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

Big props to WebMD for putting on a great party last week at the Gale Mansion in Minneapolis. A very good friend of mine, Scott Thompson, put together a top notch event that was all about ‘indulgence’. Wine, chocolate, massages, desserts….very cool.

Everytime I start to think search is the end all and be all of internet marketing, I wind up at an event like this. Let me tell you, WebMD does just fine. In fact, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you some of the CPMs they command for run of network as well as targeted campaigns. Why? The quality of their content drives the quality of audience. Granted, WebMD is a top tier internet property, so they operate in a rarefied air.

If you work for an agency or client and are interested in advertising with WebMD you can call Scott at 312-780-7571.

A great post 2 weeks ago at SEL (yes I’m just getting to it) in which Alan Rim Kaufmann calls for transparency from Google Adwords. Alan’s position:

In the long term, however, I hope Google reconsiders QS. It is time the search industry grows beyond the “just trust us” black-box approach for ad relevance. I humbly suggest that Google users, Google advertisers, and Google stockholders would be better served by some yet-to-be-discovered transparent and open model for ranking ads and charging for clicks.

I’m in semi-agreement here. To me, the quality score is a necessary element and should be further developed. Without the quality score you will quickly move towards a tiered advertising landscape in which power aggregators muscle into every single market niche and become brokers, which increases cost and barrier to entry for the smaller players. That would eventually kill what I consider the beauty of our industry. Low barrier to entry, high innovation level, flat playing field.

The quality score, as a black box element, wards off that scenario. If you keep the quality score, but make it transparent, I think you are playing with fire. Somewhere in between those two is where I think the sweet spot is. Of course, I’m speaking only as a paid search analyst and small business person. An economist would probably have my lunch here. But then again, and economist doesn’t know Google Adwords like I do.

So there you have it. Food for thought.

What do you think?

Option A: Total transparency - pure open market paid search (think overture 2000)
Option B: Black box ad ranking - what you have today
Option C: Transparency + Ad ranking - closer to option A
Option D: Complain about everything, offer no solutions

Option E: F this, I’m going back to SEO

Adwords has taken another step towards transparency this week. Releasing to the public a new feature that allows advertisers to Diagnose the Quality Score of each keyword in the campaign. In the example below, you will see that the keyword in our campaign is viewed by Adwords as:

This keyword isn’t highly relevant.
Based on the keyword’s relevance to the associated ad text, CTR, historical keyword usage, and other performance factors.

In this case they happen to be correct. (but that isn’t stopping us from trying to get impressions…)

What I find interesting about the new feature is that they are including landing page analysis along with keyword relevancy.

Landing Page Help - No problems found.

What’s odd however, is that I would assume since the landing page has nothing to do with this keyword, that the landing page would have been part of the problem. In any event, they are correct.

What does this mean for advertisers? More transparency, more ability to fine tune your campaign.

Will it give you step by step instructions to perfectly manage your adwords campaign? No, of course not. But it will help.

Here’s a few blogs you should be reading, if you aren’t already:

Aimclear - Marty Weintraub’s company from a little farther up the road in Duluth MN. An excellent blog with nothing but useful posts. Well executed, worth your time.

Gordon Choi - Gordon runs a PPC blog that provides good insight from an agency perspective. Formerly of Clicks2Customers.

PPC Discussions - Jeremy Mayes runs this PPC-only blog. An excellent resource from an experienced PPC analyst. I don’t know where Jeremy works, it’s a mystery

If you have any others worthwhile, please let me know via my contact page.

The latest hysterics from our industry blogoverse is that Google Adwords broadmatching changes are causing advertisers all over the universe to suffer a precipitous drop in ROI. The first post I read on this issue was the only one that actually made any logical sense at all. It was also different from the subsequent posts because it was limited to the implications of expanded broad match on regionally targeted ads. This is a unique issue that requires some creativity to troubleshoot.

The rest of the posts just outline problems that are simply solved by reading your analytics data or log files and implementing a solid cadre of negative keywords. Of course, there are anecdotal stories of ‘this word’ matching to ‘that word’ and oh my god our impressions went through the roof! OMG!

My problem with all of this is the apparent expectation that Google Adwords owes the advertiser a platform that works a certain way. Look, this is an advertising platform. You don’t have to use it. If it changes in it’s performance, either adjust to that change or don’t use it. You can vote with your dollars. Do you hear high level SEO’s whining everytime Google makes a change to the organic algo? Not if they’re any good. You just figure out what is going on and make the adjustment.

In fact, I will go even further and say that 95% of the problems are caused by poorly constructed accounts with loose keyword/adgroup correlation, in addition to underutilized negative keyword filtering.

I absolutely use broad matching on every single account I manage. I also use exact and phrase match. The reason broad match is so attractive is because of the scalability. It’s where you will find your greatest volume, and of course, it requires a lot of work to make sure it’s done at an efficient ROI.

Jeremy at PPCDiscussions has a nice strategy outlined in terms of how he manages his way through a campaign. My approach is different, but also relies on carefully monitored negative keywords at THE ADGROUP LEVEL.

Am I denying that expanded broad match is occuring?

No, of course not. I am as realistic about Google’s motivations as the next guy, but I’m not going blame them for any of my problems managing accounts.

Do I want Google to allow advertsisers to opt out of Expanded Broad Match?

Of course.

I am choosing to use the tools they are giving me to make the best of the situation.

Here’s some advice someone posted on a blog recently that I printed out and put on my wall:

Don’t Complain. Just Work Harder.

Partially fictional conversation between a client and a PPC Guy:

Client: We need to sell more *small goats*

PPC Guy: Sure, I understand.

Client: We sell a ton of them in our stores. It’s one of the most popular brands.

PPC Guy. Yes, I see.

Client: So how much should I spend on this? I want to really ramp up the sales. $xx,xxx?

PPC Guy: Well that’s hard to say. We have a campaign with thousands of SKUs, and normally how we approach this is to let the campaign tell us which items will sell the best. You see, through ROI tracking and….*cutoff*

Client: They sell like crazy in the stores. We should be selling more online.

PPC Guy: Right, I understand. *Small goats* sell well in your stores. We can certainly increase the exposure of your *small goat* keywords, I just can’t tell you how they will perform. Historically they have not converted all that well. See, normally what we do is….*cutoff*

Client: Great. Let’s ramp it up. When will I see some improvement?

Client: My comrades will be very happy to see the increase in sales.

Folks, listen up, you can’t dictate what will sell well. What you can do is *listen* to your data, and find out what is selling well.

Don’t be a dictator:

Be a listener.

Viva la PPC

Viva la ROI

I’m afraid to try this on any of my personal or client accounts, so I will refer you to someone who was brave enough to play the guinea pig.

I think what we’re learning just reinforces what I’ve seen with every single CPA rules based automated bidding solution. THEY DON’T WORK.

Someone please prove me wrong. Point me to an actual case study that I can verify and I’ll be happy to eat my words. Believe me, if I could find something reliable I’d use it.