An industry best practice for structuring a paid search campaign is the implementation of highly targeted and relevant ad groups. This is a part of the ‘before the click’ process that can easily be controlled and maintained. If this is not happening you have bigger issues than what the rest of this discussion is about. That being said, separated out into its own stop along the entire value stream, the paid search campaign is a relatively easy thing to manage and manage well. However, as we will see, the paid search campaign is in the middle of the value stream and can only sustain long lasting success if the upstream and downstream processes are completely aligned to serve the customer with the best user experience.

Upstream From the Paid Search Campaign

Before a paid search campaign can take form and become effective a search team needs to have certain basic information from the client who is further upstream in the process than the paid search team is. The following are key points about how to be most effective and what to avoid further upstream from paid search.

1. Goals and KeyPerformance Indicator’s (KPI’s) - To begin, clients should have a good idea as to why they are getting into the paid search game or how they’d like to grow their current paid search program. Clients should know the goals they want to achieve, their KPI’s, and their tolerance/risk for testing in order to learn. Paid search experts can help set expectations and guide clients in understanding what the potential may be for reaching certain goals, however, the initial goal setting should come from further upstream. Since both parties are working toward the same end results, ideally these are collaborative goals agreed upon by the expanded team before implementation or optimization happens.

2. Messaging Information- If the paid search program has already been implemented or is in the process of being developed, one of the most critical components of a paid search campaign is the text ad. And it’s just not the relevance of the text ad for Quality Score or how targeted it is, but more so in what the text ad messaging offers. Is there a generic call to action or is there some amazing discount or benefit that only your client can offer potential customers?

In some cases differentiated messaging can be found on a client website that can be worked into the ad creative copy. In many cases, on large e-commerce sites where there are hundreds of vendors and thousands of products, hunting and pecking for sales, discounts, and offers is not an efficient use of time. These offers, sales, and discounts should be made available to the paid search team in the form of a merchandising calendar so pro-active planning can occur.

3. Internal Communication- At times there are internal communication issues outside the paid search team that occur farther upstream that can have a significant negative impact on the success of paid search. Whether it’s an in-house paid search team or an agency there can be multiple layers of people and departments involved. If those parties farther upstream fail to communicate effectively, the lack of communication can trickle farther downstream and limit the effectiveness of the paid search team. This not only adds stress to the relationship between the paid search team and the departments farther upstream, but in effect, when the lack of communication and alignment reaches the paid search team and they are left to work with limited information this will have a negative impact on potential customers – the people you are trying to convert.

The impact of upstream goals, information or lack of information can vary but can mostly be managed to a certain level of success. If upstream processes are not fully aligned with everyone involved, the sustainability of long term growth may be at risk.

Downstream From the Paid Search Campaign

As part of the development, implementation, and continuous improvement of a paid search initiative, there are a couple of ‘post-click’ components that occur on the website that have an even greater significance on the success and growth of the account than those farther upstream in the process.

1. Does the Website Work/Are the Landing Pages Valid – This downstream process is the most critical in the mix because this one comes closest to customers you are trying to convert. First and foremost your website should work 100% of the time. Beyond that it should be user friendly providing the best experience possible for customers. Once customers have decided that your paid search ad matches closest with what they want to buy or it provides a solution to their questions, you are on the way to providing a high level of satisfaction for customers.

Not only should the website work and that its usability and navigation be at its prime, but the landing pages selected must be functioning and relevant. In reference to the large paid search program above, if you tag keywords and/or ad creatives with destination URLs it is critical to have open communication (from farther upstream) as to when those URLs change due to inventory levels or other website structure changes. If the landing page has been updated or the product no longer exists and there is not a redirect in place until the paid search URL can be updated, customers landing on error pages or some other random page is never a good thing. This not only impacts customers’ experiences, but also can have Quality Score implications.

2. Proper Implementation of Web Analytics Tracking & Tags – We all know paid search and all other online marketing channels are usually inaccurate within an acceptable range. That’s just the nature of this industry. For some reason website analytics tagging is the search industries bane of existence and inevitably problems occur when web analytics site tagging is not implemented correctly the first time. The other problem is when URL tagging parameters are not used correctly and used as a temporary work-around to fix a problem farther upstream instead of fixing the root cause of the problem. These types of downstream problems create additional challenges in reporting and decision making farther upstream in the process.

Regardless of upstream or downstream from paid search, the entire value stream should be considered as a total system.  When all of these processes are aligned there is a greater opportunity for success of the paid search account. The alignment of the entire value stream also builds trust between all those involved creating a more productive team for long term sustainability.

Let us know what you think — fee free to add your comments, ideas… below!

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Matt LeVeque is the Founder & President of SEM Science Consulting, LLC and Senior Member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ).

Google AdWords can have numerous benefits if planned, executed, and monitored properly. There are also pitfalls to be avoided. This article will cover important things to avoid as well as effective steps for implementing an effective AdWords campaign.

Step 1: Define attainable goals

A team seeking to maximize the use of AdWords will identify and articulate realistic goals, which might include:

1)    Increasing donation volume

2)    Recruiting more volunteers

3)    Raising brand awareness

Step 2: Appeal to the relevant geographic and/or demographic targets.

An effective campaign should speak to a defined market. For tracking purposes, duplicating or moving around keywords once “up and running” should be avoided. A feature called Ad Scheduler can be set up using either Accelerated or Standard Delivery (evenly delivered ads throughout the day).

Step 3: Develop tightly-themed Ad Groups

The more relevant the ad text, the higher the CTR (click through rate), the Quality Score and the Page Rank that will be achieved. As for Ad Text Optimization, place catchy calls to action and inter- capitalize your display URL.  For instance, instead of having www.marketingbydeepak.com show http://www.marketingbydeepak.com/.  In addition, rotate various ads and you can track individual performance.

Step 4: Research keywords

This requires serious consideration; an organization can benefit from using the Google Suggest Tool to find relevant keywords.  Trying to think like the target demographic may result in coming up with keywords from the User’s perspective.  Be sure to look at all match types – broad, phrase and exact.

Step 5: Landing Page Optimization.

Most people have shared the frustrating experience of clicking on an ad only to be led to page that has nothing to do with the product/service searched for.  There are numerous resources available on Landing Page Designs online.

The bottom line is that the marketer can have great goals, campaigns, ad groups and keywords; however, if these cannot be converted to close the sale, the effort has been fruitless.

AdWords Campaign Cautions and Pitfalls
Earlier, it was mentioned that there are pitfalls to be avoided. Chief among these is: Google AdWords cannot be done alone.  AdWords is only one aspect of Social Media, which is a marketing tactic.  Any business or organization seeking to leverage the social media tools, at a minimum, will establish a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and show up in organic search results in addition to running AdWords.

Statistics indicate that, when people do searches, 75% of the time they click on the organic content found within the search engine results page (SERP).  Only 25% click what they see on the sponsored links section.   Users tend to trust the organic content more because of the independent review.  An organization that shows up in both areas has a great deal in its favor!

Branding should not be underestimated.  An organization that is well-branded and enjoys good press is more likely to perform better than an up-and-comer.

Remember to use Keyword Research, the Google Suggestion Tool, and to brainstorm with your Team or others to generate novel ideas.  Even funny-sounding search terms can yield surprising results!

Campaigns that are up and running can benefit from the reporting features and Google Analytics to monitor and track campaign performance.  Every so often, adjust a campaign by eliminating low performers, refining keywords, and ads themselves.  Repeat this process often.

As with other aspects of your ad campaign, budget how much to spend on AdWords.  Calculate enough allowance for your industry.  Competitors may jump in and bid up the price for keywords.  Determine a realistic ROI. Team members should take the time to read your reports and work with AdWords as seriously as they would a direct mail campaign.

What are the challenges you face with your AdWords campaigns? Please add your comments below.

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Deepak Gupta is VP of Marketing for Help My Resume, a Florida-based non-profit and is the Principal of Marketing By Deepak Consulting Group. Prior to jumping into the inbound marketing world, Deepak worked in database marketing and analytics where he developed marketing initiatives for brands like the Auto Club, State Farm, UPS, Hooked On Phonics, Comcast, AT&T, World Wrestling Entertainment, ESPN, Nickelodeon and other related brands.

When creating a pay per click campaign, marketers commonly focus on things like keywords, match types, cost per click bids, organizing the campaign into ad groups, target cost per acquisition, and other mechanics of PPC campaigns. But in concentrating on the setup and execution of their pay per click campaigns, too many marketers don’t spend enough time thinking about their PPC landing pages – some don’t even setup customized landing pages at all!

So here are the top landing page mistakes to avoid when creating pages for your pay per click campaigns:

1) Not having a landing page. I know I already mentioned this, but this is the single biggest mistake you can make. Many marketers who are first getting into PPC advertising think it’s adequate to drive traffic to their website. Get people to your home page, and they’ll know what to do, right?

Wrong. When people are typing a search into Google, Bing, or another search engine, they are looking for an immediate answer to a specific query. If they click on your ad, they’re expecting a question to the answer they asked – now. They’re not going to dig through your website to find what they’re looking for. Customized landing pages answer the question the searcher was asking quickly and directly.

2) Not having CUSTOMIZED landing pages. If you’re running a large pay per click campaign or multiple PPC campaigns, chances are you are covering a multitude of keywords and have numerous ads. If possible and appropriate, you should be setting up customized landing pages with different offers that are aligned with the ads and keywords used in individual ad groups and campaigns.

This can help improve your quality scores for Google AdWords, which, in turn, can help bring down your cost per click. By ensuring your landing page offer and wording are closely aligned with your ads, you should also improve your conversion rate.

3) Not having a conversion goal. Too many marketers do setup landing pages, but fail to setup a conversion goal. What is a conversion? Simply put, a conversion is when a visitor to your landing page takes the action you want them to take.

This could be downloading an ebook or white paper, signing up for a newsletter, registering for a webinar, and so on. If there isn’t an action you’re trying to get visitors to take, why are you paying to get them to your website? Tracking conversions lets you know how effective your PPC campaigns are. Make sure you define what your conversion is and setup conversion code on your landing pages to track when visitors complete your defined goal.

4) Not tracking return on investment. While establishing a dollar value for conversions can sometimes seem arbitrary, doing so can help you manage your PPC campaigns and determine whether or not they are cost effective. While the dollar value of some conversions might be easy to calculate (buying a product, registering for a paid webinar), others can be more difficult (signing up for a newsletter or downloading a free white paper).

Do your best to realistically calculate the value of your conversions and use this to compute ROI on pay per click campaigns.

5) Not testing, testing, testing. Another major mistake many online marketers make is failing to constantly test and improve the effectiveness of their PPC campaigns. There are many landing page optimization tools out there to help you do this.

If you’re not continually testing and optimizing your landing pages, you’re letting potential customers get away and leaving money on the table. Testing different offers, landing page designs, copy, and images can help you improve the conversion rate on your pay per click campaigns.

Everybody has been new to Internet marketing at some point, but that doesn’t mean you have to repeat the same mistakes as everyone else. Instead, learn from the common pay per click landing page mistakes explained here.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  Jason has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

Landing page optimization can potentially be far more powerful than an increase in traffic when it comes to generating more conversions.  In order to optimize your landing page successfully, the key is to use a scientific, data-driven approach.  While you may have gut instincts about what will and won’t work, the only way to tell for sure is by carefully collecting and analyzing the data.  Following are some of the most important tools to take a look at in order to optimize your landing pages and increase conversions.

Google Analytics: The Standard in Analytics

Google’s analytics software has become a de facto standard in the web world.  It is available for free and is relatively easy to install, although, some instances, like cross-domain tracking, are a bit more complicated.  Google Analytics gives you insights into where your visitors are coming from, what pages they’re looking at, how long they’re staying on your site, and so on.

Tip: Define Your Goals and Sales Funnel in Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is already a powerful platform, the real key to using it to optimize your landing pages and maximize conversions is by defining goals.  In your Analytics profile, you can define a goal based on a specific URL visited, the amount of time spent on site, or the number of pages in a visit.  For landing page optimization, you’ll probably be using a URL visit.  You can also define a goal value in dollars, which can be helpful in calculating ROI for your website conversions.

Another optional but important step is to define a sales funnel.  This allows you to list multiple pages leading up to a conversion – for example, if you have a multipage shopping cart check out process.  This can help you determine when visitors are leaving your site and highlight pages you may need to change or simplify.

Google Website Optimizer: Scientific Testing of Landing Pages

Another Google Tool on this list? Yes – Google’s Website Optimizer is that important.  A tool that exists outside of Analytics or AdWords (though accessible through the AdWords interface), many users overlook this valuable tool.  Website Optimizer allows you to perform A/B or multivariate tests on your landing pages to determine how different configurations of text, images, headlines, and so forth impact your conversion rate.

Relatively easy to install, you just need to prepare your different page versions or configurations and drop in snippets of Javascript code.  When it has collected enough data, Website Optimizer shows which page, statistically, is most effective at generating conversions.

Click & Scroll Heatmaps: Understanding User Behavior

The overall data provided by Analytics and Website Optimizer is great, however, it leaves you wondering what is actually happening when a visitor is looking at your page.  A service like ClickTale, which ranges from about $900 to nearly $9,000 a year, is capable of recording users mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and scrolling behavior.  You can even play back movies of an individual user’s browser session. Data is also aggregated to show mouse and click heatmaps based on a large number of users.

Similar services include Mouse Eye Tracking, Crazy Egg, clickdensity, and Codynamix (open source).  Most provided a no cost option with limited functionality and a professional or enterprise solution.

Form Analytics: Why Aren’t People Filling Out My Forms?

Have you ever started signing up for a product or download, but abandoned the site, because the form was too demanding or complicated?  Form analytics gives you insight into how users are interacting with your forms and can help you improve or streamline form questions to improve your conversion rate.  Form analytic software can help identify why users are abandoning forms, browser compatibility issues, and even reveal detailed information about form abandoners.  Examples of form analytics software include ClickTale (mentioned above), Revenue Expect, and Form Alive.

Get the Most Out of the Traffic You Already Have

Why focus only on increasing traffic with advertising or SEO, when you could be getting more conversions from your existing traffic?  Landing page and conversion optimization tools allow you to carefully and scientifically analyze what is happening on your landing pages and take steps to improve them to increase the number of visitors who convert.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  He has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

Although paid search is typically associated with quick wins and guaranteed conversions there is still an element of doing things right (the first time) from a long term sustainability approach that needs to be followed. Designing paid search programs for sustainability takes time and patience but it is well worth the effort. In doing so you are building efficiency into your program, setting yourself up to pay a lower average cost per click, and helping grow your business. Otherwise, not designing paid search for sustainability affects all paid search programs, frustrates parties involved, and fails to move the industry forward.

And finding the right instructions for designing paid search for sustainability is not hard to come by. Google makes it painfully clear how to design and manage paid search programs to ensure that you are paying the lowest possible amount for a click. And I would say that 95% of Google’s advice and policies are valid. I know that Google and the other platforms are in this business to make money, but I also know that Google and the others will reward you, over time, for doing the right things when it comes to well planned and designed paid search programs.

Paid Search Design for Sustainability

So how does one go about designing a paid search program for sustainability? First, I want to clarify that we are discussing mostly pre-click and traffic related tactics of a paid search program. Obviously, there are post-click analytics that influence pre-click actions. Also, from a systems thinking perspective, there is a broader scope of how a paid search program fits into the mix with other online marketing channels, but for now let us just focus on the task at hand - paid search design for sustainability.

1. Plan. And plan again. Based on the problem solving process P-D-C-A (plan-do-check-act) made popular by W. Edwards Deming, planning is the most important and critical step. If starting from scratch, map out your campaign structure by using something as simple as your website navigation or site-map. For more advanced planning, use mental model or affinity diagram methods. While mapping out your campaign structure,  think about what you have to offer and how it provides a solution for your customers.

2. Campaign naming. This is often over looked, but assuming you are running a paid search program on multiple platforms, you will want to name your campaigns and ad groups accordingly. This does not tie into Quality Score directly, but it does help when managing and reporting on the program performance. For example, if you are running a paid search program in Google, MSN, and Facebook and you have the same campaigns with the same name in each account, third party tools may roll-up all three campaigns into one view. Naming your campaigns and ad groups specific to the engine in which they live reduces the time wasted in guess work and work-arounds to solve the problem otherwise.

3. Develop highly targeted keyword sets. Once you have thoroughly mapped out your campaign structure, you should now have a foundation to bucket your keywords in a way that each ad group is unique. Beyond advanced match type tactics, each ad group should contain keywords highly relevant to each other. The number of keywords in an ad group is irrelevant. At a certain point you will know when enough is enough.

4. Create relevant and persuasive ad ad creative text. Text within an ad creative should in some way reflect the keywords being targeted. When possible make sure that at least one keyword (phrase) in your ad group is in the ad creative title and in the body of the ad. Three to four ad creatives is recommended unless you are multivariate testing.

5. Landing page relevancy. Technically, the landing page comes into play post-click, but it is a component of a paid search program that ties into Quality Score. Just as keywords and ad creatives are required to be relevant to each other, the landing page also is required to be relevant to the preceding components. Landing pages should be as relevant as possible to what the ad creative messaging is about.

6. Negative keywords. Use them and use them deliberately. At a minimum they should be used at the campaign level and when required they should be added at the ad group level.

7. Search Queries. This is really what it’s all about – matching your keywords to the search queries users are actually typing. If you are not analyzing search queries for keyword expansion and negative keyword implementation, you are missing out on conversion and cost reduction opportunities.

This is not an exhaustive list of paid search design for sustainability tactics, but it is a good starting point. Besides aligning your program with Quality Score requirements, following these steps has implications outside of the components of a paid search program. When you do this part right, you have more time to analyze the post-click data. You will also spend less time reorganizing mega lists of keywords from one ad group to multiple ad groups and spend more time ad creative testing. Following the Quality Score requirements and designing for sustainability also allows for more accurate bid testing.

Overall, if you do things right and design for sustainability there is less time being spent on the things that do not add value and your program has much better chance of out lasting the competition while continuing to maximize its return.

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Matt LeVeque is the Founder & President of SEM Science Consulting, LLC and Senior Member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ).

As search engine marketing evolves at light speed pace, new opportunities are constantly arising–making Search Engine Marketing (SEM) that much more challenging and harder for marketers to keep up with. PPC Summit recently surveyed 3500 past PPC Summit attendees who provided valuable insight on the top areas where Search Engine Marketers feel they need more education. 

According to survey respondents, the topics that Search Marketers want to learn more about to improve their ROI are:

• Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Optimization
• Integrating Paid Search, Organic and Social Media Marketing (SMM)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimization remain strong revenue drivers for online marketers, Social Media is rapidly moving up in importance. With social media sites like Facebook (500+ million users), LinkedIn (70+ million users), Twitter (106+ million users) and YouTube (300 million accounts) all securing their justifiable placement in the marketing mix, SEM specialists have to be on top of their game in order to keep up.

ISSUE #1 – Pay Per Click Campaign Optimization: The goal in pay per click marketing is to write compelling ad copy that directs prospects to your site or landing page and then entices them to sign up or buy your product/service. Easier said than done, right?

According to the Survey Results, 82.5% of SEM respondents feel they need to focus more on PPC Campaign Strategies by: 

• Improving their Quality Score. One way to improve your Quality Score–and pay less per click– is by properly using header tags (more here).
• Utilizing Website Optimizer & Google Analytics: Paying more attention to your analytics and constantly analyzing your cost-per-customer can really help your results.
• Fine-tuning Google AdWords PPC strategies: Save time and optimize your AdWords campaigns with the AdWords Interface.

ISSUE #2 – Social Media and Search Marketing Merge: Your customers are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more. Incorporating these social media sites into your marketing mix is a must in today’s SEM world. Use Social Media Marketing to complement your paid search and organic marketing strategy and reach a broader audience.

More than two-thirds of Survey Respondents ranked “Integrating Social Media with Search Marketing” in their top three priorities. Here are some quick tips: 

• Incorporate Keywords. Use keywords in your account names and all SMM communications ie. SEO blog postings, Tweets, Facebook updates, etc
• Develop Quality Content. This is critical in attracting quality prospects through the Social Media Channel.
• Social Media Time Management. Streamline your communications with automation tools.

ISSUE #3 – Search Engine Optimization: We have heard from attendees–countless times–how they invested so much time and money on creating a fabulous SEO campaign, but in the end conversions were low due to poorly structured websites or landing pages.

Up to 82% of the SEMs polled told us they need help with their SEO campaigns. You can start by: 

• Creating Appropriate Site Architecture. Customers should be able to find what they are looking for on your site in a click or two. If it’s more than three clicks, then you should re-think your site structure and messaging.
• Using Tools Many SEO Experts Use. Utilize the industry leading tools like:
  • SEOMoz (http://www.seomoz.org/) – full complement of SEO tools, to check backlinks, PageRank, keyword research & density etc.
  • Google Webmaster Tools – research search queries, keywords, crawl rates, backlinks, diagnostics, internal linking, robots.txt, etc.
  • SEOTools for Firefox (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html);
  • Wordstream (http://www.wordstream.com/seo-keyword-management) – keyword research & management.

You can learn more about these challenges and how to solve them at the upcoming
PPC Summit Presents: Search & Social Media Successconference. We built a brand new three-track curriculum based on the results from this attendee survey. On Sept. 21-22 Marketing Professionals will gather in Los Angeles to hear from an impressive line up of experts in SEM/SEO/SMM who will share their top strategies to increase search and social media marketing ROI.

We look forward to seeing you in September!

Kelly Larsen
Director of Marketing, PPC Summit

By Mary O’Brien, PPC Summit Founder

Part One. This is a two part article. Part Two will appear in our next Pay Per Click Insiders newsletter.Small businesses face a unique set of challenges when it comes to Search Engine Marketing. They don’t have a lot of time to constantly monitor campaigns while juggling their other business responsibilities and they typically can’t afford to hire a full time marketing person to run them. They also don’t have the dollars to invest to test huge campaigns and every dollar they spend needs to return an immediate and significant investment, otherwise they tend to just throw up their hands and bail on the process assuming it just doesn’t work for their type of business .

In some cases that may be true, but more frequently they simply haven’t set up the campaign correctly to start with, or have set it up and forgotten about it until at some point they review their credit card statement and realize it’s providing diminishing ROI. With a little education you can avoid most of the common things that kill small business AdWords campaigns and make them perform more effectively for you.

Here are the top ten mistakes many small businesses make that cause their AdWords Campaigns to fail:

1. Not turning off the content network.
When first setting up a campaign in AdWords turn off the content network. Google sets this option as “on” by default, but it typically only works for certain products/industries and those advertisers with a lot of experience and the ability to perform frequent testing. The content network doesn’t deliver relevant enough results to make it worthwhile on a small budget. It’s difficult to manage where your ad shows up and what queries it will show for unless you know what you are doing.  Ads on the content network can show up on hundreds of Web sites and generate thousands of clicks. While this can be a good thing if you are looking for cheap traffic and know what you are doing, you can also run through dollars very quickly. These aren’t focused searchers, specifically looking for your product or service; they are typically impulse buyers at a very early phase of the buying cycle. Nurtured properly these leads can turn into sales, but if you are just starting out or have limited dollars to spend that’s not where you want to get hung up.

2. Using too many or too few keywords.
Some small businesses assume they can get all the sales they need with twenty keywords, others go to the other extreme and add thousands before they really know how to properly set up a campaign. The folks with the twenty keyword campaigns bail out fast as they typically blow through their budgets in less than a month, wondering why they used the main keywords their competitors are on, but didn’t get many sales. That’s why. They spent too much on obvious keywords that everyone else has been bidding on for ages. Some of their larger competitors have already tested their ads, landing pages and bids to see what works, tweaked them and moved on. This strategy does not create a level playing field for a smaller business or give them any type of advantage, as you are playing a high risk game with high dollar keywords and there are always going to be competitors who have more money to spend than you do.

The folks who start off with thousands of keywords basically forget one simple thing. There is no point in having that many keywords unless you have the ability to test them and see which ones perform for you. With this strategy you’re just throwing mud against the wall and hoping something sticks.

Start off with 200 – 300 targeted keywords and that will allow you to test appropriately. You can use free tools like those from WordStream to determine which keywords to begin with. Then, when you have a list together, work on organizing your Ad Groups, and creating relevant ads.

3. Not structuring Campaigns correctly
In a perfect world your campaigns would be set up like this:

Campaign One:
Keyword One = One Ad Group = Three unique Titles & Descriptions to test
Keyword Two = One Ad Group = Three unique Titles & Descriptions to test

But seriously, very few small businesses have time to become a full time copywriter and marketing analyst, so wait to try this approach on your top performing keywords after you get some results. At the start, you need to set up your campaigns in a user friendly fashion that allows you to test easily and frequently and see at a glance what’s working and more importantly what’s not.

Creating ad groups with sets of tightly matched keywords is critical but most small businesses don’t do it. Add a few (maximum 10) relevant keywords to each ad group and add more groups as necessary to accommodate new “themed” keywords. Google maxes out at 100 ad groups per campaign, so you have plenty of room to move things around until you see what makes the most sense.

4. Using broad match unilaterally.
When you initially set up a Google AdWords campaign and input your keywords, the default type is broad match. While broad match can work effectively, it’s better to start off using phrase and exact match types, track the performance and adjust from there. Examples of match types and their functions are:

• Broad: tennis shoes (any order, any word, not as targeted, more clicks)
• Phrase: “tennis shoes” (exact order, words before and/or after, more targeted, less clicks)
• Exact: [tennis shoes] (exact order, no other words, highly targeted, least clicks)
• Negative: – white (this would not show ads for “white tennis shoes”)

By setting all your keywords to broad match initially you allow Google to control which keywords it deems “relevant” for your campaigns rather than deciding for yourself. Broad Match can provide great targeted traffic, but ONLY when you have a large list of negative keywords attached to the campaign and ad groups. Don’t even think about trying broad match without determining which negative keywords you want to use first. Otherwise you run the risk of Google’s algorithm running your campaign for you without a true understanding of your product or service offering. Really? You’d allow a robot to run your business? I would never suggest using broad match on a small budget campaign. You will just blow through money before you can test and determine the appropriate keywords for your business.

5. Not tracking ads and keywords.
Many businesses both large and small set up their ad campaigns assuming that they will just be able to measure results by the amount of sales or leads that come rolling in. They forget this simple fact: If your campaigns aren’t performing, you’re wasting money from the very start. There is no excuse for this given the fact that the Google Analytics tool is available for free to help you track exactly which keywords aren’t performing. Set it up and use from the very start to adjust your results.

All of this may sound a little intimidating at first and as a small business owner you’re probably wondering where on earth you can find the time to work on all of this. Setting up the campaigns properly is a good first step. The next is to learn as much as you can about AdWords. That’s what will give you a true competitive advantage in the long term, and with a little bit of knowledge you can tweak your campaigns to truly perform better.

For additional information we’d like to invite you to attend our upcoming AdWords Advantage Online Summit where a team of 13 experts will go into much greater depth on strategies that you can use right now to make your AdWords Campaigns produce more dollars.

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Mary O’Brien is the Founder and Chairman of Pay Per Click (PPC) Summit and AdWords Advantage Online Summit, premier Search Engine Marketing training events held in person and online to offer laser-focused education to help internet marketers make more money with Pay Per Click advertising. These training events bring together an expert pool of Search Marketing’s most respected leaders during hands-on workshops, how-to sessions, power labs, personal consulting and much more.

By Craig Danuloff, President and Alex Cohen, Senior Marketing Manager at ClickEquations

Quality Score is Google’s way of assessing how relevant your paid search keywords are to the searchers you’re targeting.  In our popular blog post about The Economics of Quality Score, we showed how improving your keywords from 7 to 10 could reduce your CPCs by 30%.

But, the way Quality Score works and how you can improve your Quality Score isn’t as easy to understand as it should be.

Just How Important Is Quality Score?
Quality Score plays a critical role in two formulas that Google uses to determine where (and if) your ads appear and how much you pay for clicks.

Quality Score and Ad Rank
The first is the formula for Ad Rank. This is the math that decides which ads appear in the top slot, which ones sit in position #2, and so on all the way down to the point at which ads don’t get shown at all. The formula is:

 
Quality Score is equally as important as your bid in terms of when and where your ads are positioned. It’s the sweat-equity of PPC. You can out-maneuver bigger or slower competitors without spending more.

So if your keyword earns a Quality Score of 10 and your nearest competitor earns only a Quality Score of 5 for that same keyword, your $2 MaxCPC will earn you a higher Ad Rank (and display position) than your competitor’s $3 MaxCPC. Your Ad Rank = 20 (10 x 2) while their Ad Rank = 15 (5 x 3).

If two competitors have similar or equal bids, obviously the higher Quality Score will earn a higher position.
And since there are often more advertisers than available display slots, the Ad Rank impact of Quality Score in many cases is the difference between an ad displaying and not displaying at all.

Quality Score and Your CPC
After Quality Score is used to determine the position of your ad, it is used again to calculate how much you’ll pay for each click.

The formula for your CPC on any keyword is based on the Ad Rank of the advertiser who scored just below you and your Quality Score.

 
Using the previous example, our Ad Rank was 20 while our competitors’ Ad Rank was 15. Our cost-per-click is then calculated as 15/10 + $0.01 or $1.51.

For every point (or fraction of a point) our Quality Score goes up, our cost-per-click goes down. And each rise in our Quality Score literally costs us less money on every click.

Assuming that the average Quality Score is 7 (which is our experience based on ClickEquations clients), earning a Quality Score of 10 is like getting a 30% discount. If your Quality Score is 5, then you’re paying a 40% per-click premium.

These are approximate values, because the numbers Google reports to us as Quality Scores aren’t the actual numbers they use in their calculations. We can assume they have much more precision than they share, and their numbers may or may not be exactly proportional to those they show us.

5 Steps to Improve Your Quality Score
Understanding and optimizing your Quality Score puts you in a powerful position: you can improve performance while reducing costs.

1. Prioritize: Analyze and prioritize your Quality Score optimization
2. Align: Precisely match search queries with ad copy
3. Revise: Extensive ad copy tests to find best performers
4. Remove: Delete or pause ineffective keywords
5. Eliminate: Landing Page problems and penalties

To get started, we’ve put together our 5 favorite tips to boost Quality Score

1. Prioritize Your Optimization - They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and you need to know your Quality Score before you can improve it.  Pay as much attention to Quality Score as you do to CPC, CTR, and Conversion Rate.

A great way to start is by creating a distribution of your Quality Score to get a snapshot of how things look overall. Here’s one example.

Then, sort campaigns by spend, then ad groups by spend, and finally keywords by Quality Score. In those top spending campaigns and ad groups any keyword with a Quality Score below 7 should be the priority for Quality Score improvement.

2. Align Search Queries and Text Ads  – Because Quality Score is driven by click-through-rates, the more you can narrow ad groups so that keywords (and the search queries they attract) are highly relevant to the provided text ad copy the better results you’ll see.

For example, a pet website selling organic pet food wouldn’t want to have the keywords “organic dog food” and “organic cat food” in one ad group. Each of those searchers has a specific pet and a specific pet food need, so they need custom ad copy and landing pages to maximize CTR, Quality Score, and ultimately conversion rates.

3. Revise and Test Ad Creative – Writing compelling, persuasive and distinctive text ads is the most important way you can improve CTR and drive up Quality Score. (The presumes you have organized ad groups narrowly as described above.)

Find the lowest perform text ads (by CTR) in the highest priority ad groups (by spend).  Remove poor performing text ads and work to introduce new ones that are even better. To really figure out what works, run disciplined tests. 

Here are some tips for writing killer text ads.

4. Remove Bad Keywords - Because Quality Score looks at historical CTR beyond the keyword itself, it’s important to remove low CTR keywords and text ads that pull down your overall average and historical rates.

Before deciding to pause or delete a lot of keywords with relatively low CTRs, you should consider the overall distribution of Quality Score within your account. If your account shows these strong signs of solid Quality Score performance, you can be less vigilant about hunting down and removing the low-end performers.

If you’ve got some Quality Score drag, the ?rst step is to remove keywords and text ads that have particularly poor CTRs relative to their closely related peers.

For example, you may have one or more particularly broad keywords within an ad group that gain a massive number of impressions but achieve very low CTR. The decision to pause those is an easy one.

If you have a new or marginally performing account,  you may need to cut more off the bottom and put tighter controls in place, at least until you push the vast majority of your keywords to a Quality Score 7 or higher.

There is a weight of history to the Quality Score calculation so the longer you let poor results linger the harder it may be, and the longer it may take to earn your way out.

5. Eliminate Landing Page Problems  – Of all of the Quality Score components, landing pages are the source of the most confusion and myths. Let’s start by clearing up some of the more egregious ones:

a. Landing pages can only hurt Quality Score, they can’t help it. Generally, only major problems will cause landing  page penalties.

Here are some obvious things to avoid
i. Extensive, unoriginal copy (such as scraped text)
ii. Pop-up advertising
iii. Landing pages that are “bait and switch” offers or that have very little to do with the ad or search query
iv. Very slow loading pages

b. Unlike keyword Quality Score, landing page Quality Score is not updated frequently. If you make changes, be patient. It make take a few weeks to see the impact.

Google landing page guidelines provide the most definitive suggestions.

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Craig Danuloff and Alex Cohen work at ClickEquations, a complete, easy-to-use paid search platform for large advertiser and agencies. For more free tips, check out the ClickEquations Learn section and their paid search blog.

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By Nick Herinckx, Account Executive, Anvil Media

Just like peanut butter and jelly, Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) belong together. When done correctly, integrating your PPC and SEO campaigns lead to substantial increases in conversions, a decrease in management costs and a healthy boost in ROI. But unfortunately, they are traditionally managed separately, often with separate goals, budgets and teams. By handling each campaign in a vacuum, managers hinder profitability and literally do the same work twice over.

We’re going to review how to integrate your PPC and SEO campaigns to get the most from your Internet marketing efforts.

Using PPC Keywords to Guide SEO Keyword Choice
One of the most harmful mistakes a company can make with their Internet marketing campaign is to separate their PPC keywords and SEO keywords. Now, PPC keyword research and SEO keyword research are definitely very different. With SEO, it’s important to consider organic competition, link profiles and domain trust while with PPC, ROI and paid competition is your guide. But remember this: SEO can take months while PPC results and data are almost immediate. Because of this, doesn’t it make the most sense to test out keywords using PPC before you spend months working to rank your pages organically? Let’s be honest, with most link building campaigns it can take months or more of hard work before you start seeing traffic, and link building isn’t exactly the most exciting aspect of Internet marketing. The last thing any company needs is to work for months, start ranking for a keyword and then discover that it’s not really profitable or targeted. For this reason, it’s very cost and time effective to test keywords using PPC before attempting to rank for them organically.

So how do you test keywords using PPC? The most important part is to ensure you have conversion tracking set up correctly. Regardless of integration, you need to be tracking your PPC conversions so you can accurately calculate ROI. It doesn’t matter what your conversion point is, as long as it represents one of the main goals for your website and as long as it doesn’t change throughout testing. Once you have conversion tracking established, simply create your PPC campaigns how you normally would and let them run for a month. At the end of that month, you are going to have a solid idea of which keywords perform the best and lead the most conversions. These are the keywords you should strongly consider for your SEO campaigns, as they have proven their profitability.

Using PPC & Landing Page Copy to Guide Website Copy
Most companies choose a target market and then develop messaging that best resonates with their audience. But even still, small copy changes and headline changes can have a dramatic impact on bounce rates and conversion rates. This is most evident with PPC ads, where you are able to see which ad text works best for certain keywords (leads to a high CTR) and which landing page headlines lead to the lowest bounce rate and highest conversion rate. Many companies will test PPC copy and implement results separately from the main website, and this a big mistake. If certain messaging resonates well with your PPC traffic, and the traffic is being generated from relevant keywords, then make absolutely sure you integrate that messaging into your main website. I did this with one of my own clients and saw organic bounce rates decrease 10% immediately after implementing the copy that worked well for my PPC ads.

Content Network Performance and Your Link Building Campaigns
Do you advertise on content networks? If so, then you should be monitoring the quality of the traffic coming from these campaigns and specifically, which websites drive that traffic. What often happens is that content network ads run on tons of sites and generate millions of impressions, but only a handful of those sites will be the ones that drive the best performing traffic. I can’t stress enough how important and valuable this information is to your organic link building campaigns. The top PPC ad platforms have methods to see which content network websites drive the most targeted traffic, and you should take this information and use it to reach out to these sites individually to request a link or establish some sort of offline relationship. If these sites drive quality traffic with your content network ads, they will most certainly do the same with a more comprehensive and permanent presence.

So, have you integrated your PPC and SEO campaigns? If not, consider the above ideas and get your SEO and PPC managers working together. Doing so will save much time and effort and will certainly boost ROI. Remember: PPC and SEO belong together like peanut butter and jelly.

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Nick Herinckx is an Account Executive and professional Internet marketer at Anvil Media, a strategic Internet marketing agency. Nick works with a variety of companies including Axway, Trend Micro and Jones and Bartlett Publishers to increase their Internet visibility and generate a positive ROI from their Internet marketing efforts. With both a background in coding and general marketing, Nick specializes in SEO, PPC management, website code optimization and website promotion strategies.

Connect with Nick via his LinkedIn profile, or email him at nick@anvilmediainc.com.