Does Your Site Load Fast Enough for Adwords?

Google has already announced that page loading time was going to be a factor in Adwords quality scores, but now you can see if your landing page is quick enough. The change is supposed to go into effect in mid-June. The Inside Adwords Blog announced today that you can now view load time evaluations on the Keyword Analysis page.

So how do you get to the Keyword Analysis page? It's pretty easy once you know where to look.

Start at the Ad Group level and make sure your keywords are visible.

Next to each keyword is a magnifying glass icon

Click on the icon to receive the following box and click the "Details and recommendations" link.

This brings you to a breakdown of quality score elements. You can see your landing page load time at the bottom of the box.

In theory this metric becomes an official part of the quality score next month and it has an impact on both your position and your cost per click! If your web site is not loading fast enough now is the time to assess why. Is there too much junk on your landing page? Is your hosting company doing you wrong? There could be numerous reasons as to why this could be happening, but the bottom line is you should fix it anyways! Your visitors will thank you.

Ask not what position your ad is in but what position best serves your business

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"I want to come up first in Google"

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This statement echoes in my head because 90% of the time it's in the first few words of each phone call I get. This statement creates great conversations on the business, products, services, market areas, and other key elements of the marketing strategy. This helps us understand the businesses we are serving but it does not address the issue of search engine position.

I rarely address the "I want to be first" statement directly because it is fundamentally flawed and not in line with the real business objectives. Business people are by nature competitive they want to win and they want to be first. Being first serves our egos but it's not necessarily the best place for your business.

Position counts but you cannot get so focused on one attribute of the game that you lose focus on the big things. Advertising needs to feed your business in balance with the budget and your ability to serve new business. We have seen examples of too much new business where clients have had us throttle back to give operations a chance to catch their breath. In other cases we reduced the client's position bids because being first made the sales unprofitable. If it costs $100 to generate $50 in gross profit you do not want to do that too many times.

Golden Rule of Positioning #1: Position your ad as high as necessary but no higher

We like to look at this from a business objective standpoint, so we often ask clients how much is a new customer worth to your business? This is often a thought-provoking question that creates a great dialog. If the client decides that a sales lead is worth $100 then the process becomes one of finding the maximum number of leads that you can generate with a cost at or below that number and within budget. There is a relationship between the cost of the lead and the quantity of leads you can generate. In most situations the more leads you generate the high the cost per lead since you are getting into less qualified traffic with lower response rates or you are paying more to be in a higher position.

Another limiting factor in this game is the budget, and yes, everyone has one.

There come times in Adwords Management when the daily budget is regularly stopping ad delivery because there is more traffic than money. In these cases the last place you want to be is first because your marketing goals just changed. The goal in this case becomes getting the cheapest clicks possible resulting in the most visitor per dollar.

Like many business decisions position is a ying and yang challenge with position, click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and budget. The general rules are:

1. The lower the position the higher the CPC
2. The lower the position the higher the CTR
3. The more visitors the more business
4. The higher the CPC the fewer the visitors
5. The budget ends the game

The problem is that these statements are not 100% correct although they are generally true. Did you see how I talked out of both sides of my mouth at the same time? Higher position does not always create a higher CTR and a more visitors do not always create more business. What you have to do is find the right balance for your business and then consistently execute that strategy. A healthy web site has a good balance between its direct, referral, paid, and organic with a steady growth.

Does This Ad Group Make My Campaign Look Fat?

Google Adwords can be a beautiful yet dangerous mistress... her seemingly targeted traffic, easy going daily budgets, and conservative broad matching. 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 (I'm looking at you Ben Stiller). 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.

You know Adwords isn't perfect but she's the best you can get. Sure there's other fish in the sea, but that MSN chick has a lazy eye and a handlebar mustache... and who knows where those skanky banner ads have been.

Since you can't buy your Adwords account flowers, what can you do to keep the romance alive?

Do What You're Told!

Adwords holds all the cards in this relationship so don't push your luck. Adwords tells you to use small focused ad groups yet you insist on a bucket. Adwords tells you to match the landing page to your ad and you send traffic to the home page. She tells you to not leave your socks on the floor in the living room... no, wait that's my girlfriend... well you get the idea. You could make your life a lot easier if you just did what you were told. Adwords tells you how to do it right, listen!

Ask Questions

Have you ever screwed up big time with your special lady friend, and now she won't talk to you? Seeing as you're not even sure what you did, it's time to do some reconnaissance with her best friend to figure out what just happened. I'm kind of like Adwords' best girlfriend for a living.

My company gets a lot of calls from people that have been running their own Adwords Campaigns and the basic gist of most conversations is "what the hell happened to my account?" Adwords will tell you if you just ask the right way. A Search Query Report can call attention to huge amounts of waste due to the occasionally faulty logic of extended broad matching. Or a good Placement Report will show a few sites that are impressively unrelated to your business are sucking up lots of money through the content network. Adwords is full of lots of good data; you have to figure out how to turn it into information.

Put Some Effort Into Your Relationship

To be successful at anything you have to put some work into it. Keeping an Adwords Account up and running seems deceptively simple, and it is if you don't want the best possible return out of your spending. Make plans for a date with your Adwords account on a regular basis. Light a candle, add some keywords, put on some make out music, look for inactive keywords, freshen your ad copy, look at your account from top to bottom and see what you can do to make it over. If that doesn't work, talk about your feelings... chicks dig that.

Try Not to Talk About Money

I'm not saying Adwords is a gold digger... she's just very opportunistic when it comes to your declared assets. Adwords has some settings that are supposed to be fun and easy and are labeled with cool words like "automatic" and "optimizer." When Adwords wants to automatically optimize something for you, run for your life! Features like the budget optimizer are a way of getting you to fess up to how much you're willing to spend and then taking it from you.

With a little work you and your Adwords account can be happy together for a long time, but if all else fails send Google Flowers... you never know :)

Expanded Broad Match Speaks German Now Too? Scheisse!

Break out your Google-hosen, Adwords speaks German. Today I am impressed/worried about how smart broad match is becoming. I was reviewing a Search Query Report when I can across this: "arbeit von zu hause." I might have been a linguist in a past life, but I'm not bidding on German keywords in this campaign.

It's fair to say that broad matching isn't the most beloved Adwords feature for a lot of Search Marketers. Personally I kind of like broad match, it is not without purpose. I find it inspirational. You can get a clearer view of how people really search... the creativity of the general public with a blank search box is not to be underestimated. It helps me find good new keywords and lots of negative keywords too. Plus I think you're pretty conceited if you believe you can sit in your office and conjure up every possible combination of words that will drive profitable traffic to your web site.

On the one hand I'm impressed that Google made a multilingual leap that was correct. It's not like the phrase is off topic, it's dead on, but how did Google put this together? Are they using translation software somewhere? Did somebody else bid on this in an ad group containing its English counterpart and Google connected the two...? I mean seriously, it's another language. The organic results are all in German.

The part that I am worried about is what happens if they are making poor translations. English isn't an easy language to start with, a lot of the meaning of words in our language and others is based on context. Does this mean in the future I'm going to have to translate half of my search query report and figure out if it's good traffic? Are my negative keywords going to look like this: tton-i ap seo-yo, sa bai di mai, ta mina pengar...

Well I guess this is just one more thing for me to keep an eye on! At least it looks like being a quintilingual Military Intelligence analyst is going to pay off after all :)

Getting Google Slapped

It happens to everyone and you just have to learn how to fix it. A Google Slap is when Google suddenly wants a lot more money for your keyword. The typical story is a keyword that cost .50 yesterday is suddenly $5 or $10 and the word is "Inactive for Search" until you increase your bid. That's a Google Slap and it hurts and raises a red welt on your wallet and traffic flow.

To understand what is happening you have to understand the world according to Google. Google is seeking to improve the search experience because they know that is what drives the value of Google. The Google Slap is nothing more than one part of the cycle of improving the search experience. What is happening is that Google's system has detected that your keyword may not be contributing to that experience. The way they tell you that they are unhappy with that word is they simply increase the bid to a pain level that will get your attention. You have to admit that increasing your marketing expense by 10x is an attention getter.

Nobody really knows exactly what triggers this process or what the specific rules are but we do know what the general rules are. Google calculates a quality score and shows you the results of that calculation in a very broad sense. On your keyword detail page you will see the quality score range. This is not the default so you may need to customize your display to show the quality score. Here is what that looks like.

Google does not tell you what the quality score is but rather what broad range your score fits into. These levels are: Great, OK, Poor, and Poor + Inactive. While details of this quality score are cloaked deep inside Google we can tell you that quality score and organic page position are very closely related and share many of the same evaluation attributes. If you improve your quality score you almost always improve your search engine optimization. Conceptually what Google is looking at is how does the keyword connect to the ad copy and the landing page. If they think that your ad contributes to a better search experience then your quality score will be great but if it detracts from the search experience get ready to be slapped.



So you have been slapped, now what? Well the options are improve your quality score, delete the keyword, raise the bid, pause the keyword, or do nothing. Google never points out the pause or do-nothing option but they do exist.

Improving the quality score requires rethinking the keyword, ad copy, and landing page. In tests that we have performed its seems that the landing page is the source of most of the quality score but Google is looking at the whole series (keyword-ad copy- landing page) so simply changing the page will not fix the problem. Look at the other keywords in the ad group and consider how this keyword fits with them. If the adgroup is just a bucket of keywords without a theme then you have to reorganize them. When new clients come on board with us this is one of the most common tasks in the first month for those with an existing Google account.

Deleting the keyword is easy but it hurts if you need the traffic from that word. If the connection to your business for this keyword is weak then deleting it will improve your overall account. However, if the connection to your business is strong you have to think very seriously about how you deal with this and deleting the keyword should not be on the top of your option list.

Raising the bid is an option but only if that traffic is really worth the cost they want. If the word is worth that much then you really have to think about improving your quality score. As we noted above this is closely linked to your organic position and Google is telling you point blank that it does not think your page is related to what you think is an important keyword. We advise clients to listen carefully to Google on this. Raising the bid might be the way to handle this immediately but remember you are overpaying for that keyword and hurting your organic traffic by treating the symptom rather than the cause. If you have a poor quality score you can bet that you also have a poor SEO position for this keyword.

One low impact way of dealing with this is to delete the keyword and start a new adgroup focused on that word. Then connect that word to the best supporting landing page for that word on your site. If your quality score increased to OK or Great level then the keyword will live to create traffic another day. Quality score problems are often caused by adgroups with too many keywords with weak associations between the words. Breaking these into smaller more focused ad groups often will fix the problem and save you lots of money.

Most accounts have hundreds or even thousands of keywords. We commonly will pause the word and let the number of paused keywords grow then try to find ways to resolve several keywords in one pass. This saves tons of time and often you find that once the first word gets slapped others play follow the leader. Our most common approach to dealing with this is the pause, accumulate, and act strategy. During these regular reviews we examine the poor rated keywords because that is a warning level that you are about to be slapped. It's very rare that a word goes from great or good to a slap without a pit stop at poor. The expectation to that is when we know that the keyword is one of the major conversion producers. With those keywords we drop everything and work through the details until we have it resolved.

Don't let getting Google Slapped make you mad. Treat it as a learning experience and use what you learn to improve the search experience of your visitors. Ultimately this is what Google is after and you should be too.

Online Reputation Management, a Cautionary Tale

Business owners are very careful about managing their reputation but for some reason they have not come to realize the risks involved in the Internet or more specifically what is called social media.

I would like to tell you the story of Kevin, and trust me there is a business story here, but let's watch the train wreck first.

Meet Kevin

This is a true story and an absolute Reputation Management Disaster. Kevin, who happens to be pictured here in a dress, carrying a wand and a fine malt beverage, lost his job and embarrassed his employer with a quick post intended for his friends and peers. Kevin was an intern at a large New York bank. He sent his boss an e-mail letting him know that he had a family emergency and would be out for a day or two. In reality Kevin blew off work to go to a Halloween party back home and take some unfortunate pictures. Wanting to share the excitement of his Halloween costume with his friends he posted the picture to the left on his Facebook Page. By the time Kevin got back to work the picture he posted had already made it to his boss' inbox. Kevin, as you would expect, got fired.

But our story doesn't end with the indignity of getting fired. Kevin's boss forwarded the e-mail exchange to a few people with the attached picture. It ended up making Kevin an overnight Internet sensation. Social bookmarking sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com picked up the story and it became a viral hit with hundreds of thousands of readers enjoying his pain.

Kevin went from being a guy with a bright future and a good internship to being famous for dressing like a fairy godmother, lying to his employer, and getting fired. Not exactly the legacy one would necessarily desire. Not to mention at this moment every Google search for his name is dominated by this story, and he even made the front page for his employer's name!

Anybody nervous yet? Is your mind racing wondering what your employees have ever done online? Or how that might play in front of the next big client proposal? Need to do a Google Search? It's cool I'll wait...

Now for the business angle... How would you like to be the business behind Kevin's story? Oh sure you would get lots of hits on your web site, but those would also be hits to your reputation. Managing your reputation online is serious business. Many prospects will do a search on your business name before they ever contact you and is a drunk kid with a wand the image you want to share with the world? Here are a just a few of the issues to discuss at your next management team meeting.

• Do you understand what social media is?
  
• What is your policy regarding posts in social media?
  
• Have you trained all employees on this policy?
  
• What if you hire the next Kevin and the story gets away from you?
  
• Should you proactively manage your brand in social media?
  
• What is the policy of employees using the business name/brands?
  
• How should your business be represented in social media?
  
• Are you leveraging social media or just watching the world go by?
  

In closing we recommend that you proactively manage your reputation or it will manage you. Things happen fast on the Internet and you need to stay ahead of the curve or you could be the next train wreck.

Explore Social Networking at SLOCAMA

*UPDATE*
The links and presentation from last night are available at : www.smsrd.com/slocama.html

Tomorrow I am going to be speaking at the San Luis Obispo Creative and Marketing Alliance's (SLOCAMA) monthly meeting about Social Networking. SLOCAMA is pretty cool for a trade group, the people are a lot of fun, and the meetings are always a good time. This month's meeting is at Aspect Studios, 755 Fiero Lane, Suite 110, San Luis Obsipo and the in-person networking starts at 5:30.

I am going to be covering Social Networking first at a high level to make sure everybody understands the basic concepts, and then a little more in depth on a few of the larger networks (Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn).

If you're a SLOCAMA member I have set up some places for us to congregate online that I encourage you to join.

• SLOCAMA Myspace Page
  
• SLOCAMA Facebook Group
  
• SLOCAMA LinkedIn Group
  

If you have the chance to come out I hope to see you tomorrow night!