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Posts Tagged ‘Yahoo Msn’

One thing we do regularly for our clients is run search query reports from Adwords and MSN, pull all queries that are resulting in unqualified impressions or clicks, and add those in as negatives.

Doing this can really help narrow down your keyword list and prevent unqualified traffic from seeing your ad and not clicking – which prevents your impressions from skyrocketing and therefore lowering your click-through rate. But negatives also can prevent people from clicking on your ads, costing you money and lowering your conversion rates.

However, if you’re only relying on the search query reports you’re really only being reactive in preventing your ad from being shown and clicked on by irrelevant traffic.

Before you even start a PPC account, you should be running basic keyword research reports to find potential keywords that could cause irrelevant traffic from seeing your ads and/or clicking on them before it even happens. This is a more proactive approach in keeping unqualified traffic out and therefore increasing click-through rates and Quality Scores. For example, you could be doing PPC keyword research on ‘vacation in Paris’ but find keywords that have search volume for, ‘weddings in paris’, or ‘paris movies’. At this point you would want to add in ‘weddings’ and ‘movies’ to you negative keyword list to weed out that irrelevant/unqualified traffic.

You can run keyword research reports in Google, Yahoo, MSN and several other free keyword tools to find potential negatives.

Every PPC firm should have an on-going list of potential generic negatives that could be used across all of their accounts. Some of these terms can include:

Free

Sex

Comparison

Reviews

Diagram

Pictures

Career

Job/Jobs

Bargain

Discount

Cheap

And much, much more. **Note that some of these generic keywords may be relevant to your business.

Really, the search query reports are for finding negatives that you miss from your initial keyword research. Get in the mind of searchers and find those negatives before they find you!

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 clients and potential new clients ask me all the time how can they improve their quality scores in their Google, Yahoo and MSN PPC accounts. Quality Score is based off of relevance to the users search query and user experience. The higher your quality score is, technically the lower you pay for your clicks and the higher you can get in position in paid advertising. Below are my top 5 tips on how to generate a higher quality score:

1. Increase your click-through rates. No matter what, never stop testing your ads. If you have your ads set to optimize in Google, Yahoo and Bing, make sure you set them up to rotate. This will allow the search engines to not favor one well-performing ad over the other, but instead they will rotate ads 50/50. You want to rotate your ads 50/50 to test different messages. Each new message you test could mean an increase in click-through rates, which means a higher quality score.
2. Don’t Ditch your account. Ever wonder if you should just start from scratch? Well, more than likely you shouldn’t. By ditching your account and starting over you’re losing all of your account history, the good and the bad. The only time you should be ditching your account is if your current quality scores are terrible, and I mean terrible.
3. Keep things organized. One way to help achieve a higher click-though rate is to have fewer keywords in an ad group. This will allow your ad text to display the actual keyword in your ad group, which will make it more targeted and relevant to the user, improving your click-through rates. Take a look at some of your largest ad groups, and see if there are keywords that can be broken out into new, more targeted ad groups. It’s okay to only have 3 – 5 keywords per ad group. If you use Adwords Editor it makes this process of moving keywords much easier and faster.
4. Remove under performing keywords and ads. If you have a paused keyword or paused ad, Google has stated that keyword or ad does not reflect your account quality score. Therefore, pause away at under performing ads with low click-through rates and keywords with low click-through rates and low impressions all together. This will help clean up your account to where you only have some of your better performing keywords with higher click-through rates active and generating a quality score.
5. Keep your keywords in check. Quality score is essentially how well your keywords relate to your ads, and how your keywords and ads relate to your landing pages. I have several clients that have keywords that are no where to be found on their landing pages. You must have the keyword on your landing page!
6. Load times do matter. Quality score is also about creating a great user experience. Having a slow landing page load time can influence your quality scores. Be sure your landing page loads on all browers, pc’s and mac’s within 3 seconds.

Your quality scores in Google will have a number associated to them that you can see. If you have a quality score under a 7 I would make some tweaks to those keywords and ads. Whether moving them into their own ad groups or testing more compelling ad text. Keep in mind if you’re using all three match types they will have the same quality score, but could still perform very differently. Pause which ever keyword isn’t working.

Remember achieving a good quality score takes times, nothing will happen over night. I would at least give it a few weeks to a month before you begin to see positive changes and lower costs.

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.

In Google Analytics, there is an order to everything. I learned this the hard way. In the past the PPC Hero team has shared with our readers some bad things that can happen when you combine destination URLs, tracking parameters and 301 redirects. Today I am going to shed more light on this subject and hopefully prevent someone from making the same mistake in the future.

I recently began working with a client that uses fairly complex tracking systems to monitor the profitability of their pay-per-click business. A part of this tracking system required me to setup tracking URLs at the keyword level to monitor both online and pay-per-click call performance. Thanks to autotagging in Google using the gclid parameter, I only had to append the call tracking URL (i.e. ?param=a&param2=b) in AdWords. For Yahoo and MSN, I was required to combine the call tracking URL with the &utm=source parameter. Thus the source of my pay-per-click tracking issue.

As the month continued, our cost-per-sale continued to rise, and we were not seeing pay-per-click sales attributed to Yahoo and MSN. Sales from the pay-per-click campaign were attributed to organic and/or direct, which was really hurting our bottom line. So I needed to resolve this issue, fast!

Resolving URL tagging is relatively simple if you know what to look for. If you have problems with tracking search engine performance with 3^rd party campaigns, it is most likely one of three things (from my experience):

Problem 1: 301 Redirects
Believe it or not, but 301 redirects can often strip your URL tracking, and categorize per-per-click traffic into organic or direct. This includes the gclid tracking code for AdWords and the &utm=source tracking parameter for other search engines. It is easy to find if this is your issue. To test the gclid, enter the destination URL into your browser with the following appended at the end: www.yoursitehere.com/?gclid=test. The gclid should remain at the end of the URL when the page loads. If it disappears, then you are losing your tracking info.

Solution: Update the destination URLs in your pay-per-click accounts so they point directly to the final destination. If you are pointing your pay-per-click ads to a redirected URL, then your tracking may be stripped in the redirect.

Solution: Ask your website developer to configure your server to pass the gclid and all other tracking parameters.

Problem 2: Tracking Parameter Order
Check the order of your tracking parameters. Your &utm URL tagging needs to come before any additional tracking parameters. If they are in the wrong order, then you are not going to properly track performance. In the case of my client, I initially setup the Yahoo and MSN URLs with the call tracking parameter first, and the URL tagging second. Here is an example:

www.mysitehere.com/?param=a&param2=b&utm=source&utm=cpc&utm=content&parameter

Under this structure, the call tracking parameters were effectively stripping the &utm=source in Google Analytics. So similar to the case of 301 redirects, my pay-per-click traffic was counted as organic and direct.

Solution: Reorder your tracking URLs so the &utm=source tracking code comes before any additional tracking parameters. Your URL should follow this structure:

www.mysitehere.com/?utm=source&utm=cpc&utm=content&parameter&param=a&param2=b

Problem 3: URL Structure

If you are still having problems tracking 3^rd party campaigns in Google Analytics, then your issue may lie with the &utm=soruce tracking parameter setup using the Google URL Builder. If you do not properly format this tag, then Google Analytics will not record traffic properly.

Solution: Take a closer look at your &utm=source parameters to confirm everything is correct. Check out How to Troubleshoot When Tracking 3rd Party PPC through Google Analytics for a more detailed review of the problem.

3^rd party URL tagging is a great resource for tracking pay-per-click campaign performance, but you have to do it right to reap the benefits. These are all very common problems with URL tagging and thankfully the solutions are simple to implement. Please learn from my mistake and make sure you setup your URLs correctly. But if you are experiencing tracking problems, use this as a resource to quickly find and resolve the problem.

Have you experienced other issues with URL tagging? Please share your problems and solutions with us!

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.