Adword Monster

Adwords Account Braking Instructions

2010-03-18T16:46:00.000-07:00

"I stopped my account and when I restarted it my traffic did not return and my conversion cost shot up like a rocket. What gives?"

I do not want to tell you how many times I have had this conversation, so after it happened three times this week I thought this topic would make a good article. In the US Army they call this a SIW which is a "Self Inflicted Wound" and the cure requires time and faith.

Adwords does not typically restart in line with your expectations. This comes as a surprise to some, but it is very predictable. When you take a well performing account and shut it down it seems to stop almost instantly but when you restart it takes a fair amount of time to get back up to speed. The reason for this is the pipeline effect in your traffic caused by what we call "Be-Back Traffic." Be-back traffic is a visitor that visits your site from your ad and they will be-back to respond later. The better the web experience you provide the higher your be-back traffic can be.

Web site traffic is not a singular event. Traffic is made up of multiple layers and this is what causes the pipeline effect. Each day your Adwords run you get some immediate reaction but you also get some from prior days and these layers build up over a period of time. Traffic follows a predictable bell curve and the pipeline effect is caused by overlaying tails from the bell curve. The length and volume of the tail varies by business and the web experience. The chart below shows what one day might look like. It has a very high first day response and it falls quickly but it does have a residual tail.

When you layer the data for multiple cycles, the traffic builds then flattens out and this plateau is where most Adwords Accounts are when the daily spend is consistent over a period of time.

When you remove a block of days from the data, here is what the data look like but let's talk about what this feels like from a business perspective. The day it stops everyone is expecting it to drop instantly so the little bit that continues is just a little good news in the mix with lots of bad news. When the account comes back online it does not instantly jump back because it has to rebuild the base. This rebuild takes time and during this time conversion cost spike because the expense starts immediately but the revenue lags.

Some web sites are designed as a one visit experience and they either get the order immediately or they do not. In those cases the pipeline effect is very small and might not even be noticed, but the vast majority of businesses are not like that. The sites that are like this, generally speaking, will have very high levels of paid traffic and will respond in both directions much faster. For those sites where return traffic is very high the rebuild time can be very long.

The Art of Keywords

2010-02-16T12:34:00.000-08:00

In any discussion about Internet Marketing the term "Keyword" is sure to emerge early and often. There is a good reason for this because keywords are the heart and soul of the expression of the business strategy, and while they look simple they are not. The meaning and value of a keyword is driven by the context and the user's perspective. When you put these variables together with over a million words in the typical English dictionary you can see that this gets real complex real quick.

The term Keyword is technically incorrect most of the time. What we are talking about are Keyword Phrases because the vast majority of keywords will have 2 or more words in the phrase. It is actually rare to find a single word keyword that performs well, the common exception being single word brand names.

No discussion about keywords would be complete without discussing the 9 types of keywords and how they interrelate. The types are broad, phrase, and exact and there is a positive and negative form of each of these. Then there are extended, session matched, and implied. Within Adwords you have limited direct control over second set but you need to know what they are and how they work.

Extended Matched Keywords get a much more liberal match than your typical broad keyword. This happens when the keyword has what Google thinks is a good performance record, but nobody outside of Google knows exactly when this happens. This status is actually a broad range not a simple status and as the word matures the broad keyword jumps to more variations of the root words. This is how broad keywords jump from singular to plural to other forms or tenses of the word. This is often the reason that the quality of the traffic from a set of keywords will change over time. We have seen documented cases of extended match jumping languages and believe it or not it tends to do a good job of this. Extended keywords can jump to entirely new words not in your account and this is probably the source of the broad match's bad reputation.

Session Matched Keywords have been around for a long time but it is only recently that Google started to report this on the Search Query Report (SQR). In the past we suspected that session matched keywords were part of the dreaded "Other Unique Queries" that made all of us uncomfortable. Session match is when Google connects searches in a session together to create the match. The user performs a search for a city name followed by a search for real estate and they get results for real estate in that city. That is a simple example of a session match.

Implied keywords are most visible in geographically targeted campaigns but they live in other places as well. If the searcher is in New York but they do a search for Hotel LA this will match to a keyword of Hotel in a campaign that is geo-targeted to Los Angeles. Google knows that LA is a geographic region and it adds this to the base keyword of Hotel and treats it like Hotel LA. Now not every city acronym is going to make this jump but major metros like NYC and LA certainly happen. Google will make the jump the other way as well matching a search for Hotel for a searcher in LA and match that to keyword of "Hotel LA."

Broad keywords are matched to the search using a more liberal match than phrase or exact. In this type of keyword the system will match words in different orders and as time goes along the broad keyword may morph into an Extended Keyword. In the earlier stages it will jump from singular to plurals or the other way around and it will become less sensitive to additional works involved in the match. Using my "Hotel LA" keyword example, in a broad match it will match a query for "Hotel in LA" simply by ignoring the "in" in the search query.

Phrase Keywords are a more restricted type of match and they require that the words be an exact match within the search query. This type of keyword can be very useful when you are trying to really focus in on a specific element of the search query.

Exact Keywords are exactly what they sound like. To get a match from an exact keyword the keyword must exactly match the entire search query with no leading or trailing words.

Negative Keywords are not exactly the opposite of positive keywords although there are broad, phrase, and exact keywords in negatives. What is different is that since negative keywords reduce Google's revenue the rules are more strictly applied. For example a broad negative keyword will not make the jump from singular to plural or other forms of the words. Negative broad keywords will handle the order of the words and extra words but all of those words have to be in the search.

This really gets to be fun when you start to think through all the various combinations that you can use to tune your keywords. To understand this you need to realize that Google matches to the most specific keyword first so if you have a keyword in broad, phase, and exact. The exact will get the traffic first assuming it matches, then the phrase, and finally the broad. Now if you think about this for a second you will realize that the broad traffic does not match the keyword because the phrase or exact would match first. So by doing this what you end up with in the broad are words out of order, spelling errors, extended forms of the words, and other such items. You will find that you can and will get different results from these different forms of the same keyword.

Now for a disclaimer - Google does not aways follow all of the rules and we have seen situations that seem to indicate that extended, session, and implied rules can and do creep into the phrase and exact match. The occurrence of this is small but it happens and we have seen this in several controlled tests over the years.

This is where the really fun stuff starts because to do a keyword model you need to bring all of these keyword rules together to target your audience. Now you have to start looking at the really complex part of this challenge by examining keyword overlap, keyword intent value, and the competitive landscape.

Keyword overlap is one of the most basic considerations in building a keyword model. Simply stated this is where audiences not related to your business use what you think are your keywords. A simple example of this would be an Automotive Service Center who advertises for "Car Battery." Automotive Service Center keywords are going to have overlap with DIY (Do It Yourself), Auto Parts, and others. The traffic for "Car Battery" is going to be huge but as a service center this client would not be interested in DIY or Auto Parts traffic. If you go after just the broad word your account will suffer in many ways and most importantly it will probably melt the numbers off your credit card. To solve this problem you need to remove as much of the DIY and Auto Parts traffic as possible without losing any of the traffic looking to have their car battery replaced or serviced.

Keyword Intent Value is the next thing to look for in your keywords. Intent value is what it sounds like you are trying to qualify the traffic that has an expressed intent to do what you want. Staying with my auto example, a search query for "Car Battery Installation Cost" has a much higher intent value then "Car Battery Installation" because installation by itself might be DIY traffic looking for a how-to article, while the "Cost" qualifier implies that the person is looking for someone to do this for them. On the Auto Parts side of this "Car Battery Cost" is more likely a person looking to buy the part but "Installation Cost" is probably the most focused of the keywords.

Keyword types can be confusing because there are two types of types. There is broad, phase, exact as matching types and "Root" and "Qualifier" as structure types. In the example "Car Battery Installation Service" the root keyword is "Car Battery" and the qualifier is "Installation Service". When building keywords the qualifiers are repeated for each root keyword and it is the combination of the root and qualifier that builds the keyword used in the system. There are exceptions to this keyword structure approach but in most cases this will create 90% or more of your keywords. This approach will make your keyword list much shorter and easier to work with. This also will generate some dumb keywords from time to time so you do need to pass this though a common-sense filter before putting this into the system. That filter is, of course, a smart person.

Order of Words is important in broad and critical in phrase and exact. While battery car and car battery seem like the same search they do produce different results. In an account with a good reputation in Adwords the word order on a broad keyword would match both of these but this is not always the case. If the account is less trusted with lower quality scores the broad keyword might not make the jump to a different word-order.

Research versus Procurement is the second part of intent value and you have to understand how the reading zones of people change as the searches morph between these uses. In the research phase the searcher is looking for information and they are more likely to be looking at the organic results. This is not to say that Adwords is not important, but clearly in the research phase the person is most often clicking on organic not paid results. However when the person shifts into buying mode they know that the ads are related to their search and that these are directed to sites that provide the products they have been researching. Let's face it when you are researching the car you want to buy you probably visit sites like Consumer Reports and the manufacturer, but when you want to get a quote for that really cool new ride your eyes go to the ads. People are not dumb, they know exactly how the two sides work and most know how to use each of these based on what stage they are in. Search terms also change as they go through this transformation.

Quality and Quantity is the next major issue in keywords. As a general rule the higher the quality the lower the quantity, and the balance of these two is what drives the most complex decision making processes in keywords. Car Battery is going to have a great deal of traffic and it is going to be expensive because of the volume, but the quality is going to be poor because it is polluted with lots of DIY and Parts traffic. One useful tool in getting to understand the purity of your keywords is Google Insights for Search

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Here is what our example produced in this tool:

This shows us that the more qualified term of "Car Battery Installation" is so small you almost cannot measure it. There is some traffic, but to put this in perspective it is less than 1% of the volume of the broader "Car Battery" keyword. So if you go after "Car Battery" right out of the gate 99% of the searches are not related to your business and it gets worse. If you go to "Car Battery Installation Cost" the volume is less than 1% of that 1%. If you do this same inquiry matching "Car Battery Installation" to "Car Battery Service" you find that the volumes are about the same. Now does it surprise anyone that the typical click through rate on a keyword is around 1%?

Competitive Landscape is the next issue in this conversation and it is also very complex. So far we are down to .01% of the total traffic and now we have to fight with our competitors to get our unfair share of this pie. One thing I try to get my clients to understand is that they do not need to beat their competitor in Adwords, but they do have to not lose to them. What I mean by that is that your prospects are going to shop your offering, and the key to success is being high enough on the list to make it to the short list. If your typical shopper visits 10 sites to select the 3 they are actually going to consider then your need to be on the first short list of 10. Getting to the second short list of 3 is the job of your web site and it is largely based on the web experience you engineer for that visitor. At that stage in the process your Adwords are simply no longer important.

Networks count too and they add one more dimension to this discussion. Networks are where your ads are going to serve. In a broad sense the networks are either "Search" or "Content" in structure. The search is what most people think of and this is where the person proactively put a search query into Google looking for relative results. Content on the other hand works by matching to the content of the page and the person there is reading content so the theory is that they have a passive interest in your keyword. Just to stay with our car battery example in search we want very specific keywords with a high intent to act value. However in content we want to have a placement that is somehow related to the profile of our audience. In other words we are trying to model keywords that are likely to exist where our audience profile hangs around. Not to be sexist, but for our Automotive Service Center we might want to test fashion and home decorating keywords since these have a very high percentage of women and women are less likely to be in the DIY Auto audience. Conversely if we are working with an Auto Parts client we might want to target automotive how-to keywords since reading a how-to manual is a strong indicator of interest in purchasing parts and tools. .

As you can see from these very simple examples the challenge is not in finding your keywords, but figuring out how to not infringe on others. The secret is, as always, in the details and it not the positive keyword but the negatives and other restrictions that get you the traffic you really want. While "Car Battery" applies to the Auto Service Center, DIY, and Auto Parts industries the negatives and extended qualifiers are quite different.

Dating Rules for Your Google Adwords Account

2010-01-27T16:05:00.000-08:00

Google Adwords with her seemingly targeted traffic, easygoing daily budgets, and conservative broad matching makes you think you have found the perfect solution to your marketing needs.

Then as you get to know each other and start to build what you think is a trust-based relationship, she slowly goes completely crazy. Like bad movie psycho girlfriend crazy. Make a wrong move and she'll set your wallet on fire with bad content network traffic, ridiculously liberal extended broad matching, and possibly throw all your clothes out the window onto the lawn because she caught you messing around with Yahoo Search Marketing or Bing. If you catch her talking about how she wants to optimize or automate your relationship grab your wallet and run for your life!

Okay so the opening is a bit dramatic, but this is a boring topic and starting with a little humor and wit makes it easier to learn. There is no proof that Google actually has a gender but it certainly has a personality and most of its bad behavior is linked to how you trained it. There is no doubt that Adwords gets more complicated as your relationship with it grows and so today let's talk about how it learns and grows with you.

The normal course of evolution of an Adwords Account starts something like this. Someone throws a bunch of keywords into an ad group, writes a quick generic ad, adds a few dollars to the budget, and pulls the trigger. This is followed quickly by a couple of searches to confirm your genius and mastery of the Adwords System because just like magic your ads appeared as you knew they would. So you walk away thinking to yourself "That was easy" but that was only the first pitch of the game. This is a huge mistake because from the second the account starts Adwords is learning about you and if you disrespect Adwords it will get offended and it can get real rude with your wallet.

If you want to play Adwords professionally you have to understand Google, and Google wants to create the best possible SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This is incredibly important to Google and unlike a regular business the quality of the SERP is more important to Google than your money. Adwords is 50% of the most important web page on the planet so it is no surprise that if you do not help them help you, they will hurt you. Adwords is only slightly less complicated than space travel, programming all the features of your phone, or nuclear cold fusion and there are thousands of rules, guidelines, policies, and advisory comments. Since even partial coverage of this topic would fill a book I just picked a few common ones to make the point.

Rule 1: First Impressions Count

You never get a chance to make a second first impression and Google never forgets its history. If you start your relationship by just throwing keywords around without any thought then you are disrespecting the system and you teach it to treat you that way. The right way is start your relationship with Adwords is slowly and carefully building your traffic one layer at a time. Go after only the best quality words and buy only the ones that really apply to your business. You can get more liberal and go after broader traffic as the relationship develops but initially try being on your best behavior and help Google create a better SERP with an ad group that is absolutely on-target.

Rule #2: Impressions are NOT FREE!

The term PPC (Pay per click) makes some people think that impressions are free and they could not be more wrong. Just because you pay by the click does not mean that impressions are free and this can be hard for some folks to understand. As they say the truth is in the math and here is how the math works. Your CTR (Click through rate) is clicks divided by the impressions so you can change the CTR by changing the clicks or the impressions. Since CTR is a major factor in your quality score extra impressions drive down the CTR and with it your quality score. Seeing as your bid consists of your money times your quality score impressions do cost you real money. The general rule is that you want all the impressions you need but no more than that.

Rule #3: Words are special

One of the most complex issues with Adwords has to do with the multiple definitions of a word and more times than not it is the context of the word. Somehow English readers can tell the difference between how to read a document and how they read the document. Same word but different context and this happens much more than you think.

My all time favorite word for this is pearl because depending on context the word can be so many things. There pearls of wisdom, pearl jam, pearl harbor, pearl jewelry, pearl paint, pearl flip, aunt pearl, and many more. So this word can be a concept, rock band, tropical island harbor, jewelry, color, cell phone, or a person. The use of an apostrophes and plurals makes this even more fun!

A great tool for understanding how this impacts your keywords is Google Insights for Search

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

What I like to do with this tool is look at how the use of the word breaks down for the use I have in mind. I did this recently for a client and we came to realize that while we wanted a specific word only 2% of the traffic actually applied to their business. This helped to explain why we were having such a problem with the CTR and quality score. If you start with 98% of the searches not related to your use of the word, you're going to have a problem!

Rule #4: Adwords is simple, except for the details

Adwords lives where people, language, and technology collide and it is not always pretty. Conceptually Adwords is easy but when you get down to the details there are thousands of tradeoffs that you have to make. Fundamentally they boil down to a balance between quality and quantity. Generally speaking as quality goes up quantity goes down and the trick is to find the right balance because there is no right or wrong answer. I frequently have this discussion with clients about the balance between the multiple choices they have in keyword selection, ad copy, and landing pages.

What happened to Quality Scores?

2009-11-12T13:05:00.000-08:00

The one constant with Google is change, and recently it seems that it was Quality Score's turn. We actively manage over 60 accounts; each month we analyze each account and report our observations to our clients. This allows us to see patterns that are not visible to the vast majority of people and this month what is very apparent is that quality scores are on the move. Quality scores are always on the move but not like this. Across dozens of accounts we saw point shifts of 2-3 and all in one direction.

In the bidding process Google treats quality score just like money and it is a good indicator of SEO problems with the site so it is high on our list of things to watch. Because of the way the math works a dip in quality score is the same as reducing your bids, which can put your ad in weaker positions. What we observed is that almost across the board there were 2-3 point reductions in quality score. In the past a 7 was an average keyword quality score, but it appears that 5 is the new 7. From what we can tell this does not seem to have impacted ad delivery because everyone took a similar hit to their scores.

While change can be upsetting, I have to admit that the Quality Score is getting better with this change. Although there are exceptions, generally speaking the relevancy fit of the new quality scores is better than it was before this change. This was not a simple change where they removed x number of points to readjust the center point of the bell curve. Words that were a 7 before ended up from 4-6 and the ones that got the 4's generally were weaker than the ones that earned 6's. Quality score in a very broad sense is reasonably accurate and fair and while you might want a higher score the real question is do you deserve it? We get calls every day from people wanting us to improve their quality scores but they almost never want to the hard work required to impact this number.

Our guess of what is happening is that they are moving the center of the curve toward 5 to give more room in the process. With the average sitting at 7 and reporting only whole numbers it gave very little room to show the finer details. In the long run this is better for the system for the center point to be at, well, the center point. Theoretically there may be a risk of losing positions if the change rolls into your account before your competitor. So far we have not seen any indication of that happening, but we are watching very carefully.

Adwords Quality Score and Organic Page Scores share lots of attributes so it is important for both sides of your web strategy team to watch these numbers and to learn from them.

The Adwords Bid Simulator - What's Really Going on Here?

2009-09-09T09:41:00.000-07:00

Google likes to come up with new and helpful tools to make it easier to manage an Adwords account to reach their goals. Wait what? Yup, most of the suave little tools they come up with are tilted in their favor not yours! Like I've said before Google is just like Vegas, the house always wins. The more information they give you, the more paranoid you feel about how much you are bidding. The First Page Bid info that was launched a while back basically gives you what they want you to bid to get on the first page of search results. Can you get on the first page for less? Oftentimes yes. Will most people just blindly believe the First Page Bid and apply it directly to their account without testing it? Oftentimes yes. Apparently this was such a hit with the accounting department they decided to up the ante and introduce the Bid Simulator. Now they're leveraging impressions against your bid in an effort to extract more money from your wallet. Tread lightly with this one kids!

So here's an example of the Bid Simulator for you to check out. This is out of a fairly competitive national campaign. The estimator is not bad when you compare it to real life, we did get 87 clicks at the current bid with a solid position 1.1 and a 4.52% CTR. However the tool is recommending increasing the bid to $7.97 from $3.01 which is a whopping 165% increase. For the extra money we get an additional 450 impressions and 17 clicks with a 3.7% CTR (notice they don't do that math for you) which is much lower than the current performance. Since CTR is a large part of quality score, the likely effect of this will be to drive your quality score down resulting in a need for a higher bid to hold your current position. By the way, look at how easy it is to just pick a button to make the change... compare that with the click maze required to turn off the Content Network. < sarcasm >Weird that one would be so much easier than the other. < /sarcasm >

So here's my big question: where are all these extra impressions coming from? I mean I'm not losing them to position, improving on position 1 is somewhat problematic, so what's up? Break out your tinfoil helmets; I have 2 (conspiracy) theories about it.

1. Google is holding impressions hostage

So my first theory is that even though your current bid is totally adequate, Google thinks it's not enough. They let you rank highly when you serve, but they hold back on how many impressions you get. If you're going to get the rest of the impressions you're going to have to bid what they want you to bid. The price of the impression ransom is right there in the Bid Simulator waiting for you to save the day.

2. The extra impressions are born of extended broad match mixed with irresponsible bidding

My other theory is that there will always be more impressions if more money is involved. The keyword matching will get looser and looser to accommodate your obvious disregard for money. I would venture to say that a big percentage of those "missed" impressions are garbage that you didn't want in the first place.

Although the Bid Simulator is interesting, I think it's more of an attempt to make you bid higher than it is to help your account. Think about it, Google offers you new impressions of questionable value from a mystery source. You feel compelled to get in on the action and pick one of the pretty radio buttoned options presented to you. 2 or 3 of your competitors do the same thing and now the competition for your niche ad space has just jumped up by multiple dollars. Who wins in this transaction? Not you, Google. I highly recommend that you do your own testing to find real impression levels and watch your search query reports closely to ensure you're not getting loads of off topic clicks. An attentive mind will beat fancy tools and automation every time.

The Silent Web Site Killer

2009-09-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

There is an insidious web site killer just waiting to ensnarl your visitors and turn them against your business. Not only is this traffic killer silent but it is also invisible thanks to the technology that speeds up your browser. This dastardly villain is the slow loading landing page! Hard to believe but this is absolutely true! Let's explore how you can deal with this dangerous foe.

To understand the damage a slow page load can have, consider the impact on the web experience. When a page load time exceeds the patience of the visitor, they terminate the visit and your business loses the value of that traffic and maybe more. As people get better and better at navigating the web, this patience period gets shorter. Ask yourself what you do when a page does not load within the time period that you expect it to serve. I bet the answer is you hit the stop button or just click on the next available link. In the Adwords World this is a disaster because the click got charged to account when the person clicked but the value to your business happens when they read the page, which is AFTER the page loads.

Is this happening to you? How do you know? When we install an AdWords Account one item that we always recommend is that they implement Google Analytics at the same time. One side benefit of this is that you can detect lost traffic, most of which can be traced back to a slow page load problem. Adwords and Analytics operate separately and it is this difference that can help you detect this problem. In Adwords the click is counted when the user clicks on the ad, but Analytics counts the click when the java script at the bottom of the page executes. This is why you should install Analytics at the bottom of the page because you want the entire page to load before you count the visitor. There is actually a special type of implementation of Analytics that will allow you to even more accurately measure this process. You can execute the analytic tracking code once at the start of the page and again at the end. I would love to take credit for discovering this ability in Analytics but I actually learned it from a book written by Brian Clifton titled Advanced Web Metrics. If you need to do this it is one page 135-136. For the scope of this article we are just interested in the fact that it happened, but Brian's method will actually record the actual load time.

At any rate with Analytics implemented and your URL tagging turned on, set your date to last month and look at how much paid traffic you have from Google. You can get to this data by clicking on the "Traffic Source" then "Search Engines" then click on "Paid." Next you need to run a "Campaign Report" to get your invalid clicks. Invalid clicks are clicks that Google removed from your Adwords count because of suspect patterns in the traffic. To set up the report select the Campaign Report and then click on the "Add or Remove Columns" link in the Advanced Setting section and check the box for "Invalid Clicks". Add this to the Adwords traffic and subtract the total from the Analytics count. If Adwords is higher you might have a page load problem. If the difference is small you should not be overly concerned, but if your traffic is expensive and the difference in these numbers is large you need to really start digging.

If you have a problem, the next step is to figure out what to do about it. Well my friend Mr. Obvious says how about making the page faster. That is a really good idea but first you have to decide how you want to do this. The general rule of thumb in web design is that the fancier and prettier the page the bigger it is, and hence the slower it loads. What is the patience threshold of your audience? Well that varies from site to site and there is no actual answer to this question. I start becoming concerned when it exceed 3 seconds because studies seem to indicate that the average page load is in the range of 2-3 seconds and the patience threshold of your audience is probably conditioned by their other web experiences. Not a perfect estimate but it gives us a starting point.

Page optimization is outside the scope of this article and could fill a very large book. My advice is that if you have an overly large page then call your web designer and have a heart to heart chat because they need to put their design on a bandwidth diet. They should be an expert in trimming the size of the page without impacting the web experience and if they cannot do that you probably want to go looking for one that can. We recently worked with a site that exhibited this problem and the estimated page load time for a standard broadband connection was 17 seconds, way beyond the pain level of all but the most determined visitors. The page was beautiful and had all sorts of function but it lost one third of its total traffic not exactly the result you want when you are paying good money to create that traffic. In this case we estimated the cost of this slow page load at $2,600 a month and that will pay for lots of page optimization.

At the beginning of this article I stated that this killer was a silent one and I want to explain that because this is something even the most basic user can track. All browsers are designed to be as fast as possible and download a page and especially its graphics are an area that all browsers are optimized for. They do this by not downloading everything they need on every page. They use a cache on your local drive to store the things they have already downloaded. This way, they can increase the speed of a page load because the slowest part of the page load is the download. By saving items on the local drive the second load of the page is lightening fast. Since you probably have looked at your web site before, what you see most of the time is the page reloading not from the site but from your local drive. This is why the load seems fast to you and it is also how the real performance is hidden from you. Use the refresh function within your browser to see what the first page load looks like to the outside world, it might scare you.

Another area where a slow page can hurt you is in your quality score within AdWords. While Google is somewhat mysterious about the details of what goes into Quality Score the page load time is specifically called out on this. If you hover over the icon next to the keywords quality score the pop up will show page load as a specific part of the quality score. The problem with this is that so far we have not found a way to get to this data other than to hover over each icon. The data elements of the quality score are not in the report options. We have also noticed that this feature appears to be marginal in its accuracy.

A page load should take no longer than is absolutely necessary and the trade-off between functionality and speed should be a deliberate decision not an accident.

Life was simpler in the olden days

2009-07-14T10:49:00.000-07:00

Google Adwords continues to grow in complexity and it is unlikely that will ever change. In the olden days you could write an ad, pick a few keywords, and your campaign was up and running. Well, the world has changed. It is not that you cannot still do this, you can, but Google has continued to release information and smart advertisers are using this to get better performance from their marketing investment. The problem is that your competitors are really smart people and they are not going to let you get away with being sloppy or cheap. Competitors are going to push the system for maximum performance and you have to do the same thing.

We can start by talking about the broad areas that have changed and what this means to your business. In the early days we had clicks, impressions, and CTR and not much else. Today we have a whole array of information and understanding what it means is not simple. Within Adwords we have quality score, impression shares, exact match, filtering, expanded search query reports, and many other newer items. Then you have Analytics and that gets into a whole new level of complexity.

Of the newer items quality score is probably the most important since it contributes to your knowledge of both paid and organic traffic. Quality Score is simple to understand but very difficult to manage. It is in fact what Google thinks of the relationship between that keyword, your ad, and your web site. It is the first quantified feedback in this area that Google has ever given us. Quality Score is what Google thinks. Google filed a patent on the Quality Score and we read it from start to finish. Our count of the attributes in this filing is about 140 so there are 140 items they are telling us about that affect the quality score. What they have not given us is the weight of each item. Given Google’s love of partial information my guess is this is about half of what is really going on inside the quality score. What is very clear is that organic score and quality score are cousins and very close cousins at that. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that an improvement in quality score will also improve your organic score. Every professionally run web site needs to be tracking and managing this number for both paid and organic purposes.

Impression share is another area that deserves some attention. This data includes the total impression share and a break down by budget and rank. The budget side of this is fairly straight forward in that if you want to improve these numbers simply give it more money. The Rank side however is about as clear as the components of the quality score. When an auction takes place Google ranks each of the ads with what they say is the sum of quality score and bid, however this is not entirely true. There is a touch of magic involved here and magic is another word for something they are not telling us. If the calculation were as simple as quality score and bid the positions would not move very much and they move all the time. We accounts that do not run out of money yet they loses large volumes of traffic to Rank. Our belief is that Google is moving ads in and out of the list that is being ranked based on factors they are not ever going to tell us. What we have learned about Rank is that it seems to improve based on the overall reputation of the account. Those accounts that have been around for a long time with a good CTR and run a clean account have the highest impression shares based on Rank. The problem with Rank is that Google does not report this information to a level where you can develop a specific strategy for improving this. The data stops at the campaign level and the problem has to be fixed at the keyword level. So you look at the warning signs at the campaign level and you try to guess what keywords are losing based on rank. Maybe Google will fix this, but for right now there is a huge leap between the level of the data and where the change has to be made at.

Filtering is new to the beta interface being rolled out in 2009. In the olden days you would run your reports into Excel and then use that to filter your data to find what is important to you. That has changed in a big way since you can now create the filter and not only see your data but change it as well. This is a massive improvement and we think this is probably the most important improvement in the Beta Interface. We have not been a huge fan of the beta interface but it is continuing to improve and data filters are one of the really bright spots in this change. Developing filters that isolate, view, and edit the data in a way that supports your overall strategy is now possible.

Search queries are one of the basic building blocks of any account and yet it is common to run into an account that has never run one of these reports. The newer reports have gotten rid of the Other Unique query problem. This is where Google would hide much of the detail that you needed to really understand what people were actually searching for. That is no long the case and we think this is a wonderful change. Beyond that they have expanded out the search queries letting us know about session matches, which we always suspected were going on but could never document before. A session match is where Google uses parts of queries within the same session to figure out what the person is really searching for. For example if you search for Grover Beach, which is the city we are located in, then followed that with a search for Real Estate. Google gives you results for Grover Beach Real Estate. This is a simple example of putting location with topic but they get much more creative than that.

Google Analytics is another component of this conversion because it brings all the other traffic to the conversion. It is now possible to see how the multiple types of traffic interact with each other and the mixing of Adwords data with this makes some incredible things possible. In many cases you can now calculate your organic click through rate which is really exciting since organic traffic is a mystery wrapped in an enigma with little or no real information available for it. Yet as an advertiser you suddenly have information to help you tune your organic optimization. You can use Analytics to measure your branding strength based on real reactions from real people. All you have to do is accept the assumption that an increase in searches on your brand is reflective of the strength of that brand. The number of things you can learn from Analytics could fill a dozen books and I am not going to do justice to it here in a couple of paragraphs so let’s just say that it makes many things much clearer than they were in the past.

These are just a few of the really big changes so you have to add to this all the little things and you can see that the system is evolving and the pace of change is just getting faster and faster each cycle. Added to all the above the changes in the interface that include extensive graphing ability and now you have a real powerful system for advertisers to focus their investments with. The question is what are you going to do with this better information interface, and will you do it before your competitors or in reaction to them?

Loki - The Real Adwords Monster

2009-06-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

In honor of Take Your Dog to Work Day I present you Loki the Adwords Dog. Here in the office pretty much everyday is take your dog to work day. Despite his lack of opposable thumbs, Loki is an Adwords keyword generation expert with a focus on the Roofing industry :)

If it Works and it Shouldn't...

2009-06-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the best course of action in Search Marketing is to just let it ride. It sounds lazy, but sometimes it's the smartest thing you could do. I realize this might not always be a popular option, but there are cases in which doing nothing is the best thing you can do for your site.

We manage Adwords for a client that had an incredibly successful organic position for their number one keyword while at the same time doing everything wrong from an SEO perspective. This is a very old site that earned its authority and trust ranking a long time ago. We do not work on the SEO, but we do manage the analytics and report on overall traffic so it was hard to miss this one. In spite of big mistakes like the home page being titled "Home," it ranked first for the business's major keywords. The site has tons of links and authority that helped push it into this position despite it lacking the basics of SEO. Google thought so much of this site that it actually changed the title of the page to be more relevant and even re-titled the site links on the expanded listing.

When we first started working with this client our guidance was to leave these core pages alone! When you already rank 1st for a major keyword with an expanded listing, there's nowhere else to go so just let it ride... especially if you really shouldn't be ranking as high as you are. If it ever breaks that's when you'll need to go in and fix it, but in the meantime it works beautifully even though it shouldn't.

Recently someone decided to ignore this advice and re-titled the pages, and... well you can see the aftermath...

This site's strongest keyword dropped from ranking 1st to ranking between 3rd and 6th, and it switched from the Google generated headline to the newly written title. This new title didn't even have the main keyword in it! Not good! This caused a roughly 66% drop in visits. Chances are if they would have left it alone we'd still be seeing that same stream of visitors that have been coming in via that word for years.

Is there a chance the site will fight its way to the top? Yes. But will it have been worth it to lose thousands of visitors just in order to get back to the same spot it already had? Probably not. Remember whenever you're assessing a situation "do nothing" can be a valid answer in certain circumstances!

Confessions of a Data Junkie

2009-06-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

I am a Web Traffic Data junkie. The seminal event of my addiction was in October 1994 when I first gazed in wonderment upon a web log and so began my quest to connect traffic to sales. The trip has had several side trips with work in SEO, text to data mapping research, web design, programming, and direct sales. During this time I never lost sight of my objective of transforming the mountains of data into actionable business information. So is the life of a Data Junkie!

For years the web log was the standard for understanding web traffic and it was one of those situations where you were buried in data and starving for information. The next generation was a layer of software that summarized the log data to create meaningful information. The next major event was the creation of tag based analytics and in this class the largest installed base is by far Google Analytics. This differs from log based systems in that it only tracks what you code with the Google Analytics Tracking Code. The fact that it tracks only what you code is both an advantage and disadvantage. In log based systems you get everything at a painfully detailed level, but in a tagged system you only get activity that runs the JavaScript on the page. Tagged systems, like Google Analytics, brought the data up to a page level making it easier to understand for most people. In a log system there could be 50 entries just to indicate that one person loaded one page. Tagged systems have their own problems including a higher likelihood of errors of omission.

All of this brings me to June 2009 almost 15 years since the start of my data addiction. This experience gives me a perspective on this field of study and every month I work with data from over 50 clients to help them understand what their data are trying to tell them. Our job is understand the data and help our clients use that knowledge to guide their business. This month was one of those months where there was a disturbance in the data. When you work with marketing data you have to realize several things like; there are no facts only clues, marketing data is an estimate, and factual data is not causation.

As we started our monthly account review we started to notice that there was an unmistakable shift in the data. This conclusion did not come from one event or even one client but by clue after clue as we progressed through over 55 sets of data the change became clear. There was a major move in quality scores and organic position patterns. Google had reshuffled the deck; Clients with historically strong keywords were suddenly in different positions. Quality score went through data shift. Some moved up and some moved down but the reshuffling was clear and to be fair from an overall perspective it appears that the calculations got more accurate. The people that moved down will not like the results but the reality is that most of the moves we saw were fair. What we think is happening is that Google is pushing the formula of relevancy forward and we think it is evolving into a calculation of themes, trust, and authority. If we are right about this it will require rethinking web design, advertizing, and search engine optimization.

The fact that Google is headed in the direction of themes, trust, and authority is hardly a revelation. Google has been working on this for years and in their own development style they are rolling this out, receiving feedback, and then continuing the adjustments to the calculation. Google is in a continual improvement develop loop and this month was just one more installment. We have seen this before and we will see it again. This month I had the privilege to meet some of the developers at the Googleplex in Mountain View so I can tell you they have some very smart people working on their systems. If any company can improve the search quality it is Google.
If you believe like I do that Google is headed in the Themes, Trust, and Authority direction then we need to start thinking like that in our design, advertising, and optimization. Let's start with a discussion of what these words mean in the context of web traffic.

Themes are the natural evolution of keyword relevancy. Instead of a simple keyword match on a page a theme is looking for a group of words across a collection of pages. A collection of pages could be a section of a web site, the full web site, or even multiple web sites. Defining the collection includes an analysis of what pages point to other pages and where they fit in the hierarchy of the site. In the past optimizing meant selecting your keywords and making sure they are reasonably represented in the content. Themes are looking for the root keyword plus support from other associated words including things like inferred references in the text. Google has known for a long time that simple keyword relevancy was too simple to solve the search challenge and that it was way too easy to game the system. Themes makes it tougher and at some point it will force people to give up on gaming the system because creating great content will be easier than trying to beat the system.
Trust is exactly what it sounds like; how much does the system trust the content source. Themes told us what the content is about but how much do we trust the source? This is a critical question in search and it is also a complex question in our society in general. Why do you trust your friends? How did you get to a trusting relationship with them? Just like in personal relationships trust is built over time and it is built on your actions. Google is working on trying to figure out who they should trust. Certainly things like how long the site has been around and who refers to that site are critical but that is far from the only thing they can consider. I believe they are asking questions like: Has the site, or their inbound links, been caught gaming the system? Has the site been blacklisted for spam? Have the inbound links grown over time?

Authority addresses the question of the authority of this source relative to the theme? Authority is theme specific because a site might be trusted but not an authority on a specific theme. Just because Google is a trusted authority on search does not make them an authority on Microbiology. Authority is associated with trust but it is not exactly the same. Building authority takes time and it is just like building authority in the real world. You have to publish and let people comment on your work just like a peer review in the academic world.

So after this entire esoteric dialog what does this mean to your business? Great question. What it means is that we all have to start rethinking our web strategies to develop a plan on how to be the trusted authority on the themes that are important to our businesses. This is easy to say, but tough to do. However when you get down to it, this is exactly what businesses have been doing for all of history. They develop their messaging (theme) then work to become the trusted authority on that theme. Businesses do this because people do business with those they trust; and they trust those that help them understand. Your web site is a tool that can help you educate your suspects, prospects, customers, and clients on your value to them. Build solid themes and become the trusted authority on those themes and you will discover that Google is really your best friend and they are looking for you.

Till next month...

SMS Visits the Google Mothership

2009-05-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Bob and myself were invited up to the Googleplex for a workshop/feedback session. We had a great time learning about new tools and giving direct feedback to the engineers working on them. There was a small group of regular advertisers and a few agency types in the meeting and I think we were actually outnumbered by Googlers! I really like how interested the Google team is in feedback from real users, and their willingness to accept ideas and consider making those changes to upcoming products. Some of the stuff we learned yesterday is definitely going to be making its way into client accounts shortly.

Oh and everything you hear about the fantastical food situation at the Mountain View campus... totally true, We left well fed and happy :)

We'd like to give a big thank you to our National Agency Team for inviting us, and to Google for putting together such an informative and productive day!

Life after the first click

2009-05-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

Recently much of my day is consumed not so much with Adwords but with what happens next. Clients are interested in results and we are part of that pipeline so it is perfectly understandable that we would be part of the team trying to solve this challenge. This process shifts my attention from the data in Adwords to Analytics. Analytics is easy to use but there is a fundamental shift from what to why and that is not easy. Visitors arrive at your web site and if you are average, 98% of them leave without taking the action you wanted and we are left with the question of why?
The first concept that we have to struggle with is that marketing data is more clue than fact. Data tells us that the visitor left but does not tell us why they left or if we met their expectations. Different data can paint conflicting messages and the perfect example of this is pages read and time on site. In most case increasing pages read and time on site are positive indicators but what if they go in different directions? Getting mixed signals from your data is common and in reality it is the balance and direction of the data you have to understand.

Businesses have expectations for their traffic and often those expectations are not realistic. We all want results and we want them now but the reality is that the market is going to give us what we earn not what we want. So once we get a visitor to the site how do we earn the goal for the traffic? The simple answer is we earn the result by providing a web experience that takes the visitor from hello to thank you. In between those two is a conversation with the prospect and many web sites fail in managing that conversation.

Just like any conversation, the web experience has to build on the prior interactions and meet the needs of the visitor. Deviate from the interests of the prospect and they will leave. This builds from what you know and this is where many web sites are challenged because visitors arrive from different keywords and with different interests in your business. The classic mistake in this process is the searcher that looks for Italian Shoes, who clicks on an ad for Italian Shoes, only to land on the home page of a department store 9 clicks away from the Italian Shoes. In most cases every time you give people a choice you will lose 50% of your traffic so it will take 256 visitors to get one person to the Italian Shoes page. This is a huge mistake and it happens every day. Even if you get a 90% success rate on those 9 clicks you still only get 38 people out of the 100 you paid for to that page and you still have to convert them. The other side of this problem is that creating a landing page for every keyword group could become very expensive and the return on this investment could be minimized.

The next challenge is that not all visitors react to your message in the same way. It is very easy to have multiple sales attributes that move different people in different ways. The classic example of this is the balance of cost and quality and this varies by many different factors. If your product is sold based on the highest quality then offering a sales price can actually hurt you. How many sales do you think they have on a Ferrari or Bentley? On the other hand if your product is sold on price and all you do is push the quality of the product you also have a classic audience to message mismatch.

There is no perfect answer to any of this and the challenge is to find the right balance for your business.

Using the Content Network without Getting Used

2009-05-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

Here in the office we tend to fall in and out of love with the Content Network. Over the last couple of years it has gotten progressively better for the advertiser. It used to be downright awful for most people, but the advent of things like the placement report has given us much more control over where on the internet your ad is served. The Content Network can be a powerful generator of traffic and leads, but it is still capable of amazing amounts of waste if you do it wrong. Like everything in Adwords, there is an ignorance tax to be paid if you don't know the right way to deal with the system. Here are some tips on how to use the Content Network without getting used.

First things first - Do NOT mix content and search in the same campaign!!! They don't work the same way and they need to be managed separately. Plus the value of Content and Search traffic is not equal and should be budgeted separately as well. While we are talking about budgets and money, start your bids much lower in content than you would in search. In most accounts an appropriate content bid is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of what you would pay in search. Obviously there are exceptions, but this rings true for the majority of accounts. Oftentimes when we take over existing accounts we discover that Content has been eating up a disproportionate amount of the daily budget and no one had any idea. If you're going to do content, set up a new campaign for only content traffic and turn off search in that campaign.

Just because you can't track which keyword is generating a view doesn't mean you should just toss all your Content keywords into a bucket. Group your keywords into themes. Google takes a more holistic approach to serving Content ads. They're looking at how relevant your ad group is to the content they're trying to match. Content ad groups don't need to be quite as laser focused as Search, but you should take similar care when creating them.

While doing keyword research for Content, be bolder in your keyword selections. Things you could never get away with in search could be good for content. For example if you sell Nike running shoes you would never want to bid on the word running by itself. There would be way too many off topic searches, your CTR would be awful, and it would negatively impact your Quality Score. In the Content Network you want this word because it's relative to what your target audience is reading about. A site dedicated to running or an article about a marathon is ideal real estate for your ad, a search query for running is not.

Run placement reports on a regular basis, this is a big deal! This is the only way to really know where your money is going, and individual sites have a tendency to surreptitiously run away with a big pile of your money. This is a good place to catch fraud or just sites that you don't want your ad served on. Typically Google will catch most major fraudulent action, but we've managed to retrieve large sums of money for clients based on what we've found in placement reports.

A couple of years ago we'd advise most people to skip the Content Network, it wasn't a very nice neighborhood. There was value in there but, it was difficult to get to. These days we are much more likely to utilize Content because it is much more controllable. The tracking and targeting has improved dramatically. It's still a dangerous place however. Be smart and careful with where and how you spend your money and you'll find the Content Network to be worth the effort.

Adwords Webinar - April 10, 2009

2009-03-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

We will be conducting a Webinar on April 10, 2009 from 10:00am to 11:30am in partnership with the Economic Vitality Corporation of San Luis Obispo County and the law firm of Sinsheimer Juhnke Lebens & McIvor

Adwords Auction

2009-03-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

How the Google auctions off Adwords positions can be confusing and Google recently released this video that does a great job of walking through the process. We highly recommend this to everyone that uses Adwords.

Structure > Keywords

2009-03-11T09:32:00.000-07:00

In Adwords keywords are, well... key. There's no denying that. Personally however, I believe that structure is ultimately more important than the keywords. Picking keywords isn't really where the magic happens. Most business owners can come up with a semi-decent keyword list on their own, but the disconnect is in the implementation. Deciding how to structure these keywords into groups is where you go from a dude with a bucket full of keywords to a man with a plan.

We take over a lot of existing Adwords accounts and one of the most common mistakes we see is the Bucket campaign. A bucket is where you have done all your keyword research and then dumped all the keywords into one ad group. This isn't a good way to run an account. In Adwords the goal is to match the topic of your ad as closely to the user query as possible. To succeed at Adwords you need to divide your ad groups down to the smallest unit possible and then target your ad text to that subject and land your visitors on the most relevant page possible. To take the time to do it right is good for your click through rates, your quality score, the user's experience, and most importantly your conversion rate.

What I do first when setting up an account is pull together every possible keyword. I parse through the site, the individual products, competitor's sites, enthusiast sites, and industry sites looking for keyword inspiration and collect it all in an Excel file. Once that monster list of keywords is in place, start looking for themes and trends in it. When I start to find trends or clusters of similar words I drag them into their own columns (having a dual monitor set up can be really useful for this!). To help illustrate, let's pretend we're working on a surf shop's web site. You would break their keyword list into: surfboards, wetsuits, board shorts, footwear, t-shirts, hats, etc.

Once you have your first sort completed start looking at your columns of keywords, how can this be separated even more? Let's start by looking at wetsuits. Your wetsuits can be broken down into general keywords (wetsuit), branded keywords (Body Glove, O'Neil, Blueseventy, Billabong, Aquasphere, etc.), and style of wetsuit (full suits, hooded suits, spring suits, triathlon suits). If appropriate you may even want to take some of these groups and break them into even smaller pieces by product within your brands (Blueseventy Helix, Blueseventy Point Zero, Blueseventy Reaction), or whatever logical grouping you may have available. An ad with a headline like "BlueSeventy Helix Wetsuit" is going to capture a lot more quality traffic than one that reads "Surf Shop Deals Here."

I realize what I've laid out here is a lot of work, but right and easy aren't typically the same thing. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and make the process from search to purchase as easy as possible. Doing things right the first time will save you a lot of time and money down the road.

It takes a team to run a Web Site

2009-03-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

The reality is that running a professional web site takes a team of professionals across a number of specialties. A single person trying to run a professional web site is a flawed strategy because no one person can possibly have all the skills you need. Some of the team members may be outsourced and some may be internal staff but they all serve very specific needs. Let's look at the common roles that need to be filled;

Common Roles in a Web Site Team

Marketing Manager: This position is the top of the pyramid and is responsible for the overall messaging, brand control, and strategy development. They need to have an in-depth understanding of the business' strategies, messaging, branding, and objectives and the ability to articulate that to the other team members. When this role is outsourced it is commonly to a full service Advertising or Marketing Agency. This person needs to have their hands on the pulse of the market place and should be an industry expert.

Web Master: This position is a general management function that includes keeping the web site up to date with new content, product updates, and other general maintenance. This is separate from the Web Programmer because of the cost of the labor. Using a Web Programmer for Web Site Administration and Maintenance is like swatting flies with a shotgun. A web site that requires a programmer to make changes is an indicator of a poorly engineered site.

Customer Service: Including customer service in this discussion might seem improper to some but in reality this is where live interactions with prospects and clients happen so feedback from this area to the web marketing team is incredibly important. Customer Service is the ears of your web site. These people can be a rich source of new keyword information and missing web site information. Customer service also has the ability to monitor the quality of traffic.

Web Programmer/Data Architect: This position is a highly skilled technician that is responsible for the detailed back end programming of the web site. They design the database, business logic, and other highly technical challenges.
Graphic Artist: This position is charged with all the visual elements of the site including color themes, visual branding elements, and the look and feel of the web site. Simply stated they make the web site visually entertaining.

Copywriter: This position is responsible for the words that engage the audience and it is one skill that is commonly assigned improperly. Advertising Agencies separated the visual from the textual generations ago because they realize they are entirely different skill sets. Artists are NOT Authors. Copywriters can be subdivided into many different skill sets depending on the task. For example the copywriter that you use for your web site might be very different than the copywriter you engage to write a book, and the divisions go much deeper. A copywriter for a web site might be very different than a copywriter for a landing page. The web site text will tend to be more factual with a mission of conveying information while the landing page is more sales copy where the mission is to engage the reader and move them to action. A common mistake is to think that a writer is a writer because there are many variations of writers.

Response Designer/User Interface Designer: This position is responsible for examining and designing how the user interacts with the web site and this is entirely different than what the Graphic Artist and Web Programmer do although both of those need to interact with this facet of the design. Response design becomes even more critical when the web design work is a landing page instead of an informational page.
PPC (Pay Per Click) Manager: This role provides the management of the paid advertising placement and overall traffic management. The goal of this position is to provide the maximum value to the business with the least cost. This is a delicate balance between quantity and quality and requires the person understands the value of the traffic they are buying. This person needs to understand the complex text model used to deliver the advertising and how to focus this model on the marketing strategy from the Marketing Manager. PPC's primary role is to attract prospects to the business.

SEO (Search Engine Optimizer): The role of the SEO Expert is to give your business the best possible position in the search engines on the most profitable search terms. SEO work covers both on-page and off-page strategies and work. With the on-page side the SEO examines keyword uses, positions, and must understand how the search engines use this data to produce the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). The off-page side of this speciality includes work in creation of back-links and other elements that the search engine uses to create the SERP. While nobody knows for sure we estimate that off-page optimization is as much as 90% of the factors used in producing many SERPs.

To outsource or not to outsource, that is the Question

Once we understand the primary roles within the team we need to examine the internal versus outsource issues. It would be an extremely rare company that would have enough work internally to justify all these positions on a full time basis. Outsourcing parts of this is extremely common, but it does vary by company. Many companies outsource all these positions and the first position that is internal is the marketing manager. Those positions that are project related are typically the ones that are most likely to be outsourced. Web Programmers, Graphic Artists, Copywriters, and Response Designers are commonly outsourced because they are project type positions. Once the project is done most businesses will turn off the expense until the next generation of web site needs to be developed. Positions like the Marketing Manager and Web Master are less likely to be outsourced.

Web site marketing team relationships

While ultimately all positions have some degree of relationship to all the other positions some have much stronger requirements to effectively communicate with certain positions. We will skip the discussion of the Marketing Manager relationships because that position is the hub of the communications and the source of the strategy.

Web Master and Customer Service - The Operations Team

These positions are the most common that are sourced internally within the business with full time staff. This staff has a customer interface and deals with on-going changes within the business. Communicating this to an outsourced resource is difficult although not impossible. We have seen many cases of outsourcing the Web Master but very few that outsource Customer Service. In this team Customer Service owns the customer interface so they know what the issues with the site are and how important they are. The Web Master role is to make the changes as needed.

PPC and SEO - The traffic team

This is a critical relationship because they are like the relationship between your fingers and your opposing thumb. You cannot run a football team with just the defense or just the offense - it takes both to be competitive. Since PPC owns 50% of the SERP and SEO owns the other 50%, this relationship is critical. Part of the problem is that specialists tend to be strong advocates for their specialty. No surprise here that SEOs think that PPC is horribly expensive and not nearly as responsive as organic traffic and PPC types think that SEO is poorly documented and cannot prove their claims. There are huge synergies that a business needs to leverage between PPC and SEO so getting these areas to freely communicate is important to the business.

Web Programmer, Graphic Artist, and Copywriter - The Development Team

This team needs to communicate closely when development is under way. These people are very differently skilled so it is a very rare person that can fill more than one of these slots on the team. This team is also very project orientated so these are commonly outsourced. The key to this outsource strategy is that they have to leave a web site behind that the Web Master can maintain. It is a big mistake to have to go back to this team for routine web site maintenance.

Operations Team and the Traffic Team

These two teams need to have an active relationship with a free exchange of information and ideas. The traffic team will see opportunities in traffic and the operations team will see the results and hear the feedback from the audience they are serving. The audience expertise in the operations team is critical to being able to target the right traffic.

Common Combinations

Not every team has a separate person for each position. Combining Graphic Artist and Copywriter is common although this typically results in a compromise on one side or the other. People who are artistic rarely have the language focus needed to write great content and great writers are rarely artists. The most dangerous combination that we see all the time is combining the entire Development team. Programmers by definition are logic driven individuals and rarely do they excel in the creative fields.

Combining the Web Master with the Development Team is a common mistake. The Web Master needs to have great administrative skills to keep the web site it top condition. The other consideration here is salary differences. Web Masters typically do not make the same salary as professionals in the creative or programming fields and the difference is not small.

Combining tasks that require on-going maintenance with positions that are project based can be a huge strategic error. Project based staff like the Development Team are not cheap and so giving them operational duties like a Web Master is simply over powering the requirement and it is a costly mistake. The advantage of outsourcing your project team is that when the job is done you can turn the expense off but if you give them operational duties the expense never stops.

What to outsource and what to staff internally?

This is a tough question and there is no one answer but there are common issues to consider. In general positions that are project related like the Development Team are commonly outsourced because you need highly skilled people that are very expensive but you do not need them all the time. Once the web site is developed the typical site design will live for 3-7 years. Other skills like traffic team are often outsourced because it is rare for a business to have enough of this work to justify a full time position. The skills are very specialized and rapidly changing so it is unlikely that a person doing these tasks as one of their additional duties will be able to stay current. It is also rare that a site needs more than a few hours of these skills during the maintenance phase of the web site.

The Operations Team is rarely outsourced because it is part of the process of running the business and that is normally not something you want controlled outside your business. Businesses should always own the customer relationship because that relationship is a large part of what creates a barrier to entry into their market. Outsourced labor is more expensive than internal staff of the same skill so if you have enough work to fill the Operations Team position then internal staff makes sense. If however your need for a Web Master is only a few hours a month then it’s time to look at outsourcing.

Surprisingly, Marketing Managers are outsourced more often than you would think and it goes to the same issue as the Web Master. If you only need a limited number of hours of a Marketing Manager then you need to do the math to see which strategy makes the most sense. Outsourced Marketing Managers typically come from full-service Advertising or Marketing Agencies. One advantage they bring is they often have the development team your business needs and they already know how to work together. Even when this position is outsourced you still want to have the ultimate control of this within your business because nobody takes care of your business like you do.

There are people that can serve more than one position but they are rare and when they serve the multiple functions they maybe over or under priced. The key is getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats and it is the Marketing Manager that has to orchestrate this team and facilitate communication between the different skills.

Adwords Geo Targeting - The Other Side of the Story

2009-01-15T12:27:00.000-08:00

The idea behind geo targeting your Adwords is that you can serve your ads exclusively to people within a certain geographic range. For example you can choose to serve just the United States, Only California, or just a few cities around your office. Everybody understands how this is supposed to work but marketing is never that simple. Geo targeting is a lot more complicated than that and Google doesn't always choose to adhere to your preset geo targets.

The first tricky part about geo targeting is determining where a search came from. Judging geographic location based on IP addresses isn't particularly an exact science. For example, my house is in Arroyo Grande but according to Google Analytics visits from these locations have registered as Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Margarita. Those are 5, 17, and 26 miles away from my computer respectively. When you're geo-targeting you have to realize that you need to target where your customers attach to the internet, not necessarily where they physically are. We find if you draw your own custom target ranges that it's a best practice to draw your area a little wide especially if you're dealing with small towns. Also you're pretty much dreaming if you think you can effectively split a city. You can draw a geo target that only covers the north side of town, but who knows how many people on the north side actually attach to the internet via servers on the north side. This gets even more exciting with proxy servers, mobile services, masked IP addresses, privacy software, and lots of other technical challenges.

The other thing that makes geo targeting a little more exciting is the Google factor. Google has a tendency to be "helpful," especially if they can pick up a buck in the process (...think Automatic Matching and Budget Optimizers). When you geo target a campaign they take this as a firm suggestion not an absolute directive. All of your geo targeting efforts can be overridden by the right query. As far as Google is concerned relevance trumps geographic campaign settings. Because of this I can get an ad for a Milwaukee Lawyer here in California despite his geo targeting effort to cover just his corner of Wisconsin. This could be a good or a bad thing and that's why you need to know that this can happen.

The upside is a that searcher making a super specific search like "Huntsville Alabama exterminator" is probably very interested in ads targeted to Huntsville even if the searcher is on the other side of the country. By Google deciding to serve this ad you are getting in front of a searcher that you could have never planned for or anticipated. There are a million reasons why someone from out of town would look for a product or service in another location... preparing to move, their kids go to college there, planning a vacation, they're on vacation and planning to buy something when they get home, researching for a friend, etc. These are people who don’t fit your geo target but are specifically searching for your business.

Ultimately this is a Public Service Announcement type of post because Google will serve what they feel is relevant and you can't stop them. On top of geo targeting you do have one last line of defense, exclusions. Within a targeted area you can choose to exclude certain cities, states, or regions. For example say that you have a tourism site for Austin, TX that is focused on bringing visitors to the city, but you don’t want to spend money on local visitors. You could target the entire state of Texas and exclude Austin. It's not a perfect fix but it is one more layer of defense against Google deciding what they think you would want. In our testing of this, Google seems to respect exclusionary boundaries much more than inclusionary boundaries.

The bottom line is that Google puts forth a good effort to follow your geographic preferences. The system is somewhat imperfect, but so is almost everything in marketing.

Is Organic Traffic Better than PPC?

2009-01-15T12:22:00.000-08:00

There is probably nothing that gets a good flame war going between SEO Experts and PPC Advocates quite like the debate over the quality and quantity of traffic from these two sources. We have worked on both sides of this issue and we tell clients all the time that they have to compete on both sides of the search engine results page. A good SEO strategy will improve your PPC performance because of the Quality Score connection and PPC intel can improve your SEO targeting, measurement, and performance. The reality is they are both on the search engine result page and both hold a great deal of value.

Before I get flamed by some SEO-is-the-center-of-the-universe advocate I fully acknowledge that every account is different and this blog post is the results from a limited number of accounts. I believe that SEO is an important field of study and an important part of the marketing strategy. What I dislike about SEO is that there are very few facts and lots of opinions. The SEO industry seems to run on rumors and there seems to be very little visible effort to actually prove anything.

The SEO world often proposes that PPC is a waste of money but to date I have yet to see what their costs and results look like. The reason I believe I have never seen this is that to compare it you would have to operate both and track the cost of SEO. Contrary to the sales claims of some in the SEO industry we propose that SEO, like PPC, must be done continually. You can't optimize a web site in an afternoon and just be done. If you stop, your SEO efforts the traffic will slowly grind to a halt and we have seen this many times.

We started by looking at some of the best performing clients that we have and all of them have a relationship with an SEO expert, no surprise there. Some clients have a person on staff doing this work but most outsource it.

We examined several situations and found the same pattern over and over and we limited our study to the major keywords with clients that fully fund their PPC and professional manage their SEO. Full funding means that their budgets are high enough that their account never shuts down for lack of budget. This also means that the impression levels in the Adwords data is the best thing you can find to the actual number of searches conducted. The only data we know of that would be better would come directly from Google and they don't give reliable statistics in this area. By using the impressions from the keyword and the organic traffic for that keyword we can estimate the CTR for organic traffic. Is it perfect - NO - but it is much better than the complete darkness you have with an SEO only situation.

We divided major keywords into Generic Terms and Client Specific Terms. The generic terms are just that, common searches where the person is looking for the product or service. The Client Specific Terms are things like the company name or their brand names. The results for these types of words were radically different.

Generic Terms

With generic terms what we found was that PPC traffic was greater than organic. This is contrary to what many in the SEO field claim, but client after client had the same result. The split is approximately 35% organic and 65% PPC and this is on words that had very strong SEO positions. Many of these words had multiple organic positions on the front page.

Client Specific Terms

With Client Specific Terms the results were quite different and this very much supports SEO claims of dominance. SEO commands over 75% of the traffic with PPC at about 25%. All of these terms had strong SEO positions and were clearly favored by the searcher. This includes results where the PPC is in the T1-T3 position and if the ads fall into the side positions the PPC results become even weaker approaching 10%.

What about Response Rates?

Clicks are one part of this discussion but goals or conversions is where the rubber really hits the road and here we found some interesting results. PPC converts at a higher rate than organic on generic searches and the difference is large with the clients we studied the differences were 11% for organic and 18% on PPC. While conversion percentages varied by client the ratio between organic and PPC remained steady.

Are Organic and PPC related?

Google swears that there is no relationship between organic and PPC and I believe them. However in the same breath I will tell you that almost every time we start or stop advertising for a client the organic responds in kind. This does not happen once in a while it happens almost every time. I believe that organic scoring and PPC quality score are largely the same thing and that as systems have developed the relationship is becoming more visible. I believe Google in that there is no direct connection between organic and PPC, but PPC creates traffic and organic is sensitive to traffic so I think there is lots of evidence of an indirect relationship. PPC exposes your business to new people resulting in more return traffic in both direct, referral, and organic. I can imagine a common situation where the first search is a generic terms resulting in PPC traffic followed by a later search for your business name with a response through the organic listing. There is also the positive reinforcement of seeing an ad and an organic listing on a SERP that can result in a click because of a higher level of trust and visibility. This is how we believe organic and PPC are related.

So what does this mean?

Getting from data to causation is at best difficult so our comments here are one possible explanation not THE reason. We know that depending on the type of search people adjust the parts of the screen they focus on. When a person is in research mode we propose that they focus more on the organic results. When they are looking to buy or find a source for a product or service we propose that they are more inclined to look at the ad space. There is no way to know if this is true but the logic passes the smell test.

We propose that a searcher who is searching for a Client Specific Term knows who they are looking for and they expect Google to give them that in the Organic reading zone. They are less likely, in our opinion, to be a new prospect for your business. They are much more likely to be a customer or an advanced stage prospect after all they know something very specific about your business.

What is your Organic Cost Per Click?

Wait a minute... organic traffic is free, right? Not really. Organic traffic is just paid for differently than PPC. SEO is a lot of labor and labor is not free. First let's talk about how we get to the organic cost per click because it is not as simple as you might think. First we look at all the traffic from search engines that is not paid for. From this we subtract searches that are off-topic. Meaning searches that given the opportunity we would not have purchased. This process by the way is a great source of new Adwords so here is a case of SEO and PPC helping each other. Next we take out the searches that are what we would call phonebook searches. These are where the searcher is looking specifically for your business. The reason we remove this from both sides is that this is traffic that already knows who you are and they are looking for you. Organic or paid, this traffic is not a prospect - they are customers and we are studying marketing not customer service. The result we found in our study was mixed with some clients getting much better cost per click in PPC and others in SEO. One clear pattern is that the more expensive your PPC traffic is the more cost effective your SEO is likely to be. Clients with expensive PPC traffic clearly benefited from their SEO investments. It is very easy in SEO to not see the real cost per click.

Now what?

If you test this on your own data and your results match ours then it might change the way you allocate your budget resources between PPC and SEO. Each of these areas operates very differently and both require a long term strategy to produce results. Finding the right balance requires that we examine all the costs and not just the out of pocket.

Speaking Engagement - SMV Visitor & Convention Bureau

2008-11-15T11:06:00.000-08:00

The Santa Maria Valley Visitor & Conference Bureau has invited Bob Dumouchel, CEO, Systems & Marketing Solutions, to talk on Google Adwords and Analytics. The presentation to the group's membership will be held on November 19, 2008 at the Santa Maria Discovery Museum at 10:30am. For more information on attending this meeting please contact Gina Keough at the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau at 805-925-2403 x 814 or email at gina@santamaria.com

Click Fraud -- The topic nobody wants to talk about!

2008-10-24T14:30:00.000-07:00

We had a small victory in the war on click fraud this month. It feels good to win one but this is only one battle in a very long global war. The problem with click fraud is that it is tough to detect and prove. Any reasonable professional in this field knows that there is a degree of click fraud in the numbers but we must keep it contained.

The process of reporting suspect activity was surprisingly simple although it took a little determination to get the job done. The first report was responded to by a 1st level support person that told us that there was no sign of fraud. We followed this with a respectful "we disagree response" along with more details and documentation on why we thought this was fraud. A few days later we got a response from someone higher in the support chain confirming our position and issuing credit to the account. Google to their credit immediately shut down the Adsense account of the perpetrator and I trust they took other actions.

Google will not disclose their methods of detecting fraud and I agree that keeping the deep details secret is a good idea. However I think some more reputation management is in order for this issue. Maybe they could include some system wide data to the placement report. On our wish list of data to help us detect fraud would include a placement report with the site's CTR, Bounce Rate, and Conversion Rate. Ebay has built a self-maintained system of ranking sellers and maybe something like that could be implemented in the Content network. I think advertisers would be willing to pay more if they knew that the sites being served to were higher quality.

There is no doubt that if the fraud had fit one of the pattern signatures within their system it would have been immediately resolved. We know this because every month we see credits issued to our clients from Google's automated detection tools. The problem is that automation cannot find things it was not designed to find. It takes people to see new patterns and those with the most interest in lowering the click fraud level are the most likely to see questionable situations. This situation is a good example because the fraud did not create a known pattern signature. So the big question is how do we as advertisers report new tricks in a way that Google can prioritize and resolve them?

The reason it surfaced in our systems is that we look at traffic with a different perspective. Let's face it, finding click fraud is not completely in Google's best interests. After all closing this down reduces their revenue, but Google also realizes that its entire business is based on the trust that the traffic is of reasonable quality. We believe that Google is doing what it can but the violators are getting smarter and detecting fraud is hard. The new challenge is that violators are starting to engineer the user interface to force bad clicks and violate the system.

In this case what they designed was a floating window that was positioned over the ads. The close button was programmed to close with a mouse-over rather than an on-click event. For people with good mouse skills the click is happening almost as quickly as the mouse over event so they click on the close but the window closes before their click resulting in the click traveling to the next layer in the browser, which is where the ad was located. Since this was done by a smart person I would assume that they controlled the CTR by managing the ratio of mouse-over to on-click events. After all if they had too high of a CTR it would trigger a flag in Google's systems.

While click fraud is a very complex topic we all have to keep our eyes open and report anything that looks questionable.

My Google Christmas Letter

2008-10-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Google,

Every year kids from around the world write to Santa with their wish list and in keeping with that fine tradition this is my open Christmas letter for things we wish for in the Adwords system. We are not expecting all of this to roll out on Christmas Day although that would be nice. Better tools inside Adwords will create a better SERP (Search Engine Result Page) because the searcher gets ads that are more relevant to their search query. Adwords Professionals armed with the best tools will create better SERPs because it is in our best interest and it serves our clients.

Reports & the User Interface (UI)

This is, in my opinion, the most serious defect in Adwords. Some data is available only in the UI and some is only in reports. There are dozens of examples of this like average position is in the campaign report but not available on the campaign summary UI. The quality score is available on the UI but not on the keyword reports and negative keywords exist in the UI but not in the reports. Maybe the development team should stop and fix some of these before they move on to the next new feature.

User Defined Data

Almost every serious application on the planet provides UDD (user defined data) and Adwords is in serious need of this at every level. We should be able to create several different types of data to be associated with each level in the system. Data types should including numbers, text codes, and memo fields for notes. UDD should exist at the campaign, adgroup, ad, and keyword levels. UDD should be one of the options when you customize your screen. So simple examples of what this could be used for would be to put goals or targets in the display.

Move & Copy

This is probably the hardest to understand why it is not already part of the UI, especially considering that we used to have this. So to Google I say give me back my toy! The simple function of being able to move or copy information is one of the most basic functions of modern systems (iPhones excluded). We should be able to move ad groups from campaign to campaign with all the data intact. This should include all the history, search queries, ad performance, and everything else. On the copy function we should be able to copy full campaigns with all the supporting data. On a copy it is ok that it does not take the history forward since that would cause the account to be out of balance. The need for this function comes up constantly. We have clients that want to control the hours of the campaign and, of course, that does not work if you only have one campaign because a US campaign has 4 time zones to consider.

Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a great tool but the hook up to Adwords, oh please! This interface is horrible to work with except when everything goes right the first time. This could be as simple as submitting the GA account number to be linked, then have it approved by someone with administrative authority in the account. This is exactly how the client center works so replicating this should be simple. The hook up needs to be by account number so everyone knows exactly what account is attached to what account. This relationship between Adwords and Analytics needs to be a many to many relationship. An Adwords Account should be able to have multiple Analytics as it does now and the same needs to be true of Analytics. An Analytic account should be able to belong to multiple Adwords accounts.

Client Center

Allow more than one manager in an Adwords Account! This limitation is crazy and for our large clients it makes their life and ours difficult. Many large advertisers have several Adwords accounts and they have to sign in and out of each instead of running a client center because there is a limit of one manager in the account. Client centers should have a "Look-Only" access. Advertisers often times want to have professionals look at their data but not have the ability to change it. This is common in the early stages of our relationships with clients. I am sure they would be more comfortable giving us a first access of look only.

Client Center Internal Security

We need a client center with the ability to manage multiple users. Within a single client center the need to control the access of multiple people is critical. We need the ability to attach authorized users to the client center and then grant account access as change or look only. The current client centers forces the sharing of passwords and the reuse of a single profile. A manager overseeing 100 accounts might have 4 people on staff taking care of different sets of accounts and today this situation requires sharing of passwords. Client center users with full client center authority should be able to transfer an account to another client center within the same business. In this way we can have managers overseeing accounts with the ability to transfer the account within the company.

Quit pushing off-line tools

We know that off-line tools have advantages but they also have disadvantages. Offline tools create islands of information with data security and synchronization challenges. Each Account Manager should be allowed to make this decision and the online user interface and the offline application should be kept in sync with each other. You should not have features offline that are not offered online.

Ranges of Data

Common to most applications but lacking in many areas of Google is the ability to select and work with a range of data. Sure I can select keywords with a checkbox but what a pain it is to select lots of words. Do you select them all and then manually deselect those you do not want or do you just pick the ones you want to work on. This change would be simple select the starting item and the ending item and it would select everything between.

Changing Bids

Once we select the 25 keywords we need to work why not let me just say add .25 to every selected bid or add 10%. Why do you force us to retype every bid?

Negative Keyword Search Query

Negative keywords improve the quality of the SERP and that should be a goal of advertisers and Google. A system without feedback will fail to evolve and it will stagnate and die. When you run a search query report it should show you the traffic you got and also what you eliminated. A Search Query Report with the negative transactions might be more valuable than just the positive. Adwords is a much better delivery because of negative keywords and how they function needs to be clearly understood. Only specific feedback of what keyword removed the ad from the SERP will help improve the SERP.

Search Query

Tell us what keyword triggered the ad because it is not always obvious especially when it comes to broad matches.

Other Unique Queries

This is actually one of my personal pet peeves and it’s frustrating to have to work with partial information because it makes one wonder what you are hiding. At one point I thought this might be caused by the other search engines in the search network but clearly that is not the case because we have clients that only advertise in Google Search and they still get "Other Unique Queries". So tell me Google, what are you not telling me?

Rethink Ad copy Maintenance

I was trained in relational database design and the Adwords system follows many of the best practices until you get to Ads. To properly focus traffic you need to break your keywords down into smaller and smaller groups, a process we call granularization. For each ad group you end up writing the same ads over and over and for no good reason. Why not just let the ads stand by themselves and attach the ads you want to the ad group. This gets even more frustrating when it comes to image ads that we have to upload the same graphic file dozens of times and your staff has to approve dozens of times.

There is no Ad maintenance

Ads are never maintained and everyone one knows it. When you maintain an advertisement it actually deletes the old and writes a new one. There are good and bad things that happen as a result of this but in reality you should let the Adwords Manager decide when to delete and copy and when to change the data directly. In some cases we are running a split test and we discover a spelling error. We are faced with either not fixing the problem, resetting the test, or add the two results during the analysis. The default of resetting all the stats on the ad is not always the right answer.

Opt Out Advertisers

Click fraud is out of control and it endangers our entire industry. One way to control part of this is to have a cookie put on every machine that accesses the Adwords system and not count anything that machine does related to ads other than their own. If an advertiser is caught clicking on competitive ads then Google should take some sort of corrective action. One idea might be to reduce their quality score or disable their account for 72 hours. There are people that could figure out how to stop this by deleting the cookie but they would have to remember to do it every time they access the Adwords System. Advertisers should be allowed to voluntarily go to a page to create a test cookie that would put them into test mode. This mode would allow them to click on ads with no impressions or clicks being counted for their account or any other account.

Give the same result every time

Every client we have tests their ads from time to time and honestly there is no prayer of getting them to stop. Some do it once in a while and some do it several times a day. We know there is a test tool inside Adwords but honestly NOBODY BELIEVES it. They want to see it for themselves! Everyone in this industry knows that there are thousands of variables involved in rendering a SERP. The most troublesome of these are the local variables like prior searches, ad click history, other data related to the session. Advertisers should be able to go to a page and install a cookie that causes search engine to act like it is on a clean local machine. All it needs to do is turn off the local variables so the search results remain the same.

Get a better Position

It is no secret that average position is not the position of the ad. We all know that the top positions or T1, T2, T3 do not always exist but what I think we can agree on is they are different than the positions on the right side. There are many ways to solve this problem but the simplest is probably to just split the impression and click data down by the top and right positions.

Quit hiding data from me

It makes me crazy that certain things that we know exist are simply not made available to us. One example of this is the conversions by hour. Every computer system on the planet time stamps everything it touches so why can we not see the conversion time. We understand that conversions are not posted for hours after the event and fixing that problem may be more complex than we can appreciate but we do know what time the event happened when it finally gets to the data. When we are trying to control our budgets we have some control over the clock but no data to help us understand our audiences buying pattern. Another area that is hidden is who exactly is providing traffic from then search network. We know the big names because they are part of the marketing of Adwords but there is no detail of where this comes from. Just like Google did in the Content network they need to open the curtains on this data and let us control where this goes.

In closing

We know this list is long and we know that we are not going to get all of this, and hey maybe Google has a surprise gift that we did not think of. That would be cool. Like the kid writing to Santa we promise to be good and use these new tools only for the betterment of Adwords and the service to our clients.

Sincerely,

The Adwords Monster

Central Coast Code Camp 2008

2008-09-22T12:32:00.001-07:00

The Central Coast Code Camp is happening on the 27th and 28th of September at the Embassy Suites in San Luis Obispo and our own Bob Dumouchel will be speaking this year. His talk is called "SEO versus PPC, a technical discussion" and should be full of lots good information. He will be taking the stage at 11:45 on Sunday. If you want to see the entire schedule for the weekend, you can check it out here.

This is the second year for the Central Coast Code Camp, and we are really excited to see this event do so well here in SLO. For the uninitiated, a code camp is a FREE 2 day seminar put on by software developers in the community and abroad. It takes place on a weekend, so it doesn't interfere with working hours, and welcomes all people with an interest in sharing development ideas, philosophies, and most importantly CODE.

Your Questions Answered... Even Though You Didn't Know You Asked Them!

2008-09-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

I'm often overheard saying that you should never underestimate the creativity of the general public with an empty search box. If you've ever taken the time to mine through your Analytics account for organic search queries you know what I'm talking about. Here's a random sampling of some of my less than on topic visits: how to clean egg off windows, I want find sms for my girlfriend, is it illegal to sell clean urine, little strange monster brands, monster cures the porn site... And the list goes on. Luckily most of my traffic is a little more on topic but it is fun to see what kind of crazy stuff Google is matching to my site. The exciting thing inside of analytics that you should be watching is the questions. A lot of people search by asking Google a question, are you answering these questions?

I figured I would take a minute and answer some of the questions that I found in my data. The following are real searches.

Can Google ban you from Adwords?
Ultimately Google can pretty much do whatever it feels like. If you're abusing their terms of service they are not shy about shutting down your Adwords account. If you get banned you can open a new account but chances are you're going to need to use a new credit card too. If Adwords is a big piece of where your business comes from don't abuse their system!

Can you have phone numbers in Adwords ads?
Yes you can.

Do keywords with zero impressions hurt your quality score?
I don't think that they do. If they don't have impressions they're kind of quality neutral because they haven't been real world tested yet. The quality score listed beside these zero impression words is a guess based on the historical performance of your account and other relevancy factors. If you have a lot of zero impression keywords take some time to figure out why. Is there no traffic? Are you not bidding enough? Is a higher bid word in your own account getting matched to it faster? Is your geo-targeting too tight? There could be a lot of reasons.

Do you granularize your keywords?
YES!!! If you want a well run Adwords campaign you HAVE to granularize your words. This is targeted advertising, don't waste the opportunity to actually aim!

Does Google budget optimizer work?
Don't do it! I'm sure it works for somebody, but personally I think it's nothing but trouble. Adwords already has a built in ignorance tax, the budget optimizer multiplies your mistakes.

Should I leave poor quality keywords paused or delete them?
It depends. Just because a keyword is listed as poor it doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it. Google's quality score can be inconsistent and you just have to roll with it. If you assess your ad group and the keyword fits the ad and the landing page let it ride. If your keyword doesn't match the rest of the group think about deleting it from that ad group and putting it in a new one. A more targeted approach could help you improve your quality score problem.

How to fix Google slap?
Ultimately what you need to do is a keyword autopsy. Some Google slaps are random but a lot of the time you deserved it. When dealing with a Google slap you can either pay up, restructure or quit. If you've built a solid and relevant campaign you might have to just pay up because Google decided to hold your keywords for ransom. If you have a bucket campaign break down your keywords into more targeted groups and see if you have better luck that way. If your keyword was truly irrelevant and a waste of money anyways, delete it. Sometimes when I have some words slapped that I don't think should have been I let them sit for a while. Occasionally a word will have its minimum bid bumped up for a few days or a couple of weeks and then come back down to earth. You can read more about Google slaps here.

How do you get Google Adwords and Yahoo Ambassador Certification?
To become an Adwords certified professional you have to be in good standing with Adwords, manage at least 1 account in a client center for at least 90 days, spend at least $1000 every 90 days in your client center, and you have to pass the Google Advertising Professional Exam.

To become an Adwords Qualified Company you need to have at least 2 qualified individuals and spend at least $100,000 (US threshold, it varies by country) every 90 days.

To become a Yahoo Search Ambassador you basically need to use Yahoo Search Marketing and you need to pass the Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador test. Unfortunately this program is being closed. Existing Ambassadors get to keep their certification but the program is closed to new applicants.

(Systems & Marketing Solutions is both an Adwords Certified Company and Yahoo Search Ambassador.)

If you have questions for us you can send them in to rob@smsrd.com and we'll try and answer some on the blog on a regular basis.

Search Explained via Rap Battle

2008-09-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

Someone (with entirely too much time on their hands and lots of creativity) has put together an awesome set of three YouTube videos that have Google, MSN, and Yahoo engaged in a rap battle, naturally. You have to be a bit of a search dork to truly enjoy this but it was just too much fun to not share.

You can watch the rest of the videos at searchenginerapbattle.com