PPC Poll – How Often Do You Run AdWords Reports?
May 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
PPC Farming – Harvest Part I
May 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Whew! This PPC stuff can be hard work. You spend hours prepping the soil (researching keywords and competitors), planting seeds (account creation and settings), watering & fertilizing (bids, match types and testing) and weeding (negative keywords and domain exclusion). Finally, it’s time to harvest and see the reward of your labors.
Landing Pages – Where the Harvest Happens
All your work should result in a qualified person arriving at one of your landing pages. However, their is still work to be done.
- Relevance – Is your landing page relevant to the keyword searched and the ad copy they clicked? If you can’t answer yes to this question you’re losing a large portion of your harvest. The chain of relevancy is vital to conversion because your ad copy made a promise. Your landing page has to deliver on that promise.
- Clarity – As Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments is fond of saying, upon arriving at a landing page customers want to know “Where am I?”, “Why am I here?”, and “What can I get here?” Your landing page needs to convey those answers quickly (within the first few seconds) and clearly.
- Actionable – This may seem obvious, but your landing page should prominently feature the next step you want a customer to take. And don’t just “feature” it, tell them exactly what they should do. From the headline to the button copy, tell them what you want them to do and the benefit they’ll receive if they do it.
Don’t waste all your hard work with a half-hearted harvest. Get those landing pages done right.
PPC Farming – Weeding
May 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Your garden is planted, the seeds have sprouted and the water and fertilizer have really sped up the growth of your garden. However, you quickly notice that your seeds aren’t the only ones that have sprouted. You now have a weed problem.
How Did Weeds Get In My Garden?
Just like your garden at home has weeds without any effort, your PPC efforts will have “weeds” in the form on poor-performing keywords and poor-performing domains.
Despite your best efforts to pick only relevant keywords that relate to your products, the sheer size of the internet and diversity of the people using it can create problems. Here are a few reasons those weeds always come up:
- Multiple meanings for the same words – Toto is a brand of high-quality toilets manufactured in Japan. However, Toto is also the name of Dorothy’s dog from The Wizard of Oz as well as the band Toto (famous for the songs “Rosanna” and “Africa”) from the 80′s.
- Spammers/Bots – Unfortunately there are people/programs out there that will run searches and click ads for “other” reasons. Whether it is SEO rank-checking programs, PPC competitive intelligence programs or AdSense scammers, these will hurt your performance by raising impression counts, depressing CTR & QS, or even causing fraudulent clicks.
- Google’s automatic matching – The idea of showing your ads for related terms is good (ie you bid on “red basketball shoes” and Google shows you ad for “red Nike shoes”). However, that only works if you actually carry Nike (which you may not). Say Google gets a little more liberal and shows you ad for a search of “red slippers”? See how your ad can suddenly be showing for unrelated searches?
How To Weed You PPC Account
There are two main tools you should be using to weed your PPC account; Negative keywords and domain exclusion.
Negative Keywords – If you know common keywords that are unrelated, you can add them in your initial account set up. With our Toto toilets we could add words like “band”, “Dorothy”, “Oz”, etc. right from the beginning. However, as you campaigns run you’ll likely see some new terms you hadn’t thought of. Run a search query report (the new interface makes them easy – here are instructions for running a search query report) to see what terms are triggering your ads. I guarantee you’ll be surprised.
Domain Exclusion – If you’re using the content network you’ll want to see exactly which domains are showing your ads. Inevitably you’ll find sites that A) have tons of impressions buy no clicks or B) have a great CTR but high cost/conversion. Simply exclude those sites to improve your account improvement.
Weeds rob your garden of water and nutrients. In PPC they rob you of your budget, raise your CPC and thwart your efforts to deliver a positive ROI. Do your weeding earlier rather than later because nobody wants this to be their garden:
PPC Farming – Fertilizing
May 14, 2010 By 1 Comment
Plants have 3 simple requirements:
- Sunlight
- Water
- Nutrients
Google provides the sunlight (impressions), you provide the water (budget) and this will start getting you results. However, to maximize the growth potential of your PPC, you need some Miracle-Gro.
Fertilizer = Testing
Just as fertilizer helps plants grow larger, faster and produce more, testing helps your PPC efforts to get more clicks, better QS and more conversions. Here are some areas of your PPC accounts that you should be fertilizing:
- Keyword Match Type – For short terms (ie organic shampoo) test both phrase and exact match to see what works best. For longer terms (ie Utah Grass Fed Beef) test broad, phrase and exact.
- Keyword Bids/Position – These two concepts are linked, but test your ad in different positions to determine the “sweet spot”. You may be able to deliver more profit in positions 4-6, or if you want volume target the top 3 spots.
- Ad Copy – ALWAYS have at least two ad versions in an ad group. And don’t just test little differences like “Buy Here” vs. “Shop Here”. Try radically different ideas. Even ones that seem a little crazy because this is where you can really learn what messaging resonates with your customers.
Constant testing and improvement is why PPC should be managed by a qualified in-house resource or outsourced to a qualified contractor or agency. Your competition is always changing, PPC platforms are changing themselves and you can’t afford to just “set it and forget it” with PPC.
PPC Farming – Watering
May 5, 2010 By 1 Comment
Now that you’ve prepped your soil, planted your seeds, and you’re starting to see some sprouts, we need to talk about proper watering.
As mentioned in the previous post on planting, watering = money. Setting your budget is enough to get the seeds to sprout, but to keep them growing you’ll need more consistency. This is where you keyword-level bids come into play.
Too Little Water Can Kill
Remember that house plant you forgot to water for weeks (maybe even months)? If your experience is what I’ve seen, then your plant was a goner. Likewise with your keyword bids. If you don’t set them high enough your ads don’t get triggered and your carefully planted seeds sprout and then promptly die. There are a couple of watering strategies you can use:
- Full Stream – You want to dominate the space and top position is how you want to do it. Start with aggressive bids and make sure your QS is good. Keep the water coming as fast as your plants can handle it.
- Slow & Steady – You’re not going for top position, but you’re looking to find the ROI-maximizing sweet spot. My experience is that top position on the right column of ads (usually 3-6ish) provides maximum bang for the buck when you have a limited budget.
Caution! You Can Over-Water
This may seem like an oxymoron to some, but too much watering can be just as fatal as too little watering. The problem with over-watering is that plants start to drown and develop fungal growths. With your PPC efforts this usually begins appearing as grumbling from the marketing exec about budget. They see how much money is going into PPC and want to send that money to another effort. I’ve seen companies over-water, feel the spend was unjustified and stop doing PPC for months. Make sure you have tracking installed. Make sure you know your cost/acquisition. Make sure it’s comparable or better than the cost/acquisition of other channels. That is how you keep the water flowing.
How else do you water your PPC crops?
PPC Farming – Planting Part II
May 4, 2010 By 1 Comment
In our last post we discussed how PPC account setup is like planting your farm. However, a savvy farmer knows that you need a few key elements for your seeds to start growing (“germinate” in horticultural parlance).
Getting Your Seeds To Sprout
Every good gardener knows that you need 3 things to get from a dormant seed to a growing plant: Water, Heat & Sunlight.
- Water – This is your budget. You can add keywords & write ads all day, but the clicks don’t start coming until you put in the billing info and set your budget (and PPC stops delivering when you stop watering). Every situation is unique and you may have some budgetary constraints. However, you want your budget to large enough to capture significant traffic (for valid testing and for conversions) while not breaking the bank. A good PPC manager can help you set an initial budget and advise you on opportunities as you go along.
- Heat – This is your settings. At the campaign level consider whether you want to be on the content network or search partners, what devices your ads will be on, whether you should use day-parting, and changing over to rotated ads instead of optimized. The right settings will heat things up to get your account growing much quicker.
- Sunlight – This is impressions. You’ve set the budget (watered) and heated up the soil (proper settings) but if your ads aren’t showing you won’t get results. First you’ll want to look at your bids (you just might not be bidding high enough to get on the first page), then your Quality Score (low QS can keeps your ads from showing), and don’t forget search volume. If you’re going for terms with really low volume, there just might not be many searches where you could show.
R.I.P – Google AdWords Professionals
April 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
“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?
PPC Farming – Planting
April 28, 2010 By 2 Comments
Now that you’ve done your PPC soil prep its time to plant.
Account Setup
Setting up a PPC account is easy. For AdWords it can even be too easy. The first step in setting up AdWords is to decide if you would like the Starter Edition or the Standard Edition. Even though Google says that the Starter Edition is “recommended for those who are new to Internet advertising”, do NOT commit the Sin of Insecurity and choose Starter Edition. If you chose Starter Edition, just upgrade to Standard (no charge) so that you have full control over the account spend.
Okay, now that we’re on the same page, let’s talk about account structure.
Account Structure
PPC accounts have three main levels of organization. The highest level is the account. The next level consists of campaigns in the account. The lowest level exists in campaigns and is the ad group. Proper planting involves both campaigns and ad groups.
Campaigns
Several options are only applicable on a campaign level. Therefore, here are situations where you’ll need separate campaigns:
- You offer different types of products/services. For example, Zappos would want separate campaigns for running shoes, basketball shoes, sandals, etc.
- You want to target different areas with location specific messaging. For example, you want ads targeted to just San Antonio for your Spurs merchandise and ad targeted just to Dallas for your Mavericks merchandise. Geotargeting only works at the campaign level.
- You want to target mobile devices. Again, mobile targeting only works at the campaign level and you should have separate campaigns for mobile since the customer will likely be in a different mindset.
- You want to use the content network. Many people avoid the content network, but the content network is powerful if bridled. The key here is that you should have your content network efforts in their own campaigns.
Looking at your keyword research and using these guidelines you should have a good idea of where to start with your campaigns. Now what about ad groups?
Ad Groups
Here is where you’ll need to get your hands dirty. Ad groups are where keywords, bids and ad copy reside. Most of your time and effort will be spent here.
The ideal ad group has a handful of keywords that are all tightly themed. For example, San Francisco divorce lawyer and San Francisco divorce attorney would go in the same ad group. However, San Francisco DUI lawyer should be in another ad group because the person is looking for two different types of lawyer. Once you have your keywords grouped, you need to write at least 2 ads for each ad group. Use messaging that matches what the keywords. Consider using Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) but make sure that the ad matches the keyword (and as we’ll discuss later, that the keyword and ad match the landing page). And why 2 ads? You want to test which one gets more clicks and more conversions. Get in the habit of testing now, because it’s a big part of PPC farming.
To recap, our planting efforts will give you the potential for a bounteous harvest. You placed your keywords in nicely themed ad groups that were organized into intuitive campaigns. Your ad copy is relevant to your keywords and you’re eager to see your seeds sprout. But what will help them germinate (sprout)?
PPC Farming – Soil Prep
April 27, 2010 By 3 Comments
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!
