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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paused and deleted ads or keywords do not have a negative or positive effect on your quality scores because they’re no longer active.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.

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.

If you have a PPC account that allows you to target across the Unites States, try adding geo-targeted campaigns for each of the 50 states to help increase your conversion and click-through rates. In most of my accounts I have inherited, there are several campaigns with very specific keywords that are targeted all across the US or one particular area.

A great way to help increase your CTR and conversion rates is to take your top performing keywords, and put them into new campaigns, targeting each state individually. When you write your ad text, be sure that state’s name is in your title and if possible in your description line. This will help increase your click through rates because even if people aren’t typing in a state or location specific keyword, tailoring your ad text to the users location still makes it a custom ad specific to that user.

In addition to tailoring your ad texts to that particular location, you can also customize your landing pages by using dynamic landing pages for a particular location. Now personally I think making 50 different landing pages with a state name in the title is a bit much. However you can create one landing page with dynamic titles that will change depending on the users search query.

I would try testing out a few of your top performing locations before making the big leap into creating 50 different campaigns targeting all 50 states. One place you can look is Google Analytics to find out which location is driving a majority of your traffic. Simply login to your Google Analytics account, under visitors to the left, click on ‘map overlay’. Scroll down below the map and you’ll see a list of countries, click on United States, and that will give you a breakdown of each state within the US. If you sort by visits, then you’ll get the state with the most visits first. You can see in the screen shot below, for my PPC account Indiana and Kentucky drives the majority of traffic to my website. Therefore I could create two new campaigns and landing pages targeting Indiana and Kentucky specifically to increase conversion rates.

Not only can you increase your conversion rates by taking users to a more specific landing page targeted to their location, but you can also increase your click-through rates with your new location targeted ad texts. By increasing your CTR’s you can easily increase your Quality Scores and decrease your cost-per-click without losing position. It’s a win-win situation.

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.

Sure, paid search ad copy contains only 25 characters for the headline (in AdWords) and 70 characters for the body copy, but this small space can be very complex to utilize optimally.

Within the confines of a PPC ad text you need to be relevant to your keywords, list as many benefits as possible, be unique and stand out from your competition, and include a clear call-to-action. As you strive to to incorporate all of these tactics into your ad texts you shouldn’t loose site of the fact that you’re trying to connect with real people.

While monitoring your click-through rate and conversion rate, also the time-on-site, pages per visitor, percent of new vs. return visitors and a plethora of other available stats, you need to remember that these numbers represent people. These stats are numerical representations of how well you have connected with your target audience, and the individuals who make up your audience.

Paid search marketing, and marketing in general, is all about making the right connections with the right people. People have hopes, dreams, needs, fears, likes, dislikes, and the list goes on and on. Your PPC ad texts should address these core concerns.

Often, when writing PPC ads, we focus on why some should click on your ad. A core concern/emotion that is often neglected is fear (or perhaps apathy). You should also take into consideration why someone wouldn’t click on your ad. What keeps someone from clicking on your ad?

This is the great thing about search marketing: someone is searching for you (or someone like you). Don’t take this for granted; you have to take the next step to convince them that they’ve found exactly what they’re looking for.

When optimizing your ad text performance you should think about this: if a user searches on a keyword that is relevant to your products/services, and they see your ad copy (which is keyword-focused and benefit-driven) but they don’t click on your ad. Seems like everything should be in place. So, what fears or concerns is holding a user back? Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic ball to tell you why a specific user, or group of users, aren’t attracted to your ad.

Of course, the best to way find out what works is to split test your PPC ad copy. However, before you write copy to test, you need to meditate on what your audience is looking for. How does your product/service solve their current problem and what can you say in your ad text that will talk to your audience’s core concerns?

The answers to these questions will be different for every advertiser. However, once you have developed a few ideas, molded them into new PPC ad texts, then I wholly suggest that you split test your ads to see if you’ve addressed these issues.

This brings us back to stats. Yes, that which I earlier suggested you step away from to get some perspective, I suggest that you turn to when learning if you’ve improved ads. This is the best way to know if you’ve enhanced your messaging. So, this is a rough outline of the process:

1. Think about your customer’s core emotional concerns
2. Review the ad texts you have running now
3. Meditate on why certain ads have the best response rate
4. Meditate on why certain ads are failing
5. Think about why someone would *not* click on your ad
6. Review your competitors’ ads
7. Write new ads that address these concerns
8. Launch your new ad texts
9. Monitor the performance of your ads
10. Repeat the process and continue to refine your messaging

And the same goes for your landing page. We haven’t even touched on landing pages! You should think in similar terms for your landing pages as well. But that is another article for another time.

It could come down to the fact that your competitors are talking to your audience with more success. Reviewing your competition to see what they have to say could be very enlightening. And it could be that the majority of users aren’t finding what they want at all.

The 95 characters within a PPC ad text (not including the display URL) can be very complicated. The success of your campaign hinges on your ability to appeal to your audience on numerous levels. Be the solution to your audience’s problem/query, address their concerns, and you’re well on your way to success.

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.

Wouldn’t it be great to know what keywords your competitors are using with just one click? What if with that same click you could also find estimated traffic and ad positioning or even see a list of your direct competitors?

If you aspire to optimize your site without spending a lot of money and time, SEMRush.com is the first and steady step to your success.

Developed by the creators of SEOquake FireFox extension and SEOdigger tool, SEMRush allows you to check the rankings of a website in Google and compare to your competitors. Using a database with 35 million of the most popular keywords, SEMRush is the fastest and easiest way to reach the best results. The database spans across more than 13 million domains to analyze Google search results and shows related keywords for any domain that ranks high enough to be in the top 20 search or AdWords results.

Digging a little deeper we can find:

• list of Google keywords for any site

• list of AdWords keywords for any site

• list of your competitors in organic and paid Google search results

• estimated SE and AdWords traffic for any domain

• hidden related (and low-cost) keywords to optimize your AdWords campaign

Start by typing in any domain and you can find those sites that are directly competing with it for search engine traffic on the organic side and the Adwords side of the equation.

Competitors in organic search

Competitors in AdWords.

SEMRush also shows an overview of AdWords texts for each domain.

Click on «Common Keywords» next to the domain-competitor you are interested in and you will receive the report on common keywords for the both domains compared in Organic search as well as in AdWords.

Besides these reports SEMRush.com also gives information on:

• Potential ads/traffic buyers – sites that buy AdWords through domain organic keywords.

• Potential ads/traffic sellers – sites ranked in the top 20 in the Google organic search through keywords common with domain advertising in AdWords.

You can just type in a keyword and SEMRush will take that keyword, give you the top competitors in both the organic Google results and Adwords. You can push this data further and also get a list of thousands of related keywords or do research on the top ranking domains or urls.

The service updates its data once a month, the price starts at $19.95 a month with a 33% discount for paying 6 months in advance. You can also test SEMRush with their FREE limited two weeks trial and later on upgrade to the license version. To use this trial just enter this promo code P862-07F2-0WKF-G3W2 in appropriate field while your registration.

When used properly, all of this gained information could easily increase your site position – it certainly makes keyword research much easier! Get more traffic and save money with SEMRush.com.

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.

I’m getting a K800i on contract with orange, a dolphin contract that gives me a bunch of free minutes and texts a month. I want to make use of the photobloggin feature that the phone has where it lets you upload photos as blog entries on blogger.com, but I don’t know how it works. Such as, what service it uses to transfer the photo and stuff?
I’m basically trying to figure if it is going to be expensive to use the feature or if it’s free?(I’m guessing free is unlikely)
Any ideaaaaaaaaaas? Cheeeeeeeerrrrrrs!
James.

There is so much going on within any PPC campaign that it can be difficult to keep track of all the moving pieces. You can be a proactive PPC manager but there could be elements of your account that may be quietly hindering your performance. Actually, when an account is performing well, this is when you need to be most vigilant in searching for these “quiet killers” because they may be harder to notice blatantly.

Incorrect campaign settings

When you create a new campaign, I am sure you check all of your settings to make sure they’re correct. However, if you launch numerous campaigns at once or if you add campaigns frequently, something may get missed. This doesn’t mean the campaign is broken but it may not reaching its full potential. As a proactive step, you should make sure that these settings have the correct information for your campaign’s goals:

• Location targeting
• Networks, devices and extensions
• Bidding and budget
• Position preference, delivery method
• Ad delivery: ad rotation, frequency capping

Just do a quick review all of your campaigns just to make sure everything is correct. If you no errors, great! However, if you do find a setting that is incorrect, you can make great progress with just a few clicks.

Neglected ad text split tests

Continually testing your PPC ad texts is the key to click-through success. However, you may have launched a test, or perhaps a few tests, that you have not recently checked in on. If your account is performing well, then you may over look following up on a split test. It happens. Now is a good time to run an ad text report to see if there any ads that are under performing. You should make sure that each ad group has a statistically valid sample size in order to determine the clear winners and losers.

Under performing keywords that hide in good ad groups

If your account is performing well overall, that’s great. And you may not even have any ad groups that stick out like a sore thumb due to poor performance. However, this doesn’t mean that there are no rouge keywords that are generating traffic but few conversions. You should run a keyword report to hunt down those terms that are not performing well and adjust accordingly.

Irrelevant search queries are not always obvious

If you are utilizing broad match or phrase, when was the last time you ran a search query performance report? This report is easy to run and can help you hone your campaign by building your negative keyword list. In fact, you should make it a point to run a search query report at least once a month in order to monitor which queries are matching to your keywords.

Poor converting sites on the content network

The content network may be working great for your account but I bet if you looked closer, you would find a handful of sites that have a higher-than-average cost-per-conversion. Similar to poor performing keywords, the content network as a whole may be doing great but I’m sure there are a few sites that are quietly hindering your campaign. And these sites can get away with this when everything is going well in an account.

There are numerous other elements that can negatively and quietly effect your campaign’s performance, but this is a quick check list for you. Remember, if your account is generating great results – it can always do better!

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.

One of my larger clients is a resort/casino here in Indiana. The resort truly is beautiful, but there have been many other resorts/casinos popping up in the Indianapolis area making for some good competition.

I typically like to include as many benefits in my PPC ad texts as possible. Whether a client is offering free shipping, or free returns, or even free estimates/quotes, those ads will typically get the higher click-through rate therefore helping to increase my Quality Score.

One thing I have tried here recently is putting in customer testimonials into my clients’ ad text. I pulled the testimonials right off their website and incorporated them into my Google ads. They’ve been running for almost a month now and one ad has a click-through rate of 9.33% which is 20% higher than the average of my other two ads.

A few other ads I’m testing with the testimonials in them have only been running for a few weeks, but have already exceeded the best performing ad in that ad group. It’s important when you’re testing ads to give them plenty of time to generate enough traffic for a statistically valid sample size. .

If you’re trying to test different messaging in your ads to increase your click-through rates, be sure to check your campaign settings and set your ad delivery settings to ‘rotate’ and not ‘optimize’. Having it set to optimize Google will show only your best performing ad which doesn’t allow you to test your other ads evenly.

Since Quality Score is mainly based off of your click through rates, I would recommend testing all kinds of different messaging in your PPC ads. Try looking at your competitors, and find benefits for your company that can set you apart. Try adding testimonials, offers, phone numbers etc. What may not work for one person may work well for another. It’s up to you to test it and try it out for yourself!

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.

With all the talk about Google, Yahoo and MSN all the time, the little guys tend to get left out. By little guys, I mean second tier search engines like business.com, 7search.com, ask.com etc.

I’m currently using Business.com for one of my clients and I’m getting decent results. It’s important for PPC advertisers to realize there is more to this world other than Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you’ve exhausted all of your options and really need to generate additional leads, do yourself a favor and check out some of the more popular second tier search engines.

In this post I’ll go over the one I’m working in right now, Business.com.

Business.com is a search engine and a B2B directory. The search engine aspect of business.com works closely to how the top three work with Paid listings and organic listings. Business.com allows you to add ‘listings’ instead of campaigns. And within each listing are the keywords and ads. You have the same flexibility within Business.com as you have within Google and Yahoo; you can add keywords to your listing, edit your keywords, change their bids, write new ad texts, and pause under performing ad texts.

You can also set up conversion tracking within Business.com as well as Google Analytics. You can even set up destination URL’s for each keyword if needed. Reporting provided is more than necessary with status of your listing, CPC, position or rank as they call it, clicks, cost, total conversions, conversion rates, cost-per-conversion and conversion revenue. The one thing they don’t give you however is the impression count.

Your ad text or the actual listing in Business.com is slightly different from Google and Yahoo. Your listing title can include up to 60 characters and the description can contain up to 150 characters. You have your typical destination URL and a display URL. But then there is a multilink area where you can fill in separate page names and their URL’s. What this does is allow for more links to page of your site that you have listed directly under your main listing. This gives the user more flexibility and more of a chance that you’ll get a click to your site.

When it comes to reporting you can generate a traffic and lead report for any date range. You can view the report immediately and even export the data into Excel.

Last month for one of my clients I was able to generate a total of 19 leads at a cost of $26 per lead. My CPL goal was $55. The extra 19 leads helped me reach my monthly goal for total paid search leads at a super cheap cost. I could probably increase my keyword bids and get even more traffic which I plan to do here in August.

The point is as a PPC advertiser, we should be looking into all opportunities to increase leads and sales for our clients. If we’re only ever work in Google, Yahoo and MSN we’ll never know what kind of results we can receive from other search engines. If your client has it in their budget I would recommend giving Business.com a try!

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.

As I’m sure you are aware, it’s a new month! Now is the time to kick off your PPC campaigns with a bang. There are a few tasks that you can accomplish quickly in the next day or two that will help improve your performance for the rest for the month.

When optimizing your PPC campaigns, you should always make positive changes all month long. However, you should front-load as many of your tasks toward the beginning of the month as you can. Why? This way, when you make some great changes, your account will feel the effects for the longest amount of time possible.

Here is a list of five tasks you can accomplish quickly to get your month started successfully:

1. Run a keyword report and focus on your top 10 keywords. It’s easy to get caught in the mire of hundreds keywords, especially if you’re managing a robust campaign. For this task, you should look at your most valuable keywords to see how they’re performing and what you can do to improve their performance right now. This can include bids, ad texts, ad group restructuring, negative keywords, etc.
2. Are you testing multiple landing pages? Run a URL report to see if you have any weak performing variations that can be removed. This will also allow you to devote more traffic to your best performing landing pages. This way, you can get those weak landing pages out of rotation to start off your month right.
3. Are you running ads on the Content Network within AdWords? Run a placement performance report and focus on the 3-5 websites with the lowest conversion rate and the highest cost-per-lead (or sale). I am sure there are other sites that may not be performing well, and there are sites that are doing great that you want to specifically target – but for this task, just remove those 3-5 sites that are hindering your performance.
4. There is always room to expand your keyword list. Conduct a quick review of your website to see where you can add at least 1-2 new ad groups. Now, you don’t have to do all the extensive keyword research right now, but can you find a few core terms/phrases that could be expanded upon? You can then do the full research and expansion later in the month.
5. Create new automated reports. Staying on top of your performance is crucial to maintaining your performance. You should create one report that provides the vital stats for your account and have it sent to you daily. Don’t overload this report with data because it will become a hassle to review each morning. Only pull the vital stats you need. This way, when you get into the office, you have an email waiting for you and you can review the previous day’s performance.

Of course, there are many other tasks to complete in any given month when managing a PPC account, but these are a few tasks that can improve your performance quickly. As you complete these tasks I’m sure you’ll see other elements of your campaigns that require attention. You should build this list and get to these tasks ASAP. This way, you’ve jumpstarted your PPC campaign for the month!

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.