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

Google has been busy perfecting their automatic billing matching feature the past few months.

While you’re away on Memorial Day travel this weekend, do you mind if we just slip into your account and make some minor adjustments?

We didn’t think you would mind. Have a great weekend!

In all seriousness, this is a fairly controversial feature and should be measured closely.

What to do first:

Turn it off

Opting in and out: Automatic matching is applied at the campaign level. You can opt your campaign in and out of automatic matching on your Campaign Settings page.

Or Leave it on: Do nothing, it’s conveniently already running for you

Should you choose to leave it on, you will want to measure the performance. You can do this via 2 reports:

• Performance statistics: Aggregated performance statistics for automatic matching will appear in each ad group’s Keywords tab, in a line item labeled Automatic Matching Total.
• Search Query Performance report: You can see the search queries that triggered your ads due to automatic matching by running a Search Query Performance report. The queries will be labeled Automatic in the Search Query Match Type column.

Now that I’m thinking of it, this would be a great strategy to try with my clients. While they’re gone this weekend I’ll email them with the great news they’ve been selected for the ‘double management service’ where I increase their billable hours as I see fit (only when it’s relevant, of course). I’ll let you all know on Tuesday how it worked out.

Per the Adwords blog, landing page load time is now visible from the keyword detail page:

This is especially useful when a client needs a little encouragement towards optimizing their site performance. A picture is worth a thousand (key)words.

‘Imagine there’s no Adwords, it’s easy if you try’ - John Lennon

The macroeconomic slump has finally broken through and touched the impenetrable wall of The Google. While I’m not a financial analyst, I know that share price often has little to do with anything other than the psychology of outsiders. Nor am I worried that the world of search marketing is just around the corner from impending doom.

HOWEVER - there are a few tidbits that give me pause. If only because of the wee little fact that almost every single dollar in my bank account is generated from the existence of, and my salable skills using, Adwords and other search marketing vehicles.

Here are those tidbits:

the number of clicks on ads next to Google’s search results fell by 7% between December and January. Google’s ad click performance was also down 0.3% on January last year, according to comScore.

Does this represent a slowdown? Or are we just seeing a reflection of ’shopping’ in general. Who buys anything in January?

So much for that thought…

Google had seen the same 7% decline between November and December. ComScore’s data also showed that Yahoo saw a 1% month-on-month fall in paid search ad clicks in January, but Microsoft saw a 4% rise.

OK, this is worrisome, 7% drop 2 months in a row? During the holiday season? What’s going on? Did the clickable area decision come back to bite them?

The speculation will continue, and smarter folks than I will debate the topic.

Let’s not get crazy though. Some facts to calm us all down:

$16.6bn revenues from search advertising

$8bn in cash and the liquidity of its shares

Analysts at Citigroup also said that Google’s efforts to improve the quality of leads for its advertisers, by trying to reduce accidental clicks, may have impacted the volume of search clicks as well as the wider macro-economic climate.

Moving towards quality is always a good thing. Google is fine, thank goodness, but as we’re seeing, nothing is immune to a really bad economic slowdown.

Darn.

So my original question - what would you do if this niche went away? Personally, being in this business since the mid 90’s, I’ve moved from web development, to email/permission marketing, to coreg, to search. I suppose I would just adjust and move to another area of online. Mobile marketing maybe? Or maybe I’d sell trailers. Something different.

What about you?

WWJBD - aka - What Would Jack Bauer Do?

As I turned off Comanche Moon last night, after only 4 minutes of horrid dialogue and even worse acting, I realize how much I miss Jack Bauer. The writers strike is clearly having an effect on my Sunday evenings.

With no professional writers on this blog (obviously), I will attempt to channel Jack Bauer in order to improve your client relationships.

Jack Bauer (PPC expert): I trusted you, Nina…
Nina Myers: I was just doing my job.
Jack Bauer: Your job?

Yes Jack, she was just doing her job. This is Jack’s obvious reference to the dialogue between PPC manager and client. When the client, Nina, decides, mid-campaign, that it would be a cool idea to add a popup window to the homepage, or even better, one of those ridiculous talking heads.

Result: Ads are suspended, in violation of the ‘no popup rule’
Solution: Jack shoots the talking head, immobilizing it

Jack Bauer: If you don’t tell me what I want to know, then it’ll just be a question of how much you want it to hurt.

Here we have Jack Bauer interrogating his client on their internal sales data. Oftentimes it’s necessary to torture clients into sharing inhouse reporting. Ironically, this is usually the data that helps manage the campaign more effectively, and oftentimes this data shows that despite the cries to the contrary, the campaign has produced a massively positive ROI.

Symptom: Client evasively suggests that the reports are ‘on another computer’.
Solution: Overt threats, suggesting painful torture

In our last Jack Bauer intervention, we go back to the beginning, when Jack first lays eyes upon his client’s existing Adwords campaign:

Jack Bauer: I’m gonna need a hacksaw.

Symptom: Large campaign, one adgroup, 4 keywords, targeted to planet earth
Solution: New account, new campaign

This is fairly self explanatory. Jack knows a bad campaign when he sees it.

More episodes to come, as long as the writers strike is on, I’ll need something to do…

Announced yesterday on the Adwords blog:

Template Center is a free tool available via My Client Center (MCC). It allows MCC account managers to create templates for pre-defined AdWords campaigns and share them with their directly linked AdWords accounts.

I’m not sure yet what the point of this is now that we have the Adwords Editor. I’ll play around with it a bit and see if I can find anything useful. According to Google, the benefits are:

* Run pre-made campaigns.
* Mass-distribute streamlined campaigns for similar clients.
* Create high-quality supplemental campaigns that mimic existing offline advertising.
* Gain more control over partner campaigns.
* Reduce misuse of brand assets and identity and instances of poorly written or conceived

At first glance this would seem to be a tool that serves large advertising consolidators who run high volumes of advertisers at very low spend and sophistication levels. Think, IYP and IYP wannabees.

Credit woes?

High gas prices?

Market off 10% since it’s last high?

Housing crisis?

Fuggedaboutit.

U.S. online shoppers set record on “Cyber Monday”

We are in the golden age right now folks. Maybe in the 4th quarter, but still in the golden age nonetheless. It won’t always be this way, so enjoy it now while it lasts.

By golden age I mean the growth curve is still relatively strong. It will flatten out at some point. Exactly when depends on who you ask.

Trends that will always continue, however, are those centered around holiday shopping, whether online or off. Performance will spike this time of year whether you are selling hot dogs, furnaces, Elmo dolls, or snow blowers.

On a micro level, I’m seeing some unbelievable performance in my campaigns this week. Here are some examples:

Sports Retailer - 2.5 yrs managing

Historical Average:

Conversion rate: 1.86%
Cost per sale: $22.84

This week:

Conversion rate: 3.42% (all time high)
Cost per sale: $12.42 (all time low)

Those numbers make me warm and fuzzy.

What surprises me, however, is an upward trend in my non-ecommerce campaigns. For example, a lead generation campaign for financial services is performing at alltime highs as well.

Historical Average:

Conversion rate: 3.95%
Cost per lead: $25.98

This week:

Conversion rate: 5.77% (all time high)
Cost per sale: $15.61 (all time low)

I really haven’t been able to come up with a reason. The service is completely unrelated to the holidays or shopping. Anyone care to guess? Seeing anything similar?

Yesterday I was developing a proposal for a client entering their 3rd year with us. My bottom line with this client is that they have been successful, but they’ve never really taken any of my onsite advice in terms of building really good, solid landing pages that convert well. In fact, their landing pages are quite poor. I see this quite a bit. People spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising, but not investing in the landing pages or website. Penny-wise and pound foolish.

I think what the layperson don’t grasp is how inexpensive it can be to have a really talented designer throw together a very nice looking page. I mean, give me $200 and a Sitepoint contest and I’ll have 20 different people begging you to pick their design by the end of the day. 20% of them will be really good designs. I think people are still scared off by those website design proposals they saw in 1997, when everyone was charging $25000 for a 5 page site with rotating gifs and a ‘dynamic’ contact us form.

Anyhow, with said junky landing page, here is a snapshot of 1 month a couple seasons ago:

The top line is actual data. The subsequent lines are the carrot I’m dangling for them. In line 2 you see that if we can increase the conversion rate a measly 4 tenths of 1%, they would have received 14 more leads (12% better) and reduced their cost per lead $8 (11% better).

As it was the following season, by virtue of some PPC kung fu, I knocked that cost per lead down 30%. Still, imagine the numbers with a really good landing page. Obviously, the campaign works as it is running. The numbers make sense for them. Average sale is in the thousands, so if they convert 1 in 5 leads generated from the PPC campaign they are still doing well.

My gut instinct is that if we had a good cache of landing pages I could get the cost per lead down to $12-15.

Anyhow, if you want to use this spreadsheet as a carrot for your clients, you can download it here.

Google Adwords has bestowed upon us Cost Per Click pricing for their site targeting options. And it’s not called site targeting any longer. It’s called placement targeting. Why? I don’t know. I think site targeting is pretty much an accurate term, no?

Oh well. Maybe it’s those $700 shares and $80 options that are confusing the Adwords marketing team. Everyone is trying to look busy until they vest and retire at age 26.

::::Unrelated mumbo jumbo:::: (if you’re busy move on)

Q4 is starting to feel like, well, Q4. I agreed to teach a paid search class at an advertising agency next Wednesday and am speaking at a conference in January. It’s 4 hours of me talking so I am just now realizing how much material I will have to prepare. As I compile all of my paid search knowledge (and not much else) that is knocking around in my head I’m realizing this is a nice refresher for me, to write these things out. I’m also working on my Pay Per Click Book that should launch next month. The two projects are mutually beneficial so I’ve got that going for me.

In addition to that I have 5 proposals due yesterday, 2 major campaign expansions, and I haven’t even finished invoicing from last month. On top of that, because I’m overly friendly to strangers I spent a total of 3 hours in the last 10 days giving free consulting advice on the phone. Or maybe I just enjoy hearing my own opinions. Argh! Any interns out there?? Seriously - if you want to learn from me while getting a heavy duty dose of the paid search business behind the scenes contact me.

What does that have to do with your paid search campaigns? Nothing, except to give you an idea of why paid search services are hard to scale as a business model. When was the last time you came across a huge, exclusively paid search company? They don’t exist for the most part. Because it’s specialized knowledge that is hard to transfer. Anyhow, more on that later.

Hasta.

I get this question often so I’m writing an answer that I can just point people to. Here are some possible reasons that your Google Analytics and Google Adwords reporting clicks have a major discrepancy:

• Google Analytics reports visits, Google Adwords reports clicks:

  These are 2 very different metrics. For example, a user clicks your adwords ad, visits your page, then goes back to their google search results page, doesn’t see anything else they like, and then clicks your ad again. Voila - 2 clicks, 1 visit (session).

• A user bookmarks your Adwords referral link:

  Again, same scenario, multiple clicks on the URL, but 1 visitor.

• Incomplete page load:

  Your site could be slow, or the Adwords visitor changes their mind, and before your analytics code renders, the user hits ‘back’ or ’stop’.

Google also addresses discrepancies between Adwords and other 3rd party tracking solutions:

We’ve found that most discrepancies between web logs or third-party tracking software and AdWords reports occur due to the fact that third-party tracking methods are unable to detect all the clicks that your ads receive. There are several reasons for this:

* Google Network statistics: Google displays ads on a growing network of search and content sites and products. Typically, web tracking software is not able to recognize clicks from Google Network sites as being affiliated with Google. These clicks are generally labeled only with the third-party site name. If your ads are currently, or have ever been, distributed to Google Network sites such as About.com, AOL, Netscape, etc., we recommend using referrer headers and tracking URLs to monitor where your website visits originate.

* Browser limitations: There are limitations to your third-party tracking software’s ability to track website visits with referrer headers. Most recent Internet browsers automatically pass along a referrer header when a user clicks your ad and is brought to your site. This referrer header indicates what site the user came from. For example, if a user sees your ad on a Google search result page, clicks it, and is brought to your site, the referrer header would most likely read ‘http://www.google.com/…’ However, some older versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape do not support this functionality and will not send this information. Also, some proxies and corporate firewalls strip out the referrer headers.

* JavaScript not enabled: If your third-party tracking software uses cookies to record referrer headers, ad clicks that occur in a browser without JavaScript enabled will not be tracked. Your AdWords account, on the other hand, will record clicks that occur in browsers with or without JavaScript enabled.

* Repeat visits: Users may click your ad several times in a relatively short period when, for instance, comparison shopping or conducting research. Your third-party tracking software may not count these repeat visits to your site. As long as the click patterns do not fit a profile of abuse or invalid activity, however, they will be counted in your AdWords account statistics.

* Shared IP address: Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign the same IP address to multiple computers. Your AdWords account statistics will reflect multiple clicks that occur from the same IP address, while your third-party tracking software may not.

Google analytics will also differ from other 3rd party tracking solutions.

At the end of the day, all your tracking mechanisms will tell you a different story. My advice is to use a combination of relatively trustworthy solutions and have redundancies in place. Adwords tracking, Google analytics, and then something to act as an antidote to all that Google data - maybe awstats or a paid solution like indextools. Lastly, there are your trusty log files which can be tedious to review but relatively reliable.

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.