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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The one part of doing business on the web is that everyone always seems to forget that you still have to sell your products! You go through all this time, effort, and money to get someone to your web site and when it happens you don’t bring your sales “A” game. It’s an opportunity wasted.
Every day I see web sites and print ads that just show a product and a price. No attempt to sell, no romance, just a picture and a price. That’s great if you’re only dealing with repeat customers but how about the other 90% of people that are just kind of thinking about it. Consider some of the higher dollar purchases that you have made, chances are you decided to make that purchase because someone sold you on that particular item. If you went into a car dealership and asked about a car and all they told you was “2009 Camry, $23,995, sign right here” you would probably bail. Why should your web site be any different?
When I bought my new bike this week I choose it based on an hour long conversation with an experienced sales guy. I had already seen the brochure and done lots of research on the web, but I needed to be sold to actually buy it. The salesman told me why that particular bike would be good for me, how I could modify it to make it better, showed me how all the parts worked, and let me know that the store would do free adjustments for the first year. Now think about your products, what aren’t you telling people? You are the expert on your products and services, act like it! You basically have unlimited space on your website to promote yourself, use it! Put your own pictures on the site not just the stock manufacturer images, show how your product works, share customer stories, do anything that will build value. If a visitor is interested in your product and you build enough value into it via your presentation you will make sales.
One company that I think does an exceptionally good job of selling their product is Trader Joe’s. They send out sales flyers like everyone else in the grocery trade except their’s is completely different. (check out the whole thing here) Instead of staged pictures and a price they’re taking the time to tell a story. I pasted in a short article by Trader Joe’s about goat cheese logs. That’s about as uninteresting as you can get as far as I’m concerned. But look at the way they tell a story that reinforces the brand, sell the product, give you ideas on how you can use it, and build value. That’s a home run!
Now think about the ads you usually get from bigger grocery stores, they’re selling on price alone. You get a picture and a dollar amount. For some people that’s ok because they buy that product every week anyways and just want to know where to get it the cheapest. But for those that want more information you give them no substance.
No one style of presenting a product is absolutely correct. I recommend using a mix of methods. Personally I think the best thing to do it lead off with a condensed big grocery store style price and picture that gets straight to the point, and below that start selling. You have all the space you need, don’t be afraid to tell everyone exactly why they should buy from you. If you don’t try to sell you’re just throwing your ad dollars away.
I don’t think that it’s a secret how I feel about the companies that sell PPC ads also optimizing them for you. I don’t like it. It’s a conflict of interest and I think it’s awful and usually does more harm than good. There I said it.
How is someone that 1) has never talked to you and 2) knows nothing about your business, going to effectively market it? I realize that marketing is not an exact science, but optimizing blind to the actual goals of the advertiser? C’mon! You can’t do that!
It used to be that Google was really the only one that I had to worry about offering new “innovative” ways to automatically optimize more of my adspend into their wallets if I forgot to opt out. Now Yahoo wants a piece of this PPC ignorance tax Google has been charging with their budget optimizer and automatic matching. The problem is Yahoo is one upping Google when it comes to sneaking in with the “optimized” goodness. They put together an automatic opt-in system with no easy way to get out. At least Google gives you a check box!
We’ve been aware of the impending program for a little while now and some of our clients are starting to get e-mails about this new service that they never asked for. I would be very unhappy to get an e-mail from Yahoo saying “Surprise we optimized your account! Aren’t you excited?”
No. As a matter of fact I’m not.
SMS has already traded some e-mail with Yahoo over this whole debacle. Our first volley was something along the lines of: why on earth would you try to optimize the accounts of businesses that you don’t know anything about? We think you’re nuts. Leave our accounts alone!!!!
It came out slightly nicer than that but not much.
Here’s a snippet of what we got back:
We can understand your concerns about our program. Rest assured that the program is designed to help optimize your account to its fullest potential. While we may not understand the intricacies of certain businesses, we do optimize accounts on a daily basis and are in tune with dynamic changes in the marketplace. We know the tactics and strategies that have proven successful on the Yahoo! network. Any changes we make to your accounts are carefully selected, and are designed to help you become a more successful advertiser with Sponsored Search.
While we do feel this will benefit your accounts, we understand that the service does not appeal to every advertiser. This is why if you request that we not make any optimization changes in the future, we will gladly note this in your account records and make every effort to not optimize your account at a future date.
Since you’ve indicated that you would not like the service on this account, we have noted your request to opt out on your account. We will make every effort not to perform the optimization.
First off “We will make every effort not to perform the optimization.” Wow, thanks for your efforts. Seriously, I can’t even opt out completely? So even though I asked you nicely to mind your own business you might still optimize my account just for fun? Notice how they had to say it twice to really sell me on not worrying about it…
Secondly, increase performance and make me more successful according to whose standards? Every automatic optimizer program I’ve seen tunes to click through rates, I tune to conversions. One puts money in Yahoo’s pocket and the other puts money in my client’s pocket. Don’t try to pick on little advertisers to pump up your earnings with sneaky programs are advantageous to you in the guise of free help.
So I would like to politely request to Yahoo that you make this a true opt-in process instead of forcing people to figure out how to opt-out so that you will “make every effort not to perform the optimization.” This is a weak move and if you want to gain search market share this is not the way to do it.
You can sell almost anything with Adwords, almost. So what exactly can’t you sell on Adwords? Turns out it’s a lot of stuff. Some prohibited items aren’t surprising and others are shrouded in plenty of grey area. Basically if it’s illegal, unethical, too much fun or any combination of the above you might just be out of luck.
You Can’t Sell Blatantly Illegal Items with Adwords
Shocking I know. Also if I may point out, if you’re selling this stuff online at all you don’t deserve internet access. “They’ll never catch me now that I’ve posted my address and phone number online along with the fact I like to break the law for profit… oh wait…” The following items are not only totally illegal but also prohibited from being sold via Adwords:
Drugs & Drug Paraphernalia No selling weed, crack, meth, magic mushrooms, LSD, or any other mind-bending substances via PPC. You also can’t sell bongs, glass pipes, and other getting high accessories… except for black lights, those are still ok.
Fake Documents No fake driver’s licenses, social security cards, diplomas, immigration papers, etc.
Steroids It’s probably best that you can’t easily get your hands on Austrian horse steroids online.
Hate Groups No hate groups, anti certain ethnic or religious groups, or groups that encourage violence against certain peoples.
Counterfeit Designer Goods No fake purses, jeans, leather goods, shirts, shoes, etc.
Prostitution You really shouldn’t bother trying with this one, that’s what Craigslist is for… and it’s free!
If it’s Illegal in Most States or You Have to be Over 18 Just to See it, Chances are You Can’t Sell it with Adwords
Things that are age restricted, have a tendency to cause moral outrage, or have the possibility of poking an eye out are generally prohibited from Adwords. Be advised this one has some grey areas to it.
Gambling No promotion of casinos or online gambling is permitted. You also can’t promote sports books, lotteries, bingo, poker, gambling software, gambling tutorials, gambling eBooks, gambling affiliate sites, and even play for fun gambling sites.
Porn (sometimes) This one is tricky; you can promote porn with Adwords. However there are a lot of off limits areas and you have to be very careful with your keyword strategy. You must stick with very specific queries that would only bring up adult results, and I would recommend phrase and exact matches here.
So what porn topics are banned? Anything having to do with kids, teen pornography (even if the models are 18+ and the site is legal), anything denoting youth (school girl, etc), and non-consensual material or implied non-consensual material. I’m going to guess there’s more that’s banned that Google would prefer to not spell out. (Note: even though you can promote porn we don’t. We don’t have that kind of time and you probably don’t have that kind of money)
Certain Weapons Guns, bullets, parts of guns, switchblades, butterfly knives, brass knuckles, and other weapons with malicious intent are a no-go. You can however promote more utilitarian things like hunting knives, pocket knives, kitchen knives, and archery gear.
Tobacco Cigarettes, pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco, snus, cigars, and anything else full of nicotine that will make you smell bad and slowly kill you is prohibited.
Alcohol (except wine and champagne) No beer, no hard alcohol, but wine and champagne are cool. Weird I know.
Fireworks If it is supposed to explode on purpose you can’t promote it. In all fairness you shouldn’t really ship fireworks anyways; the post office gets a little skittish about explosive packages.
No Cheating!
Academic Cheating Services This includes test taking services, paper writing services, and anything else that is academically dishonest.
Drug Test Cheating Services You can’t sell “cleansing” teas or your little brother’s clean urine with Adwords, sorry.
Illegal Traffic Devices Radar jammers, plate blockers and traffic signal changers are all prohibited. Radar detectors seem to be ok however.
Miracle Cures This doesn’t cover miracle weight loss pills so much as a magic pill with a suspicious resemblance to a tic-tac that may virtually cure AIDS and Cancer.
While we’re talking drugs and pills, prescription drugs are allowed -if- you are an Adwords approved pharmacy. You can also sell over the counter drugs but this isn’t a good place for Adwords beginners. There is an extra layer of scrutiny when you’re trying to promote OTC products so you have to factor in extra work and administration time.
Prohibited Scams, Tech, and Marketing Items
There are a lot of scams out there that Google has isolated to be dropped from the Adwords programs. Also any software of services that have an adverse effect on Google or its search results are not allowed either.
Scams, Phishing, Data entry affiliate sites, e-Gold, Dialers If it’s a known scam do yourself a favor and don’t waste your time. If you’re bent on promoting a scam you’re going to have to come up with a new one, so you might as well put that energy towards a legit business idea.
Bulk Marketing (E-mail Spam) Products If you have a great e-mail list of thousands of e-mails you scraped from sites around the web you can’t promote with Adwords.
Hacking & Cracking You can’t promote sites that teach you to illegally access software, servers, websites, cell phones, unlock copyright protection, descramble cable, and anything else illegal and hacker-y. You can promote hacker skills if they are for white hat defense purposes.
Automated Ad Clicking Adwords rule number 1, don’t mess with Google’s wallet! Automated ad clicking is a good way to get your Adwords and Adsense accounts shut down in a hurry… oh and they have a word for this -click fraud
Made For Adsense (MFA) Sites Honestly I’m not sure how enforceable this one is, but it’s on the books for good measure.
Copyrighted Material You Don’t Own Adwords is not the place to try and sell your pirated DVD collections. Stick to hastily set up card tables on street corners and at flea markets.
Webmaster Guidelines Violations Don’t openly promote with a Google service services to screw with Google, not smart my friend.
Phew, that’s a lot of prohibited stuff… I hope this was educational for you all. Remember if you can’t bring it on an airplane, do it in front of a police officer, or tell your mom about it you probably can’t use Adwords to promote it. And now that I think about it I’m probably on some kind of government list after all the drug, weapon, and explosive related searches I just did to make sure my list was correct… the things I do in the name of science.
One last thing I’d like to point out is that you may be able to get away with promoting some of these items for a very, very short period of time. However your account will in time be somewhere between banned, blocked, or canceled.
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.
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
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
Copyright 2003-2009 Systems & Marketing Solutions
Systems & Marketing Solutions, 191 S. Oak Park Blvd, Grover Beach, CA 93433 - 805-481-0118 - San Luis Obispo's Adwords Experts, Phone (800) 272-0887
yourself, use it! Put your own pictures on the site not just the stock manufacturer images, show how your product works, share customer stories, do anything that will build value. If a visitor is interested in your product and you build enough value into it via your presentation you will make sales.
Now think about the ads you usually get from bigger grocery stores, they’re selling on price alone. You get a picture and a dollar amount. For some people that’s ok because they buy that product every week anyways and just want to know where to get it the cheapest. But for those that want more information you give them no substance.
You can sell almost anything with Adwords, almost. So what exactly can’t you sell on Adwords? Turns out it’s a lot of stuff. Some prohibited items aren’t surprising and others are shrouded in plenty of grey area. Basically if it’s illegal, unethical, too much fun or any combination of the above you might just be out of luck.
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.
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. 
