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…)

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 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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Google Is On The Move Again. Are You Coming?

Posted onJanuary 6th, 2010 byadmin

Google Caffeine and Google Merchant Center is Stirring Up the Pot for Advertisers.

When it comes to Google Search, it becomes increasingly obvious that it’s evolving faster than ever. Advertisers who make a living from either natural search or paid search (or both) are now being forced into evolving with it. If you haven’t done anything NEW with you search marketing in the last year or so, you’re probably in for a rude awakening. Google Caffeine 2010 and the new Adwords updates are basically what’s taking off and leaving lazy, conventional advertisers in the dust.

Caffeine is the name of Google’s new method of ranking websites that has been in beta since last summer and has been tested on at least one of their known datacenters on IP: 209.85.225.103 since then. With it, come some new changes in how Google prioritizes websites. This week, Google is said to be officially rolling out the new changes on a permanent level. At this time, we will be conducting thousands of keyword tests to update ourselves on what strategies we will take to leverage these changes.

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Staying Profitable with Adwords Minimum First Page Bid Requirement

Posted onNovember 29th, 2009 byadmin

Keyword Search Pros has had a lot of inquiry to why Google Adwords revenues have changed this year. It is probably no surprise most inquires come in the form of complaints ranging from the new interface change to Google removing the additional Sponsored results on other pages to minimum first page bid requirement.

Though advertisers will typically maneuver around the new interface until they can navigate comfortably, most are not enthusiastically diving into routine account management. The result is less time being spend optimizing these campaigns in a time when it is most critical to do so. With less attention being spent in the advertiser accounts, that bigger problems are likely to go unnoticed.

It has gone without much discussion that Google has made changes that remove the “More Sponsored Listings” link at the bottom of the first page of Google search results. Actually, without the link itself, there is not much difference in the way ads are served (or not served.) How many people really go looking for Sponsored Results on Page 2 anyway? The link missing really serves as an calling that there is a much greater movement taking place in the background. It goes back to an earlier change made last year when we saw “minimum first page bids” for the first time.

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Methods to Keyword Research

Posted onAugust 18th, 2009 byadmin

As an advertising consultant for one of the leading PPC firms, I’m always asked this question, “Where do you get your keywords from?” And since this is such a popular question, I have decided to finally write a post about it once and for all. Because afterall, if it’s something you’re going to do, you should probably do it right from the start.

Before we really jump right in, I want to mention that there are different circumstances between advertisers who are looking to do keyword research for the very first time and those who are looking to add additional keywords to their existing keyword mix. Depending on what resources you have available at the time you do your research, that would dictate how you could go about finding them.

There are actually quite a few ways in which to find keywords. Not all of them will be mentioned here in this article. However, we will mention the most popular ways to research keywords and also give the disclaimers to them as well. There is no perfect way to get the right keywords the first time around. And whatever keywords you do find will have to undergo some tests to make sure it holds true for your account.

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