Advert Text Blog Posts

The Sixteen Most Common Adwords Questions

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Advert Text, Dynamic Keyword Insertion, Google Adwords

I regularly post on PPC forums, particularly Digital Point. And the same questions seem to crop up time and time again. Now, for the first time, the answers to all these questions can be found in the same place.

1. My minimum bid is too high! Why?

Simply put, your minimum bid is high, because your Minimum Bid Quality Score is low. This is Google’s measure of how relevant your advert and site are to the person searching on Google for your keyword. Google lists the following as being the inputs into this calculation:

  • Clickthrough Rate
  • Relevance Of Keyword To Advert Text
  • Landing Page Quality
  • Other Relevancy Factors

A low clickthrough rate indicates that your advert doesn’t appeal to the searcher. They are seeing your advert, but not clicking on it, because

  • They aren’t reading it – it blends into the other adverts
  • It doesn’t give them a good reason to click on it – why should they visit YOUR site?
  • It doesn’t relate to what they’re searching for – do you have what they want?

Your advert text should relate to your keyword. Ideally, you should have the keyword in the title of the advert – this is especially important for new campaigns, as Google has no clickthrough rate data to judge your advert, so it has to guess how popular it’ll be. Google go into great detail explaining what they are looking for on a landing page. Click here for full details. In summary, there are three main points

  • Relevant And Original Content
  • Transparency
  • Navigability

Can the user find what they were searching for easily? Are your advert claims backed up? Is there unique content on your website, or is it just links and copied information? Do you provide important information about your business, like contact details, your privacy policy and your business address? Are you running an above-board, honest business? Can users easily find their way around your site? In summary, if you’re running an honest business, and your advert is clear about what you do, and relates to the search term, then you should get a low minimum bid.

2. Why Are My Keywords Inactive?

Your keywords are inactive if your minimum bid is higher than your actual bid. I’d suggest that on the page with the keywords on it, you customise your columns and show your minimum bids (and Quality Score). If your Quality Score isn’t ‘Great’ read the answer to Question 1.

3. Why Can’t I See My Advert?

There are a number of reasons that you may not see your advert. The main ones are:

  • Your Keyword Is Inactive (see Question 2)
  • Your advert has been rejected
  • Your keyword has been rejected
  • Your advert is running, but you aren’t seeing it.

There are rules about what you can and can’t say in an advert. The full Editorial Guidelines can be found here. The most common problems seem to be breach of trademark, use of superlatives without backing them up on the site and banned content. The policy on keywords is quite similar (though superlatives are allowed) – bidding on other companies’ brand names is very hit-and-miss. Are you getting results, but not seeing your advert when you search for it? Five major reasons there are.

  • Your advert is not on page one.
  • Your advert is targeted to a region, and you aren’t in it.
  • Your daily budget has run out – remember that there’s a delay on your results.
  • You are only targeting certain times of the day.
  • You’ve seen your advert too often, so Google thinks it’s not relevant and doesn’t show it to you.

If your average position is below about 8, click onto the second page of results. Your advert may simply be getting shown outside the top ten… If your advert is targeted to a region, use www.google.co.uk/adpreview to check that it’s working. If your daily budget has run out, you’re bidding too much. Reduce your bids and try again tomorrow. If your advert is shown at certain times, search then. Failing all of these, use Adpreview (see link above). Google mixes up the results a bit if you see your advert a lot without clicking on it.

4. Are There Any Cheap Keywords Left?

If you’ve read this through, you should already know that any keyword can be cheap – all you need is a good Minimum Bid Quality Score. Of course, bidding your minimum bid won’t get you very far up the search results…

5. How Many Keywords Should I Bid On?

There’s no answer to this one. If a keyword’s generating profit, why wouldn’t you want to bid on it. If a keyword isn’t generating profit, then why would you want to? Ideally, you’ll bid on all of the profitable keywords and none of the unprofitable ones. And since, by adjusting your bids, any keyword that generates conversions can be profitable, you should bid on any keyword that you think will lead people to visit your site, and convert. The only caveat I would put in here would be if you’ve got a very limited budget. In this case, you may not have the funds to bid the most profitable amount on all of the profitable keywords – in which case, you should focus on the most profitable ones (it’s hardly rocket science, is it!) Just bear in mind if you do this that your lack of budget is costing you profit.

6. How Much Will It Cost Me To Appear Top?

If you understand how Google uses the Quality Score with your bid to place your advert, you already know the answer to this one. If not, read this. Consider the following example. I’m currently top, with a Ranking Quality Score of 2.0 and a maximum bid of £1.50. How much do you have to pay to appear above me? If your RQS is 1.5, you need to pay £2.01. If your RQS is 1.0, you need to pay £3.01 If your RQS is 0.5, you need to pay £6.01 If your RQS is 0.1, you need to pay £30.01 So the answer depends on your competitors’ bids, their RQS’s and your RQS.

7. What’s The Best Position To Appear In?

I have a real problem with asking me this question. It’s unreasonable, I know. Newbies are just trying to set up a campaign, and bid roughly the right amount… But the answer is pretty obvious! You should appear in the position that makes you the most money! The further up the page your advert appears, the more clicks (and hence conversions) it’ll get. The further down the page it appears, the less you pay for each click (and hence conversion). So bounce your advert around a number of positions, work out how many conversions you get, and how much they cost, in each position, work out your profit, and Bob’s your uncle. I’d suggest that starting in about 3rd – 5th is a good idea, if you’ve got the budget to appear there all day. This is because the top couple of positions are often taken by people who are more interested in appearing top than in making money – not always, but in my experience, more often than not. If you appear much lower than this, your adverts may start dropping down to page 2 from time to time, which can make your figures far more complicated. If you’re advertising in an area where your competitors are very clued up on PPC, you may find that there’s very little difference in profit between appearing 2nd and 8th (for example) – this is not surprising, if their campaigns have been optimised to the same extent as yours, and they make similar amounts of profit from each click, then they will all have a similar optimum bid.

8. How Much Budget Do I Need?

It’s not really all that surprising that there’s no clear answer to this. You should be able to generate profitable sales no matter how low your budget, though it may take longer to optimise your campaign. Ideally, you’d want enough budget to put all relevant keywords in their most profitable positions, all the time. This would generate the maximum levels of profit for you, if you can afford to. A more meaningful question would be “How Much Budget Do I Need In Order To Make My Campaign Profitable?” This is a much more difficult question to answer – you certainly don’t want to blow a fortune while you learn your way around Adwords. If this is your first attempt with Adwords, then limit yourself to a fairly small budget, and gradually build it up as you gain more confidence (and better results).

9. I Have A Low Clickthrough Rate – What Should I Do?

There are a number of reasons that you have a low clickthrough rate. Here are the most likely:

  • You don’t really have what they are searching for.
  • You have what they are searching for, but they think you may not.
  • You have what they are searching for, but they don’t see your advert.
  • You have what they are searching for, but they don’t trust you.
  • You have what they are searching for, but somebody else persuades them to click onto their site.

The first one is a problem with your keyword. You should only bid on a keyword if most or all of the people searching for it are looking for something you have. The others are problems with your advert. It needs to stand out, be clear about what you do, be honest (more or less) and be compelling. Here’s a more complete guide to writing an advert that people will click on.

10. What’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion, And How Should I Use It?

Dynamic Keyword Insertion allows you to insert any one of your keywords into your advert text. This sounds great, but there are a few problems with it… To use DKI, you need to use the following syntax in your advert. {KeyWord:default term} Where the default term is what Adwords uses when the keyword isn’t allowed to be inserted (e.g. if it makes the line too long). Note that Adwords adds in your keyword, not necessarily the search term. If you’re using Broad Match, the advert may not be all that relevant. Also, be careful around singulars and plurals. If you’ve got “toaster” and “toasters” in your Adgroup, the advert: Buy {Keyword:Toasters} Now looks great with Toasters in there, but with Toaster in there, it reads: Buy Toaster Now which is terrible. People will immediately recognise that you’ve just put their search term in the advert, and won’t click on it. E-bay does this all the time… Finally, be aware that this doesn’t improve your Quality Score. The default term is used to determine your QS, so using DKI as an alternative to grouping your keywords appropriately is not really a very good idea.

11. Why Can’t I Bid On Brand Names

If a company has a word with Google, they’ll stop anyone from bidding on that brand name. So if you want an exception (e.g. you sell Blackberries), you need to talk to the company in question, and get them to tell Google that you’re allowed. Similarly, if people are bidding on your name, have a word with Google, and they’ll generally sort it out…

12. Should I Use The Content Network And/Or The Search Network

As a general rule of thumb, the content network produces cheaper clicks than the search network, but they are of poorer quality. How much cheaper, and how much poorer understandably varies from campaign to campaign. If you’ve got the budget, you should do everything that makes money. So try them both, see which are profitable, and do that.

13. I’m High In Natural Search – Do I Need PPC?

Is PPC a waste of money, or does two results mean twice as many clicks? There are no absolute answers on this one – everyone’s got an opinion on it, and mine is that it’s generally worthwhile on everything except your brand name. With your brand name, you may not benefit from PPC unless there are other people advertising using your name and you can’t stop them. If you’re the only advertiser, it doesn’t make much difference, since your minimum bid will be very low (and hence so will your cost per click). My reasoning is that people don’t look at the whole page, then decide which company to click on – they see an advert that appeals, and click. If this is the case, then more adverts equals more clicks, and your PPC won’t cannibalise your natural results to any great extent. So, I’d say to go for it. If you disagree, feel free to reply…

14. When Does The Quality Score Get Updated?

Nobody knows. It just happens from time to time. I suppose if Google told people, they could change their landing pages just beforehand to improve their QS, then change them back to break all the rules and get away with it.

15. Can I Have Overlapping Campaigns?

For example, if you have a nationwide campaign, can you target another one with the same keywords just on one city in the country? Yes, you can, though it may not work as well as you’d like! Google allows you to have the same keyword in multiple campaigns – but it shows the one with the higher Quality Score – so there’s no guarantee that your locally targeted campaign will ever be seen! That said, if you have locally targeted advert text, you’ll probably get a better clickthrough rate, and with a local landing page, your Quality Score should be better, so you’ll probably be fine.

16. How Do You Maintain Your Youthful Good Looks?

Photoshop. Hope that helps, Steve

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The Seven Myths Of Adwords

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

Advert Text, Google Adwords

Actually, there are probably a lot more than seven myths – feel free to reply with some more if you like! There are two types of myth – assumptions made by people who haven’t used Adwords, and inaccurate conclusions drawn by people who’ve tried it, and failed. The first lot are easy to dispel, but once somebody decides something based on their own experiences, it’s nigh-on impossible to convince them that they’re wrong. Even worse, they often shout their findings from the rooftops, spreading untruths and half-truths to new advertisers. I’m not the first to try to dispel these beliefs, and I won’t be the last, but to be honest, this wouldn’t be much of an Adwords blog if I didn’t have the occasional list-blog! I’ll start off with four myths that put people off ever using Adwords, and then have three that keep cropping up within the industry.

You Need A Big Budget

The simple fact is that you can run a successful Adwords campaign with very little money. I used to manage a campaign for a local restaurant that spent £5 per day, and typically got 10 – 15 bookings per week through Adwords. It’s probably true that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you need a big budget on Adwords, but that’s because Google don’t have a fixed minimum bid for a keyword. Instead, they establish how relevant they think your advert/site are to the searcher, and reward or penalise you accordingly. If you know how to manage your campaign properly, your minimum bid should almost never be more than £0.05, and usually it can be £0.02 or £0.03. At these prices, you can get 200 clicks per day for your £5. Of course, that’s a little unrealistic for most campaigns, for a few reasons:

  1. Not everyone will click on your advert – typically, if there are a lot of PPC adverts showing, your clickthrough rate will be 2% – 10% (less if you write a poor advert), so you’d need 10,000 to 50,000 searches in order to get this many clicks per day. I doubt there 50,000 people a day searching for a restaurant in Leeds!
  2. Your competitors are probably all bidding more than you are. If there are more than ten of them, you won’t be on the first page of the results, so you’ll only get a small percentage of the search traffic…

So. in competitive areas, if you just bid the minimum bid, you’ll only get a small volume of traffic. On the other hand, if you bid enough to appear near the top, you’ll spend your (small) budget in an hour or two. The trick is to find the balance between the two. If 1st place would get me 200 clicks per day at £0.50 each (cost of £100 per day), and 10th place would get 20 clicks per day at a cost of £0.05 each (cost of £1 per day), to spend my £5 per day, I may want to appear in about 7th, and get 42 clicks per day for £0.12 each. It may be that you don’t convert enough of these visitors to justify paying £0.12 per click. For example, if a booking generates a profit of £10, and only 2% convert, it may be more profitable to bid a bit less, and not spend your entire budget. Since you only pay for the clicks you get, there’s no fixed charge by Google, so you are completely free to get as much or as little traffic as you can afford. Getting back to the original myth, you can get traffic for only a few pence per click. If that traffic is profitable, then the campaign’s probably worthwhile. Just make sure that you understand how to get cheap clicks by managing your Quality Score before you start.

Competitors Will Click On My Advert And Cost Me Money

Understandable concern, but Google are pretty good at handling this. They look at the IP address, time of the click, duplicate clicks, and various other suspicious patterns, and only charge you if the click appears to be genuine. They probably don’t catch them all, but they do catch the majority, and if you think you’ve got a problem, you can always raise it with them. Any invalid clicks that they find will be refunded to you. I manage a large number of accounts, and have never seen a problem with any of them. And I’ve always found the folks at Google to be approachable when I have had a query, so this certainly shouldn’t be considered a reason not to advertise on Adwords.

There Are Some Clever Tricks That Mean That Agencies Will Do Better Than Me

No, actually there aren’t. Google are very open about how Adwords works, and there are plenty of guides to tell you how to run your campaign successfully. Basically, all you have to do is this:

  • Keep an eye on your Quality Score, particularly on a new campaign. Make sure your landing page and advert text follow Google’s recommendations.
  • Write eye-catching, honest adverts, and keep testing new ones. Don’t mislead people, or you’ll get clicks that don’t convert.
  • Bid the right amounts on the right keywords. If it isn’t converting, bin it. If it delivering cheap conversions, bid more. If it’s delivering expensive conversions, bid less.
  • Group your keywords in such a way that your adverts are relevant to every keyword.

There really isn’t much more to it that that!

Free Adwords!

Google “Free Adwords” and you get a long list of PPC adverts. To quote some of them, “Beat The System”, “Top PPC Secret Exposed”, “Adwords Ads Exposed” and my personal favourite “Man Makes $300 Million Because He Gets Pay-Per-Clicks Free. He’s Giving Away His Secret Here”. Sorry guys, but there is no way to get free Adwords, though selling an e-book about how you can may make you a few dollars… Ironically, people are now using the truth to sell their products. There are just as many adverts saying “Are Adwords Really Free? Read This Review Before You Buy” and “Warning! Getting Free PPC Is A Scam. Get The Truth Here”. As I said in my last point, there are no secrets, tricks or cons to make you money without putting in the work. There are good ways and bad ways to write adverts, and some interesting theories about things that may or may not work, but that’s about it. That’s the easy part out of the way. Now to tackle some more contentious ones…

The Google Slap

A regular question that appears on the Digital Point forum (which is a really useful resource, by the way) is “Have you been Google-slapped today?” or alternatively “I’ve been Google-slapped. What do I do about it?” Here’s the thing. Google tries very hard to deliver relevant adverts to its users. It has to, or they’d all go and use Ask or something! There are a lot of people out there who’ve built and advertised their sites solely to make money from affiliate adverts. The idea is that they pay a few pence when somebody clicks on their advert, and then make a lot more from the site that the visitor clicks on to from their site. But Google doesn’t really like this (even though they also run Adsense, which is what a lot of these people are using. I know that if I was looking for (for example) a printer, and I saw a PPC advert on Google for printers, but when I clicked on it, I just ended up on a page full of links, I’d be a bit cheesed off. So Google took steps. They decided that the landing page needs to be relevant and not covered in adverts. If they don’t like your landing page, they destroy your Quality Score (usually putting a £5 minimum bid on your keywords). This isn’t to make them more money, it’s to stop you from advertising with them. In addition, they reward three things – relevance, transparency and navigability. Is your site relevant to the keyword you’re bidding on? Do you have “Contact Us”, “About Us” and “Privacy Policy” pages? Can people easily find their way around your site? Google changes the algorithm quite often, but it can take a while to get around every account, so one day without warning, Google ‘slaps’ you, and gives you a high minimum bid. But this is the important thing. If you are using Adwords as they intended – to promote your own product or service – you shouldn’t get slapped. And if you do get slapped, it should be very easy to fix. I’ve never had a Google slap, and I doubt many other PPC agencies have either. The people that get slapped are generally trying to use Adwords to make money as a middle-man – in effect making money from trying to get between Google and the page that the searcher is looking for. So it’s not that surprising that Google penalises them!

Google’s A Ripoff

If there’s one claim that’s bound to wind up an experienced PPC manager, it’s people saying “Don’t use Google! They’re just trying to rip you off! They’ll keep increasing your minimum bids to gouge as much money as they can out of you!” This is usually as a result of them starting a Google Adwords account without bothering to read up on how it works. As I’ve already said, Google Adwords isn’t a fair auction. It doesn’t claim to be. Google want the most relevant and appropriate adverts to appear, so they give them an advantage by utilising the Quality Score. To get a good Quality Score, you need three main things.

  1. A good landing page
  2. A good clickthrough rate (taking into account the advert’s position)
  3. A relevant advert

If you see your minimum bid creeping up slowly over a period of time, you can probably rule out the landing page – a problem with that would generally give you a single, big jump in your minimum bids. Also, the advert relevancy is unlikely to cause the problem – as your campaign gets more history, the advert relevance seems to play a smaller part in the calculation.

  • So, if you’re seeing your minimum bid slowly increasing over time, your clickthrough rate is almost certainly not up to scratch.

No Machiavellian plot to take over the world, no evil plan to gouge money out of innocent advertisers, just a penalty for writing adverts that don’t appeal to the people searching.

Bid High To Get A Great Quality Score

This one works if you assume that Google don’t know what they’re doing (or they’re doing that Machiavellian thing again!). Basically, you bid high to get a great clickthrough rate, Google rewards you with a low minimum bid, and you can stay top paying only a few pence whilst the people below you have to pay pounds regardless of their Quality Score. Or something like that. Google make it quite clear that when they are assessing your Quality Score, they take into account the position that your advert appears in when looking at your clickthrough rate. So a 2% clickthrough rate in 7th place will probably get you a better Quality Score than a 3% clickthrough rate in 2nd place. This seems to be another myth perpetuated by somebody who bid a lot and wrote a good advert, and found that they had to bid less over time to stay in the top position. What they didn’t realise was that they could have bid that amount initially, appeared lower, and then watched their advert gradually creep up the search results, until it nestled happily at the top. Watching this ‘cream rising to the surface’ effect is one of the great pleasures of PPC management, in my opinion. Once it starts to creep up, you know that the number of conversions is going to keep rising and rising, and the cost per conversion isn’t going to change very much. Or for a variation on this, you can keep cutting the bids a bit, and watch it rise (more slowly) but the cost per conversion come down. This latter option is probably more relevant if you have a restrictive budget, and can’t afford to pay for more clicks at the same cost per click. And so, dear reader, we come to the end of my epistle. Feel free to suggest some more myths, and I’ll see if I can add them in…

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When The Adwords Sweet Spots Turn Sour…

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

Advert Text, Bidding, Content Network, Google Adwords, Pay Per Action, PPC Campaigns, Testing

I blogged a while back about the sweet spot for your campaign, and how to find it.Basically, you estimate the conversion rate, cost per click and clickthrough rate for each position that your advert can appear in, and calculate how profitable each one is. You should find that one position is more profitable than the ones above or below it, and so this is where you should be putting your advert. PPC Graph 1 Which is all fine and dandy. But the other day, I was doing some forecasts and my profit curve looked like this: PPC Graph 2 Clearly, I’d made a mistake! So I went back, and checked my forecasts for the clickthrough rate, the conversion rate and the cost per click. Here they are… PPC Graph 3 PPC Graph 4 PPC Graph 5 I’ve changed the actual figures, but the result is the same. With a profit per conversion of £300, this gave me an inverted profit curve. Assuming that the cost per click is higher for higher positions, the conversion rate is lower or the same for higher positions, and the clickthrough rate is higher for higher positions, the profit from each conversion must be higher in lower positions. In my case, the conversion rate was clearly higher, the lower my advert appeared. If this effect outweighed the increased number of clicks that I got in a higher position, then it’s possible that I’d predicted that I’d get more conversions in a lower position than in a higher position. For example, if 5th place generated 5,000 clicks with a 3% conversion rate, and 6th position generated 4,000 clicks with a 4% conversion rate, then 5th place would generate 150 conversions, and 6th would generate 160 conversions. Clearly this is a danger when forecasting, particularly if you extrapolate beyond the range of your data. I can’t accept that you can get more conversions from a lower position in practise unless you have a restrictive budget (which I didn’t), so I looked at my data to see if this was the problem… PPC Graph 6 So that’s not the problem. Finally, I looked at the profit per conversion, the number of conversions, and the product of the two (the total profit). PPC Graph 7 The number of conversions is lower in lower positions, the profit from each is higher, and you get this ‘inverted’ profit curve – a ‘sour spot’. So, the question is whether this is possible in reality, or if it’s just a flaw in the forecasting method. The answer is surprisingly simple once you think about it. If you advertise in a very low position (say, 100), you’ll get almost no conversions, and hence make almost no profit. The true shape of this curve would probably be something like this: PPC Graph 8 It’s possible that multiplying these two monotonic functions (conversions and profit per conversion) can generate two turning points in your profit curve – a maximum and a minimum. I can accept that this is possible, and graphs of the above shape will have a sweet-spot of either 1st or the local maximum (in the above example, 6th). This raises one final question. In the above example, I looked at the top six positions, saw the sour-spot and understood that I needed to extrapolate further. But if I’d only run the advert in positions 3 to 8, I would have seen a sweet-spot, and thought no more about it. In this case, I’d still (just about) have the correct sweet-spot, but another time, I may have missed out on potential profit. And perhaps I have done. My conclusion is this – extrapolate your data as far as possible, limiting your graph only at your total budget. See if this kind of shape is a possibility, and investigate it.

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Small Budgets And Big Keyword Lists

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

Adgroups, Advert Text, Content Network, Google Adwords, PPC Campaigns

I recently saw somebody describing their campaign on a forum. They said that they had 250,000 keywords, and were concerned that Google may ban them.

Really, this was the wrong question – what they should have been asking was how they could possibly manage a campaign with 250,000 keywords.

Do a few sums, and you see what I mean. Suppose that a typical click costs £0.20. How long do you need to run a keyword before you can hazard even a rough guess at its conversion rate? 100 clicks? If you’ve got a low conversion rate, even this may not be enough. But to get 100 clicks on 250,000 keywords, at £0.20 per click would cost £5,000,000. And how long would you have to wait to get 25,000,000 clicks anyway???

Realistically, the majority of these keywords would get no traffic at all, and 90% of the clicks would come from 1% of the keywords. So you can still optimise the keywords that get the vast majority of the traffic, so the problem isn’t that big an issue.

So what about the other 99% of the keywords? If you can’t optimise them, then what’s the point in bidding on them – they may never be profitable! On the other hand, people keep saying that ‘the long tail’ is the key to successful PPC campaigns.

The above example is quite an extreme one – most campaigns won’t have 247,500 keywords generating very little traffic. But the 90%, 1% issue is probably true of most campaigns. If a handful of big keywords eat your entire budget, how will you ever make the other 99% profitable? They’re supposed to be the most profitable in general, with their low cost-per-clicks and their high conversion rates…

One option would be to pause the big keywords, and spend your entire budget on the smaller keywords. This will, in turn, lead you to find that 90% of your traffic is STILL coming from 1% of your keywords, as the largest of the keywords you didn’t pause take most of your budget. These keywords are probably more profitable, but it doesn’t really feel very optimal!

If you’ve read through my case study you can see how I would go about this problem in most cases.

My keywords are generally grouped by product or service, with extra Adgroups for the more generic groups of terms. So in the case study, I had one Adgroup for each printer, one for each printer type/manufacturer etc.

Then I optimised at Adgroup level initially. I optimised this by trying to equalise the ROI from each Adgroup, such that the total daily budget lasted (on average) just until the end of the day.

This should maximise the number of conversions that you get per day.

Having done this, I look within the Adgroup that’s getting the most traffic, and start adjusting the bids on the keywords that generate the majority of that traffic, looking at the ROI again.

If you have a situation like the printers, where the products are largely similar, once you’ve got a few Adgroups done, you can see patterns emerging. Certain keyword formations will perform better or worse than others. So you can make the adjustments to Adgroups even without having enough data individually. This is quite good, as you can have a stab at optimising keywords that haven’t got enough traffic.

I would also do one more thing here. If a keyword’s had no clicks after a month, I’d delete it. Even if you get a 5% conversion rate, if a keyword gets a couple of clicks per year, it’s not important; it’s just cluttering up your campaign.

Just be aware that there are clear limitations to this approach. Just because a group of keywords works on printers doesn’t mean it’ll work on photocopiers, telephones or PC’s.

Consider again the campaign that I mentioned at the start of this post. He was promoting a worldwide hotel booking service.

Clearly, the approach is likely to be valid here. If “Hotels in Moscow” converts better than “Moscow Accommodation”, then it’s likely that “Hotels in Durban” will convert better than “Durban Accommodation”.

It’s likely that each city has exactly the same keyword list, with just the city name varying. This is a huge opportunity to save a fortune when optimising. Rather than just switching the whole thing on from the start, why not work out using a few cities which keywords are profitable or not, and how much to bid for each type of keyword? Rolling this out on the others would give you a huge head-start, saving you a lot of money.

But if it works here, why not use this approach for any campaign where you have the same keywords in each Adgroup with just a different model number/city?

Sadly, it’s not really something that I can do, in my position here. When a client asks us to start up a campaign on their behalf, they expect us to build it and switch it on ASAP. After all, one of the main benefits of PPC is the immediacy of the results. You turn on a campaign at 9am, and at 9:02, you’re getting clicks.

But if it was my money on the line, and I had a lot of keywords, and only limited cash, I’d probably use this method.

What do you think? Is this better than the ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach? Give me your thoughts or experiences…

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Should You Put The Content Network Into A Separate Campaign?

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Advert Text, Content Network, Google Adwords, PPC Campaigns

The answer to this question should be yes. After all, that way you can easily monitor it’s performance as a whole (rather than produce a separate report for it, or having to flick through your adgroups all the time). Also, you may find that different advert text works more effectively on the content network – creating a new campaign allows you to write an advert for the content network, and one for the search network. So that should be that then. But it’s not quite that straightforward. I recently took over the management of a campaign that was running on both the search and content networks. Thinking that this would be a good opportunity to assess the size of potential benefits from splitting the networks into separate campaigns, I did so. The result was disastrous! They had been receiving 80% of their traffic through the content network, and most of it disappeared! Slightly disappointed, I switched everything back. But the traffic didn’t return. So what went wrong? Well, it appears that Google’s content network uses different variables in its Quality Score, or at least puts very different emphasis on the different factors. Specifically, it appears to use the age of the campaign (or, to be more precise, the length of time that it’s been on the content network). So, the longer your campaign is running on the content network, the greater its exposure appears to be on the content network. And if you turn off the content network, when you turn it back on, you’re back to square one. This doesn’t strike me as particularly sensible, though I can see why Google might be doing it. If a campaign isn’t working on the content network, then it gets switched off quite quickly. So the fact that it’s been running for a while is a good indicator that it’s what people are interested in. Remember that the clickthrough rate is virtually useless on the content network, as it highly sensitive to things like the location of the adverts on the page. So what’s the correct move, then? I’d say that if you’ve got a successful, established campaign on the content network, then LEAVE IT ALONE!!! If you’ve just started out on the content network, or you are considering it, then you can certainly give it a campaign and budget of its own. My campaign has now recovered to about 45% of its former traffic. Don’t make the same mistake that I did.

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