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

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.

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.

Google Adwords has just added another layer of sophistication to the Adwords platform. Prior to this step, the only way you could manage an Adwords campaign with CPA based rules was to invest in a rather expensive bid management platform. Even then, what I’ve found in the past several years is that this type of system needs larger data sets to work properly. Google confirms this:

In order to accurately predict your conversion rate and optimize your bids, the Conversion Optimizer requires that your campaign currently uses AdWords Conversion Tracking and has at least 300 conversions in the last 30 days. The Conversion Optimizer tries to keep the cost of each conversion below your CPA bid. However, if the actual conversion rate is lower than we predict, your CPA may exceed your CPA bid.

If you are operating a site that meets this basic requirement you would definitely want to give this a go.

To get started:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Select the checkbox next to the appropriate keyword-targeted campaign or campaigns.
3. Click Edit Settings.
4. Under the Advanced Options section, click View and edit bidding options.
5. On the Bidding Options page, select the radio button next to Conversion Optimizer.
6. Click Continue.
7. Specify your ad group maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bids. If a recommended bid is displayed, we suggest you use that amount.
8. Click Save and Activate.

More details here…

If you have any feedback from your testing please let me know. I’m interested to hear how it works in a live setting.

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’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!

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.

It seems like a simple concept, but you don’t see it discussed much on the SEO forums and blogs all that often. I venture to guess it’s because if people are given a choice - pay now or pay later, most people will choose the latter. Matt McGee at SEL wrote what seemed to be yet another Top 20 list, but while reading I saw 2 excellent points that caught my eye.

1 - Have analytics in place at the start:

It always surprises me how many clients I speak with who don’t have analytics installed or don’t utilize what they have. Look at it this way - the NBA draft is tonight, do you think that the team executives would show up at the draft without any stats about the prospective players? Something tells me they do just a little bit of statistical and game tape analysis before they decide who to draft.

2 - Open up a PPC account

Anyone who asks me about starting SEO, I tell them the same thing. Find out now what your site should be optimized for. Start a paid search campaign. Don’t spend weeks, months, and resources optimizing for something you have no idea whether it will convert. In fact, let’s kill 2 birds with one stone, Google Adwords offers Google Analytics to anyone with an account. They’re both ‘free’. Sign up and take advantage, please!

I absolutely 100% guarantee there is no one in the world who can tell you what your best converting keyword will be before you actually start getting search engine traffic. Be patient, spend a month running a small campaign in paid search, you will learn a lot about your site and your product/service in that time.

Let Adwords handle it for you

I saw this in one of my accounts this morning:

New! Pick your ideal price with preferred cost bidding.
Preferred cost bidding is a new AdWords bidding option that lets you specify an average amount you want to pay, rather than the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per click or per thousand impressions.

If you would like to learn more about how Adwords will manage your bank account business model cash flow average bid for you, click here