In the campaign settings you need to turn on the option of allowing SiteLinks.  A little drop down box will appear that allows you to enter text and destination URLs for several text links. Once active, any keyword that qualifies for top positioning on a regular basis will begin displaying the SiteLinks.  A click on any of the links is charged the same CPC as without the SiteLinks.  From initial testing I have found the CTR to be upwards to 20% higher than the same ad without SiteLinks, so it definitely grabs people’s attention.  The higher CTR typically will help your quality score, and assuming you can continue to keep that top position, your average CPC will actually go down.

The links can be changed anytime, but can only be assigned at the campaign level.  If there are ads that you specifically don’t want SiteLinks included on, then you must duplicate the campaign and have a version running with and without them active.  The ads that you do not wish to have SiteLinks enabled must live in the campaign where the feature has not been activated.

PPCHero suggests using links for seasonal products or a direct link to a contact page.  These are great ideas, but there are plenty of more options.  If you have a complicated conversion structure similar to a travel site, then consider adding links to various parts of your conversion funnel to see what can work when the initial pages are bypassed.

This is still in beta, so you may not have access to it quite yet.  If you really want to try it, call the Google customer service line and ask if you can be included.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way it gives you a chance to try out a great feature that you may not have otherwise known about.

So far, Yahoo I think has the biggest news.  In a blog post it announced a ton of big updates, include Rich ads in search, Network Distribution reporting (to show which websites are actually serving your ads), and my favorite, the Yahoo Desktop Publishing tool.  FINALLY!

Y! Desktop Publisher

I’ve been part of the beta for quite some time, and it’s been killing me not to talk about it due to NDAs, but now that it has been made public, I can go into a little detail.  It runs on the Adobe Air platform, which makes it look really pretty, but runs fairly slow.  Yahoo makes great use of the real estate with expandable tabs for research and side windows to display secondary–yet still important–data about the campaigns and ad groups.  It’s almost too busy with as much data displayed as possible, but I see that as a feature more than a bug.  In fact, there is so much data being displayed I couldn’t even show screenshots without making it look like a declassified government document that’s been blacked out that it’s virtually useless.  The downside is it’s slow, and still acts more like a Yahoo bulk sheet instead of Adwords Editor.  It’s still a huge improvement over having nothing, but my main warning is to check the error sheet in the upload section of your Yahoo account, because I occasionally find stuff that doesn’t pop up as an error in the Desktop Publisher.  Oh well, it’s still in private beta.

Google Mobile Search & Local Search

There has been a ton of announcements this week surrounding mobile search.  Adsense will allow website publishers to post mobile ads (Adwords has allowed iPhone/smartphone targeting for some time now in the campaign settings), and announced an Android deal with Verizon. This means that Verizon will be the largest American network to carry Google Mobile OS phones.   This also opens up the realms to much better location-based advertising.  However, for any of this to mean anything, Google’s location-based advertising needs to stop sucking.

Meta Keyword Tag is Dead

If you remember search in the 90s, relevancy was often no more than how often the keyword showed up on a page.  This led to someone trying to get to the top of a SERP for the term “shoes” to write a page that went something along the lines of “shoes, shoes, shoes.  We have lots of shoes. We have blue shoes, red shoes, old shoes, new shoes.”  Then they would stuff their meta keywords tag with all those same keywords so engines knew that’s what keywords you thought were important to the page.  Google was the first to stop using it, and even told people to stop sueing each other over it.  Well, during a SMX panel this week, Yahoo said that they stopped considering meta keyword tags for search rankings several months ago, which means none of the big 3 players use it.  What this means to you is if you have a limited time to do your own SEO and can’t afford a pro, don’t bother with the meta keywords tag.  It will literally be a waste of your time.

On a more humorous side, I got a kick out of this admittance from Google’s CEO about how sometimes Larry and Sergey buy companies and don’t tell him until after the fact. Apparently Sergey found Keyhole (now Google Earth) on the web, bought the company, then later walked into Eric’s office and mentioned it.  Eric’s response: “‘for how much, Sergey?’ And it turned out to be a few million.”

For more SMX coverage, you can check out Search Engine Land’s daily recaps for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

Regardless of the tips I present below, I firmly believe that last statement.  The quality score is there for the engine’s benefit and not ours as advertisers.  It’s the engines grading us on how profitable we are for them.  If we’re not profitable enough with a high CTR, they charge us more.  However, is the quality score graded on a scale or on a curve?  If it’s on a scale then you can do everything right and get an “A” and be happy with your high score.  If it’s graded on a curve then your final grade is dependent on the performance of others.  If you do better than they do, you score high.  If you do worse, you score low.  In other words, your ability to write better ads with higher relevance than your competitor impacts your quality score.

Consider this: You have a quality score of 5 and your competitor with identical keywords and bids has a quality score of 10.  Since the keywords are identical the relevancy to the raw search query should be the same, meaning the only difference is the ad copy.  They have an awesome ad and you don’t, so their quality score is higher.  Typically, this means that they can get a click at the same position as your ad for a lower cost per click.  If they can spend less money per click, they can afford to go after more traffic, which means they have more opportunity to score conversions.  More conversions means more cash to fuel future Adwords spending and continued sales growth.

Do I have your attention now?  Good.  Here’s how to optimize your ad groups for quality score:

Keep your keyword count in ad groups between 25-50.  This includes match type variations of the same term.  This isn’t a steadfast rule, but is a good rule-of-thumb.  If you have more, make sure that they are keywords that focus around a very tight central theme.

Don’t bid on broad match.  Keeping everything to phrase and exact match will limit how likely it is for Google to match your keywords to an irrelevant term.  Remember, Google’s definition of relevancy may not be the same as yours.  (If you really want broad match, put it in a different ad group).

Separate your misspells.  If you use the dynamic keyword insertion in your ads, misspells will show up in the headline.  This will hurt your quality score, not help it.  Keep them separate and use the correct spelling of the term in the ad copy.

Don’t use dynamic keyword insertion in ads.  Surprised?  Why?  If you keep the keyword counts low in the ad group, you can write the ad to include those keywords.  Having an exact match term as a keyword and in the ad text without Google injecting it shows maximum relevance.  Besides, with everyone and their mother using the DKI these days, it doesn’t have anywhere near the CTR boost that it used to.

Now before you go off and redesigning your accounts to optimize for quality score, consider this: some of your terms will already have a high quality score.  If you have a couple terms in ad groups that score poorly (like 5-7) and some terms that score well (8-10), then simply remove those poorer terms and put them in their own ad group.  Copy your better converting ad from the original to include in the new ad group and bam!  You have a higher average quality score already.

• Grab the searcher’s attention against 10 organic links and 9-11 other paid links
• Describe the product/service you provide in a manner relevant to the search query
• Have an enticing call-to-action that tells the searcher what is expected of them after they click on the ad.

The ads need to be attention-getting and relevant, but also describe who will benefit from the site after s/he clicks on the ad. As an example, imagine each ad being a closed door with a peephole. The relevance of the ad determines the size peephole to look through, and the quality of the ad is how many appropriate people will be enticed enough to walk through the door. If all these are being performed correctly, it should provide the optimum combination of clicks and conversions, which leads to cheaper CPAs, cheaper clicks, and lots of profit.

TIP: It is very rare to want as many people to click on an ad as possible. Writing copy that qualifies an ideal visitor will tell some people that the site is not for them.

There are several online marketing metrics that don’t have the same relevance in search that they do in other fields. For example, CTR is important to banner ads because the advertiser pays for each 1,000 impressions. CTR in search varies based on each client’s goals, and sometimes won’t play a large role in making decisions within an account. The primary reason to use CTR is if you don’t have conversion tracking enabled. If this is not the case the conversion rate and the Return Of Ad Spend (ROAS) should be your key performing indicators.

Character Limits

The engines are more similar than different when it comes to ad display requirements. Here is a basic list of each engine and their maximum requirements:

Writing Effective Ad Copy & Headlines with Calls to Action

Headlines are in a different color and will be the first part of the ad a person sees. Having this stand out will be ideal to get attention. The best method of standing out is to do something that the other advertisers aren’t doing. This may require using a keyword insert function, but it may also mean to not use a keyword insert when everyone else is. It may also simply be to use a unique style of writing that others aren’t incorporating, like asking a question or even being a little silly. Always keep in mind that it has to be copy that you won’t mind if the client sees while doing their own search, so keep it clean and inoffensive. You should also avoid the use of fragment ideas or concepts, because the short number of characters should be used to complete a full sales pitch.

The description line is the place to back up a claim made in the headline, and/or to give detail about the advertised product or service. It is also the ideal place to add exclusive language to ensure that only the quality traffic is coming to the site. For example, if a client is a networking company for large businesses, a lot of the keywords used by a large business will also be used by consumers and small businesses. By saying “Designed for businesses with 200+ employees” a consumer and the small business will instantly know the ad is not for them. At the same time it will make a searcher at a large business more interested since they know they are the targeted audience.

The display URL acts as a mini-branding function by telling the searcher where the ad will take them. It doesn’t have to be the same as the landing page URL (which will sometimes be very long) and gives some leeway into bending some of the editorial policy rules.

Exclamation points and capitalized words are not allowed in ads. Only one exclamation point can be used within the ad copy of an ad, and one shouldn’t use superlatives like “best”, “greatest”, “lowest”, or “cheapest” without the claim being backed up on the landing page of the ad. This can be worked around, since Google only actively monitors terms like “#1″, “Top”, and “Lowest”.

TIP: If you upload ad copy via AdWords Editor for Google, you can bypass some of the regulations for a limited amount of time. It will let you upload individual words as capital letters. So try saying “FREE” instead of “Free”, and see if it has any impact on your conversion rates.

Using KeyWord Insert Functions

All three engines allow the option to include the search term into a headline or ad automatically to increase relevancy. Studies by Google suggest that using keyword insert increases the click-through rate (CTR) for an ad by varying amounts. The search engines want a high CTR because that’s what they get paid on: clicks. Otherwise the ads take up valuable screen space and don’t generate revenue, which is why the engines typically penalize low CTRs.

By adding the Keyword insert function into an ad, it usually guarantees a part of the ad will placed in bold, which often catches the eye of the searcher. However, as the practice has grown and is being used by less experienced advertisers, some use it as a shortcut for not creating tight ad groups and to still get parts of the ad placed in bold.

TIP: Creating a tightly knit ad group gives more reason to use keyword insert because it will make the rest of the copy more relevant to the keyword being included in the copy.

Keyword inserts don’t always work. One must always consider the character limits on the ad copy while considering using the keyword insert feature, since some search strings can go beyond the 25 or 35 character limits. The engines require a backup to display in case the search query is too long. He backup is the description after the colon mark within the brackets:

{KeyWord:Buy Black Shoes}

A space is not needed after the colon because that would tell Google to place a space before the word “Buy”, which will waste a character and will get chopped off anyway.

Google Ad Copy

Google requires two unique lines of text that can run up to 35 characters each. Previous experience shows that ads usually perform better when each line is an independent sentence instead of one sentence running across both lines. Typically the headline serves as a stand-out function that tries to separate it from the other ads. The goal is to be relevant to the search query and visible to the searcher. When an ad has the same keywords as the search query, Google puts those keywords in bold within the ad. This is often done by using a keyword insert function that takes the search query and inserts it into your ad and instantly making it bold. However, as everyone tries to stand out by using this function, they all begin to look the same. In order to truly stand out one can remove that common factor and be a successful ad without having anything in bold.

Yahoo Ad Copy

Yahoo currently allows 40 characters in the headline with 70 characters in the description line. There are two primary differences between Google and Yahoo copy:

1. Google breaks its 70 character limit up into 2 lines of 35 characters, where Yahoo has one line of 70 characters that automatically wraps to a second line as space requires.
2. Yahoo allows for alt text for dynamic headlines. These allow for more control over what appears with a keyword, if the search query exceeds the character limit.

TIP: Yahoo strongly recommends the use of keyword insert to all advertisers. If your conversion rate is starting to dip on otherwise strong copy, try replacing the dynamic headline with a static headline .

Try using the same ad copy on all three engines simultaneously. This will limit the amount of time needed to run statistically relevant ad copy tests due to the higher impression, click, and conversion data.

MSN Ad Copy

MSN took the basic concept of Google’s ad system like testing, geo-targeting, and keyword-insert, and expanded it. The character limits are the same as Google’s, but instead of two description lines of 35 characters MSN has one description line of 70 characters that will automatically wrap to the second line. Visually this makes all of the ads look left justified compared to Google’s which look force justified. Along with keyword insert, MSN allows for a new feature called dynamic text for each keyword. The premise is that one can change the standard order-level ad copy to better fit a specific keyword. This will typically benefit eCommerce sites with large volumes of product pages that want each product page as a landing page for a keyword.

MSN Dynamic Text Example

In the above example the name of the order group was put in the headline as a Parameter to emphasize a larger sale than one that would only benefit the searcher, and help the advertiser know what sale language caught the searcher’s attention. The keyword insert function was used early in the ad to draw attention and increase relevancy to the searcher, showing that the site has exactly what she is looking for. Finally, a third parameter of price was included so that the searcher knows exactly what she will find when getting to the site.

Using Price in Ad Copy

There is a debate of whether one should or shouldn’t include the price of an item in the ad copy. The argument against is that if the searcher has seen it for less somewhere else, regardless if it is not an exact item match, then she will ignore the site completely. This can be bad for both parties if there are additional rebates or other offers that the searcher wasn’t aware of before clicking on the ad. The argument for including cost is it tells the searcher up front what they’re expected to do and what it will cost them, which should increase the conversion rate. However, one would have to test different ad copies to see if the overall revenue generated with mentioning cost is greater or lower than not mentioning the cost. This will be shown in more detail later. Generally speaking, if the price is above certain psychological levels, or above the price of competitors in the same advertising space, don’t put the price in the copy. If the price is lower than competitors, and the average shopper knows that price is a good deal, then put it in the copy.

Whatever you write for your copy, keep in mind that the headline has to relate to the keyword, the copy has to relate to the headline and sell, and the landing page needs to relate to the copy to avoid a disconnect between you and the searcher. If you have suggestions beyond what is written here for successful copy, please feel free to share it via the discussion.

Ad Group Organization:

As in Google this should be done by the similarity of keywords (as opposed to similarity of definitions), however, it should also be done by keyword volume.  For example, if you have a campaign featuring all the colors of cars and trucks in your showroom, you should not just have and ad group for “car colors” and “truck colors”, but break these down even further to “High Volume Car Colors” and “Low Volume Car Colors”.  I haven’t found an advantage of cutoff points at specific limits, but for ease of design, I use 10,000 queries per month as my litmus test.  Keywords with more than 10,000 get into a high volume ad group, and keywords with less than 10,000 go into another ad group.  The query count can be found within the keyword tool in your account.

Ad Copy:

Yahoo has 40 character headlines instead of Google’s 25 character limits.  Use the headline as your call to action, with the body including your normal marketing message.  This inspires those who are attracted to the headline to follow through with the called-upon action.  Calls to action typically include a verb like “buy”, “save”, “order”, and can also include a time connotation like “now”, “today”, or “before 9/05″.

Also, no matter how tightly knit your ad copy is to your ad groups, you should almost always include the keyword insert.  Their systems love keyword inserts and it will almost always raise your quality score.  Like Google, higher quality scores mean better positions for cheaper clicks.

Landing Page:

Keyword-level landing pages is ideal.  Your conversion rate will be higher and Yahoo will give your ads higher quality scores if ALL the keywords within an ad group have a keyword-based landing page.  It can be the same page for all keywords, but they should all have it.  Remember what I said about high quality scores on ads?

The Long Description

Back in the day Yahoo had two types of ads: a short description and a long description.  The long description would allow 180 characters and be shown when your ad ranked high enought to be seen above search results instead of along the right side of search results.  It would also be the default ad copy for the content network.  This is no longer the case.  It’s dead.  Even if you fill it out you still need to write the short description ad, which will be shown for everything.  Don’t waste your time and just leave it blank.

Ad Testing:

Yahoo loves for ads to be tested, even if you know one will perform better.  Try to always have 2-3 ads in there, as it having a test ad does seem to impact quality scores of both ads.  Naturally they want the ad optimizer to be turned on (which optimizes based on how they’re paid: CTR), but I prefer to leave it off.  Play with it and determine which works better for you.

Hopefully this helps you optimize your Yahoo ads.  If you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll answer them for all to see.

Excel is undoubtedly the most important program I use in conjunction with my PPC work. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of online tools where I build my keyword lists, write my ad copy, prep campaigns and ad groups for uploading, and the center of my analysis of historical data that my campaigns have produced. I have to assume that others use it as often as I do for these and other tasks, so I thought this would be a good time to go over what I consider the most useful tools to use.  If you’d like to see even more, check out Josh Dreller’s excellent series at Search Engine Land, called How to Excel at Excel

Concatenation When I first learned to use this tool several years ago I asked where had it been all my life! This allows you to combine the information in two cells together into one additional cell.

=CONCATENATE(A1,B1)

To automatically include a space between the words in each cell, you can include a space using quote marks between the two cell numbers, so the equation would look like =CONCATENATE(A1,” “,B1). This is best used to combine two groups of words for keyword generation

Character Counting If you’ve done anything in search you know that the character limits in search engine ads are brutally short. That’s why you have the LEN counter to help you:

=LEN(A1)

This will tell you how many characters are in the designated cell. I usually set my ads up in three rows, each with a len equation, so I can play with any of them as needed.

Trimming There have been numerous times where I’ve spent much more time than it should have taken trying to format the ideal piece of ad copy to fit within character guidelines only to later find out I had an extra space or useless character taking up room. Using the trim equation will remove all of them and leave only one space between words, and remove any unneeded spaces at the beginning or end of the cell.

=TRIM(A1)

If you duplicated my character counting example in Excel, you’ll notice that the second description line (I Love Writing PPC Ads. Don’t You?) is actually 34 characters, with an extra space at the end. If you put the trim equation in C3 for A3, the LEN count in B3 will drop to 34 characters instead of the listed 35. Try it!

Left/Right Trimming Instead of removing all floating spaces regardless of position, this formula removes the dictated number of characters from either the left or right side of the cell. This is handy when editing URLs, where part of the cell stays constant, but other parts need to be removed.

=RIGHT(A1,2)

=LEFT(A1,2)

The formula will remove the number of characters stated after the comma starting on either the right or left side of the cell, depending on which formula you use. For example, if you have a URL that looks like http://www.yoursite.com?pid=13, and you wanted to remove everything after “.com”, you would write the formula to look like RIGHT(A!,7). I count 7 characters, which includes the question mark (?) and the equals sign (=).

Word Counting Word counting is good as an analysis tool to see how many words within a keyword string perform best.

=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,” “,”"))+1

This will return only a number. For example, if your keyword was “White car”, then this formula would return a value of “2″. If your keyword is “New Used Car”, then the formula would return a value of “3″.

VLOOKUPs Vlookups–short for vertical lookups–are probably one of the most powerful analysis tools, since they allow you to compare data for the same source cell to different entries within a table of data. In search, this is usually comparing a keyword’s performance over a given length of time.

=VLOOKUP(A2,$F$3:$J$247,3,)

There are some very important issues you need to be aware of when using these formulas:

• The first entry (A2) is your source cell, or most commonly your keyword. If you have the same keyword in multiple match types, you’ll need to concatenate the keyword and the match type so the two are in a single cell, otherwise you won’t get correct data. Be sure to concatenate your data the same way over all data periods.
• Do not forget to include the dollar signs ($) in the table field, which is the group of numbers between the first and second commas ($F$3:$J$247). If you forget the dollar sign, your data table will move down with each new Vlookup. The dollar signs keep the data table static.
• The number between the second and third commas is the column number in the data table that you want to retrieve the information from. This includes the column with your source data! Count by starting with the column your source data in as column 1, and count over the number of columns until you come to the data you want to see.
• Don’t forget the last comma after the column number. The help section states that this comma is used to lookup a range in the value, but in all honesty I have no clue what that means. All I know is that it works well with the comma and doesn’t work well without the comma.
• Be sure to use Excel’s formula help section to understand how to best use this formula for your specific data.

Proper Statements It’s always good to have proper punctuation! This formula will capitalize the first letter of each word in a cell, which I think is the most attractive formatting for ad copy text.

=PROPER(A1)

Using the formula will turn a sentence like “this is a ppc headline copy” into “This Is A Ppc Headline Copy”. After the cells have been PROPER-tized, copy it and right click on an empty cell. Select “Paste Special” and then “paste values” to turn the text from a formula result into editable text. Then you can make the minor adjustments like capitalizing all of “PPC” in the example, and maybe making the “A” lowercase for proper formatting and grammar.

Google:

In the past I always had to submit a claim via my rep at the customer service number. However I recently discovered a specific page buried within Google’s support section that allows you to submit a claim directly to the ad click quality team. It should be done on an ad group basis, but in some cases it is definately worth the time involved.

Check all the boxes that you think may be signs of click fraud. Once you hit the continue button you’ll see links to the help section that might contain articles that explain what you’re seeing. At the bottom you’ll see a question with radial buttons asking if the articles answered your questions. Even if your question was partially answered, click no. Doing so will expand the window to include a submission form. Now it’s time to get down to business:

Fill out all the applicable areas and click submit. You’ll get an automated confirmation from the click quality team and a response several days after their investigation.

Don’t expect a full 100% credit for the clicks in that ad group. Google will more than likely say that a percentage of the traffic didn’t meet their expectations, and give you that percentage as a credit, or possibly even a portion of the percentage as a credit.

Keep in mind that Google will only investigate claims that are filed for traffic received in the last 60 days. Put a reminder in your calendar to do this task every two months to get the maximum benefit and decrease your billable clicks.

Yahoo:

Yahoo offers online data to learn about click fraud and how to navigate it via their Traffic Quality Resource Center. To file a claim you need to log in to your account and click on the customer service link at the upper right hand of the window.  A new window will open up that will allow you to write a message. Be sure to click on the drop down box underneath the type of inquiry request and select “Traffic Quality”.

It also gives you the ability to add attachments like spreadsheets or log files to back up your claim. What I like about the Yahoo system over the Google system is that the response email tells you when you can expect a time frame to have your case reviewed and completed.

To combat future inadvertent traffic–whether it be from click fraud or other unqualified traffic–you can request to receive a raw query search report every 30 days to look at the raw search queries that are producing the impressions for your ads (yes, I’m still talking about Yahoo, not the Google report).  Look this over and see what terms you don’t think should be there. Add those terms as excluded words at the ad group or campaign level and let your money be spent on better quality traffic.

So even though there aren’t daily articles on click-fraud anymore, know that it’s out there, and chances are you’re affected by it.  Fight it, because every dollar saved is one extra dollar towards your next conversion.

Courtesy: BusinessInsider.com

You probably get them as much as I do: those sales calls from people who can “guarantee top positioning in Google and other search engines”.  Little do they know that when they call me, they’re talking to someone who doesn’t mind showing them just how little they know about search engines and business in general.  Heck, if I can keep them on the phone a couple seconds longer, that’s hopefully someone else saved from hearing their snake oil spiel in the first place.  On one such call, I let the gentlemen finish his whole script and he proceeded on the hard sale.  I asked him one question: “What kind of ROI can I expect to see from your services?”

“Oh, our ROI is AWESOME” was his response.

Um…no it isn’t.  Last time I checked, ROI was a calculation where you take earnings minus cost divided by cost multiplied by 100 to get in percentage terms [((E-C)/C)*100], which I’m pretty sure leads to a number…not AWESOME!  The analysis of how that number meets expected goals may lead to the label of “awesome” and high-fives all around, but ROI itself is simply a number.

If you’re wondering why I’m ranting on this, it’s because this is the perfect example of mixing up the difference of results and the interpretation of the results.  This is critical when it comes to monitoring PPC performance.  You could have a 500% ROI, which some might consider awesome, but what if your break-even point required a 750% ROI compared to other activities you could have done with those resources?  Ladies and Gentlemen, in this case “awesome” has left the building and you have some explaining to do.

Since PPC can be factored down to the penny at a keyword level, don’t consider ROI as a goal, but as a floor to build on.  Look at your daily or weekly reports and ask yourself “Can I be happy with these results if they continued for X amount of time?”  If the answer is no, then you just reviewed the actual results, and interpreted them to be insufficient (aka “not awesome”), regardless of what the actual ROI is.
If you know that to break even after shipping, commissions, taxes, and all other costs that you need a 250% ROI from PPC (or $2.50 ROAS…same thing) then you should set your floor at 250% and not your goal.  Set goals in three forms: Ideal, Expected, and Acceptable.

• Ideal is shooting for the moon and really worthy of being called “Awesome”
• Expected is profitable and sustainable.
• Acceptable is north of break-even but you really want it higher.

This is especially critical if you work with agencies because agencies will ask you what your target is, and if you say 250% they’ll give you as much volume as they can at the 250% to spend as much as they can (assuming their compensation is based on percentage of spend).  So remember…awesome is a goal, not a number.  ROI is a number, and not a goal.  Setting a given ROI as a goal is awesome, so long as you know what your results should be.

When discussing PPC performance, people love to refer to the low hanging fruit.  You know, that’s the stuff that’s easy to accomplish with little effort that yields great results.  This typically refers to getting more conversions for cheap, but how do you do it?  Here are a couple ways to pick that low hanging fruit and have cheaper conversions within a week or two:

Turn off the Content Network: Don’t get me wrong, the content network can produce great results–if managed correctly.  To manage it correctly it needs to be seperated from search, so turn it off on your search accounts and isolate content ads in their own content campaigns.

Add negatives: Run a search query report and look at all the search terms that have generated clicks.  Sort by impressions largest to smallest, and look for terms that are not converting and don’t resonate with your target customer.  Add them as negatives so future searchers of that term won’t see your ad.  If they’re weird terms but are converting, leave them alone.

Add misspells of converting terms: If your keyword “shoes” is converting like crazy, then I’m betting you that “sheos” or “shoeses” will too.  Add common misspellings and keyboard errors as exact matches as keywords, but make sure that the ad group doesn’t have keyword insert enabled, because then it might be taken down for editorial reasons.

Check landing pages: If terms that used to convert no longer do, maybe it’s the page you’re sending them to.  Make sure your page is what you want it to be.  If it is, test a different page or even create a whole new landing page for that keyword or ad group.

Pause poor performing ads: If one ad accounts for 80% of your conversions and the other only 20%, get rid of that 20% ad!  Let all those impressions and clicks flow to the better converting ad, and you should see an immediate lift in results.

Following these basic steps should yield immediate results (often times within hours or days).  If you have already done all of these, go back and run another search query report for a different time period than your original one.  After all, Google announced a while back that 20-25% of queries are ones they’ve never seen before.  Repeat this step every 30-60 days.  Now, go get some conversions!

credit: BusinessInsider.cm

Bing can be portrayed as a search marketer’s best friend or biggest annoyance.  Agencies, who typically charge based on percentage of media spend, hated Live/MSN search because it had relatively no search volume, which meant no media to spend, which meant no fees to charge.  It also has the hardest user interface to properly setup ad groups, took the most time to manage, and probably has the most quirks like {param} settings and a bunch of other baloney that 95% of the people don’t know how to use.

But then this rebranded search engine came out called Bing.com and was backed by $100 million in marketing–and get this–people are actually using it!  So is it time to rush over to the adCenter and open up an account?  Well, if you like making money, then you probably should.  Here’s why:

Since agencies have often shunned it for so long, there still aren’t a lot of other advertisers on Bing compared to Google and Yahoo.  This means less competition, cheaper CPCs, higher CTRs, and hopefully higher conversion rates.  Even though it only has 7-9% of the market share, you know what?  That’s still 7-9% of the BILLIONS of searches that happen every month!  If you could increase your orders by 7-9% with a 4-5% increase in PPC spend, wouldn’t you want to?  Also, since the costs per click are lower (due to the less competition) then that usually means lower costs per conversion, which means you can afford to buy more!

OK…So You’re Going to Advertise on Bing.  Now What?

Like I mentioned earlier, adCenter is the quirkiest interface to work in, so I wouldn’t go duplicating your Google account and importing it over to Microsoft.  Instead, look at your converting keywords over the last 60-90 days, and import only those.  AdCenter ad lengths are the same as Google’s so you can even import the same ads if you want.  Unless you really want to spend some time reading the help guides, I’d stay away from the param settings for now.  I’ll explain those in another post.

Finally, make sure you don’t import your Google bids into MSN, otherwise I can almost guarantee you’ll skyrocket in top position.  Use bids 30-50% lower than Google to see how you do, and adjust accordingly.

So should you advertise on Bing?  Yes. Yes you should.

The original purpose of day-parting was to let advertisers turn their ads off when they don’t want ads within a campaign to be seen. This could be due to call center hours, or perhaps a drop in the conversion rate. Here’s a better idea: Use day-parting across multiple mirrored campaigns to make sure you get exposure at different parts of the day. Let’s walk through it step-by-step:

1) Go into Google’s reporting interface and run an hourly report regardless of date for a sufficient time period at the campaign level, preferably for a single campaign. Be sure to check the boxes labeled “impression share”A sufficient time period is usually at least 30 days, but possibly up to 90, depending on your conversion volumes. Make your report screen look like this:

2) Export to Excel, and sort by hour of day. You should have 24 entries, ranging from 0-23. You need to look for a couple things:

• At what hours of the day is your impression share lowest?
• At what hours of the day is your conversion rate the highest?

Your impression share is what percentage of search queries are you getting for the keywords within the given campaign. Low numbers mean you’re losing out on opportunities. High numbers mean you show up often.

3) For example’s sake, let’s say that our busiest hours are 6:00-7:00am, 12:00-2:00pm, and 5:00-7:00pm on weekdays. For these hours we’d set our ad scheduling to look like this:

The above example is an extreme where you only run the ads during these peak times. However, if you’re using advanced day-parting also allows you to change your max bids during these different periods within a day. So if you know the 12-2 hour is where you’re going to make all your money, you can dictate that those bids automatically be raised any percentage over the Max CPC at the keyword level that you’re comfortable with. During the other hours of the day you can run the ads at a lower percentage than the max CPC, so you don’t get charged as much per click. Keep in mind that your average position will decline.

This seems pretty thorough as-is, so why use mirrored campaigns? For some really competitive keywords, you may not even last through these small peak hours to get the exposure you’re looking for. In those cases you need more than one campaign with different daily budget caps to make sure your traffic is getting spread across the times that you want, and not whenever Google thinks its best.

Expect to spend 2-3 hours of research per campaign in reports before deciding which hours are best suited for your campaign. Due to that time requirement, I’d recommend doing this on only your top 1 or 2 campaigns, and only if you see your daily budget being maxed out constantly, but can’t afford to raise it. Another good sign is when Google suggest that you should at least double your daily budget to get max exposure.

Remember, the goal is not to get more impressions or clicks for the sake of getting traffic, but instead to maximize conversions at peak times of the day. If you execute this tactic and you’re not seeing an overall increase in sales within a month or so, don’t bother with the extra management. Kill the test and go back to what you were doing originally.

It’s 10:00 pm.  Do you know where your conversions are?

I talk to a lot of people about their search campaigns in a lot of different areas.  Unless they’re really into this new concept (new to them, mind you) called Search Marketing, they will often do the equivalent of throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.  The reason they can’t show anything for their efforts is because they’re not tracking their efforts at all, or at least not on the right level.

Guided by Goals

A separate mistake I see often–typically by PPC “professionals”–is too much front-end research and emphasis on keywords.  Don’t get me wrong, this is very important.  However, the proper conversion discussion ahead of time changes the conversation from pulling out a roadmap and planning a trip to California, opposed to hopping in the car and driving West.

What are your goals?  Chances are it’s about making money.  How are we doing that?  Direct site sales?  Lead generation?  RSS subscriptions via advertising?  More pageviews for display advertising?  All of the above?  Answer this question, and you’re on your way.

Let’s say we’re selling stuff on our own site.  We have our code up, so we know what keywords will get sales, but now we need to build our campaign.  Where do we start?  My rule of thumb is to work backwards.  What items do people typically put in their shopping cart?  Of all those shopping carts, which ones typically close as a sale? (A greater project would be to look at all the carts that haven’t sold and figure out why there were abandoned, but that’s digressing).  Now that we know what items we have been selling, now we can begin looking at keywords people use to find those items or similar ones.

Now we’re back to keyword research, and all the steps that includes, like building structured ad groups, writing solid ad copy, and picking appropriate landing pages.  Chances are if you’re reading this, you at least have some experience in all those fields, but hopefully you now see why it’s important to know where your’e going and just shut up and drive.

Roughly two years ago when Yahoo started announcing what features would be available in the Panama interface compared to the old one, I was excited for one in particular: 3rd party campaign imports. This means that you could take an account you built in Google and with “very little effort” and have Yahoo convert it to their format and instantly upload it! Wonderful!

Until I started trying to use it, because then I started hating it.  There were constant errors, file rejections for no apparent reason, unconverted output files from the conversion tool. I got so mad and wasted so much time I was convinced it was faster to write new campaigns by hand.  The most infuriating part is the system apparently reads the files from right to left instead of left to right, and stops at the first error.  So you go and fix the error at the end of the spreadsheet only to find another error when you try to upload, and so on and so on.

Being the obsessive and persistent person I am, I couldn’t stand knowing there was a tool that’s supposed to work and save me time, but isn’t. After lots of experimenting I finally got the right combination of steps to make it work.

Indeed it is possible! Without further adieu, I present to you the 30+ step process to achieve this. Oh…and that’s 30 steps only if you don’t get an error message.

Ready? Here we go:

1. From Adwords Editor, Download Any Changes That Might Not Be In Editor
2. Export The Desired Campaigns (If Not All) To A .csv File
3. Open the File in Excel
4. Remove All Negative Terms Without Sorting
5. Save As a .csv File, by saving as unicode text with quotation marks around the full file name, including the .csv extention, and Hit Yes On The Warning Window. (i.e. “YahooUpload.csv”)
6. Close The File Without Saving Changes
7. In Yahoo, Click On The Campaigns Tab
8. Click In The Import Sub Tab
9. Click On Convert 3rd Party Campaigns
10. Hit The Browse Button And Find The File To Upload
11. Click Once And Add .csv To The End Of The File Name
12. Highlight The File And Hit “Open” To Add The File Into The Converting Box
13. Put In Any Desired Name In The Appropriate Box And Hit Convert
14. Once You Receive The Confirmation Screen, Click On Return To Import History
15. Download The Converted File
16. Open The Converted File And Look At The Error Columns. If You See “Please Be Sure To Update Your Tracking URLs If You Are Passing The Source Of The Click As A Parameter Or If You Are Using A Third Party Analytics Provider.” Then You Don’t Have Any Issues
17. If You Do See Other Error Codes then Scroll Down
18. Go Back To The Yahoo Interface And Click On The Import Campaigns Tab
19. Even Though The Converted Form Is In The Appropriate Format, Download The .csv Template From The Interface
20. Copy And Paste The Data From The Converted Campaigns File To The Template File
21. In Excel, Click On “Save As” And Save The Template File As A .Csv File With A Different Name Than The Imported Campaign (Even If You Haven’t Saved The Imported Campaign)
22. Again, Click Yes On The Warning Window that Says Formatting May Not Be Compatible With Unicode Text
23. Close The File Without Saving Changes
24. In The Yahoo Interface Click On The Browse Buttons On The Import Campaigns Tab
25. Hit The Browse Button And Find The File To Upload
26. Click Once And Add .csv To The End Of The File Name
27. Highlight The File And Hit “Open” To Add The File Into The Importing Box
28. Give It Any Import Name (Can Be Identical To Your Conversion File Name) And Click Upload
29. Once You Receive The Confirmation Screen, Click On Return To Import History
30. You Will See The Status Be Labeled As “In Progress” For A While. Refresh Every 10-15 Seconds Until Completed
31. If All Goes Well, The Comments Section Will Say “File Processed Without Errors”
32. If You Have Errors, Open The File To See What Got Loaded And What Didn’t

POSSIBLE ERRORS

Error Message: The Short Description Is Too Long. Please Enter A Valid Short Description. This means that your 70 character ad in Google turned into a 71 character Ad in Yahoo, because Yahoo forces a period at the end of every ad. Play with your ad and get it to fit within the 70 character limit with a period. Yes, exclamation and questions marks are fine too.

Error Message: The Keyword ________ Was Not Added Because It Is Covered By An Existing Keyword In Your Ad Group.

This means that your keywords is already somewhere in the account, and Yahoo won’t allow duplicates. If you really want it in there twice, call your rep and ask to have your account switched to an umbrella account, with a new account opened as a child account (there will probably be small fee involved). Redo the campaign import with the new account instead of the original account. (Remember you’ll need to load conversion tracking for the new account)

Error Message: Cannot Determine Which Campaign/Ad Group Is The Parent

I really hate this one. It means that you probably tried sorting the columns when working on a project and didn’t put it back precisely the way it was. Unless you’re working with only one or two accounts, it’s usually fastest just to start over.

After you correct these errors you need to re-download the Yahoo template and paste ONLY the corrected items. Then…

• In Excel, Click On “Save As” And Save The Template File As A .Csv File With A Different Name Than The Imported Campaign (Even If You Haven’T Saved The Imported Campaign)
• Again, Click Yes On The Warning Window That Says Formatting May Not Be Compatible With Unicode Text
• Close The File Without Saving Changes
• In The Yahoo Interface Click On The Browse Buttons On The Import Campaigns Tab
• Hit The Browse Button And Find The File To Upload
• Click Once And Add .csv To The End Of The File Name
• Give It Any Import Name (Can Be Identical To Your Conversion File Name) And Click Upload
• Once You Receive The Confirmation Screen, Click On Return To Import History
• You Will See The Status Be Labeled As “In Progress” For A While. Refresh Every 10-15 Seconds Until Completed

It’s possible that you get an additional error file, but it should be smaller than the original. Keep repeating the above steps until all errors are gone and you’ll be done! Congratulations!

Keep in mind some important issues:

• Bulk uploads are limited to 10mb/day/account.
• A day is defined by 24 hours, not a business or working day.
• If you are making account updates instead of 3rd party conversions, DO NOT try to upload anything that you don’t intend changing. Attempts can kick back error messages that will make things tedious.

Even though Google is the dominant player, you can still get a lot of conversions from Yahoo, and this should help you expand quickly and easily.

You’ve probably noticed the new change of clothes around here.  Why just have a change of clothes when you can have a whole ensemble though?  Here is a list of things to come:

Social media case studies – enough buzzwords already.  Let’s get into the meat and potatoes.  We’ll cover some examples of what worked, and perhaps even some examples of what didn’t.  And these case studies won’t just be coming from us – send us your best and brightest, and we’ll talk.

PPC – what’s that you say? Yes, it is a social media blog and will remain a social media blog.  Still, let’s face it: social media is one new branch of Internet marketing (and yes, you can tell me how it is soft sales, branding, engagement, customer service, etc, etc…but that’s still marketing).  A branch that should be supplemented by organic SEO and PPC.  So, we’ll be focusing on PPC.

Widgets, widgets, and more widgets – we’ll be evaluating and adding the best of breeds in search (i.e. Lijit), comment systems (intense debate, sezwho, disqus), Tweetbacks, and others like Google Friend Connect.  Plugins too.

Webinars – plans are in the works to have actual in person and web classes.  Stay tuned.

And as promised, we’re delivering a fresh post to you once a day.  Peace.