Are search ads misleading?

I picked up a magazine called Adbusters at Barnes and Noble the other day because even though I make my living advertising, it’s good to have some balance when it comes to media. I know how subversive and ever-present it can seem.
Per the Adbusters Web site, the magazine:

“is a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.”

The site goes on to describe its readership as follows:

“Our readers are professors and students; activists and politicians; environmentalists and media professionals; corporate watch dogs and industry insiders; kids who love our slick ad parodies and parents who worry about their children logging too many hours a day in the electronic environment.”

So I think it’s safe to say that not too many search marketers read the magazine, and I thought the industry as a whole would be interested in hearing the magazine’s take on buying keywords for various political campaigns. There are just a few paragraphs within a larger article about political advertising. The search piece has the frightening headline, “McCain buys ‘terror’”

From the November 2007 issue of Adbusters:

“Search for “war on terror” on Google and you may find a John McCain, Mitt Romney or Ron Paul advertisement pop up. Type in “universal health care” and the campaign site for Dennis Kucinich could appear.”

“In an effort to find ways of infiltrating the internet, US presidential candidates are paying to have their advertisements displayed beside popular search terms in Google. In what will be the most expensive and invasive election campaign in US history, politicians have now taken to branding themselves by buying words.”

…”It appears Google finally offers politicians the opportunity to buy some “integrity” and “honesty.”

Wow. I mean, really? Is search marketing so colossally misunderstood that people think buying keywords that are actually relevant to what you’re selling (in this case, the politicians are selling themselves and their own views on the issues of “terror” or “health care”) is invasive and misleading?

At least with search advertising, people are actively seeking information on the various topics they type into Google, as opposed to ads that suddenly appear front and center on a Web page or in your e-mail in box. It’s not exactly accurate to say that advertisements are displayed “beside popular search terms in Google.” As we all know, the ads are displayed beside the top-ranked organic search results. The organic results could arguably be considered advertising as well, particularly for those Web sites that are painstakingly optimized to rank well. So what should show up when someone types in a search if not search listings, paid or otherwise? Nothing?

I’m so immersed in the practice of search marketing that I rarely pause to consider how it must be perceived by those outside the industry. Do people really differentiate between paid and organic listings? I’d assumed the “Sponsored Links” heading on Google was a fairly obvious indication that the listings beneath them were ads, but in looking at a search results page, I could see how it would be easy to miss the unobtrusive label.

Nevertheless, the Adbusters article on political keyword advertising seems at best naive, and at worst, completely incorrect. Buying terms that are focused on political issues is entirely appropriate if you’re a politician trying to sell yourself on these issues. Now, if you buy the term “miserable failure” and write an ad about how George Bush sucks (if only), that’s a different story. Google wouldn’t let you get away with that anyway, but then I doubt Adbusters is aware of the strict quality guidelines that Google has in place to prevent such abuse from occurring (yes, this is ME talking - I don’t hate Google, I just don’t like arbitrary price increases that affect my beautiful campaigns).

1 comment November 3rd, 2007 Jackie

What if we were all like Google?

Since creating, launching and managing search campaigns (mostly on Google) is how I make my living, I’ve been trying really hard not to blast the hell out of Google for its latest dubious Adwords improvements.

I’m clearly not happy based on some previous blog posts, but I’ve been giving Google the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they really do want to have better search results for their users. Maybe they really are acting in our best interest (as advertisers) when they penalize us for poor quality - even if we don’t think it’s poor. Plus there’s all the information they do give us - like the search query report (*ahem* USELESS) and the ability to have ads up and running instantly (if we don’t mind paying $5.00 or $10.00 for arbitrary quality penalties).

But, well, now I’m mad (based on a series of off-putting emails from one of my reps) and when I get mad, I get snarky. And what are blogs for if not a little snark?

It must be nice being Google. Here’s a fun list.

If I were Google I’d…

• Increase my fees by 100 - 1000% overnight. Then when my clients complained I’d tell them it was for their own good. The fee increase would only be in place until they improved the quality of their business model. I wouldn’t give specifics on how to better increase it (don’t want anyone cheating!) - but I’d develop a list of guidelines they could painfully try to interpret (e.g., “no blue in the logos, make sure you link to cool stuff on your home page, don’t use the word “cheese” EVER, etc.”)
• I would consider lowering my fees if the changes had been made to my satisfaction (isn’t that nice of me?). This would occur during my review process which I would claim happened “regularly” (e.g., every one to 360 days).
• I would create an exhaustive database of guidelines and rules which I’d label “help” and direct all clients to this database for every single issue. No one likes customized answers, after all. It’s all about automation!
• I would begin referring to my services as “self-serve” any time a client below a certain fee level asked for additional attention or assistance. In fact, I would tout this as a key differentiator to my services compared with other, less popular and/or wonderful providers. Persistent questions would be met with persistent responses by me (or a fleet of mindless sales drones I’ve hired) directing questions to my growing database of canned “help” files.
• I would assign a team of people to my largest accounts and make sure that they stay happy and well-served. It’s in my best interest to grow the largest accounts, after all. It also serves the greater good because when big corporations are happy, everyone is happy! Therefore I would send all the big clients refrigerators, t-shirts, lava lamps, ipods, towels and other goodies covered with my logo (and my love).
• I would be very courteous and professional with people who complain about my new policies and would once again restate that they’re the ones who benefit from these changes in the end. After all, they’ll have a better business model and happier customers. They’ll be thanking me!!
• If my clients decide to take their business elsewhere, I would shake my head sadly but wouldn’t try to stop them. There’s always more clients, after all. Plus, I am ME and I own the market. The complainers would likely be just jealous of my success anyway.

In the words of the immortal Daffy Duck, “Consequences, schmonsequences, as long as I’m rich.”

Add comment October 26th, 2007 Jackie

Google’s quality score is killing me

Sometimes I long for the good old days of paid search, when GoTo.com was the only player, I was one of the only people who knew about them (or so it seemed) and bids started at just .01.

I knew it was too good to last, but prices continued to remain affordable for a long time and even when Google first introduced its veil of secrecy (otherwise known as the “quality score”), I continued to have faith in paid search as the great equalizer of online advertising - that is, it was cheap to start up and almost anyone could benefit from it regardless of the size of their budget. Not no more.

Barrier to entry

In July 2006, Google introduced it’s a new quality score algorithm which dictated some guidelines to advertisers about what Google considers a “useful” destination URL (or not). In fact, I avoided the term “landing page” deliberately because it’s currently going the way of the “doorway page.”

The short-short of it is, that if Google’s automated adBot finds the quality of your keywords lacking (either due to lack of good ad copy or a less-than-useful landing page) you get “slapped” with a minimum bid requirement of $5.00 to $10.00 (in rare cases it can also be about $1.00) which means your keyword remains inactivate and out of the game unless you raise your minimum bid.

Now, fast forward to August 2007 - Google introduced a new and improved Adwords “top placement formula” which they claim gives advertisers more control over achieving a top position in the paid search results, because placement is now dependent on minimum bid and quality score, than on what other advertisers are bidding and actually paying per click for the same keywords. Clear as mud? Check out Gray Wolf’s lucid analysis of the new formula for some clear (and disturbing) insight as to why this is BAD.
A tangible example of why this sucks

I recently restructured one of my client’s accounts because many of the terms were being slapped with $5 to $10.00 minimum bid penalties. I rewrote ads so they were painfully customized, I incorporated language in all the ads to match the landing pages (which were developed specifically to compliment the search campaign) and I happily relaunched everything last week. The main change I made to the keywords was I switched them from Exact to Phrase match because I figured the ads were more customized and would do more screening, so why not go for more volume?

Yesterday I logged into the new account and found that 90% of the terms had been penalized for low quality - again, these were the exact same terms as in the old account with the exception of match type. The ads were more customized and the landing pages had not changed. The campaign was essentially crippled - burning at about 1% of what we’d been spending prior to the restructure.

I activated all the disabled keywords by raising bids the required $5.00 to $10.00 and went back a couple of hours later only to discover that the client’s CPC was, you guessed it, $5.00 or $10.00 - even though many had little or no advertiser competition.

So I paused the campaign and restarted the old one. My old bids, for the most part, have remained intact although the best-converting term is now disabled due to poor quality. I have a call with the client today and I’m going to recommend reviewing landing pages as our next step in trying to combat this issue.

What’s a search planner to do?

I’ve written to Google multiple times to try to get some clarity over this issue and explain that my client is not an affiliate, or a spammer, or someone without a substantial product. In fact, they are one of the biggest publishers of technical and IT books in the world.

Google keeps pointing me to the landing page guidelines and essentially saying it’s up to the client to improve the quality score so we can lower the bid. If they want to bid on the terms that are being penalized, they have pay the big bucks.

I’m on a quest to see if it is possible to raise the quality score based on the nebulous information Google provides to advertisers via the Adwords help and blog. In the meantime, I think the best way to get the CPC down for search is to reallocate funds to Yahoo and MSN, and that’s what I intend to recommend to this client.

Oh, and in case you think I’m just a raving lunatic with a conspiracy theory - Microsoft apparently had this same exact thing happen to them for the term “hotmail” which was being directed to Hotmail’s login page.
And while this new approach may leave advertisers SOL, it’s certainly a happy ending for Google, whose Q3 2007 earnings rose 49%.

Update: Apparently Google has decided to throw us a bone. Thanks to Kevin Gibbons for posting about this on Sphinn.com.

Add comment October 24th, 2007 Jackie

Three key differences between media and search planning

I think the most appropriate definition of the term media, as it relates to advertising, is defined by the Miriam Webster dictionary as “a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment.”

A media planner’s spin on this definition would probably read more like, “The ads that run on a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment.”
So, with this clarification in mind, “are search ads media?” Yes and no.
From a budgeting perspective, search is media. After all, you must allocate a percentage of your total advertising budget to pay for search ads. The distinction blurs at the planning level because planning search is a lot different than planning other types of media, even online media.

Media Planning 101

During the typical media planning process, we consider many things about the media property (or vendor) we select to place our ads. Here are some examples of vendors, by channel.

Let’s say we’re looking at NationalGeographic.com for a travel camapign, we’d review a list of criteria associated with this Web site such as target audience, volume of traffic, available inventory (e.g., number of ad impressions we can secure), the types of ads available, pricing structure and conversion potential. We ultimately decide whether or not to include the site in our plan based on a combination of the above, plus the attractiveness of the vendor’s proposal.

But none the standard criteria for selecting or eliminating a media vendor applies to search planning because…

Key Difference #1: Search planners already know where the media is going to run.

If you’re a search planner then Google, Yahoo and MSN which together hold over 85% of the total share of searches in the U.S. (according to comScore in July of 2006) are going to be in your plan, and that’s pretty much it. These three Web sites hold the key to nearly all the search ad inventory available online - that’s like saying there are only three t.v. stations available where all advertisers in the U.S. can place ads. That would make it impossible for nearly all but the most lucrative advertisers and agencies to secure coveted ad space on television. So how come search planning takes so much time? Well, because of…

Key Difference #2: Search planning is about selecting keywords, not vendors

Here’s where media planners who don’t know much about online planning (or online planners who don’t know much about search ) choke . With search we’re actually planning keywords, not vendors. Thus, there is an unlimited number of media placements available (A placement in search is equivalent to “ad space” or “time slot”).

When every single term listed in the dictionary translates to an ad placement, the possibilities are limitless. Every keyword and keyword combination becomes a possible ad placement. Applying tactical targeting to your keywords opens up even more inventory (e.g., broad match vs. phrase match, ad scheduling, geo-targeting, demo-targeting). All keywords must be managed, just as all vendors in a traditional plan must be managed. Imagine a media plan that had over 10,000 vendors in it…that’d be quite a bear to manage.

Most offline media is limited by the hours in the day or the physical space available to run an ad (e.g. a page in a magazine). Even online media that take up real estate on a web page or a newsletter is limited by frequency and available space. Not so with search. Which brings me to…

Key Difference #3: Search ads are simultaneous

Since search ads are tied to keyword, user location and, to some extent, user search behavior instead of time slot or available space, search engines can utilize the same exact ad space for multiple advertisers at the exact same point in time. So if I do a search for “kid’s pajamas” on Google at 8:00 a.m. in New York, and my mother searches for “bird food” on Google.com at 8:00 a.m. in New Jersey, our search results will both be populated with ads from very different advertisers which appear on the exact same Web site at the exact same point in time. Of course the pages we are looking at are different pages - dynamically created to match our search queries.

Other key differences

I don’t know many online or offline media planners who regularly change ad copy, landing page text and move media dollars around on a near-daily basis. But search planners do routinely during the course of a campaign. We cap keywords that are overspending, reallocate the spend across categories, engines and keywords and routinely introduce new ad copy to the campaign. Imagine if you had to write new banner copy every two weeks?

Advertisers take note

When your agency takes a chunk of your media budget and allocates it to “search” this often means they are handing it over to a search agency who then manages the money across the top three search vendors. The problem with this is that you’re already paying the agency a percentage of the media budget, then the search agency also gets a cut so by the time your keyword ads are launched, the search budget is greatly reduced.

My advice? Consider working directly with a search agency rather than going through your main advertising or media agency, or work with agencies that have in-house search capabilities. If you do decide to go with your media agency of record, make sure you understand the pricing structure of their search management services before you hand over your search budget to them.

Add comment September 8th, 2007 Jackie

What do parked domains have to do with your ad dollars?

Last April Leslie Walker and Brian Krebs of the Seattle Times published a piece about Google’s use of parked domains to promote their own ads. The piece, titled Typed too fast? Google profits from your typo tells a disturbing tale about how Google is profiting from possible trademark infringement and advertiser ignorance.

So why am I posting about an article that is over a year old? Well, in June 2007 Google made a brand new report available to Adwords advertisers. The Placement Performance report provides more transparency to advertisers who are opted into the content network. The report allows you to see many of the URLs/domains where your ads appear so you can analyze performance by site, and opt-out of domains that don’t convert well.

What a great idea! Finally we can see exactly where our ads are appearing without having to sift through pages and pages of web analytics reports!

Well, actually…no. The report often raises more questions than it answers because Google masks certain domains by grouping them into the categories of Domain Ads, error pages and other.  What is a Domain Ad? It’s an ad that appears on a parked domain.

Okay, so what’s a parked domain? Per Google:

Leveraging Google’s Content Network

For the majority of Google advertisers who are not professional SEMs or don’t work with a search marketing professional in some capacity or other, Google’s content network remains a mystery. It is a tantalizing way to get more volume for a campaign, but conversions are inevitably lower (often MUCH lower) than ads on the search network, and click volume can be extremely high which translates into big bucks.

Understanding what Web sites are opted into Google’s content network (e.g., display Google ads) is the first step in creating order out of the chaos. For example, today MediaPost reported that CNN.com will be continuing its partnership with Google Adsense and opening up its extensive inventory to all advertisers. The official press release about the agreement can be found on Google’s site.

Google is notoriously tight-lipped about the sites in the content network. However, they will occasionally announce partnerships like the one with CNN.com in order to dangle the carrot of high-quality traffic in front of their many Adwords advertisers.

The possibility of getting your ad on a top tier Web site such as CNN is definitely a compelling reason to opt into the content network, but before you launch a content-targeted campaign on Google and let it rip, there are a few things you should know.

First of all, in a content-targeted campaign you can’t actually choose the sites your ad appears on. You can only do this with a site-targeted campaign. What’s the difference?

• A site-targeted campaign is created at the campaign level (in the campaign-summary tab within Adwords) and runs on an impression-based cost model (e.g., cost per thousand impressions or CPM). That means you get charged for every 1000 ad impressions whether or not someone actually clicks on your ad. Even though you can set your CPM via a bidding system, this can still get pretty expensive.
• A content-targeted campaign can only be set up as a keyword-targeted campaign. That is, there is no separate content-targeting campaign setup option within Adwords. So, after you’ve created your keyword-targeted campaign, you’ll need to opt out of the Google and partner search network and opt into the content network, which can be done at the campaign level. Clear as mud?

So how can you refine your content-targeted campaign so that your ads show up on high quality sites only? Well, it’s not entirely possible to eliminate all poor-performing sites, but you can certainly eliminate a lot by adding a list of URLs where you don’t want your ads to appear.

First create a content-only campaign based on your top performing keywords. You can do this easily using Google’s Adwords Editor which allows you to copy an entire campaign and clone it in about three seconds. Creating content-only campaigns also gives you complete control over ad messaging, which should be different from keyword-targeted ads since user motivation is different with content-targeted ads.

Then get a list of sites that are currently running Google ads. To do this you can create a site-targeted campaign (but remember, don’t launch it or you’ll pay on a CPM, not a CPC basis). 

1. First, log in to Adwords - it can’t be done from the Adwords Editor.
2. From the Campaign Summary page select “create a site-targeted campaign”
3. When you get to the “Target Your Ad” page select “List URLs” This is the good part! You can search for specific Web sites that are showing ads in the content-network if you’re curious to see who’s partnered with Google by typing in a specific URL. For example, when I typed in CNN.com, Google showed me a list of similar sites displaying Google ads including Digg.com, SFgate.com, Nasdaq.com and many more.
4. If you want to see what sites might display your ads within the content network, then paste the keywords your targeting into appropriate field and see what comes up. When I typed in a short list of SEM-related keywords I came up with a list of very low-traffic Web sites and/or competitor sites. I saved this list to a spreadsheet and went back to my content-targeted campaign to add them as negative URLs (this can be done by selecting Tools/Site Exclusion in the Adwords console.

I have one more trick up my sleeve for weeding out poor-performing sites in a content-targeted campaign. Run a Placement Report report on your campaign. This report lists some sites where your ad appears in the content network and if you’re tracking conversions through Adwords, you can see the best performing sites and eliminate the sites that don’t convert. This report is limited in that it doesn’t disclose all the URLs, but instead lists things like “Domain Ads” or “Other” as this post on SE Roundtable explains.

The key point of this extremely long post is that you can definitely benefit from Google’s high-profile content partnerships if you implement some optimization strategies, but they’re not necessarily going to make it easy for you to do this on a cost per click basis. My advice is to test, review results, weed out poorly performing sites and test some more. You might also consider running a site-targeted campaign on select Tier one sites to gauge performance - just be sure to watch the spend closely and (did I mention) test, test test!

 

 

 

 

Add comment August 29th, 2007 Jackie

Goole (I left off the last “g” for GREED)

I noticed an interesting Google Adwords alert when I logged into one of my client’s accounts this morning. Per Google:

“Coming Soon: Improvement to the Top Ad Placement Formula
In a few weeks, we’ll improve how ads get promoted to top positions above Google search results, giving you greater control over the placement of your highest quality ads.”

This caught my attention, so I surfed over to the Google Adwords Blog to see if there was more info about this, and of course there was. I was startled to read this explanation about the planned change:

“With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, we’ll consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control. This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you. Therefore, if you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC.”

You have more control? Oh Goodie! All you need to do is raise your maximum bid! But hang on, if you’re confused about how this is different from what you’ve already been doing, then read on.

Well, the main crux of the change will be focused on an advertiser’s maximum bid determining an ad’s eligibility to be in the TOP 2-3 positions. In other words, those ads that appear just below the search field and the ones that tend to get the most clicks. It seems that the maximum bid an advertiser must set in order to gain a position in this coveted space is going to be arbitrarily determined by Google. Hmmm.

Currently your ad’s position is not entirely dependent on your actual CPC being higher than everyone else who is bidding on your keyword but your maximum bid must be higher. Still, while maximum bid and average cost per click for a keyword do play a role in ad positioning, Google also factors quality score into the equation so that higher quality ads (essentially ads with a higher clickthrough rate) can appear in the top search results,  even though the better-positioned advertiser may be paying less per click than someone who is in a lower position.

This gives an obvious edge to well-known brands who (for example) may set their maximum bid to $10.00 but in actuality are paying just pennies a click for a top spot because their CTR is likely very high compared with other advertisers (for example, competitors who may be bidding on the brand term to try to divert visitors to their own site).

A post on Tillson Consulting’s blog titled, “New Adwords Formula: Better quality or more profit?” explains the issue very well. It’s like someone at Google saw a loophole and said, “We’ve got advertisers setting max. bids to $10.00/click and we’re only charging them .50/click for the top spot. How can we close this gap?”

Is this wrong? I don’t know. Publishers and media properties have been setting the price of top ad spots for decades, so why should Google be any different? They are charging premium prices for the premium positions. Still, it strikes me as dishonest that Google is claiming this is an improvement on their quality score formula. On the contrary, it will likely force advertisers with high quality and limited budgets out of the game completely. It’s no longer a fair playing field when only those with deep pockets get to participate.

Addendum: Okay, so maybe I’m misunderstanding the new rules here. A post on Search Engine Land by Barry Schwartz states that quality is actually going to have a larger influence on the maximum bid threshold than CPC. Barry also explains that the actual CPC shouldn’t change, even if the maximum bid is increased as long as the quality score is high. However, I think this move of focusing on maximum bids will still force the actual CPC higher as advertisers with lower quality scores attempt to keep their ads in the top spots, thereby forcing even the high-quality advertisers to pay higher a higher CPC.

Add comment August 9th, 2007 Jackie

How search marketing can make you a better lover

When you think about search marketing, are you hung up on the numbers? Things like cost per click, CTR, conversion rate, total number of impressions, share of searches, number of keywords, average position, cost per sale?

It’s easy to get caught up in the analytical side of search and become downright mesmerized with your total conversions, total sales or total ROI each month or week or DAY. But there is a pitfall when you let all those pretty, shiny statistics overhwelm you - you can easily miss out on the things that make search marketing work.

Love search!

No, that’s not half a sentence. I didn’t intend to write “ten reasons to love search” or “Why you should love search marketing.” I’ve written plenty of articles like that, and I’m sure I’ll write more. However, this article is intended to make you a better lover…of search. I’m deliberately leaving the term “marketing” out for now. My point is that you should love search because of what it represents to you, your business and your customers.

Search is about language.

Let’s put aside the buzzwords for a minute - things like keywords and match types and cost per click. All of these words belong to the language of search marketing. But the language of search is the language you speak on your Web site, in your marketing materials and on your blog.

It’s how you describe yourself beyond marketing and advertising. It’s present in your mission statement, your conversations with colleagues, and in less obvious ways you employ to help your company grow (the type of people you recruit, the way you treat your employees and clients, your company’s connection - or lack thereof - to the community).

Search is also very much the language your customers speak - it’s what they type into Google when they need something, and what they look to for reinforcement when they reach your web site. Know this language. Speak it fluently and embrace it as part of your search marketing strategy.

Search marketing doesn’t have to be about guesswork. You have all the tools you need to create a holistic search strategy that incorporates the language of the people you want to reach, right at your finger tips. These tools are your customers. Ask them how they found you or what they’re looking for when doing research or how you can make your product/site/customer experience better. Listen to them. Then write down what they say.

Love results.

Search is about results. We perform a search online for something we want. Maybe we go to Google to look for a bit of information on hydroponic gardening, or maybe we go to Ebay to look for an out of print book, or perhaps we go to Weather.com to see what the forecast is going to be in Chicago on the day we’re planning to fly there. The point is that when people search, they are actively looking for results that will satisfy that search.

Searchers are on a journey and it’s important to understand that they will not be satisfied until they fulfill their quest. That’s why relevancy factors so strongly into a well-structured search marketing campaign. If you provide the answers that people seek, then you will likely achieve your goals. Do think about what keywords you’re targeting. Do think about what people will see if they click on your ad and, above all, do tell people what they want to hear. If you’re not exactly sure what they want to hear, then test, test, test until you figure it out.

Fall in love with the fact that people are actually looking for you. They want YOU to help THEM. Cherish that fact. Don’t try to trick them or redirect them. At best they won’t respond, at worst you’ll lose their respect.

Love the journey.

The best advice I can give you when including search into the marketing mix is to enjoy it. Search is unlike any other form of marketing you’ve likely tried (or are going to try). It forces you to speak the language of your customers, and confront (perhaps for the first time in a long time) the language of your business. You may find yourself rethinking how you define your business, your products, even your mission.

Many business owners discover that they are very connected to their search campaign, more than any other marketing initiative. They want people to find them in the search engines - not just for the traffic, but as validation that their business is relevant. It’s a great feeling to realize that Google - the omnicient titan of search - deems you worthy enough to appear at the top of their results for “pink sparkly socks” or whatever it is you want to rank for.

Take this with a grain of salt - Google is not the beginning and ending of all things search. Understand how your customers embark on their journey for information/products/services online and put yourself in their path. If you learn to love the journey then you’ll do well. And that’s how search marketing can make you a better lover.

Add comment July 24th, 2007 Jackie

PPC Triage - Figuring Out What Ails Your Paid Search Campaign

One of the compelling things about paid search marketing is that it’s extremely easy to start and manage a campaign. Search campaigns can be launched in mere minutes on all the top engines. So not only is it easy to do, it’s quick to have your ads up and running. These two factors can be a mixed blessing, however, particularly if you’re new to search marketing.

One of the hard lessons that advertisers learn when they take the plunge and launch a search campaign is that it’s not always easy to get consistent results over the long term. Even if you came out of the gate with a 2 to 1 ROI or greater, it is not uncommon to see your marketing return dwindle for a number of reasons including increased competition, poorly performing ads, quality score penalties or just a poor understanding of what metrics matter.

Here are a few things to look at when triaging a failing search campaign. Most of these things are easy fixes that can help breathe new life into a campaign and get your perfomance metrics back on track.

Evaluate multiple metrics. It’s easy to look at one metric at a time and jump to conclusions about your campaign’s performance. For example, a rising cost per click (CPC) may indicate that your ads are more relevant to searchers while decreased ad positioning could mean more competition. However, you can get even better insights about problem issues with your campaign if you look at how both metrics are behaving side by side.

Here’s an example of a chart that shows the CPC versus the average position. Note the trendlines in blue and yellow (trendlines are a great way to see how a specific metric trends over time, particularly if there are wide fluctations in performance). This graph tells me that even though my CPC has been going up, my overall positioning has trended down - indicative of a poor quality score. Some actionable items I can infer from this are to:

1. Take a look at keywords and how they relate to my ad copy - rewrite as necessary
2. Delete poor-performing keywords or increase their relevance to the ads themselves
3. Delete poor performing ads. Don’t think about it, just do it.
4. Evaluate landing pages against the keywords I’m bidding on and my ad copy - is landing page text relevant to the keywords? Am I sending people to a generic home page when I could be linking them directly to a specific page on the site?

Now let’s see what the trending looks like when I compare the CTR versus the average position.

This chart demonstrates that the campaign’s CTR has been going up since April 2006, but the average  position continues to decline. This would indicate that there’s more than quality score at play here - and competition is playing a part in the increased cost of my campaign. The action items I get from this are:

1. Begin monitoring competitors for all major keywords/categories I’m bidding on
2. Review past competitive data if it’s available to glean key changes
3. Focus on keyword expansion and refinement - discontinue terms that are too competitive or expensive to maintain OR make the decision to invest more money per click in order to achieve higher positioning (I would only do the latter if there was a large margin for my client’s product and/or there was wiggle room to increase the current cost per aquisition of the campaign).

Other key features to consider when doing a PPC Triage include:

Landing page analysis and testing. I know this seems like it would be a no brainer, but horrible, conversion-fearing landing pages can sabatage a campaign more than any other single factor. Bad  landing pages are often the fallout of PPC convenience - that is, being able to get a campaign live in one-to-three weeks. My best advice to resolve this is to test, test, TEST your landing pages, Also, read case studies, statistics and anything that you can get your hands on that discusses what makes a good converting landing page and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to redesign and test your new pages. Did I mention you need to TEST your landing pages? Good. Go do it.

Engine-level analysis and testing. Not all campaigns work out well on all engines. We tend to group our campaigns into one keyword-centric bulk without really considering performance at the engine level. When reviewing how you can improve your campaign, take a look at all the search engines where your ads are running. Don’t just look at top-level data (volume, CTR, cost per click) look at your CPA then figure out how you can expand your campaign on engines that have low volume, but good ROI and vice versa. Don’t discount second tier engines such as Ask.com and LookSmart.

Campaign structure and set up. One of the first things I evaluate when looking at someone else’s paid search campaign is how they’ve set it up on the back end. If I log into Adwords and see that all the ad groups are contained within one campaign called “Campaign #1″ well, I shudder. You have much more control over your budget and targeting criteria if you break up your account into multiple campaigns which contain multiple ad groups. The more ad groups there are in a campaign, the better. Ad groups allow you to customize ad copy for distinct keyword groups and this just makes for a better, more relevant campaign.

 

Add comment July 5th, 2007 Jackie

New changes from Adwords including CPA

Did you blink? Then you may have missed several new, fun, important exciting and oh-so-critical new features that Google rolled out for Adwords.

Google launches Pay-Per-Action (PPA) Globally - As this post on the Adwords blog states, Google launched their PPA program in the U.S. in March. They began offering the feature globally on 6/22/07. The feature will only be available to advertisers whose campaigns receive more than 500 conversions in a 30-day-period (qualifying advertisers will see an alert within their Adwords account to try the program)

New Adwords reports & Features - The SEOMoz blog has a good post about some recent Adwords Changes that Google recently rolled out. 

Two new reports - The Content Network Placement and Search Query Reports provide advertisers with more thorough insights about when and where their ads appear on both the search and content networks. I’ve personally only tried the search query report - what it shows is some of the “like” or “similar” terms that bring forth your ad on Google when you are bidding on broad and phrase match terms. It’s very interesting, but as SEOMoz pointed out, lots of data is ommitted in this report so it’s not a perfect tool for seeing exactly what keywords your ads appear for. The Content Network Placement Report shows you what websites in Google’s AdSense network are showing your ads. I can’t wait to run this for one of my campaigns.

SEOMoz.org’s post also lists two other new features - IP Address Exclusion, which lets advertisers suppress up to 20 IP addresses from showing their ads and automatic ad suuppression based on user search behavior. For example, if you search for your own keywords and never click on your own ads, then eventually your ads will start moving down in position and/or not show up at all. SEOmoz explains how to bypass this feature.

Add comment July 2nd, 2007 Jackie