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

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.

As someone who makes a living by trading time for money (to the horror of self helpers everywhere), anything that saves me time in my work is very high on my list. It not only saves my clients money, it also increases my time available to work on other projects. My inner Dicky Fox says, “hey! that’s a ‘Win Win’.”

The Adwords Editor is proving to be that special time saving tool. I find myself building a campaign and thinking, “wow, this is so much easier than it used to be”. Kind of like the cheesy car commercial where the lexus is parking itself and the guy can’t believe he used to have to park the car himself. (I’m sorry, but I would never let a car parallel park itself, am I crazy? That’s ridiculous. How lazy are you?? I live in Chicago and it’s a point of civic pride to have strong parallel parking skills. Tangent over.)

The biggest time savings upgrade by using Adwords Editor: Copy and Paste. (also my 2 favorite words)

I build trump-sized campaigns. Lot’s of them, all the time. Let’s say for example, I have 20 IP targeted city campaigns, all of them are nearly identical in terms of keywords, but I have seperated each city to control spending and ROI by region.

The old way: A nightmare. Web-based, relying on Google’s site to be working at top speed.

Create new campaign.

Save. Wait.

Enter settings.

Save. Wait.

Create Adgroup.

Save. Wait.

Create Ad.

Walk to kitchen and get coffee.

Enter each ad line one by one.

Save. Wait. Enter keywords.

Go back to kitchen and make toast.

Save. Wait.

Repeat 19 times.

Argh!

The new way in the Adwords Editor:
1. Enter your 20 campaigns.
2. Build one adgroup with ads and keywords
3. Cut and paste the adgroup into the other 19 campaigns.

Time savings: At least 30 minutes.

Money savings: If you bill out at $175 per hour, you just saved yourself, or your client $87. Not bad!

Some of the other updated features with Adwords Editor 3.0

* Site targeting: AdWords Editor now provides full support for site-targeted campaigns.
* Negative sites: Add or edit negative sites for keyword- and site-targeted campaigns.
* Edit while you wait: If you manage multiple accounts with AdWords Editor, edit another account while your changes post.
* Count your selection: The status bar now displays the number of rows you’ve selected in the data view.
* Pause or resume ads, keywords, and sites: Use the Status menu in the edit panel to change the status of selected items.

Updated features:

* Export to HTML: Your HTML export will show or hide deleted campaigns, depending on how you’ve configured your preferences. The HTML export is ideal for showing your account to someone who doesn’t use AdWords Editor.
* Export to CSV: In addition to account, campaign, and ad group snapshots, you can now export custom views. The CSV export is ideal for spreadsheets or other applications that can read structured data files.
* Paste to multiple ad groups: Select multiple destination ad groups via the Edit menu > Paste Special.

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.

Yahoo Indexes Adwords Tracking URLs

One of our SEO’s here pointed out this odd SERP from Yahoo this afternoon.

Take a look at results 1 & 3:

If you look at the tracking variables, these are clearly Adwords ads that have been indexed by Yahoo. Not only are they indexed, but they rank as #1 and #3 for this particular query. So, one would tend think about how this could screw up your analytics. Basically, if you were utilizing an java-based analytics program any conversion that came through this url would be attributed to your Adwords PPC campaign, at least on the surface. This would result in a couple things:

1. Your ROI for Adwords would be falsely inflated.
2. If it happened on a large enough scale for a big advertiser, you can see the potential ramifications.
3. Yahoo loses credit for any traffic it sends you organically, and eventually makes itself less relevant.
4. Google share price increases

Update: Further discussion on this topic from SEORoundtable

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!

Saw this in my MCC today:

Your ‘Download bulk sheet’ link will be disabled soon. Use AdWords Editor instead!
The Download bulk sheet (.csv) feature will be removed from all AdWords accounts on January 23, 2007. If you haven’t already done so, download AdWords Editor to continue making large-scale changes to your campaigns. Learn more | Dismiss this message

If you want to export a campaign, you can go to the Adwords Editor>File>Export to CSV

I was traveling last week so I missed most of the show. One of the sessions in particular that I would have liked to seen was the Search Ad Buyers Forum. Stacy Williams has a great recap on SERoundtable posted yesterday. She says:

We’re bidding on “second hand as/400″ for a client who sells used mainframes, bidding $4.25 a click. The keyword is listed as “Active,”but when you roll over the magnifying glass to use the new Ad Diagnostic Tool, it’s not running because our “quality score and CPC are too low.” There is no way to know which keywords are inactive unless you roll over the magnifying glass for every keyword in your campaign.

I’ve run into this several times and can’t stress enough that you need to check the magnifying glass frequently within your campaigns to be sure your keyword is actually active.

Props to Stacy for using actual results in her presentation. It’s MUCH more interesting and useful to the attendees.

This is the first session I went to yesterday. It was a packed house as this is obviously a hot button issue with online marketers. Overall impression: I was impressed with the people on the panel, they were articulate and presented well enough, but the information in the presentations wasn’t nearly granular enough. No one really provided any insight beyond what is already widely known.

The overriding message was “relevance”. And after the Yahoo party last night I don’t think I could particularly well explain how this relates to actual quality score calculations (it doesn’t, just look at ebay ads). Maybe Yahoo put something in my Yahoo-tini so that I would forget.

One guy in particular I do enjoy listening to is Jonathan Mendez from Otto Digital. He showed off some impressively designed mutlivariate testing. Or, I just like charts with real information in them, and he had lots of them.

OK, my mind is on turkey now almost 100% of the time, but….

2 important pieces of information I wanted to make light of.

1. Bad Brad Geddes posted his pubcon presentation on the Quality Score. You should read it.

Highlight: At the bottom of slide 4, “There are over 100 factors that can affect quality score. However, not all will be triggered depending on the conditions involved.” – Google Engineer.

2. A member of Digital Point claims to have been invited to beta test a Quality Score Display in Adgroups. I’ll try to speak with some of my sources to verify that this is indeed upcoming, and I’ll do my damndest to get an invite as well.

OK, that’s the last post before Thanksgiving Day. Have a great holiday everyone.