Google

Broad Match Modifiers Now Available in U.S.

July 14, 2010 By Robert

Google announced the feature back in May and today the Rimm-Kaufman Group is announcing that broad match modifiers are now available to all US customers. So what’s the big deal?

What are “Broad Match Modifiers”?

Ever since AdWords went to expanded broad match (that’s Google-speak for “we’ll show you ad if we feel it is within 100 miles of being relevant to a search”) advertisers have been adding using more phrase match, exact match and negative keywords to avoid less qualified impressions and clicks. Frankly, experts have been bitching about this since it was pushed system wide. Of the 13 Deadly Sins of PPC, I rank it #3. Broad match modifiers is Google’s response to all the complaints.

This visual should help explain, but basically you add a plus sign to let Google know which word(s) are required.

Basically, if you add a plus sign in front of every word you can revert to the basic broad match. While most most beginner/intermediate users will go this route, advanced users will continue to test and optimize to find the best combination. I hate on broad match plenty, but Google has a lot of data and may help you discover profitable keywords you might have missed.

Filed Under: AdWords, Google, PPC Tagged With: broad match modifiers, expanded broad match

AdWords Offering to Set Up First Campaign for You

July 13, 2010 By Robert

AdWords is famous for saying that you can reach millions of potential customers in just 5 minutes. They have taken every step possible to make signing up easy. Now, they appear to have taken it even further:

As you can see, Google is actually giving you a phone number for a free consultation and offering to set up your first campaign for you, FREE!

Why now?

Google is somewhat famous for not having good customer support. Sure their products are free, but if you needed help good luck actually getting a person on the phone (unless you had an account rep, which translated to “if you spend enough money”). Now they are volunteering to talk to you and even lend a hand?

This is all about the money. AdWords is the engine that drives Google’s profit. Google obviously is looking for some more revenue, so they will help advertisers set up new accounts. Pretty simple.

My only concern is the quality. I have gotten quite a few campaign and ad groups from Google reps and I haven’t been impressed with the results. They group the keywords tightly (good) and use the keywords in the ad copy (also good) but they don’t usually do enough research to write compelling ad copy. You get cookie cutter ads that get decent CTR and send generic traffic to your homepage. Not a real recipe for success.

Has anyone out there took them up on this deal? How did it go?

Filed Under: AdWords, Google, PPC

R.I.P – Google AdWords Professionals

April 29, 2010 By Robert

“She’s a goner.”

“Time of death?”

“Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 3:01 AM.”

And thus was the end of the Google AdWords Professionals (GAP) program.

New – Google AdWords Certification

Before the body was even cold, Google already had their new bride at the altar; Google AdWords Certification. According to the post on the Official AdWords Blog “the new program provides agencies and their employees with more up-to-date, comprehensive, strategy-focused training and certification on the latest tools and best practices for managing AdWords accounts.” Here are the highlights:

More training materials for agencies so they can sell AdWords more effectively
Tougher certification tests
Advanced-level tests
New badges that link to a verification page

And here is what I think of them:

Training agencies better produces an army of volunteer AdWords sales reps who already have relationships with the clients. They’ve been trying to do this with Agency Land but this has a much larger scope. Makes great business sense.
The test is tougher than the previous test. The test browser doesn’t let you access the internet to teach, it’s 120 questions long and you only have 2 hours. However, I took the Fundamentals test in less than 1 hour, with no studying and passed easily. This should be no sweat to experienced PPC wizards.
I like this idea because it allowed them to ask very in-depth questions about more advanced features of AdWords. Still passed the test without studying, but it was a better test in my opinion.
New badges. Cool. Click to verify option. Cool. Anything that helps me sell my services to a client I welcome.

What have been your thoughts/impressions on the new Google Certification Program?

Filed Under: AdWords, Google, PPC Tagged With: Google AdWords Certification, Google AdWords Professional

PPC Farming – Soil Prep

April 27, 2010 By Robert

Just like farming starts with the soil, PPC starts with your keywords. The first step in achieving a successful PPC harvest is to prepare your soil through appropriate keyword research.

Keyword Research

Your first step is to figure out what type of soil you have. First, look at your web content, promotional materials, marketing pieces, etc. to find the keywords that you are currently using to describe your service/product/offering. Open up a Word doc or pull out a pad of paper. Write these keywords/phrases down.

Second, log in to your analytics account (ie Google Analytics, Omniture, Statcounter). Run a report on your organic traffic for the last 3 months or so. Look at the top non-brand terms and add the best ones to your list.

Lastly, if your site has a search bar, look at your search log to see what people are typing once they are on your site. This is gold because these terms are exactly what users are looking for ON YOUR SITE! Add these to the list (if they aren’t already there).

Helpful Tools

This picture is a Troy-Bilt Horse; a 1HP tiller that chews through the toughest soil and leaves behind a path of soil nirvana. Tools like this allow you to prepare more soil with less time. Here’s a list of my favorites:

Google’s Keyword Tool(s) – Google currently has 3 versions of their keyword tool, but their info is based on the most search data and so I recommend starting with Google.
SpyFu - They show you the ads, the natural results and give estimates of how much clicks are costing advertisers. This is great for seeing what your competitors are doing.
Wordstream – Easy to use, great UI and they’ll email you your keyword lists.
Wordtracker - They don’t have as much search data as Google, but this will help you get insight into searches being done outside of Google.
Suggester - This is a newer tool, but kicks out some pretty good results. Warning: Their servers are in Texas, so some of their Top Terms are biased.

Proper keyword research will help you create an environment where the seeds of your PPC efforts can grow. So how do we get started planting?

UPDATE: Just yesterday Brad Geddes wrote a great piece on 7 keyword tools. Great supplement!

Filed Under: Google, PPC Tagged With: Google Keyword Tool, keyword research, keyword tools

Google Places = New Revenue Source For Google

April 21, 2010 By Robert

Just yesterday Google announced that their Local Business Center would be renamed to Google Places. No big deal really. Even my dad’s grass-fed beef has a listing. But what is Google’s motivation?

Follow The Money

Questioning Google’s motives has become a hobby of mine. Working with AdWords has taught me that Google is always looking out for their bottom line. Regardless of how altruistic they try to paint themselves, they are in the business of making money. Lots of it. Using this point of reference it was easy to see the reason for Google Places.

A new, simple way to advertise: For just $25 per month, businesses in select cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags. As of today, we’re rolling out Tags to three new cities – Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. – in addition to ongoing availability in Houston and San Jose, CA. In the coming weeks we’ll also be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco,

How magnanimous of Google to give SMBs a new way to spend money.

Filed Under: Google Tagged With: Google Places, Local Business Center

10 Ways to Increase Your Google Quality Score for Your PPC Campaign (Guest Post)

March 30, 2010 By Robert

Quality score plays a key role in the minimum cost per click in your pay per click campaigns. It also is integral in the position of your search results; if it’s too low, your ad might not even display. Since it’s such a fundamental aspect of PPC campaigns, it makes sense to optimize it as much as possible.

But what is quality score? Google defines quality score as, “the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.” This is practically the same for the other first tier PPC networks, including Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter.

Here are 10 ways you can improve the “basis for measuring” your campaign. This article will focus on Google Adwords quality score. Adwords accounts show scores as “Great,” “OK” or “Poor,” reflecting the other options in Yahoo! Panama. Read on to learn how to be “Great!”

1: Split Your Keywords into Smaller, More Targeted Ad Groups.

Adwords comes with a built-in keyword grouper tool that will group keywords into 15 groups of 20 related words. Take advantage of this to make targeted ad groups for your campaign.

2: Create Ad Copy That’s Relevant to Each Ad Group.

The copy of the pages these PPC campaigns direct to must remain relevant to the targeted keywords used in the ad groups. Titles in the copy should be upper case and implement keywords.

3: Optimize Creatives.

Use different verbs and calls to action in each ad group. This will let you test all the ad groups for the most effective creative. This will allow you to delete the others. Weed out what works and doesn’t work and you will find an increase in the campaign click rate. Optimizing your creatives is a never ending process; even an extra 0.01% CTR is a bonus, and it’s only found through a little tweaking.

4: Experiment with Matching Options.

Use broad match, exact match, and phrase match keywords in each ad group to find out which of the three has a better quality score. Delete whichever option isn’t working out.

5: Gets Your Hands in Link Building and SEO.

Once you have your PCC campaign on its way, run a deep linking building campaign with the highest performing keywords for both volume and conversion rate. This will help your quality score and will also help your organic SEO campaign in the coming months.

6: Implement More Keywords into the Copy.

Take a moment to implement most of the successful keywords you’ve discovered thus far into the copy.

7: Split Test Landing Pages.

Set up several landing pages and test the different conversion rates. Google Analytics can make a write up on the major elements affecting your conversions. This multi variant testing and optimizing is too complex to elaborate upon in this article, but it would benefit any PPC campaign to learn how to master this step.

8: Check Your Meta Tags.

Add the keywords with the best performance and conversion to the meta tags of each page. Also, place the exact ad text from the best performing creative in the meta’s description. The best keyword should go into the title tag.

9: Implement the Essentials into Your Site.

Make sure your site has a privacy policy somewhere in the header or footer. Additional pages worth consideration are: about us; terms and conditions; newsletters; and contact us.

10: Double Check Google’s Relevancy.

The Site-Related Keywords tool provided by Google will check that the landing page is relevant to the keywords being targeted. Google should see each landing page as VERY related to the keywords implemented throughout the PPC campaign.

By following this strategy, your keywords should go from “Poor” to “Great” and your cost per click costs should drop down extensively. Make sure to delete any keywords with a poor quality score after a month of working on your PPC campaign; cutting off the excess fat will lead to a lean and successful pay per click strategy!

About the Author

Jessica Kerr is an SEO and SEM specialist from Southern California. Her area of expertise is in the education industry. She enjoys reading international news, freelance writing for a variety of different columns, and walking her dog. Contact Jessica at jessicakerr@yahoo.com.

Filed Under: Google, PPC Tagged With: Campaign, quality score

Google DROPS Their Branding from Ad Planner

March 2, 2010 By Robert

Now I have truly seen it all. Last week Google announced that they would be renaming the Google Ad Planner (their tool for making media buys on targeted sites) the DoubleClick Ad Planner. So why am I making a big deal about what seems to be a very trivial name change?

Google Dropped Its Own Brand Name

Google loves to hear it’s own name. Froogle sounded funny, so they renamed it Google Product Search (despite the longer name.) Gmail in the UK? Nope, it’s Google Mail (partially because they lost a lawsuit too.) They even have their own cell phone now, the Google Nexus One. They love putting their name on everything, so when they take their name off of something, it makes me wonder.

Possible Explanations

The tool isn’t doing well and they don’t want a failure to tarnish the Google name.
DoubleClick raised a stink and wanted some love. Maybe the purchase isn’t going as smoothly as we thought?
Google’s brand doesn’t carry much weight in the display industry (and DoubleClick does). Hard to believe, but entirely possible.

All of these are a little out there, so what do you think? Why did Google drop their branding from Ad Planner?

Filed Under: Google, internet marketing, PPC Tagged With: Ad Planner, DoubleClick

Google’s 3 Keyword Tools

February 24, 2010 By Robert

Perhaps I’m a little slow on the uptake here, but why does Google have three different keyword tools? The oldest of the three (to my knowledge) is the External Keyword Tool here. This is the tool I’ve had bookmarked in Firefox for years. However, a while back Google launched the Search-Based Keyword Tool. This represented a branch in the product development more than evolution since the search-based tool was intended to take “actual Google search queries” into consideration when looking at a URL or list of keywords & phrases. Then, a couple weeks ago I saw a tweet mentioning a new Google keyword tool that was only accessible from a link in AdWords. I have been using it quite a bit over the last couple weeks and I’m quite impressed.

The New Google Keyword Tool

Understand that I use the term “new” liberally because the official AdWords blog post about this if from September. So it’s new to me (in my defense, they say it’s in beta, so I like to think my account just didn’t get access until recently). You can read the official post for the details, but here is why I think this tool is too cool for school.

Great Filtering – On the left sidebar you’ll see that you can check/uncheck the different main keywords to weed out less relevant threads. You can also display broad, phrase and exact match searches AT THE SAME TIME!
Sorting – Now that you can actually display all 3 match types together, sorting by total search volume, or average CPC, will quickly give you a high-level snapshot of the opportunity.
Competitor Research – Here’s a little trick for you to try. Take the URL of a competitor and put it into the “Website” box. Include all match types and then sort the list by relevance (drop-down box above the keyword list, right side). This will show you what Google thinks are the most relevant keywords on your competitor’s site and how much search volume they’re potentially getting.
Self-Analysis – Now put your own URL into the tool and run the same process as above. Are you sending Google the right message?

P.S. When you first bring up the tool you’ll only see columns for Keyword, Competition, Global Monthly Searches, Local Monthly Searches, and Local Search Trends. The “Views” drop-down box will show you the other 9 columns of info you’re missing out on.

Filed Under: Google, PPC Tagged With: Google Keyword Tool

PPC for Mobile Getting Serious

January 21, 2010 By Robert

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.

Filed Under: AdWords, Google, PPC Tagged With: mobile PPC

Thursday 3-Pack of PPC Tips

January 14, 2010 By Robert

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).

Filed Under: AdWords, Google, PPC, Yahoo Tagged With: PPC tips, Thursday 3-Pack