Your campaign is set up and you have decided on your keywords, created some ads and organized your keywords into ad groups. What do you do next? Sure you can look at the numbers and watch CTR and spend go up. But what if your CTR isn’t as good as you expected or think it should be and your conversions even less?

Recorded Live: July 7, 2006

Listen to the Show:

Working with Your Keywords

Keywords are the most important part of an internet marketing campaign and that applies especially to pay-per-click. Knowing who your target audience and how you want to target them will help you determine what keywords to bid on. What keywords you bid on can greatly impact your budget, so you must choose carefully.

Working With the Various Parameters of a Campaign

Once your PPC campaign is set up, the next step is managing it. Knowing what to look at and look for can make your campaign pay off or break your budget. Google’s AdWords interface will help you by offering some automation but ultimately you will want complete control.

Working with Creatives AKA Ads

Since Goolge positions ads based on a quality score which according to Google is determined by the keyword's performance history on Google: its clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, landing page quality, and other relevancy factors, you will want to create the best converting ads you can. Write for your audience and the rest will follow.

Managing Your Google AdWords Campaign Summary

In the July 7th 2006 edition of the eMarketingtalkshow was very special because in this show our popular host Cindy Turrietta shared all she had learned about managing Google AdWords Campaigns through her extensive experience as an SEO and PPC analyst. Brooke Schumacher also added some valuable insights to this discussion.

Working with Your Keywords

In the field of Pay per Click, Google doesn’t always announce the changes it makes; you either stumble across them, or amusingly, learn about them from your client. It’s very difficult to be a specialist in all the search engines these days because there are so many things to keep abreast of.

Many marketers wonder whether they should target the same keywords for PPC as they do for SEO. Cindy explained that she doesn’t necessarily target the same keywords because for SEO keywords you can go a little more “broad”, to some extent, and you can also write pages specific to certain keywords phrases. As a result, your site as a whole will rank for a lot of different keyword phrases. For PPC your keyword choice depends on your budget and whether you want to go for more targeted keywords or go for broad. Cindy usually takes the middle path. Once again, your strategy will depend on your industry and budget.

Brooke added that she uses Pay per Click as a way to test some of the SEO terms that she thinks she wants to optimize for. She also uses Testament PPC as a tool to get the market research, see how many impressions she’s getting, and checking if there are good click rates and conversions on those terms. Terms you may have thought are good may not be converting well so in this way you can replace it with a term that is converting well. So PPC advertising can be used as a gauge.

In PPC advertising you have different types of matches i.e. broad, phrase and exact matches. Google and MSN do these matches similarly, but Yahoo doesn’t. However, since this show is about how to manage Google AdWords campaigns, Cindy and Brooke focused on how Google works. In a broad match, you put a phrase or a word and Google will match it with every possible combination that people search on with that word(s) in it. If it is a single word, anytime a person types that word in the ad will show up. If the person types in a group of words (i.e. 2 or three different words), anytime someone searches on any combination of these words, your ad will show up.

A phrase match is a little more refined, because whatever words you put in, those words have to be used in the search in that same order. The user can add words in front of them or behind them but the order of the words in the phrase must be the same e.g. Google has given the example of “red tennis shoes”. If your phrase match is Red Tennis Shoes and someone searches for “high quality red tennis shoes” your ad will show, but if someone searches on “tennis shoes red sneakers” your ad will not show because the words are not in the required order.

When using “exact” match, if people search using exactly the same terms that you had put in as your exact match i.e. they use the same words in the same order, your ad will show. Both phrase match and exact match have certain special types of formatting required i.e. certain parameters must be followed. Broad match does not have any parameters; it is open end and does not require you to enter your phrase in a certain format i.e. using brackets or quotation marks. This is because the default is broad and, as a result, your ad shows up as often as possible. This also means that you spend more money.

We all know that Google always has its best interest at heart and they are out there to make money, even though it is an excellent search engine. As a result, there are a lot of options in the Google Adwords area where the default is set to automatic and you might want to manually adjust these options. Make sure that you check everything when you’re setting up your campaign and make sure it sets up the way you want it to. You need to take Google’s recommendations with a grain of salt, because, as Brooke says, you don’t want “the fox to guard the hen house”.

How should you start your PPC ad campaign? Should you opt for a broad match? Some people start with exact because then you’re not losing your shorts. This is because sometimes when you opt for broad you really need to monitor it and make sure that you’re staying within your budget.

Cindy revealed that she prefers to set up campaigns where she tests all three (i.e. broad, exact and phrase matches) to see which ones convert the best and “depending on what my measurement is i.e. is it the click through rate or the conversion, I decide on what type of match I should use. Sometimes I don’t have the luxury of knowing the conversions and in such a case I have look at the click through rate.” Ask yourself, “Am I just wanting to drive traffic or am I really want to make sure that that traffic converts?”

Cindy advised listeners to use the ‘keyword permutator’ tool, in which you put in two or three different words and it shoots out a list of every possible combination. This is almost what you are required to do with exact match because you have no idea of how people are going to search. You can come up with 10,000 to 20,000 keywords for just one ad group which is just ridiculous.

Cindy explained “I used to think that exact match was the way to go, but now feels that it may be a good idea to start off with broad, see what works and then take it down a notch and do some phrase matching with that broad.” You can expand in this way. Also, look at your logs and look at what people are searching on to get to your site and then hone it down to exact match because you may actually pay less for exact match terms then you would for broad or phrase matches. So it is crucial to monitor it and see.

Apart from this, Google has a tool where it shows you a bar graph of which term is more popular than the others- not exact numbers or anything but a rough idea relative to the other terms. Brooke advised listeners to use misspellings. According to Brooke, “it may be a good idea to start broad with misspelled terms because a study carried out by Ask shows that 10% of the time people are putting in misspellings.”

There has been a lot of talk lately about whether or not you should use caps or put all your words together. Despite Google’s claims that you don’t need to worry about capitals, people have tested this and have noticed a difference in their conversion rate and traffic when using capitals compared to using all lower case. Hence, it would be a good idea to use caps when putting in really important keyword phrases that are high converters for you and find the misspellings of these phrases as well.

Cindy encouraged marketers to experiment with upper and lower case and putting words altogether e.g. the company that Cindy is working for is called Computer Geeks, and some people actually type in “computergeeks” instead of typing the two words separately. Brooke added that using caps in the first letter of each word in your ad text highlights it better than if you use lower case.

Next, Cindy talked about dynamic keyword insertion and how to incorporate search terms in ads. Curly brackets are used in this. You put in the word “keyword” within the curly brackets and then you put your default word next to it. It looks like this: keyword = your default word. If you put this in your title and if someone searches for “red tennis shoes” and your default was just “shoes”, “red tennis shoes” will actually appear as the title of your ad. This helps you to target your audience more effectively and as a result your ads will convert. Research shows that if you are actually using the same terms people searched for in your ad, the chances of people clicking on them is higher.

You can also use this method in either line of your descriptions, but make sure that it makes sense e.g. if you’re searching on the word “baby”, an eBay ad usually pops up saying “get your baby an eBay”, which obviously makes no sense at all.

You can also use your keyword in your display URL. Your display URL has to be a domain name, for instance www.geeks.com or geeks.com i.e. it has to be ‘dot’ something, and then you put a slash and put in your keyword e.g. “computer parts” or whatever your keyword phrase is for that particular ad group. That helps pull your keyword in a little bit more and makes your ad more relevant to the people who are searching. You do not need set up this page as a real page because this is just a display URL. Your destination URL has to be a real page.

Apart from this, use the keyword insertion tool as it is really very effective. Just make sure not to put your keyword in an inappropriate place and be careful with your broad match because you never know what people are searching on. In addition, look for good phrase match and exact match terms.

Using different variations of the same keyword i.e. using caps, the plus sign and running words together (e.g. a person may search by typing “red+tennis+shoes”) is another way to put your keywords in provided that you want to bid on them that way. This is a sort of exact match. To test whether your strategies are working, look at your server logs and see how many people are getting to your site using that type of a search phrase or search term.

When people misspell while searching, Google does ask “Did you mean?” and gives you the correct spelling, but some usability studies show that people don’t even bother to see the alternative options provided by Google. Hence, it would be wise to cover all your bases.

Regarding negative keywords and when you should use them, Cindy advises to use them in your broad match and even sometimes in phrase match terms. If you are bidding on words, you don’t necessarily want to pay for people to click on ‘reviews’ or ‘how to’. In fact, this is where you want to use your natural search to pop up for reviews and “how to” and informational type keywords. As a result, you might want to put these in as negative keywords to prevent your ads from showing when people are searching with those keywords. Use this technique with broad match ad group that you run or with the keywords that you put in. Use this method for phrase match too. However, you don’t need to use this for exact match since you will only be bidding for the exact keywords that you want.

At the end of the first segment, Cindy informed listeners that Google now has a special feature in their keyword research tool that searches for what possible negative keywords there might be and just adds them into your campaign or your ad group. You can also do a search on Google to see what other variations of that term are coming up and if the terms you are selecting are relevant.

Working With the Various Parameters of a Campaign

What are you looking for when you manage your campaign? You must look at analytics and find some way of tracking sales from your campaign conversions. Add java script to your ‘thank you’ page on your website so that Google tracks conversions for you. Google puts a 30 day cookie on there, so it may not match up one for one with your analytics reports.

There is a little bit of discrepancy in the reports because someone may have originally come in through a pay per click ad but they purchased when they got the newsletter, so the sale gets attributed to the newsletter click rather than the pay per click ad. However, Google realizes that they still came through pay per click and Google will tag that as a conversion for itself. It’s an exact science but you must be able to match up apples and oranges sometimes. If you don’t have the luxury of being able to track conversions to that degree, then definitely look at the click through rate.

The higher click through rate you are getting, the more effective your ad is and, as a result, people are clicking on it. Click through rate is the percentage of people that actually clicked depending on the number of impressions there were. If your getting a lot of impressions but not many people are clicking, this may indicate that your ad isn’t attracting them or it is not positioned high enough or maybe it is too high. So play with that a bit.

A few other things that are gauges are the:

• Minimum bid amount: you don’t have any control over this. Google automatically adjusts this. So the minimum bid is actually one penny, and if it goes up by a penny or more i.e. if it goes from 5 to 10 and then 10 to 20 and if u see it go over 5 cents minimum bid you know something is not right. It actually indicates that Google is increasing your minimum bid because your ad is not getting clicked on that much.
  
• Google rewards for good ads, so work on your ads. Do AB testing on ads. Use the ad variations tab. Google will keep track of the click through rate for the ads and will tell you, if you have 2 ads running, which one is doing better. As a result, you can get Google to automatically show the better ad more often, or you can set it to manually where Google will show each ad the same number of times and you can determine which one is doing better and make adjustments accordingly.

You don’t want to have two totally different ads up there. You just want to start with one ad and make a change, such as switching your descriptions line 1 and 2 or using the dynamic keyword insertion on the title versus not using it. Make minor adjustments and keep not more than three ads up. Cindy advises that making manual adjustments is actually better than letting Google do it unless it is really hard for you to manage things manually either because your campaign is really large or you don’t have enough time.

• Another thing that affects your ad position apart from the quality of your ad is your maximum bid. Google positions your ad based on your quality score i.e. how well your ad is doing and how much you’re willing to bid for it, as well as other factors. They don’t reveal their whole algorithm for this but if you want to raise your ad position when you are getting started you might want to initially bid a little bit higher with your maximum bid in order to get a higher position out there. Afterwards, when your click through rate is pretty good you can throttle that down a little bit and go with a lower maximum bid because your ad is working.

When asked whether or not we should go after the top three positions on the page for that keyword or whether it is better to be in the top ten, Cindy explained that if your budget allows it the top 2 positions, then go for them as they are always favorable because not everyone sees them as sponsored ads. If they are on the left hand side on the top, some people automatically think they are the number 1 and 2 positions of the search results. Hence, if your destination page is really relevant to what they are searching for and it should be, it doesn’t hurt to be in those top two positions if your budget will call for it.

However, if you can’t afford to do this or you are bidding on way too many key words in order to have that sort of exposure, then on the right hand side, opt for being down one or two ads and don’t be at the very top on the right hand side. In Google it is difficult to do this because you don’t have the degree control you still have or used to have in Yahoo. In Yahoo you could and maybe you still can bid to position. However, Yahoo may be changing that and switching over to Google and MSN’s model which would make it more difficult to bid to position but would ensure more relevant ads.

If you are down a little bit on the right hand side it might actually be beneficial because in eye tracking studies they talk about the golden triangle. This study shows that when your working from the top left to the bottom right or if you picture someone’s eyes moving across the page, they might not actually hit that top right hand side of the page and see the ads that are right at the top, so maybe positions 3 or 4 are better.

Again, testing is necessary. If you are at position 3 or 4 go ahead and increase your bid and see if you get more conversions or a better click through rate. Sometimes you see an average position can be a decimal number e.g. 3.4. This is because people set their budgets differently i.e. if you have a daily budget that is not going to cover the amount of impressions or clicks that you would actually receive if you had a higher budget, your ad will not show all the time. So sometimes it will be 3 or 4, sometimes it will be 2- this is how they get the decimal point there. It is actually like an overall average.

Regarding how to track those conversions and whether there is a code you need to add to the page, you can take Google’s tracking code and add that to your page. If you are using an analytics programs, put their code there as well so that they can track your conversions and sells. So look at it from both angels. When your comparing apples and oranges sometimes you just have to sort of make fruit juice and find the happy medium i.e. what is the real picture. Google is saying this and my analytics program is saying something different but at some point they come together and it makes for a real story.

Another important point to remember is that the “Thank you” page or conversions page or “order has been processed” page is a third party cookie so you’ll have to have a site or server that allows you to track conversions. Since there may be variations in the different conversions shown, which figure is more reliable? Is it the one given by your analytics program or Google?

The Google conversion, as we know, shows up in the interface itself. Cindy says that the figures you rely on depends on who you have to please. If the people you want to please are your bosses and they are looking at your analytics tool, help them to understand that there are some variations there and explain why there are these variations. It’s good to present all the data and offer a summary based on it.

If you use Google’s figures, Google is saying “hey they came from us and they bought from you at some point in time.” The analytics tool does not recognize where the visitor initially came from and says “when they came and bought, they came this way (i.e. either through pay per click ad or a newsletter)”. Remember that the cookie holds the information for 30 days.

If you want to reduce your cost per click and still maintain your position, once you get a good click through rate going and you have a pretty high maximum bid but maybe your not paying that much, go ahead and throttle your max bid down a little bit. You might even go one or two cents below what your average cost per click is. Keep your eye on it. If your click through rate on your ad is good enough, your average cost per click should decrease.

Working with Creatives AKA Ads

In the last segment, Cindy talked about the ad creative and working with ad text for Google. She also discussed Adwords as well as some new tools Google has released.

Adding to the tips given in the last segment regarding reducing your cost per click, Brooke advised listeners to separate their campaigns out i.e. separate their content and their search. Google sets this up automatically i.e. you’re automatically opted in to the content network so you should either opt out or set it up separately so that you can monitor your campaign more effectively.

Marketers must also make sure that they check their destination pages for relevancy and adjust their keywords. Check where the people who click on your ad are landing and ask yourself whether that page(s) should those be customized for each keyword or each campaign theme.

A lot of people think “I’ll send them (i.e. the people who click on the ad) to the home page and they can go everywhere from there. However, studies have shown that we have a low attention span. We are not going to reach a site and then start searching for what we were looking for. If we click on an ad or on a link, we want to go directly to what it was we were looking for. So send people to a destination page that is as targeted as you can possibly make it. If it means creating landing pages or a page that is separate (i.e. it looks like your site and feels like your site but it’s not actually a link from your site), then by all means go ahead and do that.

This applies to within your ad groups as well. When you set up an ad group in Google, set up your ad creative with landing pages and destination URLs, and this will apply as a default to all the keywords in that ad group. However, if for instance that ad is really relevant to a particular keyword but there’s a more targeted page to send the keyword to, you can edit the keyword and put in a different destination URL, but be sure to add a tracking code for your analytics program to it. You can do this keyword by keyword as well as this really helps with conversions.

Some people strip off the navigation to give users fewer choices to go to i.e. instead of taking them to a page that has the regular “About Us” or “contact Agency” information, take them to a page that involves filling out a form or clicking the ‘buy’ button or signing up for a newsletter or something. You might want to test whether this approach is suitable for you because if you are, for example, a purely e commerce site, you might want to let people surf the rest of your site, be able to look at other things and do some comparisons etc.

You add tracking codes to the destination URL to be able to tell where the clicks are coming from in your analytics program. You add the tracking code to the destination URL at the end of the “.htm” or the “.html”. However, it depends on the type of the analytics program you are using because each program has its own way of doing it. In Core Metrics, for example, there is a generator that generates the code saying “given these parameters, here is the code you want to use”.

In Google Analytics there is a certain format that needs to be followed so that the analytics program will be able to recognize your tracking code and will be able to track it accordingly. It is another way of checking whether or not the reports that Google has sent you are true and are coming directly from Google Adwords. You can see it in the interface that when you want to check it in your web stats program you want to add some sort of tracking code. Tracking helps small businesses spend their money wisely and know what is going on with their campaigns.

We all want to know how we can write a better ad. Cindy advises “write in their language. If you know who your target audience is, write to them in their language and find out what their age group is and whether the audience is composed of more males or females. Give them a persona- give them an age, a gender and even a job. Figure out what it is that they will be looking for and then write to them based on this information”. Also, don’t just use the benefits statement for your company. Focus on what’s going to benefit them and use that verbiage in your ad.

Be careful about using “Looky Lou” words e.g. ‘how to’ etc, which aim to capture the web users attention when they are doing research. Whether or not you should use “Looky Lou” words depends on your budget. Do you really want to be paying for those clicks to attract people that are doing research (and may not be interested in purchasing) to come to your site? If you’re just getting started with your campaign, Cindy advises to stay away from this. However, as you get better at it, can monitor it better and have a larger budget, you can cry using these Looky Lou words.

When your local targeting, you can actually save some ad text by targeting, for example, San Diego, California in the campaign. Google automatically types that in for you at the end of your ad so that, in essence, you have a fourth line that you can use instead of actually putting the word “San Diego California” or “San Diego” in the actual title or description. In this way you can save on those two words. You also have the option of targetinf regionally. Apart from this, Google has their keyword tools that you can use to make further suggestions and you can use a thesaurus for similes.

Cindy informed listeners about a few of Google’s latest releases:

• Google has a service for non profits called Google Grants and you may be able to sign up for it even though it is still in the Beta testing stage. The address is Google.com/grants. Google doesn’t offer grants to religious and political groups and you need to meet certain other requirement to qualify. They just want to fund groups that will benefit all types of people. If you qualify for the Google grants, your ad spend will be zero i.e. you don’t have to pay anything you get to put your ads out there. But since it is still in Beta it is still not clear whether or not they will have a keyword limitation.
  
• Google has just released Google Business Local which is now out of Beta. It serves local business looking to market locally. However, you need to be an Adword’s client. Hence it is now possible to get your local business in Google. They also are allowing local business to target worldwide e.g. if you live and run your business in San Diego, which is a tourist destination, you might want to target worldwide because people will be coming to San Diego at some point. Ad scheduling is also offered now which is basically day parting, i.e. turning ads off and on at different times of the day and you can change your bid for different times of the day as well.

Research shows that a lot of people do their personal online shopping during the work week especially during lunch hours, so it would be a good idea to advertise during this time slot.

• The Adwords Editor is the latest release which is used to manage your campaigns. You can download it to your desktop. However, Cindy doesn’t find the editor to be particular useful and thinks that the interface is sufficient. You can find out more about this at the “seroundtable.com” (i.e. Search Engine Roundtable) archives section. It was a June 22nd posting titled “Small but Important Google Adwords Features and Fixes”.