the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

Well, until today, I had no clients under my management that were adversely effected by the quality score changes. My previous thought was that only arbitrage and straight affiliate sites were being targeted. That no longer appears to be the case. No, I’m not going to over dramatize this as most bloggers have in the industry. I’m just going to show you what happened to my client.

The one reason I want to highlight this is that it is a real business with a storefront and real human operators. It’s a service oriented company. It’s not arbitrage or affiliate related. They spend more than a couple thousand a month with an IP targeted campaign and conversion tracking. Once the quality score algo changed last week, I noticed a massive drop in traffic. Here’s why. Some of their best keywords had been disabled. In fact, 75% of their keywords were disabled. This is not a junk campaign with one adgroup and 2000 keywords. Each adgroup is carefully crafted with about 20-25 keywords. 7 adgroups. 5 ad copies per. Here’s an example of the performance I was getting and you tell me why it’s shut down. Notice, the CTR is ok, and the conversion rate is good (relative to the call to action)…

Here’s another example…

This isn’t an example from a huge client, and that’s why I chose it. This demonstrates the potential effect to your everyday advertiser who runs a legitimate business, with legitimate ads, who’s trying to use this platform to generate business.

I think, as with so many Google innovations in the last 2 years, that the intention is good, but the execution is extremely poor. The intention here is to devalue sites that don’t offer value to the searching public. They are after arbitrage sites, thin affiliate sites, and MFA’s. What it appears they are catching is some of the baby with the bathwater. The small, medium, and large sized advertisers who are doing things the right way.

This isn’t a disaster by any means. I know exactly what can be done to get this campaign back on track. I believe Google will get better at discerning the MFA’s from the ‘real’ websites, and at the same time, we as marketers have to get better at telling Google what our site is about.

Again, at the end of the day, I see more and more that Pay Per Click and SEO optimzation are becoming one in the same. In order to have a successful Adwords campaign you now have to optimize your site just as you would for SEO.

Much to my liking Google appears to have ‘opened up’ the Google Analytics registrations for Adwords users. Because I didn’t jump on the bandwagon early, I was shut out of the first wave of free accounts. Now I’ve been able to actually dive in and play around with this really nice analytics package. Say what you will, but this is hands down the best free solution out there, and definitely rivals most of the paid solutions. (beware clicktracks investors;)

In addition to implementing this on my sites, I also have a client who needed an analytics solution badly. I got them set up with a Google Analytics account, had them implement conversion tracking from the adwords account, viola, we’re all set.

This client had recently heeded my advice to create 4 different PPC landing pages themed around their major ad groups. In addition to our compulsary conversion tracking, Google analytics gives you the ability to set up ‘goal tracking’, which is essentially conversion tracking, but with the additional capability, through the analytics program, of tracking organic traffic, or email traffic, or any other source as it relates to the goals you set up.
So, in digging around the somewhat complex google analytics navigation, I got frustrated and google’d for a tutorial, or just some sort of clue how to set this up. Here’s what I found:

To implement goal tracking, follow these steps:

To set up your goals, Enter Goal Information:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account and click Analytics Settings.
2. Find the profile for which you will be creating goals, and click Edit.
3. Select one of the 4 goal slots available for that profile and click Edit.
4. Enter the Goal URL. Reaching this page marks a successful conversion. For example, a registration confirmation page, a checkout complete page, or a thank you page.
5. Enter the Goal name as it should appear in your Google Analytics account.
6. Turn the goal On or Off. This selection decides whether Google Analytics should track this conversion goal at this time. Generally, you will want to set the Active Goal selection to On.

For further details on setting up funnel tracking, I suggest you go straight to the source and visit the google analytics support site.

If you get through that and you’re feeling really chirpy, you can take things to the next level and start your A/B split testing. These guys lay things out about as well as you’ll find.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to be in on a call in which the Yahoo Search Marketing team walked us through the upcoming and badly needed Yahoo Search upgrades that are coming down the pipe. eWhisper covered this in the paid WMW forum, probably more thoroughly than I, but I’ll give you a few bulletpoints nonetheless. I’m basically giving you my notes from the meeting, but I think you’ll get the basic idea.

Fast Editorial: This, to me, is the most promising feature. I am so tired of the snail-mail speeds at which my ads get approved or rejected. Yahoo promises automatic approval and eventual editorial reviews, a la Adwords (you’ll see more of this phrase)

Categories will become campaigns, and adgroups will be an option on new campaigns.

Multiple Ads! WooHoo! I believe they will allow up to 20 ad copies per ad group.

Geo Targeting - Yes it will be part of the new system. Don’t quote me but I swear she said they will offer this at the ad group level.

Separate URLs AND ad copy for content match

Quality Score/Index - Yup, kinda like someone else but definitely needed. You will still be bidding on a position, but that doesn’t mean you’ll end up there. They will take into account CTR, relevance, historical perfomance, etc.

No dayparting in the initial release, maybe next year

Integrated Forecasting tools

Those are my highlights. All in all it looks like someone finally lit a fire under the search group and they decided they are going to play ball with Adwords afterall.

Good news for everyone I believe, especially in the PPC analyst world.