Archive for Paid Search – PPC
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.
Properly Setting Up Excluded Placements Inside Google AdWords
Posted by: | CommentsDo you advertise with Google AdWords? Do you have your Google Adwords paid search ads show up on their Content Network? Not sure what that exactly means?
Google allows you to not only display your ads in Google’s search results pages when someone performs a search on Google, but also on sites that use their Google AdSense program to automatically display paid search ads that are relevant to their website copy – although many times it’s not always relevant – but which makes this post relevant to you!
You can set up lists of sites or domains that you do not want your Google AdWords ads to show up on via the Excluded Placements section (found in the Networks tab of the new Google Adwords interface). By viewing the detailed stats of your ads on these sites, assuming you have your conversion tagging set up to show AdWords conversions correctly (surprisingly many put it on the wrong page) you can determine if your ads that are appearing on specific sites on the content network are profitable or not for you.
If not set-up properly though, you may be surprised to find out that your ads are still appearing on sites that you thought you had banned through the Excluded Placements section in the AdWords interface.
According to ROI Revolution’s Make Sure Your Excluded Placements Are Actually Being Excluded post, there is a easy fix in the Excluded Placements section to make sure you are correctly banning an entire site from having your ad appear on it.
Unless you specifically want to ban just a certain subdomain such as www.about.com, or marketing.about.com, but want your ads to appear on other subdomains of their website, you need to enter in just about.com. Entering in the root domain (about.com) without the third level (www, marketing, etc.)you will be successfully banning the entire domain not just that specific third level entered.
For more detailed information, you can view Google AdWords help section on setting up Excluded Placements.
Google AdWords Launches New Interface
Posted by: | CommentsAt Search Engine Strategies in New York this week, Google demonstrated its new Google AdWords interface to the attendees:
According to Google, updates to the interface include:
• Easier account navigation through an account tree.
• In-line editing of keywords, bids, ads and placements.
• Integrated reports available on campaign management pages.
• Roll-up views of all keywords, ads and placements in a campaign.
• Quick filtering to focus on the data you care about most
• Performance summary graphs for quick trend-spotting
You can read more detail on the changes in the AdWords Interface Changes Overview PDF or view 6 videos they have posted to further explain the updates – including this video from advertisers and AdWords team members.
Sign up for the beta now to get early access to it. Go on, you have nothing to lose – after speaking with a Google AdWords team member at the Search Engine Strategies New York conference, they confirmed you would be able to toggle between the beta and the current version and would not be stuck in the beta.
The Value of Upper Funnel Keywords in PPC
Posted by: | CommentsUpper Funnel Keywords in paid search (or even in organic search by definition) are those keywords that do not bring in visitors that convert in a traditional sense into an immediate purchase or lead, but rather are the keywords that convert the potential customer to the next stage of the “interest cycle”. These Upper Funnel Keywords typically bring potential customers or leads into your website that have not made up their mind to make a purchase (or fill out a form or take a trial) because they are still in their “considering their options stage” of decision making and are possibly not yet familiar with you or in some instances not familiar enough with you to complete a conversion during that visit.
Example:
You are going on vacation to a cold climate (let’s say the North Pole). You know you need to buy something to keep yourself warm, but you’re not sure exactly what options are out there because you live in a year round warm climate. So you do a search on the keyword phrase extreme cold weather coats. You end up at a website by clicking on a paid search ad that appeared when you typed in the phrase and notice that they have a section for cold climate coats and even list the temperatures they can withstand. You think to yourself, wow this is great, now I have a better idea of what’s available and I kind of like Brand X Model 4567, but I am not going on the vacation for another 4 months so I am not going to purchase anything today because I don’t have the extra money. Forty-five days later you win $200 on a scratch-off ticket that you found and decide that you are ready to purchase a coat with your extra money, you do a search on Brand X Model 4567 since you knew the exact coat you wanted to buy now and end up back on the same website as before and purchase the coat.
The difficulty in measuring the value of these Upper Funnel Keywords is that they don’t produce single visit conversions -you can’t see the whole picture of entrance to conversion in your analytics data in a linear fashion.
For instance, a single visit conversion would show start to finish in one visit from entering your site to making the purchase. Here you easily have the whole picture from the PPC keyword that triggered the ad that they clicked on to enter your website and their entire path to the purchase.
With Upper Funnel Keywords, a typical scenario would be that the visitor arrives at your site from these keywords or phrases, looks around, leaves, comes back another time reads more information, exits your site again, then finally comes back a 3rd time and makes a purchase.
Most only know how to measure the keywords that produce single visit conversions and thus deem these Upper Funnel Keywords more or less valueless because their value isn’t easily seen in a typically known fashion. The ROI isn’t easily visible.
In the example given earlier, the keyword phrase you searched on first, extreme cold weather coats, was the Upper Funnel Keyword phrase. You didn’t purchase during that visit of your initial search, but you did eventually go back and purchase based on the information you learned during that first visit. Had another website come up with a different but possibly similar featured coat that you liked, you would have purchased from there and a different coat. So there was definite value in that first search as it gave you the information you needed to make a decision, but you just didn’t purchase then. Now imagine if you were only looking at single session conversions, you would only be able to confirm that Brand X Model 4567 was a valuable keyword because a sale was associated with it. But in reality, without having a presence in paid search for extreme cold weather coats a sale wouldn’t have been made – thus showing the importance of being able to look at multi-session conversions to contribute back value (and ROI) to the Upper Funnel Keywords.
Avinash Kaushik on his Occam’s Razor blog this week made a powerful and very instructionally clear post on how to measure the success of Upper Funnel Keywords and I suggest you read his post for the details on how to do so.
PPC Landing Page Optimization – Keeping the Continuity in Your Message
Posted by: | CommentsIf you’re investing in Paid Search then it will most certainly and profitably make your wallet happy if you clearly understand how to optimize your landing pages that visitors arrive at after clicking on your PPC display ads to increase conversions.
Of course you will need to perform testing on your landing pages to determine the best page combination of elements statistically speaking-but it’s important to understand or to at least be reminded of the importance of carrying your message through in landing page optimization. Understanding this concept will help you in choosing initial test elements to test.
IMPORTANT: Your message needs to be carried over from your display ad to your landing page.
If someone is on Google or any other search engine doing a search on Apple products and your display ad copy influences them to click based on its references to your special deals on Apple products, but the landing page features and talks about Microsoft products, the visitor in most instances won’t spend the time to find out where you have that information placed or hidden, it’s just too easy for them to use the back button. Additionally, if you are presenting information on your special deals (your offer) as I mentioned above, and your landing page has the right products, but no mention of the special deals (offer) you can also lose the visitor for many other reasons such as the frustration of feeling they were mislead.
Remember the visitor clicked on your ad because it drew them in by what it had to say, be it a specific product, your offer, your brand, your verbiage, etc. You don’t want to let the visitor bounce and go back and click on the next display ad. And unfortunately, in most cases that next ad will be your competitors’ ad. You wouldn’t have a sign on your brick and mortar store that says Tire Sale and only have toothbrushes on the shelves.
When you don’t carry over the message, you’re throwing a good portion of your PPC money away on unproductive clicks that won’t convert as often as those who carry over their message from PPC to their landing page.
Therefore it’s extremely important to keep the continuity of your message all the way from your display ad through to the landing page to increase your chances of influencing a conversion.
On a final note, you should know that just carrying over the message isn’t the magic bullet where you don’t have to worry about anything else. You still have to be concerned with your page layout and presentation, your offer, your images, the style and content of your copy and so on. Carrying over your message is just one major but important factor in the process of landing page and landing page optimization success.
