The Art of Keywords

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

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.

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

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.

Using the Content Network without Getting Used

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.

Structure > Keywords

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.

Adwords Geo Targeting - The Other Side of the Story

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?

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.

No Adwords for You! Prohibited Adwords Item Rundown

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.

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.

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.

SMEC Adwords Presentation

Last night Bob and I had the chance to talk at an event put together by the Santa Maria Enterprise Center and SCORE. We had a great discussion on Google Adwords, and I hope everybody learned a lot last night.

As promised we are posting the PowerPoint from last night online as a PDF. Click here to get a copy of our Adwords Presentation!

Google Budget Optimizer - The House Always Wins!!!

Think about it for a minute... you walk into a car dealership with $20,000 dollars cash. You're greeted by a salesman, and you tell him that you can spend up to $20,000 dollars and everything else is his call. That doesn't sound like the best idea ever does it? It's entirely possible that you will roll out of there with the world's first $20,000 used Toyota Tercel (but c'mon it has spinning rims!). So why would you go to Google and tell them "here's all my money, could you spend this for me however you see fit?"

Could you punch me in the face, but not make it hurt?

When you turn on the Budget Optimizer, you're pretty much asking for it. I recommend that you never, ever, ever, ever, ever use the Budget Optimizer. Its job is to spend as much of your money as you tell it to, that's it. It's not thinking "hey $8.79 per click can't be right, let's think this through." It's thinking "hey I have $8.79 left in my budget, maybe right now is a good time to bid my way to number one on a tangentially semi-related but irrelevant word."

I've inserted a screen cap from one account that we took over recently that was getting absolutely abused by the Budget optimizer. They do have a very competitive market, but it's not $9.38 auto bidding competitive. Google Was eating up a $1500 per month budget at $5.00 per click on its own, we have the same amount of traffic down to about $2.50 a click right now.

Wow, Google-centric Optimization sounds awesome, what else can they do for me?

The other optimized option that bothers me a lot is the Ad Serving Optimize option in your campaign's advanced settings. It sounds like a good deal, Google makes sure that the better ad is always showing (by the way it is the default choice). The problem is the metric they measure with is Click Through Rate (money in their pocket), not the actual conversion cost (money in your pocket). Is it easier to just let Google pick? Yes. Should you actually just buck up, pay attention and do the work yourself? Yes.

So how do you turn off this not so handy optimization feature? It's pretty easy; you just have to know where it is. This is a feature that is set at the campaign level in the same place you set your daily budget. Click on "Edit Campaign Settings" at the campaign level and then scroll down to "Advanced Options." At the bottom of that box you'll see the box I've inserted below, Choose "Rotate." From there you just have to pay attention and control your own split tests.



The thing to remember with Google Adwords is that it is self service advertising. They want you to succeed and to get traffic, but they also want your money. Someone has to do the work, and if you leave it up to Google you are going to get burned.

Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

Ideally when you are proactively marketing a business, a product, or a concept you want to see measurable growth in money, fame, or popularity day after day. The reality of the situation is that every market has some sort of cycle to it and it is natural to have good days and bad days that average each other out. When watching the trends within your own business and within your Adwords account, sometimes you have to step back and look at things from a higher level.

A free and simple to use tool that we use fairly often to get a general feel for the popularity of a search term is called Google Trends (www.google.com/trends). It allows you to enter a search term (note: this works mainly just with broad keywords) and see the search volume history on Google.

To illustrate ways this can be used, and reiterate my assertion that Google is the new phone book, I took a Google Trends screen cap for "Google Adwords" and one for "Yellow Pages."




You can see that Google Adwords has been climbing steadily in popularity since2005, but it does see a dip every year around Christmas. The Yellow Pages on the other hand has been steadily declining in popularity since 2004.

Google Trends can also be used to anticipate when you may need to start ramping up your marketing if you are tied to a seasonal event like Christmas Shopping. You know how everybody jokes that Christmas seems to start earlier and earlier each year... according to Google it is! You can see that each year that the query "Christmas Shopping" starts to get traffic earlier and earlier each progressive year.



Or if you ever wondered why your CPC shoots up certain times of year a trip to Google trends can help you understand when and why it happens. For example if you are selling Flat Screen TV's summer is going to be slow but the traffic will probably be cheaper, but if you want to play from Thanksgiving to New Years you better get out your check book.



Now remember Google Trends isn't gospel, but it is a very useful tool for web marketers. Plus it's free! So the next time you're in a slump or your Adwords account seems to be acting a little weird, check out the current trends and see if it's the entire industry or if it's just you!

Join SMS's CEO in the Santa Ynez Valley!

As we've mentioned before on the blog we keep active in the community and do a fair amount of public speaking on topics like Internet Marketing and Google Adwords. Last month Rob and I spoke to a marketing class at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, and this month I will be speaking in Santa Ynez.

The Santa Ynez Valley Visitors Association has invited me to talk about Google Adwords and how they can positively impact your business. The meeting is next Wednesday, January 9th at 8:30 a.m. at the Santa Ynez Valley Marriot Hotel (555 McMurray Road, Buellton). The SYVVA is a nonprofit group focused on the promotion of the entire Santa Ynez valley as a year round tourist destination. Admission to this event is free and open to the public, so I encourage you to come out and join us if you are in the area.

For more information, you can see the full press release at syv-online.com

Adwords Triage Checklist

Bob and I are both Army veterans and one of the things they drill into your head starting in Basic Training and continuing on through the rest of your career is how to evaluate a casualty (FM 21-11 if you were curious). As I was evaluating a new account that had a fair amount of history I realized the same steps applied to an Adwords account.

Remember with your accounts, much like a casualty; don't do too much until you figure out what is actually wrong!

Responsiveness - Are you generating impressions? Are people seeing your ads?

If your account doesn't have a pulse start looking for problems with your bids, are they too low? Or maybe your keywords are too obscure. Also check your geographic settings maybe they're too tight.

Breathing- Are you getting clicks?

Ok so you're getting impressions but no clicks. Check your ad copy, is it any good? Are you running a price ad that is higher than the prices offered by your competition? What position are you coming in? If you're not even on the front page you need to reevaluate your bidding.

Bleeding- Are you hemorrhaging money?

Are you getting too much traffic that isn't converting? Do you have a rogue keyword spending all your money and not converting? Has the Content Network gone out of control? Does your landing page just suck? Figure out what the problem is and stop the fiscal blood flow while you regroup and re-strategize.

Shock- "I spent how much for one order!?!"

At the end of the day ROI is what matters most. Make sure you track your orders and your ad spend to make sure that you're making your business money and not just helping Google's stock prices. If your shock problem is of a more electrical nature, stop putting USB cords in your mouth... it's bad for you.

Fractures- Are your links broken?

Getting clicks but no visits? We've seen this before on a site run on a content management system. The CMS went through an upgrade and changed the naming conventions for all of this client's URLs. Once that goes into effect basically every link in your Adwords account is broken! They had no idea this change had happened, we were the ones that caught the error! Make sure your links work on a regular basis, especially if there has been recent site changes or upgrades.

Burns- Are you getting a disproportionate number of clicks from one area or ISP?

We don't see this too often, but click fraud does happen. Google is smart enough to catch most of this stuff, but if your account takes a major turn for the worse that can't be explained by the steps above you might be getting burned by a competitor or Adsense fraudster. Start investigating and looking for suspicious trends.

Head Injury- Is running a PPC campaign beyond your general mental capacity?

It's ok and nothing to be ashamed of. There's a reason Adwords Experts exist, and it's that not everybody should manage an Adwords account... much like I shouldn't wear spandex, change my own oil or sing in public.

Apply these steps to see what condition your Adwords are in, and if you're stuck give us a call. We can rebuild it, we have the technology :)

*Just to point out the coincidence, in writing this article we realized that we both had essentially the same picture of ourselves in uniform even though they are 32 years apart. Bob and I are about the same age, same name on the uniform, the same rank, in the same pose with the same weapon... hell for all we know it might be the same serial number!

Understanding the Potential Power of a Click... or a Man with no Hat

A lot of us that deal in clicks and impressions and conversions have a tendency to get lost in the numbers presented to us. Seeing as we don't function in a vacuum, you have to take into account a lot of what ifs when determining cost per conversion and return on investment numbers. What if someone clicked my ad and bookmarked it to make a purchase later? What if they saw my ad and called in an order? What if they saw my ad and then came to the store?

Recently I lived out one of those untrackable what if conversion tracks and thought it would be a good example of how there is more value to your advertising than what is tracked in your Adwords campaign.

I have what I would categorize as a slight internet addiction, and a taste for hard to find products... luckily these are complimentary problems. Being bald and Californian, also complimentary problems, necessitates the acquisition of a good hat... unless you look good with a red, peeling scalp. Since I have a general distaste for regular baseball hats, especially seeing as any team I like is pretty much horrible (Milwaukee Brewers anyone?), I've made a move to fedoras. So far I'm a fan, they're fun and different, keep my head and ears (bonus!) covered, and ...if I may say so myself... look pretty suave on me :) Here's the problem, when's the last time you came across a fedora store in the last 40 years? Yeah me neither.

So here comes the internet to the rescue! I did my initial Google search for Fedora and got all kinds of Linux related stuff, not helpful. So I expanded it to Fedora Hats and hit pay dirt. I clicked on one of the Adwords ads and found a site that I really liked. It was easy to navigate and had a good selection. Problem was I didn't feel comfortable dropping $200 on a hat I couldn't try on first. Feeling somewhat defeated, I proceeded to sulk through their site a little more. Eventually I came across their Location page and realized I was going to be in their state and driving past their store in about a month, problem solved! I bookmarked their page and printed directions on Google Maps of my little side trip before I flew out.

Fast forward about a month and there I was about 2000 miles from home in their doorway with cash in hand. Unfortunately for your friend and humble narrator, they were closed... and I burnt my head sitting on the 3rd base line of a Cubs game the next day.

So there are 3 lessons to learn here... One little click can do more than you think! Make sure the days you're open on the website actually correspond to how locked your doors are on the day a bald guy shows up from half way across the country to buy a hat. And finally, Lesson 3, if you're bald pack sunscreen irregardless of your destination.

I Left My Brain in My Other Phone

I was reading an article in Wired Magazine (Human Memory and the Outboard Brain by Clive Thompson) this weekend about how computers, PDA's, cell phones, and Google have replaced quaint and outdated things like actual human memory. In a recent study, respondents over 50 years old were substantially more likely to be able to recall information like phone numbers and birthdays than those 30 and under. A full third of the younger set didn't even know their own number off the top of their head. It's enough to make you wonder if your business has enough visibility on the web for those who use Google as an external hard drive for their brain.

As a member of that under 30 group, I can vouch for our collective inability to remember dates and numbers. Case in point - my old cell phone is roaming the streets of Milwaukee in a cab somewhere with how to get a hold of pretty much everybody I at least sort of know. Once I flew back into San Luis Obispo and bought a new cell phone I proceeded to put 3 numbers into my phone from memory: Mom, Girlfriend, Work... pretty much everybody that might yell at me, and then I hit the wall. Luckily the Internet knows everything I forgot. A bunch of e-mails, a Myspace bulletin, and some Google searches later I'm at least half way back to my original phonebook glory.

Notice not once did a physical phonebook come into play. That's because we all rely on websites, devices and search engines to find things.

So how does this apply to Internet Marketing?

If you're not in Google you don't exist. It sounds a little harsh, but for most people if they can't find you in just a few minutes they're done and on to the next thing. If you like customers and you like money, it's in your best interest to make sure that someone searching explicitly for you will always be able to find you.

Now some of you will say "but I'm first on Google for my business!" Well that is all well and good, but unless you're a major company like Microsoft or Wal-Mart an unfortunate tweak to the algorithm could send you off to the outer reaches of page 10 never to be seen again. What we recommend to any business is to have a Pay Per Click phonebook style listing for your business. Google is the new phonebook! Advertise on your business name, important people associated with your business (owner, founders, sales people, etc.) and the type of business you run plus the street/mall/plaza that you reside in. For example you could advertise on "car wash Grand Ave Arroyo Grande," that way if someone knows you but forgot who you are; they still have a shot at finding you. How many times have you tried to explain what business "that great place over on main street" is that really like but can't remember the name of?

Not advertising online is like not putting a sign on your store... a good way to save money and a bad idea. And you don't have to be a Rockefeller to get in the game. A small PPC campaign like this won't cost you much money, and won't get huge amounts of traffic. But it will tend to be of the highest quality traffic which is more likely to result in a purchase. They were specifically looking for you by a very specific search, which in my book is money well spent. Now if I could just do a Google search for my phone...

Brown Bag Business Dialog in SLO

Good afternoon everybody,

Rob and I just got back from our presentation at the San Luis Obispo Mission Community Services Corporation's Brown Bag Business Dialog event and I think it went really well. We ran out of chairs and had a lot of good questions from the audience!

The talk today was about Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in general, and Google Adwords in depth. We hope you all learned a lot, and we look forward to working some more with the MCSC in the future.

We've already had some requests for the PowerPoint presentation used in the class and we've made it available as a .pdf at www.smsrd.com/mcsc.pdf

Thanks again for coming out to see us and we hope you learned something that you can apply to your growing businesses!

Back to Basics: The Forgotten Art of Negative Keywords

Everybody is always so concerned with what keywords do I pick to advertise on. The words you specifically do not advertise on are just as important.

When developing a keyword list, try to think of ways that your words could be related to other topics irrelevant to your business. Take the word coach... think about it for a minute. You have football coaches, baseball coaches, motor coaches, life coaches, Coach Handbags, Coach the TV show, and the list undoubtedly goes on. Well if the word coach is central to your ad campaign you better get to work on brainstorming negative keywords.

Once you've done your own brainstorming go online and do some actual searches. See anything that doesn't match your query? You can use this method to generate more negative keywords. If your Adwords campaign already has some data accumulated run a Search Query Report and see how your keywords are being matched. Another good place to look if you have an analytics package attached to your site is at your organic traffic. Like the Search Query Report, Analytics will show you actual searches that resulted in a visit. Do any of them look a little bit off?

Now that you have all these possible negative words you need to make some decisions. Are they going to be implemented at the Campaign or Ad Group level? And are they the right words? Make certain that a good negative word for one keyword won't kill the relevant traffic of another.

Once you're satisfied that you will be decreasing bad traffic without hurting the good stuff, pull the trigger. Let your changes simmer for a couple of days and then check out the impact. Are your CTR's up? Conversion rate improve? Or has your traffic fallen flat? Even if you're happy, keep experimenting. Adwords doesn't stop changing so you can't either. Whether the results are good or bad, make sure you know why your traffic changed so that you can either fix or replicate the action.

CTR vs. ROI, When Less Traffic Means More Money

A good Adwords campaign requires balance. CTR & ROI are 2 particularly difficult items to keep in harmony with each other. In the future we intend to examine more facets of this topic, but this article focuses on trimming traffic to increase profits.

Click Through Rates (CTR) are really important to any PPC campaign, but they don't mean anything if there is no Return On Investment (ROI). Sometimes when we take over an existing account we'll find ads with astronomical CTR's which is at first glance awesome, but the Cost Per Conversion is a little wonky. Seeing as companies market for the sake of making money, sometimes CTR needs to suffer to help you profit more.

When most people get started with PPC advertising it's usually all about traffic. They get excited to see their web site grow from 15 visits a day to 100 visits, and then 200 visits, and so forth. While they're getting all caught up in the number of visits the Return On Investment is being ignored.

So how do you tune down traffic and turn up sales?

PPC advertising is all about relevant traffic, not necessarily as much traffic as you can get. Look at your keywords, are some too broad? Are some related but too far of a stretch? Go into you analytics and check the bounce rates for some of these words, are they way above your sites average?

The first thing to consider is does the word buy you anything? If it sends you traffic of no value just pause it, you may want to revisit it sometime later but for now it's just a hole you throw money in. If the word is an important word for you but is sending good and bad traffic start looking for ways to limit the bad stuff. Think of possible negative keywords and run a Search Query Report for inspiration.

The other hidden offender is ad text. When you look at your ads are they too effective for their own good? At first that sounds ridiculous, but is your ad attracting traffic from a broader group than you were targeting? A lot of web surfers scan and only see the headline of an ad. Could your headline be applied to other unrelated searches? If it can consider adding a qualifying word to your headline to ensure people know what they're getting if they go to your page. For example if you sell training, use a word like "buy" so people don't click on your ad looking for free information. The word "buy" will reduce the CTR, but the conversion rate should remain the same or even increase because the visitor knows they are going to a site that sells training.

There is no definitive silver bullet, but these steps can help keep your ROI under control.

Why Does SMS Focus So Much on Google Adwords?

Sometimes people ask us why we focus so much on Google and Google Adwords, the short answer is volume. While we do run PPC campaigns in the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), we focus the most attention on Google because of its overwhelming market share.

How do you know Google is the biggest volume search engine?

Both SMS and others within the industry have studied the topic to try to figure out which search engines provide the most traffic and business. I did my own scientific testing (I deemed it scientific because I wore a lab coat and goggles) by running the exact same ad groups and ads in Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter (btw, I didn't use content networks, just pure search). Over about 45 days tens of thousands of impressions and a few thousand clicks I had my answers.

Google Adwords won in both clicks and impressions with Yahoo and MSN taking 2 & 3 respectively. Yahoo actually pulled pretty close in search volume, but Google outpaced them severely in actual visits delivered.

In my tests Google had 49% of the total impressions and 72% of the clicks. Yahoo Search Marketing came in with 44% of the total impressions and 21% of the clicks. And lastly MSN Adcenter despite its best efforts only mustered about 7% and about 7% of the clicks. Now although this wasn't the most extensive study ever done on the topic, the results are pretty clear. And if you look for bigger studies the actual numbers are always different, but the rankings are always the same Google, Yahoo, and then MSN.



How do I leverage this information for PPC Success?

The way we like to do things is from the top down. Build an Adwords account in Google, get all the bugs out, perfect your message and then make a move into Yahoo. The Yahoo account will give you more perspective on search trends and patterns, and once you're settled in if you have the budget for it give MSN a shot. At the present time I wouldn't focus much attention on anything below MSN unless it's an industry specific search engine that relates to your business.

Each PPC program has its own tools and quirks, and each one will teach you something about your target customers, but ultimately Google is probably going give your business the most bang for your buck and should be the initial focus of any foray into Search Engine Marketing.

Myspace, Your Money

Everyone knows Myspace as the biggest social networking website around for the 15-30 year old crowd, but not everyone knows that it can also be a drain on your Adwords budget.

Myspace is free, and all of the sites that offer graphics and layouts for Myspace are free as well. So to make money they all rely on advertising and Adsense is their weapon of choice. Thanks to the huge amount of traffic and loose broad matching there's a good chance if you use the Content Network that you have graced the pages of Myspace. For some advertisers who advertise consumer products to a younger demographic this is great; for many others this is a big waste of money.

Up until just recently one had no way of knowing that social networking sites were eating up their ad budget. There was no reporting associated with where your ads were showing, it was either Search Network or Content Network. Recently Adwords finally released a report with very little fanfare to see where your Content Network traffic was coming from. A real eye opener for those that noticed.

Social media and other web site of little to no business value can swallow up hundreds to thousands of dollars from advertisers. We've talked to a few people running their own Adwords campaigns that had mystery spikes in spending and traffic but not sales. They had no idea where the money was going and why they weren't getting anything back in return. For some of them we've taken on their accounts and trimmed a big percentage of their ad spend and maintained or improved the number of sales or leads.

Remember when you're looking at you account not all traffic is created equal. Make sure you track your conversion so that you can make an informed decision on whether a word is worth it or not. Just because it sends you visitors, it doesn't mean you want it!

The Granularization of Keywords

There's a good chance Granularization isn't actually a word, yet. However the principle behind it is more important to your Adwords account than the actual existence of the word, kind of like 'truthiness.'

The more specialized your ad group, the more effective your campaign will be.

That's my campaign building mantra. A common mistake people make in setting up their accounts is to decide on campaign topics and then throw all the related words in one ad group. I call this the 'Bucket Approach.' Once all your words are in the bucket, your ad or ads will be shown for any keyword in the bucket. Because of this you're going to have to write a pretty generic ad. This is going to hurt your relevance, quality score, click through rate, and ultimately your wallet.

Now I'm not saying you can't use a 'bucket' group every once and a while, it has its uses. They can be good for testing the impression levels of new words for an existing account. After they've gained some data you'll be able to tell if the words deserve their own ad groups, should be dropped completely, or may be fit for an existing ad group.

So how do you set up your account for maximum effectiveness?
Granularization.

Keyword research is a lot of work, and you're going to amass lots and lots of words. Having the right words is just the first step... fight the urge to toss them in a bucket! Start looking for themes and key root words in your list. Divide it into as many reasonable, logical, relevant groups as you can.

One example of granularizing a campaign is if you carry foreign languages. An ad group that covers all of them at once isn't going to be very effective, but if you break it into 1 or more ad groups per language you're going to do much better. Your word groupings will be tighter, your quality score should be higher, and your ad can be more targeted and thus get better click through rates. If a query for "Learn Swedish" triggers ads for "Learn a Language" and "Learn Swedish Today" you can guess which one is going to perform better. "Learn Swedish Today" is more relevant to the search engine and the searcher. You get the click because you're giving the people what they want.

Kick the bucket, Granularize, and give the people what they want!

Those three things will help you succeed in the PPC game. Put in a little extra work up front in structuring good campaigns and delivering relevant solutions to user queries PPC, and you'll be able to break out your old bucket to carry money all the way to the bank.