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

This is an update from March 6th, but an important one, so I’ll link to the post from Adwords.

In the next couple weeks Google will start to measure your landing page load time. I’m actually surprised this wasn’t being done already, so no complaints here.

2 things to keep in mind:

1. Load time ’scores’ will be displayed on your keyword analysis page
2. After the load time scores are displayed, there will be a 1 month review period for you to make adjustments

Yes, it’s another thing to keep an eye on, and Google just keeps raising the bar. For those managing client campaigns this will be a bit more of an issue, as addressing client hosting is a messy proposition. A smart strategy in that case would be to bring it up when you’re in the setup stage of a campaign. Load time is generally ‘visible’. You shouldn’t have to wait for Google to tell you that your page loads slowly.

More information here.

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.

We all know Google hates affiliates, and there has been speculation that this new Ad placement algo shift was the latest in a long line of arrows slung at this group. I certainly don’t follow the mortgage niche everyday, but I do check every once in a while when I want to gauge what’s going on in the most competitive niches. So, I’d like to ask the mortgage affiliates who use PPC as a primary traffic tool - how are you feeling today?

The Top results for ‘mortgage refinance‘

Lending Tree (big dog)
Countrywide (woof woof)
eloan (large sized dog)
American Equity (local result, real business, not affiliate)
DiTech (large breed)
GMAC (great dane-like)
Lex Home Loan (local result, real business, not affiliate)
Bank of America (woof)
Best Lenders USA (holy cow, an affiliate!)
Quicken Loans (never heard of them )
Mortgage Rates Expert (2nd affiliate)

So, the affiliates aren’t even sniffing the top 5 results. Someone who follows this niche more closely than I could probably provide a more detailed analysis, but I do remember seeing more affiliate saturation in the PPC results before this change.

Agree?
Disagree?

If you’re just tuning in, last week the PPC world was all huffy about the proposed change by Adwords to factor in max cpc versus actual cpc when calculating ad rank.

As for my experience, I haven’t noticed an overt difference in CPA or campaign ROI. Although, here is an interesting trend in one of my larger campaigns over the last 7 days (the period we can assume this change has been implemented)…

My average position has dropped over 1 full slot:

While my cost has stayed relatively the same:

2 screenshots does not a case study make, but it warrants a little investigation on my part. The bottom line, my campaign performance has not changed, I’m still hitting my client’s target spend and CPA, so I’m not all that concerned.

Anyone else see a difference in campaign data or performance?

Okay, so it took a few re-reads before I got a handle on the new Adwords quality score update. Basically, what you need to understand:

The key change to the formula will be how we consider price.

Instead of factoring quality score and actual CPC, they are going to factor quality score and maximum CPC.

The Adwords team tries to convince you that this gives you more control over your placement:

Actual CPC is determined, in part, by the bidding behavior of the advertisers below you. This means that your ad’s chance of being promoted to a top spot could be constrained by a factor you cannot influence. By considering your ad’s maximum CPC, a value you set, you will have more control over achieving top ad placement.

Whatever, that’s fine. I understand Google wants to make more money, I have no problem with that. Just don’t tell me you’re trying to increase the ‘quality’ of your ads.

This change is designed to improve the quality of our ad results…

I’m speculating here, but do you think that turning the dial all the way to ‘quality’ last year started to make ‘too much’ of an impact? Now the dial is going to be somewhere between ‘we like high bids’ and ‘we’re rich as hell’. Maybe, just maybe, the quality score was partly responsible for the drop in net profit margin from 29% last year to 23%?

I don’t know why this topic gets me so fired up, but it does. This morning I was reading a new article over at SEL that argued against focusing on PPC ads for brand searches, by a PPC analyst of all people.

The general position of the author was that brand searches don’t drive incremental sales, and therefore shouldn’t be the focus of your PPC team.

Sales from brand phrases are non-incremental, and don’t reflect the effort of the search team.

To me, this is a totally irrelevant argument. It’s akin to Best Buy telling their newpaper reps that they only want their Sunday inserts to show up in markets where no one has ever heard of Best Buy. Sure, that’s a very useful ad, but I still want my inserts to show up where people have heard of me, and perhaps they even look forward to the Sunday inserts so they can browse the new plasma flatscreens or mp3 players (I know I do).

Let me put it this way. I know for a fact that I will be buying a flat screen sometime in the next month or two. The day I plan on purchasing this TV, I will probably pick up the Best Buy insert, as well as the ABT ad, and the Circuit City insert, and I will compare prices among those 3 retailers. If Best Buy doesn’t place an insert that day, they are out of luck (pretending there’s no internet for a moment).

Paid search is a similar playing field. When a user searches for brands, it’s because they want to see what the vendor has to offer, and it indicates a predisposition to a purchase. To me, this is a prime prospect, and I definitely will craft a finely targeted campaign for this person. Now this is where clients always object:

“I already rank for my own brand/name, why would I pay ‘extra’ for that click?”. Brand searches are an opportunity to:

1. Reinforce your brand
2. Inform users of new sales, products, or special offers
3. Deliver a more customized message that can’t be controlled through serp descriptions as well
4. Ward off competition who may be bidding on your brand
5. Control the dialogue

Now, this is not to say that there should be no special consideration for a brand search. Far from it, in fact. Every campaign I build has separate brand adgroups as well as a name adgroup, as a matter of default strategy. I will value a brand sale very differently, and the CPA will likely be significantly different than a non-brand sale. The messaging is different, the call to action is different, and landing page may be different as well. A brand searcher is just a segment of your audience, and they should be treated as such, not ignored becuase you have a decent organic ranking.

For small to medium sized businesses brand searches are even more important. Your site may be new, or have low visibility in general, but there are still a handful of people searching your name or brand, and you want to be in front of them, even if it means paying a few cents extra for a click. Last month I had a small regional client spend $5.16, at $.07 per click, on branding terms, most of them generated by searches for the company name. They do rank for their name, but other companies bid on this as well, and would show up on top of their organic listing if not for our PPC ad. That $5.16 drove over $2,000 in sales. Would those sales have come organically? Maybe, or maybe not. Maybe someone would have been diverted by another PPC ad. But now we know for sure, we drove the sale, the ROI was astounding, and the client is happy.

What’s the overall point? Brand searches are an opportunity. Whether sales from brand searches are incremental or not is irrelevant. They are sales, and should be measured in a separate adgroup as other segmented queries are.

Don’t miss the boat!

While not the ideal situation, many PPC analysts have been in the position where they have to take over a PPC campaign that was originally opened by the client themselves. What often happens is the client started with Adwords as a way to gain new customers, being the entreprenuers they are, they take it on themselves, and one of 2 things happens:

1. They get slaughtered (70% of the time).
2. They overachieve, and actually have a marginally ok campaign (30%).

I can think of many examples of both situations. The 30% are the easiest to work with, because they actually have an idea of how to do it the right way, but they realize the number of hours required to actually do a comprehensive job managing the campaign correctly, and by the time they come to me they are more than happy to hand over the reins.

The 70% are the most difficult to work with. These are the people who jumped in the water without thinking, and didn’t set the campaign up remotely correctly for whatever reason, and have high expectations. What they’ve done is actually worse than never trying, because now their account has a poor history, which can be difficult to overcome.

In either case, the analyst ends up working on an account in which the client can log in and access the campaign. Now, we’re spending their money, so that’s perfectly ok, I would do the same thing. However, what has to be avoided at all costs is the client actually making any changes whatsoever to the account while it’s under the analysts control. I know it sounds crazy, but it has happened to me personally (only once, thankfully). Not a fun conversation to have with someone, but at that point you have to let your client have it, full on.

So, the question is, how do you keep an eye on your client? Well, that’s simple, and as soon as this feature came out (seems like eons ago) I was all over it. It’s the My Change History tool. To get to this page, go to the:

Campaign Management Tab
The click Tools
Under “Analyze Your Ad Performance”, see My Change History

Here you can track everything that has happened within the account for the last 3 months. Specifically, it will tell you:

* Daily budget adjustments
* Keyword edits or additions
* Changes in distribution preferences
* Changes made via the AdWords API

So, if you are in the situation with a client that you suspect there are changes being made (it’s usually very obvious), you can confirm this fact by checking here.

How do you know if the change was made by the client specifically? Well, the first column in the history tab will tell you the user login. Since you should be using your MCC to manage the account, the client will always login under their own username.

How else can this be used? Well, in two primary ways.

1. Managing multiple campaigns at the same time can get tricky, and sometimes you need to go back at your own changes and try to correlate cause and effect. For example, all of a sudden you see a huge drop in CPA for an adgroup, and also a drop in overall impression volume. What happened? Well, you can go back and see that 5 days ago you lowered the content network bids to $.10 for an adgroup that wasn’t converting well for content targeting. Ah, now I remember! Sounds silly but it you’re managing 20+ accounts, you can relate.

2. Keeping an eye on your junior analysts or sub contractors. If you are in the process of training newer analysts, or you are responsible for the performance of a campaign you aren’t managing directly, the account history tab is absolutely invaluable.

So, as you see, if you haven’t yet taken advantage of this feature, you should defintely get on the ball. It’s extremely useful in a number of different scenarios.

The Adwords Quality Score update is propogating over the next couple days, as per the Adwords blog

we began rolling out improvements to the Quality Score algorithm, which will update the Quality Score for keywords in your account over the next 3 to 4 days….

As a result, you may see the minimum bid for your keywords increase or decrease based on the updated algorithm

The reason I’m calling this one the Manning update is because it’s the absolute opposite of the bumbling Grossman leak late last week. Why Manning, because he’s smart and learns from his mistakes. Because Peyton Manning takes what the defense gives him, and will kill you all day long if you don’t adjust. He doesn’t force his agenda, and doesn’t need to throw the ‘Brett Favre’ every play. He knows if he wants to win, he just needs to poke and prod at your weakness, until you make an adjustment.

If we go back to the superbowl, we saw that Peyton Manning did his homework. He knew that the weakness of the Bears Cover 2 defense is the pass to the flat underneath the corners/safety’s. Peyton’s not special for knowing that, the whole world knows that. Buy he took what the Bears gave him, and they never made an adjustment otherwise. What’s the Adwords equivalent to a pass underneath? A very small adjustment, a penny here and a penny there.

From WMW:

It seems like the changes are live and kicking, i see some pressure on about 5% of my keywords so far. Strange this time “blue cool widget”

“was great” “now great”
Min bid was .04 now .05

Like Manning, Google learned from past mistakes with the previous quality score updates. You can’t blow up the entire industry to make more profit, or you lose your base. This was a small, predictable adjustment, so far at least. As Google looks at it now, they’d rather make 10 small updates a year, increasing the rake a few pennies each time, than make 1 update a year to jump $5.00. It’s small, but Google will take it. And at the end of the day, they’ll go home with the trophy.

You’ve heard nary a complaint from me since the notSuper Bowl about my beloved Bears, but when presented a chance to compare Google to Rex Grossman, I could not turn it down….

Quality Score Update > The Adwords Advisor has confirmed on WMW that what some people are seeing today IS NOT the Quality Score update coming next week.

A quick update to my previous post.

Here’s the message I received when I pinged the tech folks, which basically confirms that what some of you are experiencing is a tech issue that will be addressed as quickly as possible.

Thanks for all of the reports. This is a technical issue - we’ve now identified the problem and expect to have this resolved soon. Please note that this is unrelated to the Quality Score update that we plan to release next week.

So, please accept my apology for the upset this has caused - but please don’t mistake this for the Quality Score update to come.

AWA

In response to the quality score ambiguity and the ensuing uproar, Google Adwords tries really really hard to explain their ’system’.

The main elements:

The Quality and Performance Overview section includes 11 topics meant to define quality and performance, and to help understand AdWords system behaviors.

Within the Quality and Performance Factors section, you’ll find links to more than 25 topics on Quality Score, quality-based minimum bids, landing page quality, ad position, and clickthrough rate (CTR).

The Troubleshooting section offers more than 15 helpful links that can assist you in troubleshooting your keywords, ads, landing pages and minimum bids.

Lastly, the Improving Ad Performance section offers 20 or so topics on choosing successful keywords, creating targeted ads, and optimizing your account.

At first glance I haven’t seen anything that we haven’t seen before, but I’ll give it a complete read after the holidays.

Have a great weekend everyone! All 3 of you!