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 :)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Google Analytics Counter-Intel

One of the most overlooked advantages of using Analytics is the business intelligence that can be extracted from the program. You can track specific visitor traffic, and generally keep an eye on everybody watching you. Sometimes extracting this type of information is labor intensive, but it can be very worth it. Plus if you're like me, it's fun.

Before I got involved with Search Marketing I was enlisted in the Army as a Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) Analyst, oddly they go very well together. I was taught to gather, sort, and interpret data to figure out who was doing what where and why. The clever networker (the in-person type of networking) can use Google Analytics as a BIZINT tool to gauge their social effectiveness and who they should follow up with.

After going to a trade event, a Chamber of Commerce meeting, or any other type of networking meeting I come back to the office and check out the web site addresses on some of the business cards I picked up in the course of the evening. Chances are some of the people you gave your card to did the same thing. Give it a day or two and then check your analytics.

Select the day of the event up until today then on the side bar of analytics click "Visitors," "Network Properties," and then "Network Location." The results will have the network location of every visit to your site. See any familiar names? Now not every business will have an identifiable result, smaller businesses will usually show up as a visit from an ISP like Charter, Comcast, RoadRunner and the like, but the midsize to big companies, schools, and government agencies will almost always be identifiable.

As you sort through this list you can see how many times they visited, how many pages they viewed and how long they visited for. If you want to investigate further click on the name of a specific network location, the next screen will be dedicated to just that location. Underneath the visit graph is a dropdown menu called "Segment" that has 20+ ways to dissect the traffic from this location. With this tool you can figure out if they came directly and used your card, or if they Googled you and what keyword they used to find you. You can even figure out if their office is running Windows, Mac, or Linux, and even their browser of choice. Experiment a little and see what data you can extract that would benefit you to know.

If you want to know what pages specific businesses were visiting Google is going to make you work just a little bit harder. Click on "Content" in the side bar and then "Content by Title" or "Top Content." They both ultimately do the same thing. If you give your pages unique and easily identifiable titles choose "Content by Title" if your URLs are more easily identifiable use "Top Content." From the resulting screen, click on the link for one of your pages. This will send you to a new page that gives you information on just one URL. In the "Segment" drop down choose "Network Location" to see which businesses may have visited that page. And now that you have Analytics set to show "Network Locations," you can change the tracked URL via the "Content" dropdown menu.

If you see a person of interest lurking around your website, track their behavior. It may present a pattern that gives you a better idea of what may be important to them, and you can adjust your sales presentation accordingly. Also take the initiative and follow up with them. You've met them in person, they visited your web site, a follow up call or an e-mail wouldn't be inappropriate at this point. What it is all worth is up to you, but I recommend keeping an eye on who is keeping an eye on you.

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!

Upcoming SMS Speaking Engagements

Systems & Marketing Solutions likes to stay active in the local community, and I am often asked to speak on Search Engine marketing topics or be a part of a panel of experts.

September 22nd and 23rd at the Embassy Suites in San Luis Obispo will hold its first ever Code Camp. The Code Camp is organized by Rob Hope CEO of San Luis Tech Consultants and an SMS client. The date and the time haven't been set yet, but I will be giving a talk on Designing for SEO and Adwords. The Code Camp is free, and you can register for the event online at www.centralcoastcodecamp.com .

I will also be speaking at the Santa Maria Manufacturer's Association meeting on September 25th. The SMMA holds a meeting on the fourth Tuesday of each month at 7:30 and is open to anyone interested in the advancement of manufacturing on the central coast. The meeting I will be speaking at is going to be hosted by Hardy Diagnostics (also an SMS client). My talk is going to be on Internet Marketing and how to get the most from Google Adwords.

If you have the opportunity, I encourage you to check out both groups and come meet some new people!

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.

Focused Expansion, Controlling Expanded Search in Adwords

Personally I'm a fan of broad match and the ensuing expanded search feature in Google... now that I can track it. I can't say this enough ...I love the Search Query Report... it opens a lot of doors and shows you negatives you would have never thought of. Plus it has potential to save you money!

One of the reasons I like expanded searches is that no matter how hard you try, you will never be as creative/ridiculous as the general public. The way people structure their searches is really fascinating. The general populace's inability to spell is a little troubling too. But just because someone can't spell, or uses an awkward path to get to your site doesn't mean they don't have a credit card. As a search marketer you need to cater to everybody who could buy your advertised product.

Now the downside of expanded matching is that Google can get even more creative than the public. It's kind of scary that an algorithm is making leaps in logic to include you in queries that may be related to your objective. To give you a few examples of the mayhem that ensues: I searched 'buy a luxury bus' and some of the ads used the word coach, in position 6 was Coach.com the handbag maker. A word I use for a general contractor now has about 400 negative keywords to include 'Land Cruiser', 'foreskin', and 'hearing'. I've also seen a lot of celebrity name crossover, if you're not up to date on pop culture at least use derivatives of the word 'naked' as negative keywords (half of all celebrity searches seem to involve nudity, traffic I'm guessing you don't need). All these types of match drop click through rates and waste money.

Now that it is available, I can't stress enough the importance of running at least a monthly Search Query Report. This matched with the Adsense Placement Report are probably the two most useful features that Adwords has given us this year. Run the SQR report and sift through it by hand to extract all the most irrelevant searches. Then make a second pass looking for good words and phrases you don't have in your account that you should. Your first SQR report should be a PPC revelation, there's going to be some crazy stuff in there. Make sure you make the most of this new tool!