Righteous Marketing

If you consider YouTube a search engine it would be larger than Yahoo or Bing (according to the February numbers from comScore). BILLIONS of videos are viewed every month. However, most PPC advertisers haven’t been tapping this resource because of the resources required to create overlays for YouTube videos. Google saw a huge revenue opportunity felt their pain and enhanced the Display Ad Builder to create InVideo ads.

Advertise on YouTube

Just bring up the Display Ad Builder, pick a template and turn your current image ads into overlay ads. You can still choose either CPC or CPM while targeting all the way down to a video by video level. However, I would recommend you ask yourself a few questions before taking the plunge:

• Is your product/service relative to the videos on which it’s being overlayed?
• Are you okay with potentially being perceived as an annoying advertiser messing up someone’s YouTube creation?
• Why should someone leave their video by clicking your ad?

If you don’t answer Yes, Yes and have a dang good reason on the last question, this probably isn’t for you. But Google isn’t stupid and I see some opportunities here. With the video by video targeting you could place your ads on a handful of extremely relevant videos where your ad presents a complementary product/service or you could “hijack” a video as it goes viral to get a ton of exposure. However, the best opportunity I can think of would be to serve your own ads on your own videos. The link in the video’s description is great, but now you could have a clickable call-to-action (CTA) right on the video itself.

How do you see this working?

Yesterday on the Official AdWords Blog, Google announced a few new features targeted directly to the fast-growing mobile search arena. I’ll give you my 2 cents and then you can go and read full post.

Target by Device & Target by Carrier

You want granular, you got it! Targeting by device will allow PPC advertisers to customize copy, landing pages and offers specifically to the device. If you’re running serious mobile campaigns this is going to be a boon. And can’t you just hear the mobile execs pulling their hair out because of carrier-specific targeting? Yep, now Verizon can run ads that only target AT&T users and vice versa. There is already a price war brewing and Google just handed both parties a bazooka.

Direct App Downloads

Have an app to sell? This will make your life so much easier. If you’re advertising for iPhone or Android apps just use the URL for the app store and Google will automatically put a “Download App” link. No more worrying about losing people on a landing page. Just 1 step and they’ve got your app in their hot little hands.

To fully paint the picture, imagine this scenario:

Your company develops iPhone apps and you just developed and app that increases your gas mileage (everyone is gonna want this). For the US you can set your device targeting to iPhone/iPod Touch to prevent bogus impressions and clicks from lowly Android and Palm OS users. You then target AT&T and Boom! Each click is going straight to the App Store so you’ll get insane conversion rates.

How else could this be used? I’d especially encourage any international ramifications if you’re out of the US.

For today’s post I’m going to borrow from Charles Dickens a bit. You will be visited by 3 PPC tips; the PPC past, PPC present and PPC future.

• PPC Past – Our ghost of PPC past is Kate Morris who wrote this exceptional post about dayparting using Google Analytics. This is a step-by-step guide that will reveal important data to help you know what time of day justifies additional (or any) spend.
• PPC Present – Our ghost of PPC present is the Official AdWords blog, posting about the recent change to the display URL policy on subdomains. However, Brad Geddes thinks they still didn’t get it quite right.
• PPC Future – Our ghost of PPC future is Mike Churchill of SEM Clubhouse writing about the new Yahoo PPC Network distribution option. Proving that it’s better late than never, Yahoo finally gives advertisers more control over content network impressions and bids (though I wish they would have also bumped the number of Domain Blocks up since 500 isn’t enough sometimes).

Say you’ve been working hard with your AdWords account and you feel good about your results. CTR on ads and keywords is good. Conversion rate is okay, though not stellar. Where can you look for further improvement you think? Look in your analytics.

PPC Bounce Rate

To find your PPC bounce rate, log in to your analytics account. For most of you that will be Google Analytics (which I’ll be basing this post upon) but any analytics package worth its salt will have this data. In GA you’ll want to go to click on Traffic Sources in the left nav and then select Search Engines. For this example I then select Google in the main content section and then filter it to only paid traffic by clicking “paid”:


Now you’ll see just the performance of your AdWords keywords and we want to focus on bounce rate.

What It Tells You

As you can see, this keyword has a bounce rate near 90%. But what does that mean? It can mean a couple things:

• Wrong Stage – The purchase process involves numerous stages from interest to research to actual purchase. If the keyword is often used by prospects in the research phase and you’re putting them on a purchase page, you’ll likely see a high bounce rate.
• Broken Promises – The most likely explanation is the simplest; your ad piqued their interest, but the landing page didn’t deliver. They expected one thing and got something else.
• Multiple Meanings – Many words have different meanings. Toto can be a fancy Japanese toilet, Dorothy’s dog from the Wizard of Oz, or a famous rock band. Look at your keyword reports and put some negative keywords to work.

What else does PPC bounce rate tell you?

Preface: I love Google and in no way want to incur the wrath of almighty Google (via Google slaps, banned accounts, etc.). I just want to vent a little frustration and everything will be all good when the issue is resolved.

The Situation

I manage the PPC for a large, international company in the payments industry. They prepay their AdWords account by transferring funds directly from their bank. They sent in their last payment in plenty of time to avoid running out of funds. The Billing Summary in AdWords shows the payment as received on Nov. 26. Despite this fact all campaigns are suspended and ads are not showing at this moment.

I contacted my agency rep (she’s great with helping me put together RFPs for new business) and since she doesn’t handle billing she referred me to their regular support. I brought up the issue in an online chat, of course the representative couldn’t fix the issue, and said she would escalate it to the “Specialist Team”. I got an email back about 24 hours later telling me the “Specialist Team” was investigating the matter and would get back to me. Well, it’s been another 24 hours and no word yet. Meanwhile I have a client with money in the AdWords bank who can’t seem to get Google to turn on their ads despite wanting to spend that money.

What The Hell Google?

Last time I checked AdWords was your moneymaker, so why does the customer service suck so bad? I can understand when their isn’t customer service for free offerings like Analytics or Voice, but AdWords? I’m starting to wonder if something isn’t wrong over there when I can’t get a seemingly simple fix made within 24 hours of contacting them. Anyone else having this issue?

Last Thursday Google quietly rolled out a new feature in AdWords called Comparison Ads. The official explanation (via the Google AdWords blog) is that Comparison Ads “lets users compare multiple, relevant offers more easily.” Okay, I can buy that. Google trying to make things easier on users. They do that a lot. However, this should make a lot of AdWords advertisers uneasy.

Why Comparison Ads Are Good

The most obvious benefit is that given by Google; it allows users to make a quick comparison of different offers and take action easily. Also, for some advertisers, only having to pay once a lead or phone call comes in (instead of paying for lots of clicks that don’t convert) will be a blessing.

Why Comparison Ads Are Evil

Basically, Comparison Ads are evil because this gives Google more power and advertisers less power. Just look at the example that Google put on their own blog. The screenshot shows 9 lenders, all on the same page with their name, APR, fees, two lines of ad copy and call-to-action buttons all lines up in pretty little rows. How does a lender set themselves apart? Are two lines of ad copy enough to convey your competitive advantages?

As a consumer I would look at this page and the first thing I would do is look for the lowest APR (which Google has conveniently bolded and enlarged). Then I would look at the fees and payment info next to the APR. See what’s happening? Pure price comparison. You no longer have landing pages to convey your message. You will always be listed right next to your competitors. This should make AdWords advertisers very nervous.

So What?

I’m interested to hear your thoughts. Hopefully I’ve got you thinking and if I’m wrong I want to hear why because I would dearly like to be wrong on this one.

A couple months ago the PPC gods smiled upon me and I was assigned a Google agency rep. I bring this up not to brag but to give my rep (we’ll call her B) and Google some props.

Getting Started

To start things off B gave me a call just introducing herself and explaining the general reason why she was calling. We had a good chat and she let me know that she was available as a resource. She also asked me to pick a client’s campaign that they could look at and give suggestions for improvement. I chose a campaign in a tough niche and let them take a whack at it.

B got back to me in a couple days with the suggestions. There weren’t any magic beans, but the advice confirmed some things I had been observing as well as pointing out a couple of additional opportunities. At that point we scheduled a meeting for B and her team to speak with our team here, including the company president.

The call between our team and their team repeated a lot of the information B and I had discussed in our initial call, but this forum allowed for everyone to get on the same page. Our president was impressed with Google’s initiative and enjoyed having a direct contact, so it was definitely a success.

Followup

As you all know, when work gets busy you tend to put your head down and crank (at least that’s what I do.) Therefore I was surprised to see Google come up on my caller ID since I hadn’t reached out to them. The call was from B to check up on how we were doing and ask if there was anything she could assist with. This reminded me that we had a proposal out to a client and that she could get me some stats on the space (# of impressions, keywords suggestions, CPC) to help with the proposal. It was much appreciated.

The Lesson…

I bring this up as a demonstration of a pattern I observed:

1. Initiate The Relationship: Keep it low-pressure, offer something of value and deliver on your promise
2. Reinforce The Relationship: Involve key stakeholders to gain support
3. Follow-Up: Reach out to show you care and again offer something of value

For me, the biggest part is follow-up. This requires you to be proactive and consistent. What are you doing to follow-up with your customers/clients?

The greatest strength of AdWords has always been the fantastic metrics. As a PPC manager for an internet marketing agency I can attest to the fact that clients love knowing exactly how much they’re spending, how many visitors they get for that money and how many conversions it produces. However, Google isn’t resting on its laurels.

Google Campaign Insights

In short, Campaign Insights is an attempt to attach metrics to impressions in the content network (currently a money black hole for many advertisers) by utilizing the massive amount of search data that Google possesses. These metrics are generated by comparing two groups: one large group who saw your ads and one large group that didn’t. Campaign Insights then compares search behavior and visits to your site to determine if the impressions had any effect on their behavior. That is pretty dang cool.

For those people who worry about privacy concerns, Google only uses data from Google Toolbar users who have opted in to enhanced features. Also, the data is anonymized as well as obfuscated by the size of the groups being analyzed. Translation to all that jargon: nobody knows your search history.

Yesterday I was reminded of a paradox in PPC management. As you expand your PPC efforts beyond a single campaign with a single ad group you too have encountered the paradox, though in varying degrees. This paradox is caused by the collision of two commonly accepted best practices: testing and tightly-themed ad groups.

Testing v. Granularization

Anyone worth their salt in PPC knows that you should always be testing. You test two to three versions of ad copy to get a better CTR. You test two different landing pages to improve conversion rate. You also know that these tests require a certain amount of clicks or conversions before they achieve validity.

Another best practice (and Google pushes this a lot) is to create small, tightly themed ad groups. By having only a handful of keywords in your ad group you can write extremely targeted ad copy and send traffic to a more targeted landing page. This practice improves the chain of relevancy (and your QS) while optimizing the user experience. The paradox, however, lies at the convergence of these concepts in practice.

The Paradox

The genesis for this post was a Powerpoint sent to me by one of our Google reps. The recommendations were solidly based on best practices like the two mentioned above, but the part that got me was when the slide said that by making more ad groups that were small and tightly themed I would have “easier campaign management.” On the surface that seems accurate; the ad groups have fewer keywords and the copy would be more specific, but what about tests?

To reach validity tests need to achieve a certain number of actions or responses. This particular client already has their campaign divided into nearly 100 campaigns with hundreds of ad groups. They spend a lot of money, but even with the existing account structure tests can take weeks or months to achieve validity. And now Google wants me to INCREASE the number of ad groups, further spreading out my traffic into more tests? This could potentially slow our test iterations to a virtual standstill.

Perhaps I’m tripping out about nothing, but I’m curious what all of you think. How do you balance testing and granularization?

PS I would especially appreciate someone from AdWords to chime in here, so consider this a challenge Google.

I read an interesting article over at Search Engine Land on Tuesday titled “Coming Soon: Paid Search Without Keywords.” The author, Mona Elesseily, was commenting on a keynote address she heard at SES San Jose where Nick Fox was discussing that in the next 5-10 years paid search would operate without keywords. The reasoning was that as search users get smarter they use longer search terms (20-25% of searches on Google in the last 6 months were unique) which makes PPC a game of generating and managing increasingly longer keyword lists.

Benefits of No Keywords

The main benefit of this system would be the simlification of AdWords. Google has always played up the fact that anyone can use AdWords to drive traffic to their site. While true, doing a good job is beyond most users. I agree with this benefit (though it gives me concern, which I will get to in a minute). Better relevancy on natural language searches and better connections are also mentioned, but these seem too fluffy and undefined to mean much.

The Drawback

While Mona seemed excited about the possibilities I couldn’t ignore the impression that Google was trying to take AdWords, the product where Google is most transparent and where the levers are fairly well understood, and make it another of their famous black boxes. Nobody knows exactly how the search algorithm works (and it’s changing all the time). Nobody knows the revenue split in AdSense. Nobody knows how PageRank is calculated. Am I taking crazy pills?

In short, I agree that PPC is getting more complex as search users get more savvy. I like that Google is an innovator and is looking for new, more efficient ways to handle paid search (that means more efficient ways to make money, but that’s another story). However, I do not like working with a black box when it’s my money going into the black box. Anyway, that’s the end of my rant. Any Googlers out there who want to come to the defense of Nick Fox? Did I miss something?