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Playing the game of increasing relevancy and reducing cost on Google’s content network makes me feel a little like I’m playing a game with a deity who occasionally drops delicious cookies and golden coins in my path, and sometimes leaves banana peels and fish heads for me to slip on instead. I know it’s dramatic, but this is how I feel. I know the tradeoffs: sometimes the lack of relevancy of some the sites we show up on is the price we pay for wider exposure. Though Google is making progress in their efforts to increase relevancy, there is much work to be done on the advertiser side to make sure we don’t run into as many unexpected surprises along the way, and to arm ourselves with the tools to overcome them when we inevitably do.

In contextual targeting, treat your ad groups like keywords.

Google recommends having multiple small, theme-focused ad groups as standard best practice to increase relevancy for site matching purposes. However, there’s another benefit: as we know, there is no keyword-level data available for the content network. If you make many very small ad groups with very closely related keywords, they can function within your account almost just like keywords, with all of the associated data. This allows you to pause and bid change on a much more granular level than using larger ad groups, which is very helpful in eliminating unnecessary spend on ad groups/keywords that don’t end up matching well contextually or have a high CPL which can be affected by bid modification. In larger ad groups, you’ll never be able to identify which keywords are matching you to sites that are less relevant.

Consider what else your keywords may mean, and use intelligent ad group separation to learn where your target audience is online.

Not every keyword you use for search is going to get you relevant traffic on the content network, but sometimes they’ll surprise you. Some keywords, especially those with very broad meanings, may match to sites with an audience that isn’t exactly within your normal target range. For example, say you advertise for a fashion design school. An ad group which contains “fashion design” and “fashion designing” as keywords is much likely to create a situation where your ads show up on fashion design game websites, fashion advice websites, and any other number of locations related to fashion which may or may not convert well for you. It’s worth introducing these keywords to see if the audience on these sites converts well, but it’s also well worth separating them from keywords such as “fashion design school” or “fashion design college”, because yes, Google knows they are different things, and these keywords are likely to be matched to very different sites than the first two. Google’s recently introduced predetermined audience-targeting options (which are not yet available for all advertisers) look to the goal of targeting your audience of interest specifically rather than allowing a complicated algorithm to match your keywords to sites with similar content, but the audiences currently available, even to those advertisers who have this function, are fairly broad, therefore it will continue to be useful to use this type of testing.

Be creative in eliminating non-productive traffic.

This is a constant uphill climb for me. The problem is that in a well-managed ad group on the content network, your cost is often driven up by a lot of websites spending, individually, a very small amount of money. In the past we have set a “cost without converting” limit that is well below our goal CPL and excluded any sites that had not converted within a 60 day date range but had spent more than that set exclusion limit. This works to lower CPL to some extent, but it’s not as effective as I’d like, and it also presents the problem that you are also eliminating sites that had a chance of converting before they reached your CPL goal (this is why we used at least a 60 day date range- to give new sites a chance to perform well). There is an additional problem in that it’s fairly ineffective to eliminate sites at the URL level: you can add a million excluded URLs, and your CPL might never go down, because for most domains you will only show on a given URL a few times. Excluding at the domain level blocks much more non-converting traffic, but the danger of excluding domains is that there is the potential, if you exclude a domain based on the poor performance of a few of its URLs without evaluating entire-domain performance, that you will also exclude converting traffic. We’ve recently been using another method for reducing multiple-small-spend sources without reducing conversions which I think has been very helpful:

1. Run a placement performance report for a content campaign for the past 6 months. You can choose another date range, but the longer it is, the lower your chance of excluding sites that may not be performing well currently but have the potential to do so. You can also run the report for multiple campaigns, but the steps below are cleaner if you do each campaign individually.
2. Autofilter the data headers and freeze the header row, then sort by cost.
3. Identify any URLs which have spent more than your cost-without-converting goal or have a CPL over goal and mark them. You don’t know at this point whether it’s safe to exclude them at the campaign level or ad group level, or at the domain level or URL level.
4. Sort by domain.
5. Identify domain groups that contain a lot of individual URLs. This is fairly straightforward: just visually scan the spreadsheet for domain groups. They stand out. Insert rows above and below a domain you want to analyze, and sum the total spend and total conversions per campaign. If all of the collective URLs in a domain have spent more than your cost-without-converting limit with no conversions, you can exclude that domain at the campaign level. If the cost is of the overall domain is high, but some URLs within the domain have converted, you can try to exclude at a more granular level, either at the URL level for those URLs which have not converted, or by domain at the ad group level if all of the conversions have been within one or two ad groups. Note: indicate in another tab of your spreadsheet which domain you want to exclude.
6. While your document is still sorted by domain, find your previously-marked exclusions (from step 3) and determine the performance of the domain as a whole in the same way. Exclude at the appropriate level.

And that’s that. A way to eliminate pesky sites that act like mosquito swarms, stealing our lifeblood a tiny bit at a time. It is as with much content network management- a little more complex than managing search, but worth it to lower our CPL and make running content profitable.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Effective Keyword Grouping for Pay-Per Click

One of the most underrated means of driving down your PPC costs and driving up the number of conversions you can generate through paid search is effectively grouping and segmenting your keywords.

In this article I’ll cover one means of effectively grouping keywords for pay-per click marketing: keyword grouping by purchase intent.

The aim in improving your keyword organization – via keyword grouping by purchase intent or any other means – is to help you to increase click-through rates (and subsequently Quality Scores), better manage your paid search budget, and create better focused (and higher converting) paid search landing pages.

Knowing Which Levers to Pull

As you set out to structure your keywords, you need to be cognizant of the different “organizational levers” available to you, and when to pull which:

• Campaigns – Your campaign is basically a shell that helps you to manage different Ad Groups. The controls available to you at the campaign level are:
  • Locations
  • Languages
  • Network
  • Bidding
  • Ad Rotation
  • Ad Scheduling
• Ad Groups – Your Ad Group allows you to match a list of keywords to a series of ad text variations

If you have specific location or language requirements, it may make sense to take a geo-focused approach to campaign creation. Similarly, if you are applying ad rotation or scheduling and/or network and bidding strategies in non-traditional ways that will “trump” any of the following organizational tactics. The nice thing about the following grouping strategies is that they can all be executed within a campaign; in other words, once you’ve settled on a campaign structure, you can then organize your keywords within that campaign by Ad Group using any of the following methods.

Grouping Keywords By Purchase Intent

Basically, the idea behind grouping keywords by purchase intent is to create a campaign and Ad Group structure that maps closely to the way people actually research and purchase products. You can do this by segmenting your keywords by modifiers.

Modifiers are basically adjectives that are appended to a core keyword and reveal an additional layer of intent. Some great examples of modifiers that reveal purchase intent are:

• How-to – This is an informational modifier; people searching for “how to” do things are typically either just looking for information, or are very early in the buying cycle. These searchers are still “browsers” looking to learn more about their potential purchase.
• Compare – People looking to compare products are also on the lookout for information, but these fit more closely to the “shop” stage of the buying cycle; by asking for a comparison of different products the searcher is revealing that they’ve narrowed their choices and would like to learn a bit more about two products.
• Buy – This is clearly a transactional modifier, and the searcher is obviously ready to purchase something: they’re in the “buy” stage of the buying cycle.

You can then use these modifiers and others like them to create a high level keyword hierarchy:

The above image is our software, but you could easily use Excel to create this architecture for your paid campaign. You’ll work through the keyword organization a bit like this:

• Purchase Stage – This is the initial container you’ll use to house different modifiers (browse, shop, or buy).
• Modifiers – Here you can create a segmentation around a specific modifier: for instance how-to, what is, etc.
• Semantically grouped sub-segmentations – Once you have a “how-to” bucket, it’s not enough to just throw all of your keywords into a campaign or ad group based solely on the fact that they share a modifier. You then have to dig even deeper to create more specific segmentations within your modifier groups, like “buy a bird” versus “buy a cat” pictured above.

SEO Book has a great worksheet with a list of modifiers you can use as a series of seed lists to help map your keyword strategy to different types of intent: http://www.tools.seobook.com/keyword-worksheets/keyword-worksheet.xls.

So What Does All this Allow You to Do?

By organizing your keywords based on purchase intent, you’ll now have campaigns and Ad Groups that map neatly to buyer intent. This improves your ability to:

1. Measure performance based on the stage of the query – Look at cost and conversion data based on each stage in the buying cycle. You’ll get some particularly interesting data by investigating newly released AdWords search funnel data to see how people are interacting with your ads at every stage of the buying cycle.
2. Message to each stage with specific ad copy – By creating really granular segmentations based on buyer intent, you can write very specific ads that speak to searchers. This means increased click-through rates, improved Quality Scores, and lowered costs per click.
3. Design a unique landing page experience for each type of searcher – Similarly, you can create landing pages and landing page experiences that speak directly to the searcher. Customize offers, page length, and messaging on your landing pages to answer specific objections, speak to specific pain points, and deliver custom benefit statements

Of course, this is just one means of segmenting keywords: what approach do you take to organizing your keywords for PPC?

About the Author

Tom Demers is the Director of Marketing at WordStream, a provider of pay per click software, The Free Keyword Tool, and advanced PPC tools for researching, organizing and grouping large numbers of keywords for greater PPC campaign relevance and higher Quality Scores.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I recently had an opportunity to take the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam, what fun! Overall it was a good experience, but here are a few tips that I wish I had known before taking it:

1) Read all of the materials in the learning center for the exam. Even if you’ve been working with Adwords for a while, this could still be useful for the random trivia they throw at you. Especially if there’s a new feature or if one might have been updated.

2) Watch all of the videos. Whether it was intentional or not, there are topics which are not covered in the readings but covered in the videos. You’ll definitely have a few gaps in your learning, if you skip the videos. Here is one that I thought was great at explaining quality score.

3) Best practices for ads are important. Review Google’s list for the exam.

4) Know what to expect when you click Begin Exam. Once I started the exam, my screen blacked out, so I only had the exam in front of me…. no googeling! If you plan on using notes, print them out.

5) 120 questions and 120 minutes. I nearly ran out of time, so bust out the questions you can. As with most certification exams, at least put down an answer and mark it to come back to, before you finish.

6) Experience counts. If you’ve been working with accounts for any amount of time the exam will be much easier for you. Some of the questions have you thinking through real life scenarios and choosing the best solutions. New account managers may find it a little more challenging.

Before taking the exam, I wasn’t quite clear on the adwords account access levels. Know the limits you can place on accounts! Also be fully aware that text, image and video ads are all covered equally. If you’re more familiar with one than the other be sure to read up. Best of luck!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of a properly structured geotargeting strategy to the success of a good percentage of PPC campaigns. We’ve discussed geotargeting for PPC many times before on the blog, so if you are confused, go ahead and read about it. But to get the value out of this post you need to know that there are basically two reasons geotargeting could make or break your account:

Everyone Can’t Be Everywhere

Some products or services can only be offered to people within a certain distance from your actual physical location, so you better only show your ads to people either within that distance, or who are using search queries that contain your location. This is important to remember for local businesses, who often also have small PPC budgets, and for larger businesses with multiple locations. Targeting the people searching in a certain area with keywords and ads that are specialized for that area is much more likely to return success.

The World is Not Homogenous

In addition to the somewhat specialized case above, some…many…all? products or services are going to have geographical locations in which they sell better. If you use the data available to you properly, you can determine where these are and devote more resources to a population you’re more confident will convert.

There are a few ways to find out where your high-value location targets are. For one, you can use analytics data to determine continents, regions, or cities where your conversions are concentrated. Depending on the analytics package you use, you’ll have different levels of detail available, but in any case, this can be a helpful place to start. For those without analytics availability or who just want more detailed information, sourcing this information directly from your conversion data can be a viable option if you have the right tools.

For some people, leads come in the form of form submissions that ask for data such as city, state, and zip code. On top of that, for sales or revenue-based clients, you have shipping and sales address information available. That means that you have all sorts of potential to geotarget your PPC campaigns.

So What to Do?

Almost everyone can get this data compiled into a spreadsheet, which is great but can be overwhelming. A year’s worth of conversion data? This could be 32,428 rows in excel, and sounds completely daunting to sort through to try and find conversion location patterns. Which basically gets us to the point I’m trying to make: the idea overwhelmed us, too, until a team member discovered this very neat website: BatchGeo. You just paste in your properly-formatted spreadsheet information and it maps the locations of your whatever- sales, leads, high-value customers- on a Google maps map. It can even handle missing information and can map city/state combinations, address/zip code combinations, and zip codes only. It’s free, and it has been an extremely helpful tool for us in identifying areas in which leads are concentrated. Whether you’re using this kind of raw data for geotargeting now or not, it won’t hurt you to plug the data in and see how the map looks- you might get a useful surprise!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Anyone who has been working on a PPC account for a while- whether it be your own or a client’s- probably reaches a point of inspiration deficiency. A new PPC account can be like a new toy (if you’re not as nerdy as us, as I’m assuming you are, and this does not hold true for you I apologize); it’s fun setting it up and seeing what it does and how the world responds. But after a while, you have other new accounts to play with. Or you don’t, and this is the one account you’ll be handling forevermore. Either way, boredom can lead to neglect, and neglect will eventually damage your account’s profitability. So what to do? Get a little creative and find new ways to improve your accounts:

• Use your colleagues! It really doesn’t matter if they do PPC as well (though that helps)- anyone with familiarity with your product or service can give a new perspective, which can be very helpful when your ad texts all start to look the same and you can’t think of one more benefit for your landing pages. If you do work with other internet marketers, you can take this one step further and ask them to review your accounts for anything you may be overlooking, and for new ideas. This works beautifully and I think you should try it. Aside from actually having coworkers review your accounts, if you have access to theirs, you can also get ideas for settings or account structure changes by looking at what works for them and then applying relevant findings to your own clients.

• Remember there’s a world outside of your PPC account. It’s not all keywords and ad texts- don’t overlook landing page testing! Clients, even if wary of website redesigns, often will allocate budget for one-page design projects if you can adequately justify the increase in conversion rates they’re likely to see as a result.

• Think outside the PPC box- luckily, at Hanapin we have both PPC and SEO clients, so we have a bit of an advantage in this area, but if you don’t, you can still look at your website from a non-PPC perspective. Improvements to your site’s structure, updated content or products, and social media integration can all translate into new PPC opportunities. Updated content can give you ideas for new ad texts and landing page messaging. New products translate to keyword targeting opportunities. Understanding who your customer is and what they want from you via social media can help your messaging become more targeted as well. Meeting your visitors’ needs and expectations is paramount to success in all areas of internet marketing, and exploring how you’re doing that outside of PPC can open your eyes to a lot of possibility.

• You can ask search engine reps for help and ideas, particularly if you work at an agency and have dedicated reps for this kind of thing. I’ll just say a) they are extremely helpful, and sometimes have great ideas and b) you should always take their ideas with a grain of salt, because ultimately their first job is to increase their employer’s profit…not yours. If you choose growth avenues wisely, you can find a balance that does both simultaneously: lovely!

One last note: don’t let your desire to try something new win out over your ROI’s best interest…some ideas are more likely to have a substantial impact than others, and you know your account well enough to understand logically what’s most likely to be useful and what is just a pointless waste of time and money. Trust yourself, do your research, and get inspired. Everyone will be better off for it.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I’ve always been behind the philosophy that telling customers what to do on your landing pages or website is much better than letting them figure it out on their own. After all, that’s what marketing is, right? We lead them in the direction we want them to take; to see our new product, new offers, new promotions, new content, etc.

However, if you’re working with graphic designers to design a website, I must say, they typically don’t like using buttons. Buttons are also known as a ‘call to action’. We’re calling the customer to take an action. Buttons can certainly ugly up a page if too large, too colorful, or too in your face. The up side to these kinds of buttons is: they work. Adding buttons or calls to action on not only your landing page but throughout your website can help increase conversions and conversion rates exponentially.

For a large client of mine, we had a landing page dedicated for user submissions requesting more information. This page was accessible via top hand navigation on all pages of their site.

What I did was add an additional ‘request more information’ button to the body of all the pages of the site that also takes users to the same ‘request more information’ landing page. Just by adding these buttons consistently throughout the website we increased our conversion rates 8% and conversions by 33% in one month.

Sometimes customers can actually ignore (although not on purpose) top, left or right hand navigation on websites, especially if they’re looking for content. So by adding your call to action clear within the body of your content they may be more likely to take that action.

Here are a few tips I’ve tested using buttons that have worked wonders for me:

1. Add multiple buttons throughout your website (be sure not to be too annoying though)
2. Make your buttons above the fold – very important
3. Set your buttons to a different color from the background of your page to make it more visible and stand-out more to the user.
4. Be precise in the verbiage you’re using on your buttons, don’t just say, submit, but rather, ‘Get your free Info Kit Now’.
5. Wherever there is a button, there is a form to be filled out. Be sure to send customer’s confirmation pages/emails confirming you have received their information and how to contact you with questions.
6. Be sure to make your call to action a button, or button like. Some people prefer to use text link calls to action that don’t necessarily have the same effect as regular buttons.

Adding buttons to your site are not difficult, you’re graphic designers should be able to create a unique button in about 2 minutes or less, and programmers can program them to a site in about the same amount of time. They’re a great way to increase conversions and conversion rates for your PPC account. If you haven’t convinced your marketing team that adding buttons to the site will help, use Google’s website optimizer, which allows you to test a version of your landing page with the button and one without the button. Website optimizer will then show you conversion rates on both conversions. Not too many people can say ‘no’ when numbers are there backing you up!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I have to say I really love my Yahoo! Rep. He calls me whenever there are new features coming out in Yahoo! And, instead of depending on other bloggers for the info I’m hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth.

There have been some new advances made in the Yahoo Network (finally!) that may help decrease spend on non-converting domains and increase conversions are high converting domains, as well as optimize your bids on the Yahoo network or partner networks.

1. Yahoo launches distribution quality report. This report can be found in the reports tab, at the bottom of the reports list.

The distribution report allows you to see all data (clicks, impressions, spend and conversions) broken out by Yahoo! O&O (yahoo owned and operated – all yahoo branded sites) and the partner network.

This report allows you to determine whether you can afford to advertise on Yahoos! Entire network or just yahoo search only or yahoo partners only depending on your traffic and conversion rates.

If you find that you no longer want to advertise on the Yahoo O&O or Yahoo search partners you can adjust your settings so you’re only advertising on one or the other, as well as adjust bids on one or the other.

To change your settings, click on a campaign, then click on campaign settings. Under the network distribution area on the right, click edit. This will allow you to choose which network you wish to advertise on. You can also adjust your bid plus or minus a percentage of your set maximum bid on the yahoo partner sites only at this time.

2. You can also run an ‘ad delivery report’ in the reports tab under Traffic Quality Reports. This report shows you specific domains you’re ads are being served on via the Content Network or Yahoo’s search network. If you find there are several domains that are driving up your traffic and spend but not converting, you can easily block these domains.

To block certain domains, you can go to the admin tab, under the account general information there is an area for ‘blocked domains’ (right under blocked continents). Here you have the option to submit up to 500 domains to be blocked from serving your ads.

If you find that you are exceeding the 500 limit of blocked domains, you can send your domains to your Yahoo rep and they can remove domains that they no longer advertise on any longer, so you can remove those domains and add in others.

My Yahoo rep says though a great way to prevent your ads from showing on certain unqualified sites is to keep track of your negative keyword lists. Negative keywords allow you to not show up for searches that contain that keyword. For example, if you’re offering bridal magazines, you may want to add in the keyword, ‘free’ assuming your magazines are not free. This will prevent your ad from showing if someone types in the keyword, ‘free bridal magazines’.

Another great addition to Yahoo is they have expanded their negative keyword limit from 250 to 500! To add negative keywords you can add them in at the account level by going to the admin tab, then clicking on edit under tactic settings. Or you can add them in ad the ad group level by going to your ad group, click on ad group settings, and again click edit under tactic settings and add in your excluded keywords there.

There are a few more new Yahoo! features or enhancements that I’ll talk about later this week. Stay tuned!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Happy New Year! 2009 was a rough year for the country with the economy and all, so PPC Hero is cutting loose! Okay, maybe a bit too loose! But you can’t blame him… he has the PPC world resting on his shoulders. He is the sentinel being, the chosen one, who watches over the land of PPC to make sure all is fair and just. That is a lot of responsibility! So, even our fearless hero needs to get gussied up and have some bubbly everyone once in a while! Have a safe & happy new year!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Brad Geddes is one of my favorite bloggers, and he has a really interesting link to a YouTube video that talks about how you can get information at the keyword level in Google Analytics that shows what conversion rates you get at what position in the SERPS. You can view the video here:

I have wondered at times for a particular account that recently lowered its budget if our positions are just too low now to generate the kind of sales we used to. Now, I should be able to find out this information using this report in Analytics.

If you find that you generate super high conversions in positions 4 – 6 over positions 1 – 2, that’s great evidence to your client that you don’t need to be in super high positions in order to convert well. Some people call clicks on ads in positions 1 and 2 curiosity clicks. Curiosity clicks are clicks from people who aren’t ready to purchase yet, but they’re in their leaning phase and click on ads in top positions just to get a further idea of what they want.

To run the report in Analytics, simply follow these steps:

1. Login to analytics
2. Click on traffic sources on the left hand navigation
3. Click on Adwords
4. Click on Keyword Positions
5. From there you can click on any keyword that shows up in the middle of the page.
6. The report by default will show keyword visits by position
7. If you want to get conversion rate by position, simply click on the drop down menu where it says visits, and click on conversion rate. (see screen shot below)

This report is also great to get additional budget from your client to get in higher positions in the SERPS. You can simply show your client that you convert higher in higher positions (if that is the case) and hopefully they’ll increase their budgets to get in those higher positions more frequently.

The more insight you have over your Adwords keywords the better decisions you can make on bid adjustments, etc. I love that Google offers these robust reports and will explore this in all of my accounts!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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We are continuously working to improve the blog and need your help in order to do so. Plus, you can be entered to win a free landing page review from the Hanapin Marketing team! If you’d like a shot at winning the review, be sure to fill in the last box of the survey which asks for your email. If you’re the lucky winner, the PPC Hero team will provide an analysis of the well-formatted elements of your landing page, as well as some ideas which could be tested to continually improve PPC conversion rates. Thanks for your participation and as always, thanks for stopping by!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.