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Posts Tagged ‘Placements’

The Google and Yahoo! Content Networks are great for capturing additional PPC traffic but if not managed, it can quickly spend a lot of money without giving you the results you are looking for. If you haven’t reviewed your network website list recently and added in exclusions, it might be time to take a look.

In both Google and Yahoo! you can exclude both domains and subdomains from your network. When reviewing your performance, make sure to choose a date range that will give you enough data so you can make appropriate exclusions. Typically you want to use at least 30 days but depending on your account, you may want to use 60 or 90 days or perhaps even longer. Keep in mind that it is important to look at the big picture. Just because a site doesn’t work for one ad group doesn’t mean it won’t work for another.

In Google, to review performance and exclude sites from the content network, go to the Networks tab and then select show details next to Automatic Placements. You will be able to see all of the sites Google is placing your ads on based on the keywords in your ad groups. Just like with all of the other Google reports, you can sort the data by spend, cost per conversion, clicks, etc. to find the sites that are spending without converting or converting at a very high cost per conversion.

In order to exclude a site, click the box to the left of the website and then select the Exclude Placements button. You will then need to confirm if you want to exclude at the Campaign or Ad Group level. In most cases, I recommend only excluding at the Ad Group level unless you are completely positive the website is not working in any of your other ad groups. Once you hit okay, you will see a red Excluded box next to the site so next time you review your placements, you know it has already been excluded.

To review all of the exclusions currently in the account, scroll down to the bottom of the Networks page and expand the exclusions section. Similar to how Google displays negative keywords, it will breakout your exclusions by Ad Group and Campaign level.

In Yahoo!, the process of adding exclusions is very similar. One big difference in Yahoo! over Google is that Yahoo! exclusions are done at the account level so keep in mind your exclusions will impact all of your campaigns. You can review sites for both the Yahoo! Content Network as well as for the Yahoo! Search Partners sites. Although Yahoo! Search Partners is not actually the content network, you can perform the same steps to help rule out partner sites that are not giving you the results you want.

In Yahoo!, go to the reports tab and select an Ad Delivery Report from the reports listed on the left-hand side. If you export the report to a csv file, you can review the domains and subdomains in a spreadsheet, which is then easy to sort and review.

Once you have gone through the data and are ready to add exclusions into your Yahoo! account, click on the Administration tab at the top. In the Account General Information box on the left, there is a section called Blocked Domains. Click on edit and you will be able to add your excluded sites, one per line, to the entire account. If you try to add an exclusion that is already in the account, Yahoo! will flag it and not let you add it. As you only get a total of 500 exclusions, make sure you excluding sites that are truly not performing. If you have a Yahoo! representative and a large account for which you want to run search partners, but need more exclusions, you may be able to request an extension for the number of blocked domains you are allowed.

Taking the time to add exclusions into both your Google and Yahoo! accounts can help control your overall spend, cost per click and cost per conversion. Especially if you rely heavily on the content network to generate your results, make sure you regularly review and update your exclusions list.

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.

Last week we talked about the Google content network and automatic placements. I completely ignored the fact that managed placements exist because they didn’t fit in with my description of the ways in which targeting automatic placements is just like riding a flaming motorcycle, but I’m fixing that this week with an even more convoluted metaphor for the content network.

So play along with me for a minute. You are a lion! There are lots and lots of cute little bunnies hopping around your savanna. Whenever you come across one, you can probably reach your paw out and swipe it without much investment. But you have to catch so many to eat well. You might have to spend your whole day munching on rabbits just to feel well-fed. It’s one of nature’s balances: low risk, low reward. Automatic content placements: they are the rabbits of the search marketing world.

But what if you look up and see: a wildebeest? Now that’s 600 pounds of respectable animal. Those things are scary. They can hurt you, and it’s an enormous energy expenditure to try to catch one. If you’re unsuccessful, it’s has the potential to be a huge loss for you. But if you succeed: Wow! 600 pounds of meat! Your whole family can eat for a week. Managed content placements: they’re our wildebeests.

When you launch a content campaign and ad groups based on keyword themes, it’s like waking up in the morning surrounded by delicious bunnies. Google automatically matches your ads to sites they think are contextually relevant, and you’re supposed to start converting! But Google knows a few things. There are millions of sites in their content network. Some of them convert well, some of them don’t. They try to balance this out for advertisers and improve our ROI with a system called smart pricing, which basically boils down to: on sites Google thinks will have lower conversion rates, you pay less for your clicks. You don’t have visibility regarding what sites you’re getting smart pricing on, but overall, it can help lower your cost per lead for your automatic placements. For advertisers with a lot of traffic on the content network, this can be a great advantage because if you have a lot of automatic placements, you will sometimes convert on the very low-cost smart priced sites. With aggressive elimination of non-converting, high-spend sites, this can help generate a lot of conversions at a reasonable cost; but as I said last week, it can be a time-intensive process to turn all of those one-off conversions into a viable long-term lead generation strategy.

So you might think: can’t I just find a couple of wildebeests and stop messing around with all of these little guys? Wouldn’t that be nice, to just target a few high-conversion sites with managed placements and simplify your life? It’s possible…you might stumble upon a site and know this is just the audience that will convert for your ads. Or it might be hiding in there with the rabbits, the page Google automatically matched you to that has a CPL 1/3 of your goal and has converted 52 times this month. It’s tempting to want to grab these up, add them to our managed placements or create a site-targeted ad group for them, and let the leads roll in. Which is a great strategy, except for that it doesn’t always work.

Do you know why? Well, because targeting a placement is just like telling Google: this is high value for me. You’re not going to be getting any kind of discount on your advertising for that site. If the conversion rates on a site are really so high that you can afford to pay more per click, then by all means, try to add a managed placement for that site or page. But be sure to increase your bid- you’re probably not going to get away with using the same bids as you use for your automatic placements on your managed placements. You’ve declared the value of that site, and you will have to take on additional risk to obtain that value. It might not work: if your bid isn’t high enough, your ads won’t show often, and traffic on the site will decrease enough that you’ll lose leads rather than gain them as compared to the site’s performance as an automatic placement. Also, if conversion rates on the site aren’t high enough to counteract your increased bid, it’s possible your CPL could go up once a placement is managed as opposed to automatically matched.

Like the lion’s decision about when it’s wise to chase down a wildebeest, you can’t just be adding managed placements without carefully considering your potential for success and expect to win every time. If you’re getting a high number of low CPL conversions on a low conversion rate site because your clicks are high but your CPC is very low…probably not a great candidate for managed placement. A high conversion rate, coupled with a reasonably low cost per click and low potential competition on the managed placement you’re considering (you can go to the page and see who’s competing for that space) are probably the best indicators of potential success. But as always, there are no guarantees in life. You need to follow the data carefully, modify your bids to gain more traffic or lower CPL as necessary, and understand when to give up the chase. Sometimes managed placements you would really like to make work don’t. Delete them, eat some more bunnies, and keep an eye out for the next big one.

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.

Have you ever truly thought about what your overall account Quality Score looks like and how it has affected your PPC account over the years?

The more I manage long term clients the more I realize everything I do today will greatly effect what happens to my account Quality Score in the future.

Achieving a great Quality Score does not happen overnight. It may take a week, a month or longer. But by constantly optimizing your PPC account over time you will see the effects of having a great Quality Score. Those effects are mainly seen in the cost it takes to get your PPC ads in higher positions. Over time, your costs should be less, and your ads should have higher placements.

I mainly work with my ad groups and ad texts to achieve a great Quality Score. And lately my new Google rep mentioned something to me that I don’t think I realized before.

She mentioned that paused or deleted ads/keywords do still have an effect on your account Quality Scores. Now I could have sworn my Google reps before told me that paused and deleted ads or keywords do not have a negative or positive effect on your quality scores because they’re no longer active. After all, you’re supposed to pause or delete poor performing ads/keywords; so why would a paused or deleted ad/keyword still negatively affect your Quality Score?

To add to this, even Adwords Pro Sarah on 11/5/09 mentions that although pausing or deleting have the same effect, that if you pause or delete a group of great performing keywords, your Quality Score would be based on the ok and poor performing keywords in that ad group, and no longer the great performing keywords you paused.

You’re right- there is no difference between deleting and pausing in terms of Quality Score. The only real way you could see an affect is in a scenario like this: you have 100 keywords, 50 performing well, 25 performing ok and 25 performing poorly. If you paused all 50 high performing keywords, your account quality score when then be calculated from the ok and poor performing keyword- so you would see a drop in the overall account Quality Score. That said, if you reverse the scenario and only pause the poor keywords, you could see a positive affect.

(AdwordsPro Sarah).

If anyone was under the impression that paused or deleted keywords or ads didn’t have an effect on your overall account Quality Score, please throw that out the window.

The following is a statement from my Adwords rep stating when to pause and/or delete ads/keywords in order to achieve a higher account Quality Score:

The historical performance of paused or deleted ads and keywords will continue to affect your account history. However, we still recommend deleting poorly performing ads and keywords to improve Quality Score. This will prevent the ads and keywords from performing poorly in the future and further affecting your account history. As the rest of your account accrues more performance history over time, the impact that the deleted ads and keywords have on your Quality Score will diminish.

I think it’s a good idea to delete poor Quality Score keywords and ads so they don’t accidently get resumed for some reason. Just note that in Adwords you can still resume deleted ads/keywords – so be careful of that.

If you’re really trying to increase your click-through rates (as you should be) delete those old poor performing ads, and continue writing new ads to test to increase your click-through rates. That should help over power old deleted ads or keywords that have lower 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.

Refining your performance on the AdWords Content Network requires diligence and a varied approach. We have written previously on excluding specific sites on the Content Network, as well as restructuring your campaign to gain additional exposure. Now I’d like to discuss how you can further optimize your performance by excluding entire categories from your distribution.

Within the Google AdWords interface you can exclude entire categories. First, let’s discuss where you can find these options. Go to the Networks tab and under the Search and Content Network data you will see the “Exclusions” information. This is where you’ll see these options:

As you can see above, you can exclude placements and/or categories at the campaign level. For our example today, you’ll want to click on “Exclude category.”

When you choose this option, a widow will pop up, here is a screen shot below:

There is a set of standard categories that is included within your Content Network distribution. Within this screen you can choose entire categories from which you can exclude your ads.

For this example, you can see that I previously excluded certain categories, and I have a feeling you may want to review these categories as well:

• Military & international conflict
• Juvenile, gross & bizarre content
• Profanity & rough language
• Sexually suggestion content

I have excluded other categories as well but I doubt these 4 categories are applicable for most of your campaigns. I’d give these a look to see how they are performing for your campaign.

This method can help refine your Content Network distribution, increase your conversion rate and decrease your cost-per-conversions.

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.