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

Partially fictional conversation between a client and a PPC Guy:

Client: We need to sell more *small goats*

PPC Guy: Sure, I understand.

Client: We sell a ton of them in our stores. It’s one of the most popular brands.

PPC Guy. Yes, I see.

Client: So how much should I spend on this? I want to really ramp up the sales. $xx,xxx?

PPC Guy: Well that’s hard to say. We have a campaign with thousands of SKUs, and normally how we approach this is to let the campaign tell us which items will sell the best. You see, through ROI tracking and….*cutoff*

Client: They sell like crazy in the stores. We should be selling more online.

PPC Guy: Right, I understand. *Small goats* sell well in your stores. We can certainly increase the exposure of your *small goat* keywords, I just can’t tell you how they will perform. Historically they have not converted all that well. See, normally what we do is….*cutoff*

Client: Great. Let’s ramp it up. When will I see some improvement?

Client: My comrades will be very happy to see the increase in sales.

Folks, listen up, you can’t dictate what will sell well. What you can do is *listen* to your data, and find out what is selling well.

Don’t be a dictator:

Be a listener.

Viva la PPC

Viva la ROI

Here’s a great example of how you can learn from the 800 lb gorillas in your industry. When I’m pointing out examples of best practices within our industry to client, I always encourage them to learn from those who are spending the most money, companies like Best Buy, Amazon, Orbitz, etc. Sure, they do things that make me scratch my head (ebay’s paid search), but more often than not, they are doing things well. Better than most of us can afford to. Example?

Today I was searching for a 19′ monitor. What I found was the usual assortment of ultra-competitive retailers hawking their prices on various stock for an approximately 1.5% margin. No one stood out to me in particular, save for one. I guarantee you almost no consumers notice this one thing that stood out to me, at least consciously. We, as marketers, should watch and learn, however. What thing am I talking about?

Query and Message Reinforcement -

Search marketing is composed of many things. 2 of the most important elements are QUERY and MESSAGE. First comes the query and then respond with the message that you won the right to display. You need to be consistent with your initial messaging. It has to be relevant to the query, and then reinforced throughout the sales cycle. Ideally you are repeating your message on the landing page. Almost no one does this because it’s too much work. When it is done, the results are self evident.

Here’s the example I found today.

Notice the ad copy:

And on the landing page, a beautifully relevant and consistent reinforcement:

What is impressive to me is the consistency in model/pricing between the ad and the landing page. Consider for a moment the size of the campaign they are managing with all Best Buy SKUs, and then multiply that by the ad copies they are responsible for. To actually pull this off cleanly is really labor intensive. I don’t know what agency is managing the PPC here, but hats off to a job well done. Not many of the other ads on this query did this as well as they have.

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!

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.

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.

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;)

First things first: The image verification is gone.

Please excuse me while I get up and do a little Ocho Cinco merengue around my cube.

I’m just starting to get into the account and play around with the interface. It doesn’t look like Adwords and it doesn’t look like Adcenter. It has it’s own look and feel, and is somewhat confusing at first glance but as you spend time with it, there are some interesting features.

First impressions?

Logging into the main dashboard I’m presented with the following modules: Alerts, Performance/Account Summary, and a list of the top campaigns. The design is bland, so from a GUI perspective, functional but underwhelming. I’ll give them a pass on this for now. I’m more interested in what’s under the hood.

If I select one of my campaigns from the dashboard I’m taken to the campaign overview page. From here I can do everything I need to, which is quickly generate graphs that show my clicks, impressions, and cost over the last 7 days. I can edit the campaign settings, or create an adgroup. Or, I can drill down into an existing adgroup. All basic functions, easily accessible, it just takes the eyes a few minutes to adjust to the ‘different’ layout. The campaign settings button is a drop down that offers:

Tactic Settings - choose content match, sponsored search, and match type
GeoTargeting - choose geo targeting, or specific region (city targeting or state/province). there are some adwordesque features here with maps and such, but I couldn’t get them to work at the time of this review.
Delete

At the adgroup level Panama starts to get a little more interesting. At the top you see your ad creative with a quick overview of it’s performance.

Display Rate (%): 100.0 CTR (%): 5.32 Clicks: 8 Quality Index: (*bar*)

We also have the defacto keyword list with the current bids and status and performance numbers you would expect to see. Continue drilling down to the keyword level and what do we have?

Slider bars!

I’m a fool for fancy graphics with slider bars. I can move the slider across the graph and it immediately displays the:

estimated monthly clicks
estimated average position
estimated share of available clicks —Pay attention to this

What will be interesting to see is how accurate these estimates are. We know how challenged Adwords has been with this regard. My first instinct is that this may be too much information to share with advertisers. As much as we curse google for not sharing the secret recipe behind everything, there’s a purpose to it. We’ll see if this feature stays for the long term, and I’ll use the hell out of it while it’s here.

Overall, I’m intrigued with the updates and I look forward to getting to know the system better than I do now. I see potential, and think Yahoo, at the very minimum, has gone a long ways towards getting back in the game.

I’ll try to look into the features with more detail, including reporting, in the coming weeks.

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!