Enhanced Campaigns: Major Update by Google Adwords

Posted onFebruary 6th, 2013 byadmin

Today at exactly 12pm Pacific, Google officially announced its plan to roll out major changes to the Adwords campaign functionality. Calling the “upgrade” Enhanced Campaigns, Google has said this is the “first step to help you more simply and smartly manage” Adwords campaigns as it pertains to the different devices, locations, day scheduling, and conversions across these segments.

Previously, we made it a best practice to segment campaigns based on different devices and locations. Now with Enhanced Campaigns, Google is going to force all devices and locations for keywords to be managed in 1 campaign, making for less overall campaigns.

For advertisers who don’t have mobile-optimized websites or ads, this is definitely the wakeup call they have been in need of. Search has been completely turned upside down with the growth in mobile device browsing. It is expected that by 2016, 75% of all internet searches will be on a mobile device and much of these searches will be with local intent. Google is anticipating this growth and making these changes to push advertisers to evolve with the times. (more…)

Taking Your Content Marketing Strategies to Market

Posted onJuly 19th, 2012 byadmin

What is content marketing and content curation? Content Marketing is the creation and publication of original content for the purpose of generating leads, enhancing a brand’s perceptibility, and putting the company’s expertise on display. Content Curation is the accumulation, selection, and organization of the best possible content. Researchers in 2011 found that an impressive 82% of B2B marketers now employ content marketing as a strategy in their marketing programs. Other forms of advertising are search engine marketing at 71%, followed by events at 60%, public relations at 64% and TV/print/radio advertising at 32%.

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Adwords Search Queries Gone Wrong

Posted onNovember 1st, 2011 byadmin

The state of Adwords Advertiser Accounts have changed over the years where it was once very common to find an account without negative keywords and now it is rather uncommon. In time, advertisers have either become savvier to Adwords best practices or they have hired agencies to implement strategies.

But how far have they really evolved?

I can tell you for certain that the Google’s profit algorithm has evolved even further and is always 10 steps ahead of its advertisers. So my job is to make sure you guys are keeping up with the times. (more…)

The Optimal Blend of Match Settings for Adwords

Posted onOctober 27th, 2011 byadmin

In a recent webinar we’ve been conducting, we talk about using an “optimal blend” of match settings in an Adwords account. There seems to be a bunch of confusion surrounding this topic because we receive frequent requests that we elaborate on the subject.

Some questions that come in are:

• What match setting is the best?
• What percentage of our match settings should be broad?
• What match setting has the cheapest CPC?
• Which match settings make the optimal blend?

All of these questions infer that we are really missing our mark when explaining the subject. What we are saying is there is no definitive best or worst, appropriate percentage, or optimal blend that works for every advertiser. There is only the optimal blend for each individual account. The only way to really understand what blend is optimal for you is to look deep into your account’s search queries. (more…)

3 Ways to Lower Adwords Conversion Costs with Negative Keywords

Posted onMay 9th, 2011 byadmin

Most advertisers use negative keywords in the most limited fashion. Limitations occur both in the way advertisers retrieve their potential negative keywords, as well as where and how their negative keywords are executed. It’s very common to see advertisers try their luck guessing as to which negatives to use and it’s obvious those advertisers aren’t paying attention to which specific queries people ACTUALLY type into the Google search.

When you, as an advertiser, can discover not only which queries people actually make but also what keywords and ads they trigger, you can take back control over your account and learn how easily people convert under the proper settings.

Negative keywords have other purposes than to simply weed out irrelevant inquiries. Here are 3 simple ways you can increase conversions by using negative keywords. (more…)

Is Your AdWords Account a Hidden Horror?

Posted onApril 28th, 2011 byadmin

Have you ever watched a horror movie and seen a character do something so counter-intuitive it makes your brain explode? The victim walks into a dark basement without a flashlight knowing the killer is in the house. You’re already thinking, “Turn around! Don’t go down there!” But it’s no use, it’s too late. The victim’s fate has been written.

An unmanaged AdWords account is a lot like a B-rated horror flick and every day thousands of business owners walk into their own dark basement. Without a flashlight they are subjecting themselves to the hidden horrors that lurk in the dark. These business owners are allowing themselves to get slaughtered, financially speaking, by setting up Pay Per Click campaigns without understanding Google’s rules.

Pay Per Click is a thousand tiny knives slicing open the throat of your business. A click is a click and they add up fast. This is especially true when you’re paying for clicks regardless of how relevant they are, whether those clicks convert to a sale, or how much your products cost. The results can be savage. Advertisers commonly complain about spending up to $60k on AdWords yet they still can’t make a sale.

When the Keyword Search Pros look inside an unmanaged AdWords account it’s like turning the lights on in that dark basement for the first time. What we find will rattle even the most seasoned bones. (more…)

How Many Keywords Should I Have?

Posted onJanuary 31st, 2011 byadmin

How many keywords should I have? This is the question advertisers should consider more. Instead many ask: Where can I find more keywords?

More is better, right? Hell, it’s the American Way.

“If I have more keywords, I can cover more bases when customers do a search for my products. The more I have, the wider that net is and that means I’ll be seen more. Where can I find more keywords?” Tell me if this sounds familiar?

This is a very logical point of view. In fact, it’s not a bad strategy at all when you set limits and don’t spread the keyword mix too thin. That plan will work fine until you’ve gone too far. That’s when things get out of hand.

Here’s the rub. When you have X amount of budget to spend monthly/daily on keyword clicks, X gets distributed throughout all the keywords you bid on. Keywords that don’t have many clicks and impressions don’t have a high population of statistical data. When the distribution is over a vast amount of keywords, a higher percentage of the budget becomes lost to all the many keywords that don’t produce enough volume of clicks. There won’t be sufficient data to make any assessment to whether the keywords are in fact performing greatly, poorly, or even average. That’s when you’re stuck!

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Use Match Settings and Increase Return

Posted onMay 23rd, 2010 byadmin

In order to use match settings and increase return simultaneously, you’ll have to understand a few things about match settings and search queries. One is that the level of impressions significantly decreases for phrase and exact match versions of keywords. And secondly, applying match settings to keywords should be done only with the intention of lowering “high” conversion costs or slowing the amount of clicks to conform to a limited daily budget.

When attempting to lower high conversion cost, it is important that you take all the preceding steps to lower conversion cost before applying match settings. Match setting will likely result in lower traffic and consequently lower sales volume. If you race ahead and apply match settings prematurely, you might forgo the opportunity to lower conversion cost without lowering traffic and sales.

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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. 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 typed into Google. Whenever someone clicks on your website, there is a record of what they typed into Google to do so.

One of the largest misconceptions that 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 of the exact words. The point is that Google is trying to find relevant matches 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’s 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 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 a 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’m 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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