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

I’m going to do everyone a favor and give you a head start on the Adwords Site Exclusion feature - as you may have noticed I’m quite obsessed with the new content network reporting that Adwords is offering. If you spend a lot of money in this platform and you’re not running these reports - bless you because you’re making my job easier. If you ignore the content network because someone told you a horror story about losing money and low ROI, bless you again because you’re making my job easier. **sarcasm** - You should be running on the content network, it’s absolutely necessary in order to scale your campaign to the highest levels.

Adwords Site Exclusion is one of the primary control methods in running a successful content network campaign. In order to use effectively, you will need to run a Placement Performance Report. This report will tell you which domains or urls are sending traffic that isn’t providing a good ROI. Pick out those underperforming domains and paste them into a txt file. You should compile a running log for each campaign or client you are managing. For example, a domain that I will block 99% of the time is myspace.com, but if I’m running a campaign for a particular band or tshirt company or dating, for example, I would probably reconsider. Point being, each list of excluded domains should be unique to the campaign you are managing. This is not a one size fits all tool.

With that in mind, I’ll get you started with a list that I am building for one particular campaign that competes in a legal services niche:

123mycodes.com
codestogo.com
commentbuddy.com
coolmyspacecomments.com
freelayouticons.com
freepagegraphics.com
freeweblayouts.net
freeweblayouts.net
mycommentcodes.com
mycrunkspace.com
mynicespace.com
mynicespace.com
myprofilepimp.com
myprofilepimp.com
mypsace.org
myrockinprofile.com
myspace-codes.com
myspace-crash-codes.com
myspace-crash-codes.com
myspace-help.com
myspace-pictures.com
myspace-surveys.com
myspacepicturecodes.com
myspacesugar.com
mywackospace.com
mywackospace.com
mywackospace.com
pimp-my-profile.com
pimp-my-profile.com
pimp-my-profile.com
pimp-myspace-code.com
profileeye.com
profilegoodies.com
profilegoodies.com
pyzam.com
quackit.com
seekcodes.com
myspace.com
youtube.com

Happy excluding!

Chris Dohman from MIMASM.com and northrock publishing organized an informal happy hour Tuesday night at the Liffey Pub in St. Paul (minnesota). There was a nice turnout with a diverse group of search marketers. The event didn’t really have any agenda, which makes it all the more valuable as people got to talk about whatever was on their mind.

The upstairs deck at the Liffey turned out to be a great setting. Chris has some pictures posted this morning as well as a rundown of those in attendance. Paul Jahn captured some shots as well with his sweet iPhone, as well as Ward Tongen.

It was a fun evening and I’m definitely looking forward to the next one.

Well I’m going to sound somewhat contradictory here when speaking about the value of traffic we’re getting from the Adwords ‘Domain Ads’. As I’ve mentioned previously, I respect the skill and volume shown in the domainer industry, so much so that I’ve recently written about it. I even own a small little portfolio of quality domain names and have tested various parking resources recently, some with good success. So my publisher side envies and at time emulates the success that domainers achieve.

On the other hand, I’ve experienced some very poor results in the content network at the hands of parked domain traffic. So in this case, I may be biting the hand that feeds me (not very well). As a client side marketer I am going to show what kind of traffic I get from Adwords Domain traffic.

Courtesy of the Google Adwords Placement Performance Reports, here are screenshots of a spreadsheet covering DOMAIN ADS only for the last couple days for a client in the running a lead generation campaign in the education industry.

As you can see, I’ve changed the name of the adgroups to protect my client (as well as my brilliant proprietary naming conventions). The average CPA in this group - $58. Ugh - that’s just awful compared to the campaign as a whole.

Here are the top 20 traffic generating domains in the content network. Notice the percentage of those that are DOMAIN ADS- which I cannot opt out of…

What’s confounding here is that you can clearly see some domain ads are working, quite well in fact. I would like to reward those domains with a site targeted ad, possibly, but I don’t know who they are.

As a point of reference, and to be statistically relevant, here are stats over that same period:

Content network total -

Conversion rate: 3.4%
CPA - $27.84
Conversions - 68

Adwords Total -

Conversion rate: 5.4%
CPA - $23.51
Conversions - 205

Depending on the day, 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 leads turns into a sale worth $400.

Not a bad business, eh? You can see why they like working with me, but credit to them, they are pushing hard on improving performance week after week, and not settling for the benchmarks we’ve already established.

What can you do to protect your campaign from poor content network performers?

1. Start with Google only in the campaign settings
2. Once you’ve mastered (positive ROI) this platform, expand to the ‘Search Network’
3. Once you’ve mastered these 2, then it’s time to explore the Content Network - my rule of thumb is to start with bids at 50% of the search network (this is a very general rule of thumb, use your best judgment)
4. When you reach a statistically significant number of impressions and clicks on the content network, run a Placement Performance report.
5. Using this data, block any site that is costing you money without providing return.
6. Once the content network provides a positive ROI, increase your bids.
7. Rinse, Wash, Repeat
8. For any star performers, consider a site targeted campaign.

It’s quite simple really, just be diligent and detail oriented. Good luck!

Last night was my first ever Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association event. A topical theme was brought to the event by Chris Boggs from Avenue A, who was the moderator. The panel was composed of 3 very astute guys - Kevin Willer, Google (opened the Chicago office), Saleel Sathe, MSN AdCenter (works on the contextual side, I believe), and Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing (local MN super search marketer).

The panelists did a superb job of outlining their positions on search without taking shots at their competition. The overriding theme heard throughout the evening, both in the panel and the backroom discussion:

lists are just the beginning -

I heard a lot of talk about video indexing, audio indexing, and all company assets (lee) that can be digitized. The need for optimization doesn’t end with text on the page, of course, and this will be more important as the SE’s mature. Another theme was the importance of personalization. It’s somewhat of a four letter word among SEO’s, but it is happening and I think it’s an opportunity to defend your niche, if you have one And the last words I heard a lot of were ‘live’ and ‘universal’. Yep.

There were a few people I am a fan of that I wanted to meet going into the event and actually got to speak with, Chris Dohman of mimasm.com, and Lee Odden of TopRankBlog.com. A few other folks I met for the first time - Annie Picken from Arcstone, Ari Malek from WSIWebImpact, Chris Mayhew from Page10, and Lin Combs from Eye4Image.

Some others I hope to catch next time - Paul Jahn at LocalMN, Mary Weintraub of AimClearBlog.com, Nina Hale, and

Prince…

Isn’t he an SEO?

If he was, he would probably just be a symbol, like ^ or something. You can be the first to rank for that I believe

^

Search Marketers and Domainers have been two completely separate industries since the dawn of the internet. Ironic, really, since we both serve the same ads. Domainers have been around longer and have a completely, entirely different business model (well not entirely). Relying on type in traffic, typos, and creative dns solutions for traffic, they look to bypass the searchbox and then serve ads to monetize that inventory.

Search marketers, as well as the mainstream media are starting to discover this world, and it holds some interesting possibilities. I believe Domainers can learn something from the ‘inside the searchbox’ folks about traffic monetization and the manipulation of content, but more importantly, we as search marketers need to better understand this medium and how it can be used more effectively in our work. Combining the strengths of both strategies could create some extremely powerful properties.

A good place to start learning is from one of the Domaining A listers - Frank Schilling, who also happens to be a candid, unassuming, and prolific blogger. Another one I’ve read recently is Rick Schwartz. Follow their blogrolls for other good domaining resources.

Last week the Adwords blog highlighted another reporting innovation that really has a lot of potential. Not as groundbreaking to me as the placement performance reports, but certainly something worth taking note of.

Impression share is what Adwords is calling their reports that allow the advertiser to guage how much of the available market they are reaching. Here are the 3 columns that represent this measurement:

Impression Share (IS): The percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting. This metric is available at the campaign and account level for search.

Lost IS (Rank): The percentage of impressions lost due to low Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score).

Lost IS (Budget): The percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints.

This information will be useful to both advertisers as well as the PPC campaign managers. Why?

Advertisers:

Very simply, you can now estimate the share of impressions that you are reaching, and more importantly, how much farther you can scale your product reach.

Also, the Lost IS data will tell you whether you are missing impressions due to budget or Ad Rank. If you are losing share to Ad Rank you need to:

1- re-evaluate your ad copy
2- re-evaluate your landing page
3- examine overall quality score per adgroup and keyword,
4- also talk to your PPC campaign manager. “why are we in this predicament?” if they can’t give you a clear answer as to how they will address this, you should be concerned.

Your goal should be to never lose impressions because of Ad Rank, only budget. Why? Because once you optimize the campaign to the point where you are achieving the desired ROI you will want to go ahead and increase the budget as high as you can possibly afford. If your Ad Rank is poor, it doesn’t matter that you’re ready to spend more, you won’t be able to (efficiently).

Campaign Managers:

This report can be your best friend, assuming you’ve got the campaign configured correctly and firing on all cylinders. It’s often been difficult to estimate the available market share that a client was not reaching due to budgeting constraints. In fact, I would say it was completely impossible to do so accurately. This may be oversimplifying things a bit, but you can now run a report for a client that very clearly indicates that they are missing XX% of the market, and therefore should consider increasing their budget accordingly. This is especially valuable to larger brands who are not necessarily concerned as much with direct response variables, but more with campaign reach.