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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