Advanced AdWords Strategies

Hat tip to the guys over at ROI Revolution for providing us with some great tips on how to post new campaigns in a way that doesn’t get slapped with a poor quality score.

In their blog post, they point out how Google will often assess a poor Quality Score to new campaigns, and it can take quite some time and lots of extra cost per click to cause them to change their minds, if ever.

Here are their tips:

1. Never post a paused campaign. Better to create the campaign offline with AdWords Editor and post it Google only when its ready to go live.
2. Be sure the landing page is relevant to the ad groups. If necessary, create separate landing pages for each ad group, or at least for each campaign.
3. Landing page should be high quality with lots of content, not spammy. If there are lots of stolen images, high pressure sales tactics, and lots of fine print, forget about it. Also, your site should have more than one page on it, and they should be linked from the landing page – such as privacy policy, about us, contact information, and other relevant content.
4. Make sure your campaign has lots of ad groups – each one with ads featuring the keyword in the headline and description lines of the ad.
5. Always create the campaigns offline and post when the campaign is complete, rather than put together a campaign online piece by piece. Google may give your campaign an initial QS before you get a chance to finish putting everything together.

I can’t begin to tell you the nightmare of creating a brand new campaign for a client and then suffering for months with a poor QS. This will affect the performance, not only with regard to their minimum first page bids, but also with regard to impression share. In our experience, campaigns with poor quality scores will also have very low impression share.

On very competitive keywords, Google may tell you that your First Page Minimum Bid is significantly higher than your current bid. You may be tempted to raise it in order to show your ads for that keyword.

Don’t fall for it.

Many times this is not necessary, and all you will be doing is killing off your profit margin needlessly.

Instead, follow these steps to determine if your current bid is adequate.

1. Check the Quality Score of that keyword. If it is higher than 7 or 8, continue to step 2. If it is lower, try improving the quality score of the keyword instead of raising the max CPC.
2. Is the keyword getting impressions now? Toggle the view to the most current view (either Today or Last Week). Are impressions showing higher than 0? If they are, that is a sign your Max CPC is adequate and nothing need be done. Google is just trying to get you to pay more for something that you are already getting.
3. If impressions are showing higher than 0 but the CTR of the keyword is poor, it may be that the position is too low. If that is the case, raise the bid, but not as high as Google suggests. It is likely to be enough to raise it 10-20% in most cases.

On Thursday, Google announced they are making massive changes to their Trademark policy. In the past, Google could disapprove your ad if it contained a trademarked term, even if you were not using it to compete with the trademark owner – such as “compatible with Windows” or “iPod Accessories.” Now , Google announced that as of June 15^th, advertisers will be able to use trademarked terms in their ads, even without permission from the trademark holder, as long as their webpages contain references to the terms that are being advertised. To determine if Google sees your site as containing those terms, you must go to the Google Search Based Keyword Tool, enter your site URL in the box, and see what terms come up for that search. If the trademarked terms come up, you are in luck. Google will most likely approve your ads, beginning on June 15^th, for use of that trademark.

This is very good news for many advertisers. Google, together with some trademark owners, had been using the trademark policy to unfairly target some businesses that were using the trademark legitimately. For example, and advertiser that sells QuickBooks Checks could not advertise that their checks are compatible with QuickBooks – even though that is precisely what the searchers are looking for! Not only that, Google unfairly leveled this policy against certain advertisers, while giving others a free pass – even though they were clearly not obtaining permission from the trademark holder for use of the trademarked term in the ads.

It’s about time Google updated this policy, and start allowing small businesses and other firms which offer products and services related to trademark names the ability to advertise freely on the internet, without being unfairly denied the freedom to compete with their counterparts in the same field.

NOTE: One way to avoid this trademark policy (until it takes effect on June 15^th) is to use the trademarked term in the Display URL. For example, if you are selling Apple accessories, you can create an ad with a Display URL such as this: Apple.eBay.com. This gets under the Google radar and will not cause your ad to be disapproved for a trademark violation.

Whenever something new is introduced, my first reaction is, “Oh no!” It takes time to learn it, and I hate having to figure out everything all over again.

Here are some of the bright spots (in no particular order) that I am enjoying in the new AdWords interface.

• In My Client Center accounts, the “Jump to client” drop down first shows active clients, and then puts all clients lower down in the list.
• Drop Down box next to campaign, ad group, and keyword showing status set to: enabled, paused, deleted. Changes are effective immediately.
• Click pencil icon next to ad, or the box of the keyword to make changes. No need to tick mark and find the “Edit Keyword” or “Edit” link to make changes.
• Excellent graphs built into the campaign management interface, no need to browse to Account Snapshot
• Easy download of data – click the More Actions… button and select Download – brings up dialog box to select download format
• Handy navigation & help panel on the left, if you find it annoying it can easily be collapsed
• Click on campaign name to change Campaign Settings – no more hunting for the “Edit Campaign Settings” button
• Easy to use Campaign Settings screen – everything organized neatly, with default options already selected

Some of the dull spots:

• Takes longer to load than previous version
• Java platform needs to be downloaded in some browsers before use
• When clicking on the icon next to keyword or ad group (enabled or paused) the drop down doesn’t disappear after mouse scrolls away
• Too much horizontal scrolling
• Split screen requires clicking the top portion again to be able to scroll to top of the window

This list is in no way complete, just a quick observation from what I have seen so far. Although the AdWords Editor performs much of the same functionality, the new interface gives you instant changes, easy to read data, and a more organized structure of the account. Overall, this is a great improvement, and I actually welcome the changes. Yahoo & MSN, are you watching? Your interfaces are way overdue for a makeover.

Be sure to test it out and send feedback so they can get it right.

Here is another great way to discover highly relevant sites to use for Placement Targeting. It takes a bit of research, but according to my preliminary tests, it can be a great way to get clicks at a fraction of the cost for regular Google search bidding.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Do a Google Search on a keyword in your campaign with the highest impressions.
2. See which sites come up in the natural organic listings.
3. Are there any sites that are primarily informational sites? If so, visit them and note if they have any Adsense ads running on them.
4. Add that URL to your placement targeting, and bid a high CPC for that site.
5. IMPORTANT: Write an ad specifically for that site, and put it in its own ad group.
6. Monitor the performance of the ad group, noting the impressions, clicks, and conversions.

See my example for the highly searched keyword “air jet bathtubs”, notice how www.ehow.com ranks very high for that search. Ehow.com accepts AdSense ads, so you would take that URL and add it to the placement sites for which you are targeting.

Google’s Ad Scheduling feature allows advertisers to set different bids for various times of the day and or week. This setting in controlled at the Campaign level by selecting “Edit Campaign Settings”.

If you are a B2B ecommerce site, your typical customer will be shopping during workdays, and during business hours, so it makes sense to lower the bids during nights, weekends and holidays when the traffic is less likely to convert. It usually makes sense to lower the Max CPC bids to 25-50% of the set rate during these times.

However, if you are a B2C site, many of your customers will shop after work and on weekends. If so, it makes sense to raise the bids to 120-150% of the normal rate.

How do you determine when your site does the most sales? There are a couple of metrics to use, but unfortunately, none of them are perfect. Here is one method that I use, which requires many steps:

AdWords Campaign Performance Report:

1. From the Reports Tab in AdWords, create a new report. Select the Campaign Performance Report (you can also use Account Performance if you only have one site on this account).
2. Under Settings, select View (Unit of Time) >> Hourly (by date).
3. Select a date range (as far back as is meaningful) and the campaigns to use
4. Run the report
5. Open the report, and export as a .csv file into Excel (get a template of this report from the link below)
6. Add a row above the header fields in the report
7. Add a column to the data called “Day of Week”
8. Add the following formula to B8: WEEKDAY(A8)
9. Copy the formula for the entire row
10. Create a pivot table for the entire data
11. Add Day of Week to the filter
12. Select the different days of the week from the filter to view which days have the highest CTR – that will provide a rough estimate of the highest conversion days.

Adwords does not yet give Conversion Data for hourly reports, which is why we need to “guess” the conversion rate based on the highest CTR. However, there is a way to determine the hourly conversion data by using Google Analytics, which is explained in this post (coming soon).

Download the template of the Excel file for this report

Although you may think that you have an exhaustive list of keywords, it is almost certain that there are a bunch of keywords that you are not bidding on that can potentially bring you in lots of business.

Here is how you can discover those hidden keywords

and bid on them to your advantage:

1. Your site must have Google Analytics with Ecommerce Tracking enabled, or, if your site is not an ecommerce site, a Conversion Goal with a defined Goal Value.
2. Select a date range from the top right of the Analytics Console that you wish to track. Preferably, you should go back as long as is practical. If your site has not changed dramatically during this time, it will provide you with the most accurate data.
3. Run the following report: Traffic Sources >> Keywords
4. In the top right corner, click on the advanced segments drop down, deselect all visits, and select Non-paid visits.
5. The report now lists all the keywords that have brought visits to the site during the data range selected.
6. Export the report to Excel – make sure all rows of data are downloaded.
7. Scroll down to the keywords section of the report, and format the header row as column headers (select the entire row, press ctrl + B).
8. Now comes the fun part: Sort the data by Revenue (column L) or Per Visit Goal Value (column J) highest to lowest.
9. There you have it, a full list of keywords that are the most valuable to your business. I am betting that you will find at least 2 or 3 keywords that are not in your campaign. Make sure to add them to the right ad groups and they are sure to bring you in more money than from organic search.
10. CAUTION: There may be keywords that by luck happened to bring in lots of revenue, but only off one or two visits. To be statistically significant, filter the visits column (B) to only show rows that equal 10 or more visits. This way, the report only shows keywords that have consistently brought in large sales, and leaves out the keywords that happened to “get lucky”.

    

If you advertise on the content network, running a Placement Performance Report is a way to view sites that get clicks, enabling you to do tricks that can double or triple your click through rates and conversions from the content network.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Click on Reports tab – select Placement Performance
2. Make the selections on the page as needed – use a long time frame if possible, the longer the better.
3. Be sure that the conversion boxes are checked in the Add & Remove Columns
4. Download the report as a .csv file for Excel
5. Open the report, and highlight row 4 (the column headers row) click Home >> Insert
6. A blank row appears above your column headers
7. Click anywhere in the sheet below Row 5
8. Click Home >> Sort & Filter >> Filter
9. Go to the column header that says “special category” and click the drop down arrow, deselect the box of special category
10. Go to the column header “CTR” and select Number Filters >> Greater than or Equals…
    
11. Enter 1% in the text box
12. Go to the column header “Domain”, select all the entries in that column
13. Click on Home >> Find & Select >> Go To Special…>> Visible Cells Only
14. Press Ctrl + C to copy all the entries
15. Open your Google AdWords Editor and select the campaigns you wish to add these sites to
16. Click on the Placements tab >> Make Multiple Changes >> Add Update Multiple Placements
17. Press Ctrl + V to paste all the domains into the field
18. Press Post Changes

Now, all these sites will be getting placement targeted traffic as well as showing for the content network, bringing you more relevant users and higher CTRs + conversions!! Sometimes, you may even double your content network performance with this very easy step.

One of the most important factors that determine the CTR of an ad is its Display URL. Most viewers will make a judgment on the relevancy of ad based on the Display URL. Here is just one example for the search term “fix my phone”:

CTR – 4.26%

However, look at a similar ad in a similar position:

CTR – 1.09%

In other words, the lower ad had ¼ of the CTR that the higher ad had.

A client of mine experienced this first hand. In April 2008, Google announced that all display URLs must match exactly to the actual destination URL that appears in the user’s browser. This caused lots of trouble for many advertisers, who were using vanity URLs to appear relevant in their ads.

When this rule took effect, we were forced to change the URL to the more generalized term instead of the focused and keyword specific vanity URL that had been in use up to that point.

Here are the results:

For the week of Jun 2, the CTR was cut in half, and the conversions were down by 75%!!!, and our quality score plummeted.

We quickly implemented a fix by aliasing the vanity domain onto the main website, enabling us to regain the original CTR just a week later.

However, we learned a lesson the hard way – the importance of a highly relevant, keyword specific Display URL for ads. If you don’t have one, users will ignore you.

The Keyword Positions Report has been available for a long time in Google Analytics, but it is not widely used, according to tests that I have conducted.

It has long been a favorite discussion amongst AdWords professionals to try and figure where is the best position for a Google ad. Although logic and bid prices dictate that the top position is the best, the actual evidence has shown otherwise.

Perry Marshall and Don Crowther have done a study on this back in the early days of AdWords, and in their Black Belt AdWords course demonstrate how the actual ROI based on position was higher in the 4-7 spot than in the 1-3 spot.

This can now easily be seen using Analytics. Here is a screenshot of the Keywords Positions Report, which is available in the Anlaytics interface at Traffic Sources » Adwords » Keyword Positions:

Leave the dropdown box on the left side set to Visits, and switch the right side dropdown to any measure you prefer. I suggest using either Ecommerce Conversion Rate, or Revenue, assuming you have set up Analytics to track Ecommerce.

As you can see, the report shows that the most profitable positions for this keyword was 10 (100% conversion rate) and 5-7, while top 1 had a lousy 1.61% rate.

This is true in most all keywords that I have researched.

Tip: You can use this report even when you don’t track ecommerce conversions. Say, for example you want to track downloads of a whitepaper or email signups for a newsletter. You can set that up as a goal conversion in Analytics, and then measure the % of Goal Conversions based on positions.

Success Tip # 37: Run a Keywords Position Report on your campaigns, and then use Position Preference in your AdWords account to limit the ad to the positions with the highest ROI.