Archive for June, 2009
Paid Search Success Includes Tight PPC Ad Groups
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Tight PPC Ad Groups A Key Factor in Paid Search Success
When building-out or optimizaing your PPC Ad Groups, whether it is at Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any other PPC engine, one of the unanimous tactics amongst the top PPC professionals is to have what is referred to as “tight” Ad Groups to aid in your paid search success.
An over-simplified understanding of the workings of keywords and ad triggers inside PPC ad groups will help you further understand why it’s important to have a “tight” ad group. First, your ad group contains keywords that trigger and then displays an associated ad from within that ad group when someone searches on a keyword that you’re bidding on. If they click on the ad, they are then taken to your landing page. Your ad is hopefully highly relevant to the keyword or phrase being searched and thus with your excellent PPC ad copy and high relevancy it entices the search engine user to click on your ad and then ideally they convert on your landing page for whatever you page goal is.
Relevancy
Needless to say, the more relevant your display ad copy is, the higher the chance the user will click on it. If you are searching for Hotels in Connecticut, and an ad for a Hotel in California is displayed, the likelihood of you clicking on that ad would be very slim – it’s not what you are looking for and would be even less appealing especially if the other ads on the page are for in fact Hotels in Connecticut. Another scenario is that your ad is somewhat relevant to the search thus enticing people to click on it, but it doesn’t convert well because the landing page associated with the ad (only 1 landing page per ad unless you are testing the landing page via AB or multivariate) isn’t as relevant for certain keywords and therefore costing you for the unproductive click and therefore driving up your costs.
Tight Ad Groups Explained
So what is meant by a “tight” ad group is to have an ad group that contains only keywords that are extremely similar. This enables you to create display ads that are highly targeted for those keywords which will then be shown when someone does a search and the results are displayed. With extremely similar keywords, and highly relevant ads, you are then able to create a highly relevant landing page to both the keywords and the ads ensuring a much higher rate of conversion success due to relevancy all the way through.
If the ad group is not tight, you will either then have generic display ads that appeal to all of the keywords, or ads that are relevant for only some of the keywords and therefore not highly relevant to the others keywords; and the same goes for the landing page your PPC display ad links too. In each of these situations, the performance will be less than desirable.
Managing Tight Ad Groups
Another benefit of tight ad groups is the ability to more easily determine the success or lack of success of individual keywords because you know that the ads and landing pages are more relevant to all of the keywords in that ad group. Or, if the keywords or phrases are not performing well, you can test the ad copy or landing pages and know that the traffic for those terms are similar in the sense that they are searching out similar terms.
In an ad group that isn’t “tight”, it’s harder to determine if it’s the keywords, the ads, or the landing pages underperforming in the sense that testing any of them may reverse performance of others within that ad group – i.e. changing the ad copy in an ad group where the keywords are extremely similar may result in some of the good performing terms to underperform, while the previously underperforming terms start to perform. In reality, many unwanted situations could occur, whereas this is the simplest problematic scenario easily avoided by keeping your ad groups “tight”.
In Conclusion
Don’t be afraid to create lots of ad groups if needed to keep them highly targeted. Sure it’s easier upfront to set-up only a few ad groups and stuff them with lots of keywords so that you only have to manage a few ads and a few landing pages. But in the long run, it’s not so easy or beneficial, their overall performance will suffer (or underperform) and your costs could go up (and very likely your conversions will go down). Not to mention that it makes testing your ads, landing pages, etc. much harder and less reliable.
Interpreting Google Website Optimizer’s Page Sections Report
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle Website Optimizer, the free multivariate and AB testing tool makes available to you two results reports when you are running a multivariate test; the Combinations report, and the Page Sections report. The Combinations report is easy to read and interpret for the most part (for simplicity purposes here, the pages are listed in order of best performance, and a statistically significant winner with a 95+% confidence level over the control will be highlighted in green), but the Page Sections report many people incorrectly use the data that is presented or are confused on what the report is actually providing. You MUST know how to correctly interpret this report; otherwise you could incorrectly make decisions from the data that can cost you potentially big-time down the road.
The Combinations report provides you with the performance data for all of your page combinations that you are testing and compares each page combination to your original page (the control) in order for you to determine what test page combinations are outperforming the original.
The Page Sections report on the other hand displays all of your page sections that you are testing and the elements within each section in order to show you the best performing page element for each particular section.
Here is the scoop on the Page Sections report.
Many times, when you are running a test you will notice that the best performing elements according to the Page Sections report are not the same elements that are present in your winning page combination. It’s not as simple as looking at the different sections and choosing all the “best” elements according to Google Website Optimizer Page Sections report and then rolling out a page that contains these elements. The reason being is that the performance of the elements in each section being tested as shown in the Page Sections report are not being calculated and presented in context with the other sections. By this I mean that the results of each element in each section are presented by how they performed against the other elements in that same page section. It’s not taking into account the context of all the other elements on the page when showing you the best performers. To see which the best elements are in proper context, view your Combinations report and look at the individual elements in your top performing page combination.
Confused?
Let me give you an example. If you are testing a main headline, and have 3 different versions:
- Control/original headline
- Test headline # 1
- Test headline #2
And the report shows that test headline # 1 is the best performing element in that area, it’s only reporting to you that between those 3 headlines, headline #1 is the best performer, but it is not taking into consideration how it interacts with the other elements on the page. It’s not saying that for the page you are testing, headline #1 is the best to use for the roll-out page, but instead – between those 3 headlines, headline #1 is the best performing if you are comparing just the performance of the headline itself. Headline #1 might perform the best out of the 3 headlines when compared to each other out of context with the rest of the page elements, but Headline #2 might perform the best in combination with all the other elements and therefore is the one you want to roll out with (but not necessarily reported this way in the Page Sections report). So please, don’t use the Page Sections report to pick out which elements to roll-out live with.
The Relevance Rating graphic (currently found to the left of each page section), alerts you to how much impact each section had on your test (as defined by your test’s conversion goal). It’s presented as a range, from 0 to 5, with 0 representing that the section had virtually no impact on conversions and a 5 as having a high impact on page conversions.
So while the Page Sections report is important to look at to understand what is happening between the different elements in the page sections themselves, and the Relevance Rating is important to look at to understand what page sections are providing what level of impact to page conversions, you should ideally only use this information to help you gain more insights into the test. Insights that will also give you further help in planning future testing of the page.
However, you will only want to roll-out the panel that is deemed the best performer according to the page Combinations report. Of course this is after you finish running your head-to-head follow-up test between your control and the best performing page combination to verify your results outside of the multivariate testing environment!
