What is a Good Bounce Rate?

Posted onApril 25th, 2010 byadmin

High bounce rated could be attributed to a variety of different scenarios. The danger with bounce rate is that it really only tells you one thing: the percentage of people who came to and left the website from the same page they landed. That’s all. I often get asked, “What’s a Good Bounce Rate?” And like all  the times I get asked, “Whats’s a good__(CPC, CTR, Conv. Rate)_?” My response is the same. It depends.

Bounce rate doesn’t tell you why they did. Remember that each visitor is different and has a  different experience when they visit your site. Its reasonable to assume they leave for different reasons.

This is just a quick read to give advertisers some reasonable and possible conclusions regarding bounce rate. I’ll also give you some steps you can take to improve bounce rate or otherwise disregard it.

Suppose you get into your analytics and you notice the following bounce rates:

Adgroup 1                     67%                                    Homepage

Adgroup 2                     58%                                    Product Category Page

Adgroup 3                     89%                                    Product Description Page

How to Decipher: What is a Good Bounce Rate?

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4 Easy Steps to Reviewing Google Analytics

Posted onApril 25th, 2010 byadmin

Before we jump straight into Google Analytics I want to set the approach strategy with everyone. Sometimes advertisers are forced into making decisions about search marketing from the pressure lacking campaign performance. They’re not getting enough sales, leads, inquires, and often they are paying good money for these limited results which causes them to look for answers inside Google Analytics.

My only disclaimer is that advertisers who are specifically going to Analytics for answers of what to change in their Adwords account might be quick to jump the gun before learning all the answers. I want to remind you guys that Analytics should be used, not as a change agent, but as a tool that allows us to get the entire story about your campaigns before making any decision at all. In other words, we use Analytics to paint the entire picture so that we can process all the information and eventually come to a justifiable conclusion about what is actually happening when people visit our website.

So for the purpose of this segment, I only want to give you tools that might help paint that picture clearer for you. In reality, everyone who follows these steps will achieve different results that will eventually demand different actions. What you learn today might be change the way you see your campaigns and even your business. Once the picture is clearer, what you do about it should become clearer too.

Note: Because Google Analytics contains information about your website from all referring sources, it is important that you observe the correct source segment (Adwords or Google) and compare to others.

1. Explore Bounce Rates in Comparison to Other Referring Sources

2. Explore Exit Pages (Top Exits and Percentages) in Comparison to Other Referring Sources

3. Explore Average Time on Site

4. Examine Content Page Views and Sort by Source

(video in edit room)

Great job. By now you should have a stronger approach to Analytics and because you have more of the story, your decisions will be more informed and you won’t put yourself in a bad position because you took action prematurely.

Lower Conversion Costs While Increasing Sales Return

Posted onApril 25th, 2010 byadmin

Lowering Conversion Cost without lowering sales return has always been the advertiser’s dilemma. Increasing return has always been an amazing feat. Advertisers have pushed for the lowest conversion cost. But at the end of the sales day, they paid closer attention to sales volume and return than conversion data. As professional Adwords managers, its expected that we’ll be asked to lower conversion cost for our clients. Now at what cost can we do this? The fastest way to lower conversion cost is to lower CPC and the fastest way to do that is to lower the keywords bids and consequently lower ranking, exposure, traffic, and sales return.

So in our business, the client has passed the dilemma onto us. How are we to manage client expectations with lower conversion costs while increasing the sales revenue?

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Unmasking the Abomination of Quality Score

Posted onApril 24th, 2010 byadmin

Dear Quality Score Victim,

I have to admit: I’ve been dying to write an updated piece about Quality Score (QS) since 2 years ago when we put out THIS BLOG piece. The game has changed forever and I’ve spent more time gritting my teeth and cursing at my monitor (logged into Adwords) than ever before. The reason is because we were told quality score was to help ‘reward’ advertisers for constructing highly relevant campaigns and adgroups. But its all different now. Where’s the reward?

When QS was first introduced to advertisers in 2005, it was just a static score used to determine the minimum CPC based on the ad relevancy to its keywords. Over the next five years, Google would add in: CTR, landing page relevancy, account history (a combine average of all CTR’s in an account, and (the best part) “other relevant factors.” I’ve always gotten a big laugh out of “other relevant factors” because as I would dissect QS, I could see there was much more unexplained reasoning for low quality scores.

An Illustration of Traditional Quality Score (Pre-2009-2010)

In August of 2008, Google restructured QS and made it a “real-time” score that would take effect as soon as someone searched on Google. Some of the other differences Google made were: replacment of minimum CPC  to “first page minimum bid”, landing page quality, and landing page load time. In expectation of a rough change to quality scores, we were surprised that existing advertisers who had been advertising a while, didn’t really see much change…until 2010. Now we go into the accounts and look around at QS but we’re not in Kansas no mo.

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Cut Wasted Spend with Search Query Reports

Posted onApril 23rd, 2010 byadmin

Cut More than 10% of wasted Google ad spend with Search Query Reports. Search Queries are keywords that visitors have types into Google. Whenever someone clicks on your website, there is a record of what they types into Google to do so.

One of the largest misconceptions about advertisers have is that they think people who click on their ad, always type in their “exact” keywords. This is really true only 5-10% of the time. Most of the time, they are searching some different, longer or shorter tail variation of the exact words. The point is that Google is trying to find relevant matched between what you offer and what people are searching for. The rub is that Google is a computer that doesn’t have the human-like capabilities to understand every single person searching intention and match it exactly with what you do. When looking for relevancy between your keywords and keyword searches, there lies irrelevant search queries.

So you grab this record of search queries called a Search Query Report. Once you have this report, you can go through it and look out for potential negative keywords that can be used to qualify for only the relevant the search queries. How long would you spend sifting through wasteful keywords if you could save more than 10% of your monthly as spend? An hour? 2 hours? I’m gonna teach you how to do in less than 30 minutes month.

I’ll tell ya: just about every time we have furnished an advertiser with this sort of analysis the standard response has been, “I’ll paying for that?” And the answer is yes.

We’ve written about this before and done a video but never really showed advertisers how easy this really is. Here it is.

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VP of Paid Search to Speak at SMX Seattle this Summer

Posted onApril 21st, 2010 byadmin

Aaron Putnam, KSP Vice President, was recently chosen to speak on a Pay Per Click Tactics Panel this June in Seattle, Washington. The topic for speaking is said to involve the discussion surrounding Google’s Search Partners Network and Targeting Partner Placements.

Los Angeles-April 21, 2010- Keyword Search Pros, Inc., a Los Angeles PPC Management Company, announced that Executive Vice-President Aaron Putnam was chosen yesterday to speak on a panel at the Seattle 2010 SMX Convention held June 8-9th. The discussion block entitled ‘Paid Search Track: Amazing PPC Tactics’ will be a dialog block for advanced paid search professionals looking to learn about new and cutting edge ideas surfacing in Sponsored Search Advertising. Sponsored advertising accounted for 95% of Google’s annual revenue intake last year.

Although Keyword Search Pros will not discuss the specifics of the talk at this time, it is saying that the discovery is monumental in the PPC world. “It’s gonna change the way people view search partners” says Putnam.

For years, Google advertisers have been paying for traffic on the Google Adwords platform in 3 basic advertising areas: Google Search which is actually on Google, Content Network where web property owners subscribe to have Google ads placed on their sites, and Search Partners where Adwords advertisers can find expose their ads on Google Partners like AOL and Ask.com. Historically, the partners network has been the most ambiguous area with regard to where, in foct, the ads actually show.

Putnam submission to SMX is said to be innovative in exploring the possibilities to illicit Search Partner placements. It remains to be seen how far advertisers will be able to go after June’s SMX but Keyword Search Pros, stays confident that is a giant step in the right direction.