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AdWords Offering to Set Up First Campaign for You

July 13, 2010 By
AdWords Free Campaign Setup

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:

AdWords Free Campaign Setup

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

How To Add Sitelinks To Your Google AdWords Ads

June 30, 2010 By
AdWords sitelinks settings

Have you seen an AdWords ad that looked like this, with the links across the bottom?

Picture of AdWords ad with sitelinks

This is an example of Sitelinks, and as of June 24th, all AdWords advertisers can use them. But in typical Google style, they’ve buried the feature so that most basic users won’t find the option. Therefore, I have put together this step-by-step guide:

Google AdWords Sitelinks

  1. Choose Your Campaign – This feature exists at the campaign level, so login to your AdWords account and select the campaign where you’re going to add sitelinks.
  2. Go to the Settings Tab – Along with lots of other goodies, here is where you’ll find this golden nugget.
  3. Find Sitelinks under Ad Extensions – Click EditAdWords sitelinks settings
  4. Fill in up to 10 links – AdWords sitelinks interface
  5. Click Save

The Catch


For now Google claims that sitelinks will only show for “the single top-ranked ad for a given user search” (but lower position ads also have been seen with sitelinks too). So make sure and take the time to add these valuable little guys to you campaigns, but remember that the links should be relevant for the entire campaign.

Filed Under: AdWords, PPC Tagged With: ,

AdWords Reporting Keeps Getting Easier

June 24, 2010 By

Google logoWhile Google has been called out recently to release ad and campaign QS data, they have been taking steps to make other data more easily obtained in AdWords.

More Reports in the Interface

I was a big fan when the Search Query Report functionality was moved into the interface. Not only did it make obtaining the information so much easier, it made it easier to act on that data by adding new keywords, new match types and negative keywords.

Google is continuing to build on that success by moving even more reporting functionality into the interface. A recent post from Inside AdWords blog details the changes, which includes the ability to “segment your data by things like keyword match type and day of week, and email and schedule downloads of the data you want to share.”

If you haven’t been using reports, don’t blame Google, because they’re making it easier all the time.

Filed Under: AdWords, PPC Tagged With:

Will Facebook PPC Never Learn?

June 16, 2010 By
Annoying Facebook Ad

Ever since June of 2008 (yes, 2 years ago) Facebook ads have allowed you to “rate” the ad. At first it was a simple thumbs up/thumbs down approach where you would then be prompted to select the reason for your rating.

Facebook Ad Feedback

Initially I believe this feedback was used primarily to punish ads that users didn’t like, thus helping Facebook promote a better user experience and keep a handle on “spammy” advertisers. However, the current Facebook ad ratings also promise that my ratings will help Facebook serve me more relevant ads in the future.

Annoying Facebook Ad

Facebook Ad Removal

Facebook Ad Removal Thank You Message

When Will Facebook Learn?

As a single male in my mid-twenties, I get targeted by every major dating site on the web. I understand that I match their demographic info, so I’ve been “rating” their ads as uninteresting or repetitive for quite some time. However, as you can see from the screenshots above (taken from my account today) I still see dating site ads. It drives me crazy. Facebook asked for my feedback, I gave my feedback with their promise to improve the relevancy of my ads, but I still get the same lame ads. Come on Facebook!

Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: ,

LinkedIn PPC – Should You Be Using It?

June 15, 2010 By
LinkedIn PPC Ad

The other day I was in my LinkedIn account and came across the following ad:
LinkedIn PPC Ad
I was surprised because not only is the ad personalized with my first name, but it even uses my profile pic. That’s some heavy-duty personalization. So I decided it was time to go give LinkedIn a shot by setting up a campaign.

Step 0 – Big or Small?

After clicking the Advertising link in the footer I was presented with the following two options:
LinkedIn For Large Budgets
LinkedIn for Small Budgets

At the moment I don’t have $25K/month to blow on LinkedIn ads, so I chose the 2nd option.

Step 1 – Write an Ad

Pretty simple format. Looks like the character limits match up with AdWords limits and you can add a 50×50 image to the ad as well. The unique feature is the ability to say who the ad is from. You can choose either your personal profile or your company for additional “credibility”.

Step 2 – Target Your Audience

They have a dynamic “audience ticker” like Facebook with a starting value of just under 70 million. There are 7 areas to target, of which you may choose 3. I’m choosing geography (Salt Lake City Metro Area has about 190K people in it evidently), gender (Male takes me down to 98K) and seniority (Director, CXO and VPs leaves me with about 17K). There is an option to reach LinkedIn members on the “LinkedIn Audience Network” but I’m unchecking it for this little experiment. Also, the geographic targeting isn’t very advanced yet. They only had about 20 countries and in the US you only had about 30 metro areas to target. Not very precise yet.

Step 3 – Budget Info

You get to pick between CPC and CPM bidding (LinkedIn is throwing out some really high suggested bids), set a daily budget and give the campaign an end date if you so desire. WARNING: Though I classified myself as having a smaller budget, they won’t let me proceed on CPC bidding unless my bid is at least $2.00. Might be the demographics I chose, but dang LinkedIn!

Step 4 – Billing

Evidently they’ve got good user experience people because they asked for the meaty info last, after I’ve put in the time and effort to create an ad, choose targeting and set a budget. Pretty basic stuff so they have a CC on file for you.

Overall the setup was really easy. Nothing too fancy, but as a small advertiser using their “DirectAd” format, I didn’t have the ability to personalize my ad with the user’s name or profile picture. That must be a feature reserved for the big guys who are cranking through at least $25K/month. Figures! Well, I’ll keep you updated on how things turn out, but the only real interesting part of the process was the demographic info you could glean from the targeting section.

Who else is experimenting with LinkedIn right now? Would love to see some comments.

Filed Under: PPC Tagged With:

PPC Spell Check #Fail

June 2, 2010 By
PPC Spellcheck

Hey! Whoever is doing PPC for www.ThemesPress.com. You should probably run spell check on your PPC ads. #justsayin

PPC Spellcheck

Anybody come across any other good ones lately?

Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: ,

PPC Poll – How Often Do You Run AdWords Reports?

May 26, 2010 By




Filed Under: AdWords, PPC Tagged With: ,

PPC Poll – Which AdWords Report(s) Do You Use?

May 26, 2010 By


Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: ,

PPC Farming – Harvest Part I

May 20, 2010 By
Amish Harvest

Amish Harvest
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.

Filed Under: Conversion Optimization, PPC Tagged With:

PPC Farming – Weeding

May 19, 2010 By
Pulling Weeds

Pulling WeedsYour 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:
Weedy Garden

Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: , ,
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