’s Keyword Niche Finder is designed especially for the task, but you can also use the Google Keyword Tool or Übersuggest for free if you don’t mind the results being less well organised. You can also find ideas from search query reports, if you have keywords on broad or phrase match – this has the advantage that you have a more accurate idea of the search term’s CPC.

Of course, you have to use your judgement and knowledge of your site to make sure the niche is suitable! If a keyword isn’t relevant but get lots of impressions, then use it as a negative keyword to keep the unwanted searches away.

Go local
This may not be relevant for all business, but for some it is an opportunity to get clicks from very targeted potential customers.

You can geotarget with geographical search terms – for example, advertising around ‘Oxford SEO’ instead of ‘SEO’. This is a sort of niche keyword, as above: these keywords are likely to be both better targeted and cheaper, maximising your returns.

An alternative is to set up a geotargeted campaign to only display in your locale, where you can afford to bid higher as the searchers are more likely to convert.

Even if you don’t think your website would benefit from targeting local searches, you can still check to see if there are areas with high impressions and good conversion rates – use the Geographic view in the Dimensions.

Expand
If you’ve got a campaign in your account which is doing well but is losing impression share from a restrictive daily budget, then give it a more money. If you’ve got keywords which get high conversion rates but low CTR because of bad positions, raise the bids to improve their positions and see if they continue to convert.

If your paid search is working well and delivering a good return, then it’s time to consider upping your game by increasing your spend. If your business has the capacity to increase turnover then you should consider growing an existing successful pay-per-click campaign.

Analyse and test, test and analyse
Small businesses with no dedicated search marketer often set up advertising around a set of keywords and then ignore it. But a good paid search campaign is constantly monitored, tweaked and sharpened in order to maximise the returns. Even just a few hours every week or two can really make a difference.

Not Using AdWords Remarketing? Don’t Delay! (Actually Do)

Richard Fergie — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:13:52 +0000

I recently read an AdWords Remarketing tips post which made me think of a few ways to improve your AdWords Remarketing campaigns by introducing a delay between when a person visits your site and when you start showing adverts to them.

Image from Stuck in Customs on Flickr

Buying Cycles
One problem with Remarketing is that it is hard to measure incremental value from it. A remarketing conversion tells you that someone who visited your site came back to your site and then bought something; the causal link between the advert and the purchase is not as clear as it is with search advertising.

Giving users time to complete their purchase naturally before you start showing them adverts avoids this problem whilst still taking advantage of the main feature of Remarketing; that people who have already been on your website are more valuable than people who haven’t.

For an ecommerce client we set up a 7 day delay on their remarketing to match the length of their buying cycle.

To setup a delay you need to create a remarketing tag as normal and then create another list using that tag but with a shorter duration. In this case they have 1 tag across their whole site with two remarketing audiences associated with it, one of them has a duration of 21 days and the other has a duration of 7 days. Then create a custom list containing everyone in the 21 day audience and no one from the 7 day audience. Bingo! Now you have to wait to see if it works.

Consumables
Another client sells a product which uses a consumable that they also sell. They reckon that people will need a refill after about 6 months. Using AdWords Remarketing, we are able to target people 6 months after they purchase with adverts for refills. Awesome!

Setting this up can be a bit more complicated.

If you want to target everyone who purchased but with a 6 month delay then you can use an existing Adwords conversion tracking code as a Remarketing tag. Then you can define your audiences as above.

If you need to target only people who purchased a particular product then you will need to insert a new remarketing tag into the conversion page only if the customer has bought the product. This might be easy or hard depending on your platform and web development team.

Seasonals
I manage several clients in the travel industry. I have setup a Remarketing audience for them that targets people who have converted 11 months down the line; just when they will be thinking about their next holiday!

Image from joiseyshowaa on Flickr

The maximum duration for a Remarketing audience membership is 540 days (nearly 18 months) so there is plenty of time to take into account all sorts of seasonal variation.

I hope this post has given you some Remarketing ideas. Leave a comment or find me on twitter if you have any other Remarketing tips.

2010 Predictions – How Well Did I Do?

Richard Fergie — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:54:02 +0000

Last year I made 10 predictions for PPC in 2010. I got a few of the more obvious things right, and few things wrong and I completely failed to predict some quite important changes. Here’s how I did:

1. CPCs will rise

This one was spot on (and also a complete no brainer).

2. More display advertising

More of our client’s at SEOptimise are using the display network now; some of them are even getting very good results from it so as far as my own PPC life goes this prediction is correct. I don’t know about the industry as a whole, does anyone have any figures about how the search/content share of spend has changed?

3. Conversion Attribution

“As part of their drive to push more business advertisers into display advertising Google will begin to move away from the last click attribution model that is the core of Google Analytics (and to a certain extent, AdWords).”

To a certain extent, the AdWords Search Funnels feature fits in with this prediction. It does not yet feature an actual attribution model but it does give you the data to have a shot at building one. I also predicted that we would still be talking about attribution modelling well into 2011; it is too early to say if I’m right on this one, but I think I probably am.

After seeing the Search Funnels data I no longer believe that conversion attribution is the answer to all my PPC problems; I think we will still be talking about it but I don’t think that much progress will be made in the near future (it is just not as important as I first thought).

4. Bing/Yahoo I

I predicted that Binghoo would increase their share of ad spend. For SEOptimise, this is true but for the industry as a whole I was completely wrong about this. As of Q3 2010 Google had increased their share of ad spend by 2% (according to Efficient Frontier’s search engine reports

5. Bing/Yahoo II

I thought that one of the ways Binghoo could improve their market share was by improving their interface and advertiser tools. Although I quite like their new keyword tool not much has changed in this area. The AdCenter interface is still pretty horrible and still doesn’t work in Chrome. I couldn’t have been more wrong about this one.

6. Other Platforms

“Other sites will introduce their own CPC auction platforms.” I didn’t mention Facebook in this prediction. If their CPC advertising feature was launched in 2010 then this prediction is a success but I think they already had it in 2009. I am unaware of any sites that have launched CPC adverts in 2010 so this prediction is wrong.

7. Real Time Search

What real time search?

8. Conversion Optimiser

“I expect Google to continue to work on their conversion optimiser tool”. Google launched “enhanced” CPC bidding during 2010. I consider this an improvement over their Conversion Optimiser tool although it is far from a “set it and forget it” solution (which is a good thing in my opinion).

9. Changes to the AdWords Advanced Exams

I haven’t noticed any big changes in the industry after the introduction of these exams. Fail.

10. Paid Search Will Dominate the SERPs

New background colour for adverts. Instant suggestion box pushing organic below the fold. New ad extensions giving AdWords even more real estate. Changing “Sponsored Listings” to “Ads”. A fairly obvious prediction to make (and one I’m happy to make again for next year) but definitely a successful one.

I give myself 4.5/10 for last years list. What do you think? What about your predictions from last year?

No related posts.

My Thoughts On Google Instant

Richard Fergie — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 11:13:10 +0000

Everyone is talking about Google Instant; the new way for Google to display results.

Image from Zenera on Flickr

The basics are covered in many places:

I want to talk a bit less about the implementation and a bit more about the implications. It is too early to say anything for sure but here are my thoughts on how the new Google UI will alter the PPC landscape.

1. There will be more impressions
Impressions on Google Instant are counted differently to normal. Even thought Google are not recording impressions willy nilly (the user must interact with the page or wait 3 seconds) the total number of AdWords adverts served will increase. The interesting aspect is how these extra impressions will be distributed rather than if there will be extra impressions or not (they have to go somewhere).

2. The number of clicks will increase
This one is much more of a guess than point 1. I can’t see the number of AdWords clicks dropping so it will either stay the same or increase. I’m going to go with “increase” for two reasons:

I can’t imagine Google making a change that hits their bottom line
Organic results are pushed even further down the page.

3. CTR will blah, blah, blah
Who cares? Aside from quality score implications (discussed below) who gives a shit about CTR? Joking aside, I think this one will go both ways. On the one hand, there will be more impressions so CTR may go down. On the other hand the page interaction criteria for an impression to count introduces a sampling bias in what is counted as an impression.

4. Quality Score
Make up some quality score numbers and perform the quality score calculation as it is described by Google. Now reduce the score for you and the you-1 ranked ad by 10% and repeat the calculation. Your CPC has not changed! The point I am trying to make it that I believe it is your quality score relative to other advertisers that matters. If the new interface penalises everyone equally then there is nothing to worry about. Of course, any advertiser who can find away to avoid a drop in quality score when everyone else is failing … ;-)

5. Redefining the “Head”
A lot of people are talking about bidding on “stem” queries in order to capture searchers earlier in their query. For example an advertiser selling widgets may bid on “wikipedia” or “widnes” because these searches are triggered before the user has finished typing “widgets”. I don’t see this as being a massive game changer; it is no different to an advertiser selling black nike football boots bidding on “football boots”. The top of the head has been made bigger (the head now has a “hat”) but that is all. The game is still the same, but the pitch is larger.

6. The shorter, fatter tail
I expect to see the number of different queries drop as people are steered down well defined search paths. However, it is important to remember that the suggestions aren’t set in stone so that discarding a keyword because it doesn’t appear in the suggestion box may mean that opportunities are missed later on.

7. CPCs
CPCs may increase on head keywords that are stem phrases for valuable queries. Morrissons may start paying more for their brand terms in order to stay ahead of people trying to target people looking for mortgages. For keywords in the tail CPCs should fall; aggregating traffic from a larger number of search queries into one query will result in a small amount of inefficiancy that wasn’t there before; this should cause CPCs to fall (use the comments to correct me if I’m wrong). What I think will actually happen is that a larger number of advertisers bidding on a smaller number of keywords will cause CPCs to increase.

Top 10 tips & things you need to know about AdWords Remarketing

Rob Hillyard — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:39:29 +0000

This is a guest post from Rob Hillyard at Return on Digital.

Create a brand new campaign for Remarketing. This will enable you to monitor how everything is doing much easier than running it within an existing campaign.
You need at least 500 people in your target list before Google will start to show your ads. Depending on how much traffic your site gets and who you are targeting, it could take a couple of days before you see any traffic.
Image ads work best. Make sure you include all the possible image sizes to allow your ads to receive the largest amount of impressions possible.
Use a different message than your standard ads to bring the users back to your site. This is your second chance to convert the visitor into a customer. Special offers / discounts work well.

If you include an offer in your ad make sure you mirror this offer on your landing page.
Plan who you want to remarket to. You need to know your strategy before you start your implementation.
A Good place to start is to remarket to people who visited your site but didn’t convert.
Control how long people will see your remarketing ads for. Being constantly targeted by one advertiser can be annoying and you don’t want to put people off your brand.
Your ads may be displayed on sites that wouldn’t normally be seen as relevant. This is ok. Users are targeted based on previous interactions with your site rather than the content of the website.
Your ads will follow your users around sites within the Google Content Network. This can be quite annoying. Consider allowing users to opt out. http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/view

For the full guide on how to set up Remarketing, check out this post.

The Value of AdWords Brand Bidding

Richard Fergie — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:08:06 +0000

In my last post I talked about a method for testing the value of using AdWords on your brand.

The results are now in:

Average Hourly Revenue from brand keywords when Running AdWords: £3471
Average Hourly Revenue from brand keywords without AdWords: £3278
Average Hourly Cost of brand keywords: £0.86

WIN!

Methodology

Traffic in this account varies quite a lot depending on the day of the week so I chose to segment by hour rather than day of the week. I wanted to keep the slices as fine as possible to reduce the variation caused by the time of day so I used the following day parting scheme:

I waited a month before analysing the data; for this account a month is plenty of time for the result to be statistically significant.

To get the information I needed I opened the Total Revenue part of the Ecommerce Report in Google Analytics.

After exporting the information to Excel I could easily find the averages that I needed. To make the test as fair as possible I only looked at the hours between 1600 and midnight. This may mean that my results are invalid during the rest of the day

Is PPC Canabalising your Brand Traffic?

Richard Fergie — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:38:51 +0000

Are your PPC campaigns eating your organic traffic? Google love for you to bid on your brand name in AdWords, but how to you know if you are wasting money on traffic you could have got for free? Of course, to find this out you need to run some sort of test.

I don’t know how you could run a good A/B split test for this because I don’t know how to randomly segment people into the “see’s PPC ad” and “does not see PPC ad” buckets. Without random segmentation our test will not be fair but hopefully we can get a test that is “fair enough”.

Use AdWords ad scheduling to set time periods where your brand adverts run and do not run
Be aware of that you can’t split a day into more than 6 segments. You should also think about if your traffic changes much depending on the day of the week.
Wait. Be the surfer. Get ready to ride the gnarly wave of data.
Use Google Analytics to get the data. I’ve done a post in the past about how to segment by time .
Draw some graphs (call them “data visualisatons” if you want to impress) and calculate your averages.
Bar charts will give you the info you need; I’ve used stacked bar charts to show a bit more detail about how PPC has performed.

We are interested in the incremental value of adding PPC which is the difference in value between the “No PPC” and “With PPC” averages. This is the figure which you need to compare with the cost of your PPC to decided if it is worth running or not.

The idea of incremental value is important here. Just looking at the value of the PPC traffic will almost certainly give you a positive answer because brand clicks are so cheap.

6 Personas that Google Analytics can’t Track

Richard Fergie — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:21:00 +0000

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

This intrepid traveller ranges far and wide across the internet but has so far resisted the siren call of your site. People like this are very interesting for online marketers especially if they represent your target demographic but you will not find out anything about them from your onsite analytics. Service like Hitwise or Google Ad Planner can give you information about where on the internet Odysseus is hanging out.
2. Henry In-a-Hurry

Image from boeke on Flickr

Henry decides very quickly if he wants to continue looking at a web page. If your analytics code hasn’t loaded by the time he clicks a link or presses the back button then his pageview will not be recorded. The new Google Analytics Asynchronous code will improve tracking of Henry In-a-Hurry.
3. Nadia No-Script

From notionscapital on Flickr. Also WTF?

For whatever reason Nadia browses the web without javascript. This could be for many reasons; paranoia, browser security settings, browser default settings or browser age. Nadia may be a competing SEO trying to view the web as Googlebot sees it or a geek browsing using only the command line.
4. Christopher Cookie-Eater

Image from zoetnet on flickr

Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar? Christopher just can’t bear to leave all those cookies just sitting on his hard drive so he eats/deletes them at the end of every browsing session. Chris will be tracked but he will seen as a new visitor even if he visits your site everyday.

5. Deborah Disabled-Cookies

Image from cmaccubbin on flickr

Unlike Christopher, Deborah doesn’t eat cookies at all. In fact, she won’t allow them anywhere near her browser. Some javascript based analytics systems will track Deb’s pageviews but there will be no persistance so every pageview will be seen as the start of a new visit. Google Analytics will not track Deborah at all (probably to prevent your own site appearing in your referrer stats).
6. Thomas Tin-Foil-Hat

Image by jeffhall2069 on flickr

Tom does not like the idea of you having any information about what he does online. He probably has javascripts and cookies disabled but what distinguishes him from Nadia and Deborah is that he has explicitally told his computer to never communicate with Google Analytics. This can be done by editing the hosts file. Thomas may also use a variety of (secure) proxies or Tor so his visits can not even be tracked in your server logs.

PPC for the iPhone

Richard Fergie — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:29:29 +0000

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

Google Results on the iPhone - Bottom

One of our clients has an iPhone app that they wanted to publicise. I setup a PPC campaign focusing on keywords like “widget iPhone app”. Surprise, surprise there was very little search volume on these terms.

My next idea was to do a campaign on upper funnel keywords like “red widgets” or “blue widgets” but to display the adverts only to users on smart phones and have the advert and landing page publicise the iPhone app.

This campaign was getting a good number of impressions but the click through rate was very low. This could be because I need to work on the ad text a bit more, or because people searching on the targeted keywords aren’t really interested in an iPhone app but I think it is because the average position of the advert placed it right at the bottom of the page.

Further thoughts.

Google normalises quality score based on ad position. If they don’t make a distinction between their iPhone results and their desktop results when doing this normalisation campaigns with a large number of smartphone impressions at lower ad positions will be disadvantaged.
Mobile is meant to be one of the many next big things in search. This will make paid search even more competative because there are only 5 ad slots on the front page.

Awesome AdWords Flowchart to Check PPC Performance

Richard Fergie — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:16:54 +0000

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:

More leads
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.

Using Xenu Link Sleuth to Find Broken Landing Pages

Richard Fergie — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:28:06 +0000

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.

2. Get a List of Landing Page URLs

Of course, you need a list of all your landing pages. I got this information using AdWords Editor (be careful with the new version). I put it through Excel to remove duplicates but this step is not necessary.

You must save the list as a text file (.txt)

3. Set the Maximum Level to Zero

Open Xenu, click “Options” and open the “Preferences” dialouge. You need to set the “Maximum Level” option to zero. This means Xenu won’t spider the whole site but will only request the pages on the site from your list.

Set the Maximum Level to Zero

4. Import your List of URLs

In Xenu open the “File” menu and select “Check URL list”. Choose your text file as the list.

5. That’s It!

Xenu will automagically try and crawl the pages from the list. Pages that 404 or have some other error will be listed in red.

Google AdWords Session Based Broad Match?

Richard Fergie — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:10:21 +0000

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?

Head to Head: Old and New AdWords Interfaces

Richard Fergie — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:27:24 +0000

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.

The purpose of the new Adwords interface is, of course, to help you manage your AdWords account as efficiently as possible. To test this efficiency I made up a scenario and then recorded the number of clicks required to complete it using each interface (quite a stupid metric but the best one that I could come up with that didn’t require weeks worth of complicated productivity measurements, which Google is probably doing now). The tasks are as follows and will be completed in sequence:

Look at the campaign overview.
Compare the metrics for two time periods. Notice that something has changed
Run a report. To find more detail about what has changed and why.
Navigate to an ad group. To make adjustments based on what was found above
View the adverts. Which one is better?
Adjust keyword bids.

Using the old interface I can do the above tasks in 13 clicks (I’m running a report from a template). Lets see how the new interface stacks up.

1. Look at the Campaign Overview.

Simple, the campaign information appears as soon as you login. The interface is very green (is that meant to be easier on the eye?). It also seems to have fitted itself to the width of my screen rather than the width of my browser which is pretty irritating. Total so far: 0 clicks

2. Compare time periods

The menu for this is on the opposite side of the screen to what I’m used to. I’m sure that is something I can get used to. Apart from that this seems to be about as simple as the old interface. 1 click for a standard time period, 3 clicks for a custom one.

3. Run a report

This is a bit of a disappointment. It takes 1 click on the reports tab, but then I’m reverted back to the old interface making this task a draw between old and new at 3 clicks each.

4. Navigate to an Ad Group

In the old interface going from the reports tab to an ad group was a major ball ache. I always ended up on the completely useless “Account Snapshot” screen so I’d expect the new interface to begin to pull ahead here. Unfortunately this part of the test is broken because I’ve been switched to the old interface. A click to change back to the new one takes me to the campaign summary page. Then it takes 2 clicks to get to the ad group. Total for this step 3 clicks.

5. View the Adverts

As with the old interface this will take 0 or 1 click depending on what tab you were viewing the last time you looked at an ad group.

6. Adjust Keyword Bids

In the old interface this took 5 clicks. The new interface makes this much easier and finishes the task in 3.

The Verdict

It seems like the only task that the new interface is significantly better at is adjusting keyword bids or destination URLs. I normally do this within AdWords Editor, but if you do this a lot in the web interface then using the new version will help your mouse last 67% longer.

Of course, this is a massively unfair test. I didn’t use any of the unique features of the new interface (graphs, filters and more) and just adding one more step in my test (view another ad group) would have put the new interface even further out in front with its sidebar navigation menu. However, all these points could only act in the new interface’s favour so I think it is safe to say that, at worst, the new interface is at least as good as the old one.

Now I feel like an old man trying to use a new video recorder; I know it is better then the old one, but I still don’t prefer it.

AdWords Account Structure: The Next Steps

Richard Fergie — Mon, 11 May 2009 10:31:42 +0000

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.

In a running account I would only make a new campaign if the client wanted to target an additional location or if they wanted to allocate budget in a different way. Making new campaigns in other circumstances can make reporting harder with little extra benefit. This post will mainly focus on when and how to create new ad groups.

My thought process goes something like this:

Take a look at the ad groups in your campaign. I order them by spend because I don’t have any clients for whom this is not an issue, but I this this process will work with clicks and impressions as well if they are your metrics of choice.

Of course some ad groups will have spent more than others, but what I regularly see is that some ad groups spend ALOT more; the distribution of spend often has the same shape as the graphs used to illustrate what the long tail is. If you see this distribution it means that you should segment your top ad groups more.

Why? Lets turn the question around and ask why don’t we segment ad groups as much as possible, so that each ad group only contains one keyword. This enables ad texts to be as targeted as possible but it also creates too much work in managing the account: writing ads takes a lot longer and ad tests take a lot longer to run. In most cases there is not much to gain from doing this as the intention of a person searching for “blue widget” is not very different from someone searching for “blue widgets.” However, for a campaigns most popular ad groups I think this extra effort is worth it.

Look at the keywords inside the most popular ad group and you’ll probably see the same sort of distribution of spend as at the ad group level. Pick one of the top performers and grab all similar keywords; these will make up our new ad group. For the ads for the new group I generally test a more specific one against a copy of the best performer from the old ad group.

Other benefits

The great thing about this method is that you can iterate it; just repeat the same process again the next tiime you feel the ad group structure isn’t up to scratch. Depending on how you segmented the first time you my find the same ad group at the top of the list again, in which case it still drives enough traffic to make further segmentation worthwhile, or you’ll find a different ad group at the top of the list.

Creating a new ad group with a smaller keyword niche is also an excellent time to do more keyword research within that niche; a niche that has already proven itself to be one of the best sources of AdWords traffic for your business.

How Search History Influences Google AdWords

Richard Fergie — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:33:47 +0000

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.

Now I was thinking that I’d write a post entitled something like “Renault: Worst… PPC… Ever”. The interesting thing happened when I then tested queries from the SpyFu report. Here are the top three ads for the query “antique dealers”, largely powered by my previous search:

The next query I tried was “campus computer shop” where the results looked much more normal indicating that it might only be the previous search that is used in messing up everyone’s referrer statistics, instead of multiple queries this time.

I ran another test, in fact I ran several; here is one that displays a similar pattern:

1st Search: “Mortgages”
2nd Search: “Cheap mortgages”
3rd Search: “Book shop”

This one is even better:

“Car insurance”
“Cheap car insurance”
“Men’s trousers”

Google Ads for "Men's Trousers"

There were only two clothing retailers on the front page, both below the fold (unless you have a really big screen).

So What Does This Tell Us?

Apart from being a fun way to mess with people’s heads when they look at their analytics this also gives a bit of insight into the Google Money Quality Score/Expanded Broad Match algorithm. The two examples that I’ve found above both have the first search being made in a highly competitive vertical with the followup being in an area with much lower CPCs.

I haven’t told you the details of all the test searches I did to try and find the examples above (I know, I know, the science/study bias police are on their way) but this only seems to occur where there is a big difference in CPC between the two searches.

Is it Good or Bad?

It is good for Google as it increases their expected earnings for what would otherwise have been a low earning search.

I think it is bad for searchers because, apart from displaying irrelevant adverts, it is not adding anything new; they have already had the irrelevant ads displayed to them on their previous searches.

I’m not sure if this is all good or all bad for advertisers. It is bad for the book sellers, clothing retailers and their equivalents because valuable ad space is being taken up by adverts that they cannot compete with without losing money. For advertisers whose ads are being shown for irrelevant keywords I am undecided. It is true that the keyword is not at all relevant to their services but it is important to remember that in PPC advertising keywords are only an approximation that we use; actually we are targeting people. The people the ads are being shown to have expressed an interest in the service so in that respect the advertising in targeted. On the other hand they are not quite so interested right now. Different advertisers will have different ideas about whether this is good or bad.

Google taking previous searches into account when displaying adverts helps explain why travel ppc got a click from the search “shooting holidays USA.” What is the most crazy, off the wall or embarassing example of this that you can find?

The Golden Rules of Paid Search

Richard Fergie — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:00:04 +0000

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.

However, it is very easy to get it wrong and fail to make the most of your spending. Here are the essential rules for highly effective paid search.

Measure success through ROI

It is great that your paid search campaign has upped your traffic by 700 per cent. However, if the increased number of visitors has failed to up your conversions by a similarly astounding figure then some of that budget has been wasted.

Return on investment (ROI) is the only measure of success. If your chosen keywords are bringing vast quantities of people to your pages but these are not relevant or interested individuals then your campaign is not working.

Similarly, if your paid search spend is seeing sales soar, then make sure you increase the budget on your campaign and milk every prospective penny.

Seek sustainable goals

In paid search, the way in which you use your budget is key. If you spend all your money bidding on hugely popular and therefore expensive words, you are unlikely to have maximised the potential of your investment.

Spending X pounds securing 50 visitors who typed in ‘car insurance’ is fine. However, if that X pounds could have paid for 150 visitors who typed in ‘car cover’, then you have lost 100 potential customers through overly-ambitious keywords.

Managing your money effectively and sustainably is essential to long-term success.

Do not use paid search in isolation

You know all that stuff I said at the beginning about how paid search rocks? Well, it is all true, paid search is a really useful and effective tool when used well.

However, the best online campaigns will not simply rely on paid search but use SEO as well to ensure the brand is getting the maximum coverage.

Many, many searchers trust the organic results far more than the paid ads. That does not mean paid ads are ineffective (returns on paid search can be immense), it means that a company wanting to appeal to the widest possible group will work on both.

Use analytics tools

Not using the various analytical tools on offer is like not reading the instructions that come with your new high-tech gadget. You can probably still make it work but you won’t know how to get it to do all the cool stuff you bought it for in the first place.

If you could know important, useful and relevant stuff about where your visitors are coming from and what they do on your site, why would you choose not to?

Taking the time to understand the behaviour and actions of your consumers will help you hone all your online marketing efforts. Not to take advantage of the many free tools out there is crazy.

Consider consumer concerns

Obviously paid search has to be relevant if it is to be effective. However, before bidding on certain keywords and phrases, be sure you are targeting a consumer who wants to hear your marketing message.

To pick an extreme example, if you are a free-trade coffee seller, displaying adverts when a consumer searches for “fair-trade coffee seller” may not leave that searcher feeling positive about your brand.

Newspapers have been criticised for bidding on keywords such as “Madeleine McCann”, debate has raged over the ethics of letting pro-life groups bid on words such as “termination”. Consumers are always on the watch for acts of overt cynicism and will react negatively if your advert is insensitively positioned.

Bear in mind that with everything you do online, the end result is a human being, sitting behind a keyboard developing an opinion on your brand.

Using Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation to Get Proper Ad Scheduling Data

Richard Fergie — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:51:32 +0000

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.

Google Analytics can tell you how conversion rates vary by hour of the day or by day of the week, but it doesn’t give you both pieces of information at the same time. This is still useful but it means you can’t take into account weekends or similar odd days. You can get AdWords reports segmented by hour of the day, but these reports do not contain conversion data so they are useless for ROI or CPA based campaigns.

In this post I will tell you how to use the new Advanced Segmentation features to get the day parting information you need so that you can bid more for the best traffic.
AdWords will let you separate a day into up to six periods so you can’t bid by the hour. In this example I’ll segment the traffic into five segments; use existing data to decide how many segments you’ll need. Here are the instructions

Log into Google Analytics and select your paid search profile (if you don’t have a profile that filters out organic traffic use your standard profile).
Click the “Advanced Segments” link in the left hand menu and then click “Create a new customised segment”
You are now in the customised segment interface. Click “Visitors” under the “Dimensions” label in the left hand menu. Then drag “Hour of the Day” into the box labelled “dimension or metric”
My first segment will be from midnight to 06:00 so I’d select “Less than or equal to” in the condition drop down box and enter “6” in the value box.
If you aren’t in a PPC only profile then you’ll need a PPC filter as well. Click “Add “and” statement” and then drag “Medium” from the left hand menu to the box (In the Traffic Sources category). Select “cpc” in the value box.
Name your segment and then move onto the next one. You’ll have to add an extra “and” condition to tell the segment to start after 0600.

Now you can view the report and select your segments. As the picture above shows that over the whole week midday traffic is the most valuable but on Friday morning traffic is better whereas on Saturday midday traffic is the best.

Google will only let you choose three segments to display at once but to see everything on a day by day, hour by hour basis use the export to .csv option and then view the graph in your favourite spreadsheet. By comparing the percentage difference between the conversion rate of a particular segment and the average conversion rate you can tell how much more that traffic is worth to you.

6 Resources for Finding Negative Keywords

Richard Fergie — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:56:03 +0000

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.