the PPC Book|PPC Blog | Querying for Dollars

Yesterday the Google Adwords team posted a mea culpa to advertisers regarding the latest quality score adjustment.

You say, “Jeff I don’t have time to read that stuff, tell me what they said”. And I say, Grasshopper, the whole thing boils down to one sentance:

“the Quality Score doesn’t incorporate any conversion information”

Hmmmm…….

I’m thinking maybe conversion is a good indicator of quality, no? Other folks have shown hard data that clearly illustrates there is a problem with their algorithm.

The tone of this post kind of reminds me of George Bush talking about Iraq. He can say whatever he wants but intelligent people all over the world know it’s seriously fubar. My message to Adwords? Your intentions may be good (maybe), but you are driving people away in droves. And not neccessarily the kind of people you want to drive away. I’ve seen far too many real campaigns from real advertisers get smoked with the new LPQS changes.

Anyhow, I won’t complain, I’ve always said we need at least 3 major, competitive, PPC platforms. Right now we have approximately 1.5. The more Adwords tries to make sweeping overhauls with poor execution, the more opportunity for someone else to step in and take that business. Anyone? Buhler? Anyone?

In another move to shake the pesky affiliates from their saddle, the Adwords team announced this week that they will require you to take a lie detector test as part of the account sign up process.

Wait, that’s the news form 2009. In the present day, Adwords did announce some changes coming soon regarding their calculation of landing page quality. Most conspicuously, these changes will effect the content network ads:

In the next few days, we will be making two changes to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. First, we’ll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network.

This makes sense to me and really is no big suprise, but what is more vague and won’t be measured to any extent for weeks and months to come is this comment:

Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.

Obviously, this will make things more difficult, and not easier, for both middlemen affiliates and everyday advertisers. Google is currently in a position in which they can afford to approach the market from a position of strength, exerting their utopian advertising dreams upon everyone at will. In Larry and Sergey’s perfect world, every advertiser will be like wikipedia.com and there will be nary a call to action anywhere on your site. If you think I’m joking you don’t know Google very well.

You won’t find me complaining, though, as moves like this make professional grade PPC management a necessity, not an option. Even better if your PPC analyst has figured out the adwords algorithm;)

G-Man at SEOMoz posted an interesting interview with Shoemoney yesterday. The most interesting part of the interview to me was the very frank and accurate assessment of what it takes to succeed with a campaign in Yahoo (currently):

Yahoo - I think Yahoo search marketing is crappy. It’s really the red headed stepchild of all the big 3 ppc engines. Their quality control is so hit and miss. Basically, the key with Yahoo is you just have to hammer the piss out of it. Upload 10,000 keywords and 8,000 will get denied. Upload those 8,000 keywords and 6,500 will get denied. Upload those and, well, you get the point. I guess it just depends on who is looking at your keyword to see if it’s denied or not. Keep hammering away and you will get in tons of 10 cent keywords.

Secondly, and most people will ignore this tidbit, but he talks about automating the transfer of search logs from his site and turning them into keywords.

Ok, check this out. I have a ringtone site that I log searches on (searches people do in the site); this is live data. I know what is hot in the ringtone industry in like 0 second time. I can automate this with apis so that it bids 0 second too on ppc->affiliate.

eCommerce sites should pay special attention to this strategy. If 90% of searches are unique, the ones you see on your own website are the most valuable you can find anywhere. And, they’re yours!

I’m sure there will be more of these to come:

Ppc
We manage them so you
don’t have to Save time,
money. Free Trial!
www.adisem.com

The problem is that within this particular adsense layout, the description portion of the adcopy is compressed horizontally into 3 lines. This causes the lines to break where you don’t necessarily want them to.

Lesson: Use periods at the end of your sentences whenever possible.

All queries are really nothing more than someone asking a question. At least, that’s how I approach pay per click advertising. What I find often is that advertisers are so concerned with giving consumers the hard sell on their business that they forget that they are there to help the consumer. At least, that’s what you should be doing if you ever want to get anywhere with your business.

Case in point…

I have been wearing contacts for 20 years. They are expceptionally fussy when I sit in front of the monitor 14 hours a day. They get dry, sticky. In short, it’s a pain in the **. My wife is always encouraging me to get Lasik surgery. She thinks I’m a wuss for being afraid to cut my eye with a laser, that it’s a routine procedure with virtually no risk. I disagree. So, I go out today on the World Wide Interweb to get some stats, and make myself a little more comfortable about getting the procedure.

My first query at the Google web: lasik problems

Obviously, I’m afraid of lasik. My query tells you that. If you are a smart advertiser, wouldn’t you take advantage of this? Speak to my question. My question is: Is Lasik safe? Are there potential problems with Lasik? Etc Etc.

What do I find for paid search ads?

Free LASIK Program -Mich
Wavefront and Bladeless intra-Lasik upgrade.
Hurry reserve your spot.
www.yaldoeyecenter.com

Um, I don’t live in Michigan and cost is not my concern, thanks though.

Top 10 Lasik Surgery
Lasik Centers Ranked for you. Leading Lasik Centers.
www.aLasik.org

Doesn’t address my concern

Marina Del Rey Lasik
0% Financing, Free Consultation!
As low as $99 per month.
www.marinaeyecenter.com

Hmm. Chicago must be closer than I thought to Marina Del Rey.

Lasik Problems
Affordable Laser Eye Surgery By The
Top Surgeons. Optimax, Lasik, Lasek
www.bertybuzzard.com

Bad use of Dynamic Insertion

Lasik Problems
All About Lasik Problems
Get Informed Before You Decide.
LaserEyeSurgeryReviews.info

Even though it’s a double dynamic insertion trick, the copy comes out reasonably well. Too bad it’s an MFA arbitrage site. Bummer.

Lasik Problems
Lasik Problems. Learn
about costs, risks, and procedures.
www.TheVisionGuide.com

Again, good ad copy, obviously dynamic insertion. Another MFA. They do seem to write the best ads though.

Avoid LASIK Complications
A guide to risks and complications,
and steps to take to avoid them.
AllAboutVision.com

This is a good ad, well crafted, it addresses my query directly without generic dynamic insertion, and the site is actually a good resource for information. Well done!

So, what have we learned? Copywriters need to take the time in the campaign creation stage to carefully craft detailed ad copy that will speak clearly to the query being performed. Don’t rely on dynamic insertion so heavily. It does save time, but in the end, it can produce boilerplate ads that don’t really engage the user.

Take the time at the beginning and it will pay off down the road!

What in the world is KwPI¢? I was reading a post by the world’s best recruiter about a candidate’s KPI, or Key Performance Indicator. Being that I’m a lowly google adwords certified professional and live in a PPC vacuum, I’d never really heard or paid much attention to this terminology. I immediately assumed it was Keyword Performance Indicator, and thought, wow, how in the world are they measuring that?

Well, turns out they aren’t. No one is. But I think we should, as search marketers, develop a standard way to measure the performance of a site against a key phrase. Don’t you? Doesn’t that make sense? I’m sure some people are doing it but I’ve never seen it discussed and formalized.
This measurement would have several useful benefits.

1. Search marketing agencies can list in their credentials a KwPI score for their client’s key phrases.

2. If I’m a job candidate, I can say something to the effect of, “Raised company KwPI to 7.2 on phrase “wide blue widgets”

3. It would be an effective way for a company to measure the performance of their own efforts, whether in house or outsourced.

As I’m thinking of what it could be used for, I think first you have to define what IT is.

Here’s a stab at it:

KwPI: Keyword Performance Indicator - A measurement of a website’s reach or visibility within the scope of the major search engines and advertising networks.

I think you would want to separate organic KwPI from PPC KwPI altogether. Measuring PPC reach is a manual process right now and the way I would do it could take 30 minutes for each keyword.

Let’s call the organic version Keyword Performance Indicator - Organic.

What key measurements could determine a company’s organic KwPI? This is a tough one, and will have to be refined over time. At least you’d have to start with the following:

1. Organic rank in Google (sliding scale points based on ranking)
2. Organic rank in Yahoo (sliding scale points based on ranking)
3. Organic rank in MSN (sliding scale points based on ranking)
4. Alexa Ranking (sliding scale numerical value based on ranking)

Of course there are hundreds of other small search engines out there, as well as a few medium sized ones, like ASK. But for now, I think if you take a score based on your rankings in these search engines you’re getting a fairly accurate representation of the visibilty of a site, organically speaking.

What this won’t take into account: roi on keywords, feeds, ppc, paid placement, email driven traffic, and countless other techniques.

This is just me brainstorming, and there are a lot of people who will pick this apart, so please, share your thoughts on how to refine this measurement. I’m already working on a tool to measure this and hope to release it soon.

Yes, if you currently manage PPC campaigns for any number of clients this question is no doubt the bane of your existence on a daily basis. Normally, the conversation goes like this:

“Jeff I can’t see my ads, what in the world is going on here?”

“Dear Client, your daily budget is 45 cents and your main keyword is ‘New York Injury Attorneys’, we may never see your ad, ever. Ever.”

OK, that’s not exactly how it goes, but you get the idea. Google has given us a nice tool in order to help advertisers see their ads with certain geographical restrictions in a ‘preview‘ environment. What is nice about this is that the ads will not accrue impressions or clicks, and the advertiser finally gets to see something tangible (while not live, yes, but it will still help people get over their skittishness.)

To me this has been one of the major challenges in PPC client management. Many of the advertisers who have adopted pay per click marketing were yellow page clients. They understand the importance of this medium, but they can’t get over the fact that they can’t see their ads all the time. No matter how many times you describe the adwords system, they still hang up the phone feeling like someone is taking their money in some sort of scam. Think about it.

Pay for Yellow Page ad, see thousands of copies of your ad everywhere.

Pay for newspaper classified ad, see thousands of copies of your ad everywhere.

Billboard, everywhere.

Magazine, everywhere. On and on and on.

The irony is, all of those offline ‘impressions’ are by and large completely, utterly, untargeted. However, you can touch and feel them, which goes a very very long way.

Anyhow, the point of my post, if you want to show someone exactly what their ad looks like, Google can do it for you.

From the Adwords blog:

“We’ve heard your feedback and now have a tool for you to use to preview your ads no matter where they’re targeted. Here’s how it works:

1. Visit www.google.com/adpreview
2. Enter your keyword(s) in the search box and click on the “Search” button
3. Preview your ads on the search results page that loads or the subsequent pages (click the next link to see more ads on the right-hand side)

For example, if you are trying to preview ads for “pay per click genius” in Chicago, IL, the URL you would use would look like:

http://www.google.com/search?adtest=on&hl=en&q=pay+per+click+genius&gr=US-IL&gcs=Chicago

A useful tool from the folks at the Adwords farm.

If you manage PPC campaign for clients, what’s the best explanation you’ve heard, or given, to a client when asked about the inability to see their ads all the time?

Salesforce is now becoming an agency of sorts for Adwords.

This is interesting to me because a client, once upon a time, was integrating their tracking with Salesforce. As I’m always pushing my clients to implement end to end tracking solutions, which are defined differently by every business, I’ve come across Salesforce/PPC tracking a few times.

In this particular case, the client had users register for a whitepaper, once the registration hit the database, the user info was passed into their database and to Salesforce. Now, to date, there wasn’t really an efficient way flag that user as an Adwords prospect. Once that lead hit the Salesforce system they entered one of those epic software sales cycles that lasted 12-16 months. Good luck managing the campaign for ROI based on only landing page conversions. That doesn’t tell me if the keywords I used pulled in a valuable prospect or not, it just told me that someone, anyone, wanted the whitepaper. Not good enough for an ROI freakazoid like me;)

Tracking all the way though the Salesforce CRM lifecycle was a pain. I used a tag in the URL that showed up in some obscure Salesforce field jumbled with other url data. This resulted in a manual parsing of referring information, which required intervention on the clients part, wasting their valuable resources. What would have been ideal would be to have Salesforce look for a variable that I defined, like, ADWORDS>KEYWORD, then, we could sort in Salesforce by PPC lead, keywords, and other useful methods.

So, my question is, will this new Salesforce development come with better integration for PPC/Adwords campaigns with regards to tracking? I would think so, but hey, I’ve been wrong before.

Technically this is a post about affiliate-based arbitrage, not pure arbitrage. In my opinion, here is the difference:

Pure arbitrage (using ppc): The technique in which a publisher buys mass amounts of traffic from various PPC platforms. The traffic is directed to a site that then serves the user a page that contains outbound links that are monetized on a CPC basis. The publisher tracks both the cost of the inbound traffic versus the income from the outbound traffic, and attempts to monetize the ’spread’ as much as possible. For example, if I bid $.09 for the keyword ’sears washer dryer model RX21223′, someone clicks on my ad, lands on my page, and sees a link for ‘Buy Sears Washer Dryer - Free Delivery’, which is a link I got through a feed at Yahoo, and that click pays $.25, I just netted $.16. If I can do that on a mass scale, I am running a nice little business.

This technique is different than using PPC to do affiliate arbitrage.

Affiliate arbitrage (using ppc): The technique in which a publisher buys very targeted PPC traffic focused around a theme or product. The traffic can be sent directly to an affiliate landing page or to a publisher hosted page that contains one, or several, affiliate offers.

In my particular case, I was trying to figure out how to track conversions back to keywords on an affiliate I was promoting through Commission Junction. It’s a little hard to figure out due to poor documentation on CJ, but I’ll help you get right to the goods.

Basically, CJ uses SID’s, or site ID’s I believe they call them. Normally, people apply these to a site, so you can tell which site is converting for a particular advertiser they are promoting. In this case, we are going to use SID’s to track a PPC campaign at the keyword level.

Let’s say our campaign is for payday loans, and we’ll use 2 keywords as a starting example. My keywords are:

pay check advance
“pay advance”

Notice the second one is phrase match. CJ will give you a long url under “keyword links” that look something like this:

http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx

Obviously, the x’s are placeholders. Your affiliate id will be in there. Now, as is, you can’t tell which keyword generates a sale or conversion. Adwords conversion tracking won’t tell you either. We need to use SID’s to track the sales. You can build out a nice Excel formula to do this on a mass scale if you have a lot of keywords, but I’ll show you how to do it first with just a couple.

Take your base url:

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx

add a question mark

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?

add sid=

http://www.dpbolvsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=

then add the keyword, replacing any spaces with +

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=pay+check+advance

for phrase match keywords, you can do this:

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=pay+advance+phrase

That’s it. Just plug those urls into the keyword creative and you’re in business. Now, in your CJ account reporting, you will be able to see which keywords converted by looking at the report details. Viola. You’re a millionaire!

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

One of my clients is an online soccer retailer. They have a fantastic campaign to begin with, but when you add in a once in 4 years event, as the World Cup is, you get absolute top end performance. The client actually had me cap the campaign in the middle of July because the 4 guys who worked at their main store couldn’t ship any more orders during the course of the day.

Of course, being a soccer retailer, there is an ad group devoted to player names. Suprisingly, it’s the smallest portion of their campaign in terms of clicks/sales, but it’s interesting to me nonetheless because of the whole sports celebrity thing. I’m not a huge Zinedine Zidane fan, but I am a former soccer player, and he’s one of the best, so I can appreciate watching him play. Now, if you don’t know the story, you’ve obviously been under a rock so stop reading here…
Even though this is a low percentage of the overall campaign in terms of spend, I thought this was an interesting example of things an analyst has to pay attention to while managing a campaign. In particular, an analyst always has to be on the lookout for a star athlete head butting an opponent in the middle of the sport’s final game, and the effect it may have on keyword pricing and conversion.

To illustrate, here are the numbers from Zidane’s keywords broken down into July Overall, July 1-9, and July 10-31. The final game and infamous headbutt occured on the 9th.

July 1-9….

July 10-31…post headbutt…. Notice 3 things:

1. The cost per conversion before and after the incident.

2. The drastic drop in conversion rate.

3. Also notice the average postion rise, as I’m assuming many people stopped competing on his name because they anticipated the drop in conversion.

Anyhow, I just thought this was somewhat amusing. I suppose that’s about what you can expect to happen with your jersey sales when you make a completely foolish decision like that. Anyone out there have any similar examples?