Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

The formula behind Google AdWords’ all-important Quality Score is a mystery to many PPC marketers, who have to guess what Google means by terms such as “relevance” and “quality.” This mystery leads to speculation on how to improve Quality Score, and much of that speculation is misled and confused.

Here, we’ll debunk three commonly perpetuated myths about Quality Score and how you can raise it to achieve better results from your AdWords campaigns.

Myth #1: Exact match keywords will always have a higher Quality Score than broad match keywords.

False!

This is one of the most widely repeated myths about Quality Score. In fact, Quality Score is not dependent on match type. If you use the same keyword in the same ad group multiple times, but with different match types, they’ll all have the same Quality Score.

This is because Google calculates Quality Score based on exact matches only. Even if a keyword is set to broad match, the Quality Score for that keyword is based on your click-through rate (CTR) and other relevance factors for exact matches. So don’t be led down the path of using only the exact matching option, thinking it will boost your performance. You could be missing out on lots of valuable long-tail traffic.

Myth #2: To improve your Quality Score, you need to improve your conversion rate.

False!

Google doesn’t care at all about your conversion rates; in many cases it doesn’t even know what they are. If you think about it, there’s no reason Google would care. Google gets paid when people click your ad. What happens after that is your problem.

To raise your Quality Score, focus on improving your click-through rate, not your conversion rate. Tips for raising CTR include:

• Using the keyword in your ad’s headline, text and display URL
• Writing more compelling, specific ad copy
• Testing different headlines, calls to action and other elements of your ad

Conversion rate is important for your business, but it doesn’t affect your Quality Scores.

Myth #3: Higher Quality Scores result from higher bids at the initial launch of your campaign.

False!

This may have been true in the past, when higher bids would ensure a higher ad rank and hence a higher click-through rate, allowing you to then make lower bids while maintaining high positions with your keywords. But now, Google accounts for ads placed lower on a page being less likely to be noticed and clicked. Google expects your click-through rate to be maintained relative to other ads placed in the same page position. In other words, a lower CTR in a poor ad position could be considered great.

Different keywords may also have click-through rates different than you’d expect. Commercial words that are highly specific are expected to achieve a click-through rate higher than that for generic keywords about the identical subject. And remember that CTR on Google’s own search results page are the only ones that count.

So don’t bid up to the top position of the page – just be happy with the position where your ad’s click-through rate is doing well. Of course, low-positioned ads won’t get as many clicks, so if you think the keyword is worth it, raise your bids. Just know that it won’t affect your Quality Scores.

Image via KeywordSearchPros.com

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Larry Kim is the founder and VP of products at WordStream, a provider of PPC software and Quality Score management tools for AdWords advertisers.

In the Dark Ages of internet advertising, bidding was done on a cost-per-mille (CPM) basis. “Hits” and “Page views” ruled the land. Soon however, a new day dawned. Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing was born and Google AdWords emerged as the advertisers’ knight in shining armor. You only paid for actual visitors to your site and you controlled your position by simply increasing or decreasing your keyword bids. Alas, the simplicity didn’t last and Google AdWords bidding is now much more complex.

The 4 Types of Bids

Google AdWords offers four different options for bidding; manual bidding, automated bidding, CPM bidding and CPA bidding. Each of these methods has both strengths and weaknesses that should be considered.

1. Manual Bidding – This is the classic, auction-style bidding we grew to love when AdWords was first launched. You set a default bid at the ad group level that applies to all keywords in the ad group. You then have the option of setting a custom bid for every keyword if you wish.Manual bidding offers the greatest control of your cost-per-click (CPC) and allows you to see how changes in bids affect position, CTR and even conversions. However, this control comes at a price. Manual bid management can be very time consuming, hence the abundance of 3^rd party bid management tools on the market.
2. Automatic Bidding – This is Google’s attempt to make bidding easy for even the newest AdWords advertiser. The user sets a daily budget and then Google tries to get as many clicks as possible with the given budget.While this option requires virtually no effort to manage, you also have virtually no control over what time your ads are being shown, what search queries are triggering your ads or the position of your ad. Unless you trust Google 100% with your money, I don’t recommend this option.
3. CPM Bidding – This is the oldest method of bidding. You tell Google how much you’re willing to pay for 1,000 impressions and they start showing your ad. While some would view this as a step backward in internet advertising, if an advertiser has proven ad copy that delivers a high CTR, this can actually deliver clicks cheaper than PPC, especially for brand terms.
4. CPA Bidding – Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding is the newest addition to Google AdWords bidding. Another name for the feature is Conversion Optimizer. With this feature you must first install conversion tracking (which you already have installed right?) and have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days. Then all you have to do is go to the campaign settings and under “Bidding and budget” select the “Edit” link for bidding options. There you select the “Focus on conversion” radio button and set your desired CPA.

The benefit here is that Google is able to use all its available data to obtain conversions at the desired CPA. Google can alter position or time of day, try more broad search queries or different geographies. You relinquish a lot of control, but you can see phenomenal results.

As you can see just choosing your bid type is quite a decision. However, you should also consider the other factors that Google considers along with your actual bid. These factors are rolled up into the mysterious Quality Score (QS).

Enter Quality Score

Perhaps the least understood metric in the otherwise robust reporting of AdWords is Quality Score. It affects where your ad will appear and more importantly, how much you will pay for a click! There are many factors that influence QS. Google lists the following:

• Historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword/ad pair on Google
• Overall account history
• Historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• Quality of your landing page
• Relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• Relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographic area where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

As you can see, QS is very complex and constantly changing as Google adds and subtracts “other relevance factors.” Google has also had issues with incorrectly reported QS, though they assured advertisers that it was only an error in reporting, not in actual calculations.

Golden Era Over?

Though simplicity is long gone from the realm of Google AdWords bidding, PPC is still a smart investment of marketing dollars and provides performance metrics that are second to none.

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Robert Brady is the owner and head PPC wizard at Righteous Marketing, a Google AdWords Certified Partner for PPC management. He has worked for 6+ years in PPC with a variety of companies ranging from a small grass-fed beef grower in Idaho to a large B2B data storage provider.

Google recently introduced a new keyword matching option in Google AdWords: modified broad match. As you can probably guess, modified broad match is similar to the traditional broad match option, but gives you a little more control as the advertiser. Let’s take a look at how this new option works. 

What is modified broad match?

Modified broad match is a new AdWords feature that allows pay-per-click (PPC) marketers to set keywords to a more targeted level than broad match, while still having a greater reach than phrase match or exact match keywords.

To use modified broad match, add a plus sign (+) in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. The word or words that are preceded by a (+) sign must appear in the user’s search query, exactly or in close variation. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations, acronyms, and stemmed forms.

The words that are not preceded by a plus sign may vary more significantly or not appear at all in the user’s search query, as with regular broad match.

This is potentially a very interesting and profitable opportunity for AdWords advertisers, as effective modified broad match keywords are likely to drive more traffic than phrase or exact match keywords, while attracting more qualified, targeted traffic than broad match.

What are some examples of modified broad match keywords?

Let’s start with the keyword “aromatherapy oils”—if this keyword was set to broad match, your ad might display in response to queries like “cooking oils” and “oil spill.” Not very targeted and not very good for your click-through rate, cost per click or Quality Score.

If you modify the keyword with a plus sign before “aromatherapy” (+aromatherapy oils), you’ll guarantee that only queries that include that word or close variations trigger your ad. For example, queries that trigger you ad might include:

• aromatherapy
• aromatherapeutic oils
• aromatherapy massage
• organic aromatherapy products

But your ad won’t display in response to queries like “massage oil.” As you can see, this gives you the ability to define your target audience much more closely, while still catching some interesting variants.

As another example, say your keyword is “anti wrinkle cream.” Set to broad match, your ad might show up in the results for queries like “wrinkle resistant pants” and “acne cream.” If you modify your keyword with plus signs like so (anti +wrinkle +cream), only queries with close variations of both “wrinkle” and “cream” will prompt your ad.

Hasn’t broad match always worked this way?

Originally, AdWords’ default broad match type was more restrictive than its current broad match feature. Close variations of your keyword could trigger your ad, but the field of possible queries that could trigger it was narrower. For example, the words in your keyword phrase could appear in any order, and along with any other words, but they all had to be there.

Eventually broad match became less targeted (as it is today), and many Google AdWords users complained. These advertisers felt that the change was allowing their ads to display against terms that weren’t relevant to their offerings, requiring them to develop extensive lists of negative keywords. Negative keywords are crucial for high return on investment when using broad match, but some users felt the new broad match was still too inclusive. For example, one user complained that “zebras near Chicago” showed up in his search query report for the keyword “widgets near Chicago.”

Now AdWords users can get the same control offered by the first version of broad match, but they also have the option to use today’s broader broad match.

How do I enable modified broad match?

In your AdWords account, click on the Keywords tab and select the keyword phrase you want to edit. In the Type column, click on the current match type and choose Modified Broad Match from the drop-down menu. Edit your keyword as necessary with (+) signs.

Is modified broad match is a good idea for my campaign?

Unless you are perfectly happy with your campaign performance given your current keyword settings, it’s a great idea to give modified broad match a try. If you’re mostly using phrase and exact match because you like to have more control over your keywords, you might find that modified broad match gives you a high degree of control while increasing your reach, impressions and clicks. If you’re mostly using standard broad match, you might find that enabling modified broad match on some of your keywords reduces wasteful spend on irrelevant traffic, and improves Quality Score and other key metrics.

As with any change to your AdWords campaign, be sure to keep close track of how your campaign performance evolves. Take note of how clicks, CPCs, conversion rates, and ROI change. Helpfully, Google lets you produce a performance report with information solely about your modified broad match keywords.

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Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, a provider of PPC tools and an advanced keyword research tool to help PPC advertisers discover profitable head, mid and long-tail keywords.

PPC Summit recently conducted a survey of leading bid management vendors and their customers.  Some common themes emerged, some of which were unexpected.  This article captures five of several messages search marketers are sending vendors.  See the full report for other expectations, challenges they’ve faced, and advice they have for their fellow marketers.

#1:  Provide Kick-Ass Support or Else

We interviewed more than 50 people and 41 organizations.  Of the 66 criteria they defined, support rated #1 by a long shot.  “Support” means a lot of things, though, not just an 800-number or Internet-based support.  And quite frankly, some vendors don’t even provide an 800-number.

Vendors better listen and prove they’re listening too, before and after the sale.  The level of support a vendor offers before a sale can foreshadow the level of service you may end up with after the sale.  Sure, some vendors have tiered customer service levels meaning if you pay them extra they’ll be at your beck and call.  With others the amount or type of support you get may depend on your spend level.  For example, you’re spending a couple of thousand dollars a month you won’t have a dedicated account manager but if you’re spending $50,000 a month you likely will.

My favorite pre-sale support story came out of Zappos from Assistant SEM Manager Tim Schaeffer.  When Schaeffer was evaluating vendors he had three companies on his short list.  He sent e-mail messages to all three at the same time and was surprised by the results.  Two of the vendors were located in the same time zone (Pacific).  The third, Kenshoo, was located in Israel which was Kenshoo.  It was midnight in Israel at the time.  Guess who responded first?  Kenshoo.  Guess who got the business?  You guessed it. 

Kenshoo responded immediately.  Both US vendors responded in about 4 hours and one of them was located a five minute drive away!  Oops.

The “support” bucket also now includes customer-requested product features.  Those companies who listen to their customers or solicit customer feedback and turn customer requests and comments into product features or feature enhancements are viewed as more “customer centric” than those who don’t.  Moreover, the customers who have witnessed their ideas transformed into product features are taking emotional equity in the vendor and its product to the point where some sound like a Windows 7 commercial:  “I’m a PPC (search marketer) and I invented [my favorite vendor’s product].”

#2:  Get the Lead Out

Vendors differ in a lot of respects but here we’re going to discuss time to market.  Some vendors have agile software release cycles ranging from about two weeks to three months while others still have annual or semi-annual “major release” cycles. 

Major release cycles are how software companies have traditionally built software:  They plan, build, test, and deploy a big software release that’s packed with all kinds of features and enhancements.  Traditional software development is a linear practice that moves a product down a line through several types of specialists who specify, build, and test the software, respectively.  Agile development involves software releases that are smaller in scope and released more frequently.   It breaks down interdepartmental fiefdoms like coding and testing, among other things, so software teams can develop better quality software faster and more collaboratively.

Among the people we interviewed the difference between traditional and agile releases meant a lot.  Companies with shorter (agile) release cycles are seen as more in tune with customer requirements and also more up to date with Google’s constant algorithmic modifications than companies with slower release cycles.

This finding also ties back to the point about turning customer ideas into product features:  When customers see product features a few weeks or a few months down the road that they personally suggested they become more loyal customers and they’re also amazed how fast their vendor of choice incorporated their idea(s).

#3:  Make Me More Effective

Almost everyone we interviewed had switched vendors at least once or dumped their agency because they believed they could do a better job in-house using the right tools and with the help of the right experts on the vendors’ account team.

“Help” comes in several forms including human assistance and machine assistance.  The human element we’ve already touched on; however, I can say the vendor account teams when they’re good are a valuable extension of the in-house search team.

Machine help is also popular among both experienced and novice search professionals.  Some systems have automated best practice engines that will suggest best practices automatically, kind of like contextual help.  The engines apply algorithms to historical history, keyword prices, the buying patterns of organizations inside or even outside your industry, and then compare the results with your current actions.

Experienced search marketers sometimes ignore the suggestions based on experience.  Seasonal keyword buys are a great example.  They nevertheless value a second pair of eyes, virtual or not, because it forces them to think about what they’re doing and why.  New search marketers like best-practice suggestions because it’s a great way to learn hands-on.

In terms of product features you may have noticed – and we point out in the report – that bid management isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to managing search programs effectively.  Vendors tend to categorize the additional features differently but reporting and campaign management are the two major buckets with the latter including bulk uploads and editing, Quality Score management, and more.

#4:  Help Me Do Business My Way

It’s wonderful some vendors have so many features available for every imaginable vertical market.  On the other hand, who cares?   If a company sells professional services it has no need to tie inventory to paid search because it has no inventory.  The message here is twofold:  1) Make me effective in my vertical and 2) Don’t make me wade through hundreds of features just to guess which 50 actually matter.

(Actually, you can do yourself a BIG favor by prioritizing what you’re trying to accomplish.  That way, what is and is not relevant will be more obvious to you.)

Search marketers appreciate domain expertise but it’s hard to know what you’re missing if don’t know a capability exists.  One gentleman we interviewed is convinced multi-channel attribution is impossible and yet other fellow retailers are doing it with varying levels of success and sophistication.

Vertical market nuances can also play out in sales.  A search marketer who works for a national insurance agency is spending lots of money but on very few keywords so a percentage-of-spend cost model doesn’t work for him.

Help Me Improve ROI

ROI is a moving target and as you well know search marketers are under constant pressure to improve ROI.  Many search marketers are looking beyond last click attribution to multi-attribution and multichannel attribution for two main reasons:  1) Last-click attribution rarely reflects actual human behavior and 2) Paid search is being integrated into overall marketing strategies more than it has been. As a result, paid search is increasingly being compared to, contrasted with, and optimized in relation to other marketing tactics.

Retailers are a good example of a vertical market making this move.  Admittedly, it’s the larger retailers that are pushing the trend forward but as always sophistication flows downstream over time.  Smaller retailers are already paying attention because they’re hearing more buzz about it generally thanks to AdWords search funnel reports.

Not all vendors provide this capability and those who do don’t necessarily support it to the same degree.  At the present time, some search marketers are doing the functional equivalent of sticking a finger in the wind to using complex data models to attribute costs to specific actions.

It’s a growing area and people are interested so expect to see a lot more about this (and more sophisticated solutions) in the near future.

Conclusion

There are a lot of reasons to hate bid management solutions and vendors, especially if their products and/or services don’t align with your business.  If you’re unhappy with your present vendor, you’re wise to take a thoughtful approach to vendor selection starting with your objectives.  Along the way, pay attention to things like responsiveness and a willingness to ensure your success, particularly if your spend level is formidable.

The main message is don’t settle.  You don’t have to.  Most vendors offer free trials so you can take their solutions for a test drive and all of them would be more than happy to be your next business partner.  Just make sure you’re in the driver’s seat or you may end up feeling like you’ve been taken for a ride.

Lisa Morgan is CEO of Strategic Rainmakers, a management and marketing consulting firm that helps organizations meet their strategic business and marketing goals.  Its services include in-depth research, marketing consulting, content development, and strategic initiatives, among other things.  Past and present clients include vendors, service providers, event producers, publishers, and associations.

By Dennis Yu, The Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal

You may have read these HitWise numbers  on how Facebook has overtaken Google as the most popular site in the United States– now at 7.07% of all visits versus Google at 7.03%.  At 400 million users and 25% of all traffic (not visits), it’s not just teenagers anymore. Did you know that Facebook serves 150 million search queries a day? Industry estimates place Google at 250 to 400 million queries per day.

Thus, “search” is not a website– it’s a function that occurs across any site or application. Think of websites as vertical bars, while applications such as search, commenting, and user participation as horizontal slices that go across these sites.  Even the concept of a “website” is being blown away– note that most users of twitter are interacting not at twitter.com, but via a 3rd party tool or within another blog. Whether it’s @anywhere or even the APIs being released by CitySearch and Foursquare, it’s clear that there’s a increasingly shared data layer underneath these websites. Think of the sewer and electrical grid that is below Manhattan.

I had a chance to sit down with Alex Schultz, who runs online marketing for Facebook– he is also in charge of Facebook’s SEO.  He mentioned the concept of “interestingness squared, boringness squared”. Let’s say you have 500 friends and each friend, on average, has 20 things they do each day that could be shown in the feed.  Thus, with no filter, you would see 10,000 items in your feed on your Facebook homepage. Impossible to sort the noise on what’s important or most relevant to you.

Facebook must choose what to show, based on the influence of each user, their track record (are they spamming others or is their stuff being actively shared and commented on), and general “karma” FriendRank-like factors.  Thus, the things that are interesting get promoted in the social graph– to quickly become viral.  And things that are boring get buried, never to be shown in activity stream.

This morning, Facebook released some insights into how their search works.  It’s worth a read if you some time, but let’s just say that they’re serving personalized search results based on proximity (of the many “Jose Gonzales” in the world, show the one that has the most mutual friends in common), popularity, and context. I’m in Boulder today, so my search for cosmetic surgery here should ideally yield a different result than someone searching from Chicago.  Google’s Caffeine and the introduction of personalized results from your friends only starts to approach what happens on Facebook.

5,000 new businesses join Facebook each day.  Google has about 570,000 advertisers on AdWords. Do the math.  Who has the deeper relationships and has 50% of visits from users that log in at least once a day? Facebook is on track to hit a billion dollars in annualized revenue, if they haven’t already.

Are you using Facebook’s self-serve ad platform yet?  For the 2.5 years, we’ve treated Facebook PPC as another paid search channel, just behind Google, while ahead of Yahoo! and Bing.  And the results for Facebook lead gen and consumer product have been phenomenal.  They will continue to be so long as the territory is still new to advertisers and agencies– and clients understand that social media, properly targeted, and integrated with other channels, is quite effective.

Google has discussed that they’re incorporating social signals into ranking factors.  An article that a couple years ago might have generated 50 links might today generate 10 links and 300 mentions on twitter and Facebook.  Facebook now opening up pages to be indexed, along with many other previously private default options, means that you should be sending stronger signals in social media to influence search results not just on Facebook, but in traditional search engines, too.

So what does this mean for your business?

1. Create and pimp out your fan page immediately. When you get to 100 users, grab your vanity url at facebook.com/username. Get customers and friends to comment and participate regularly, knowing this can generate a viral effect, plus generate links to your fan page (links between pages are votes for Google, while fanning on fan pages are votes for Google).

2. Start testing Facebook’s PPC.  Run traffic to both your fan page and site, to build up a fan base and generate a viral effect. Use proper analytics and attribution, determine the effect of the “assist” on organic search traffic and direct traffic, much like a view-through conversion.

3. Run demographically targeted ads on the Google Content Network– this is a good proxy for what will work on Facebook and MySpace self-serve, given your display creatives and demographic targets are in alignment.

4. Focus more on offers and “interestingness”. Remember what Alex Schultz said about “interestingness squared” earlier? With the rise of local, social, and mobile games– or platforms like Gowalla that effectively are video games, make sure what you are saying doesn’t sound like a shameless ad.  Make it cool, interesting, or perhaps even offer a coupon.  Is it funny or shareable in some other aspect?

5. Begin reaping the rewards for being a first-mover. The spammers were first, but your legitimate brand is still early in the game. 

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Dennis Yu is an entrepreneur and internationally recognized lecturer in search engine marketing. Areas of expertise include search marketing technical analysis and pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign development and optimization. He is co-founder and chief executive officer of BlitzLocal, a Denver area firm that provides local search solutions for enterprises of all sizes. Dennis is also a regular speaker at leading industry events like AdWords Advantage Online Summit and the upcoming PPC Summit Presents…Search & Social Media Success.

By Elisa Gabbert, Content Development Manager at WordStream, Inc.

If you’re still building pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns from a traditional keyword list, it’s not doing your business any favors. A spreadsheet is an inefficient, outdated way to manage keywords for search marketing, leading to wasted dollars and lost time.

A keyword database is a completely different approach to research and manage PPC keywords. Compared to a keyword list, it’s:

• Private and proprietary
• Easier to organize and manage
• Easier to update and expand
• More actionable
• Collaborative

Essentially, it’s a flexible infrastructure that enables you to work with large numbers of keywords and quickly determine which pockets of keywords have the most business value. You can then translate your database into a highly effective PPC campaign structure.

Building a keyword database isn’t difficult, and as your campaigns scale, you’ll find it much faster and easier to keep things running smoothly. Here’s the five-step process to build an effective keyword database for PPC marketing.

Step 1: Start your PPC keyword research

The most important part of a keyword database, naturally, is keywords! To build a comprehensive, up-to-date database, it’s important to look at keyword research as an ongoing process, aggregating keywords from multiple sources.

Here are four sources, both public and private, that will help you gain a complete picture of the terms you should be using in your campaigns:

• Public keyword tools: A traditional Web-based keyword suggestion tool is based on popularity; remember that overall popularity doesn’t guarantee relevance to your audience.
• Historical site logs: Your server logs are a great source of keyword data—they contain a record of the real search queries that have led people to your site.
• Web analytics: The keyword reports in your analytics provide a continuous stream of new keywords. Incorporate those new insights into your research.
• Search query reports: The search query reports in AdWords Editor are another source of real data. These tell you the actual search queries that have triggered your PPC ads.

Pooling these sources gives you a personalized database that is highly relevant to your business. Be sure to keep your research up-to-date with traffic and conversion stats to see which keywords do the most work in your PPC campaigns.

Step 2: Segment and organize your keywords
Better keyword research gets you a lot closer to more profitable PPC campaigns, but to reap the full benefits of your research, it’s crucial to organize your keywords into small, manageable groups of closely related terms. This process will improve your campaigns by enabling:

• Better landing pages: It’s easier to write targeted, high-ranking copy around close-knit keyword groups.
• Better ads: Similarly, you can quickly write relevant, compelling text ads for well-structured keyword groups (aka ad groups).
• Better click-through rates: More relevant pages and ads grab a more qualified audience, so your CTRs and conversion rates improve.
• Better Quality Scores: High CTR and relevance lead to high Quality Scores, so you pay less for better positioning.

A well-organized database structure makes everything else you do for PPC, from adding new keywords to managing bids, simpler and more effective.

Step 3: Cut out waste with negative keywords
With strong keyword research, you can identify profitable keyword opportunities. But for high ROI, it’s equally important to identify and eliminate waste. This means discovering negative keywords, or irrelevant terms that eat up pay-per-click advertising budgets without generating quality leads.

Here are a few ways to find negative keyword candidates:

• Generic negative keyword lists: These aren’t a bad way to get started, but remember that generic negative keywords may not apply to your specific niche, and many are likely missing.
• During regular keyword research: When looking for relevant keywords, also keep your eyes open for suggestions that aren’t relevant to your business.
• Search query reports: Regularly look through your search query reports in AdWords and remove irrelevant keywords from your ad groups.
• Organic log files: By using your own log files for negative keyword discovery, you can catch irrelevant keywords before they trigger your ads.

Step 4: Create strong, targeted text ads
The next step is to write text ads for each keyword/ad group. If you followed the above process, your ad groups are already highly targeted, so it should be simple to write strong, targeted ads. Here are some tips for writing effective PPC ad copy:

• Include the top traffic: driving keywords in the title, text, and display URL of the ad when possible.
• Don’t overgeneralize: address a specific segment of your audience.
• Test several ads for each ad group. Google will rotate the ads so you can see which works best.
• Always include a call to action.

In addition, to maximize Quality Score, your ads should clearly be relevant to their associated landing pages.

Step 5: Repeat as necessary to maintain gains
One of the benefits of a keyword database is the ability to expand your research without losing control. So keep monitoring, testing, and tweaking your campaigns to improve results. And keep adding keywords from your analytics! The keywords your clients use to find you are among your most valuable marketing assets.

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Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, Inc., a provider of advanced SEO tools and pay-per-click software for search engine marketing efforts. WordStream also offers a FREE keyword analyzer tool for conducting keyword research and discovering profitable head, mid- and long-tail keywords.

By Kelly Larsen Director of Marketing, PPC Summit 

At past PPC Summit events, attendees have shown a lot of interest in WordStream’s keyword tool so we decided to provide a more detailed look at how these tools work. We recently had the opportunity to talk with Larry Kim, Founder and VP of Product Development at WordStream, to learn about their new keyword tools. Larry walked us through how the Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper work and how you can use them to enhance your SEO and PPC results. We wanted to share some of the cool product takeaways in the following Q&A on how these tools can help you better manage the keyword development process.

1.  How do these new tools help Search Marketers do their jobs better?
We launched these free Keyword tools to offer Search Marketers a broader range of keyword development and management options. The Keyword Niche Finder is designed to help prioritize content, keyword targeting and campaign creation based on an entire “keyword universe” surrounding a topic. It helps Search Marketers find the most popular pockets of related keywords (keyword niches) rather than individual keywords. And the Keyword Grouper helps Search Marketers organize their own keyword lists and data into actionable groups and niches.

 Advantages of The Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper:
a. Identify Keyword Niches Versus Single Keywords – Many times the most popular   keyword will perform best on your site, but not always.

b. Discover In-depth Keyword Variations – The Niche Finder offers popular variations within a given keyword cluster. This helps to vary page content and anchor text – something SEOs advocate – and it helps to structure comprehensive PPC campaigns or Ad Groups.

c. Improve Campaign Structure – These tools help to create a well-organized, semantically themed campaign and Ad Group structure for paid search accounts.

2. What are keyword niches and how do they help SEO and PPC campaign performance?
Keyword niches are groupings of tightly related keywords that can be used to drive paid and organic search marketing strategies.

For SEO purposes, identifying keyword niches helps marketers prioritize SEO workflow, identify promising topics for Web content and blog posts, and ensure that a website is optimized for the most profitable keywords.

As for PPC performance, when you identify keyword niches in your vertical, it allows you to create a strong PPC account structure at inception. This will save time and money by delivering more relevant ads, which in turn generate more clicks and improve your Quality Score.

3. How does the Keyword Niche Finder work?
Let’s take a look at the Niche Finder in action. It’s interesting to compare the results of a traditional keyword tool to The Free Keyword Niche Finder, as shown below. Here are results from WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool:

 
Now let’s look at the results for the same topic using The Free Keyword Niche Finder:
 

The interesting point here is in the difference between the two results, and the way that the two tools function. The Free Keyword Tool looks at the volume of results across a variety of sources (ISPs, search engines, and toolbars). The Free Keyword Niche Finder takes the same data that The Free Keyword Tool is using and then clusters that information semantically. So what we’re seeing here is that some keywords have a longer or more substantial “tail”.

Take one of the more popular niches (“refurbished laptops – dell”) and enter that keyword into the Niche Finder:

 
Assuming we’re using Refurbished Dell Laptops as a campaign, these would make for a series of pretty tight Ad Groups, ranging from approximately 10 – 35 keywords. This allows you to write very targeted ads and create a very specific, compelling landing page for each group.

4. What is the Keyword Grouper and how does it work?
The Keyword Grouper offers similar functionality to the Keyword Niche Finder, but instead of asking for a keyword as input, it groups existing data. You can export data from your analytics or a search query report, drop it into the tool, and then The Free Keyword Grouper segments that data.

Just drop in a list of keywords, and it provides a list of results similar to what you would find with The Free Keyword Niche Finder. This is a nice way to look at either a list you already have, or to examine historical data on a client site or an existing site you may be taking over. You can then leverage the same advantages The Free Keyword Niche Finder offers.

5. How can I get these tools?
The tools are free and easy to use; all you have to do is create a free WordStream account to gain full access to both tools, the Keyword Niche Finder and the Keyword Grouper.

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.

By Mike Nierengarten, Online Marketing Consultant, Anvil Media Inc

The MCC

MCC’s or My Client Centers were originally created for third party agencies with multiple clients to monitor client accounts from a central location.  Google has since recognized the value an MCC can hold and has since described an MCC as “ideal for large advertisers” in the What is My Client Center section of AdWords help (but apparently not enough to change the name to something that makes sense for advertisers).

Despite Google’s endorsement, the MCC remains an underutilized tool in most search marketers’ arsenal.

The power of the MCC is that it provides an extra level (or levels) of segmentation and makes large accounts much more manageable. 

The Power of the MCC

In any pay per click (PPC) account, account structure is exceptionally important.  Segmenting keywords into well-defined ad groups and ad groups into well-defined Campaigns allows marketers to better associate ad text with keywords, thereby creating more relevant ads.  A hierarchal account structure also allows marketers to better analyze subsets of the overall account by dissecting specific sections of the account.

Three levels of structure – Campaigns, ad groups, and keywords – works well for the average PPC account, but what do you do if you are selling 10,000 unique products in 500 unrelated categories geographically targeted by region?  The answer is to create a hierarchal structure more than three levels deep.

This is precisely the power of the MCC – the ability to add more levels to the PPC account structure.

Multi-Tiered MCC’s

For large-scale advertisers who target hundreds of thousands of keywords, a regular old MCC may not be enough.  Multi-tiered MCC’s may be the best solution.  Multi-tiered MCC’s are essentially master accounts of MCC’s and provide another level of depth. 

Using multi-tiered MCC’s, marketers can control the level of segmentation, adding new levels as necessary (hence, segmenting to the nth degree).  A multi-tiered MCC for a toy store, for example, could segment specific toys by current promotion, category, age group, and country where the toy ships and, using Google AdWords reports, can easily pull statistics for each level.

Avoiding Infection

Beyond simplifying account management and analysis, MCC’s also avoid cross-infection of Quality Score (QS).  A keyword’s or an ad’s Quality Score directly impacts other keywords within an account. Because the competitive nature of paid search varies from region to region and category to category, marketers may experience a wide range of Quality Score implications. 

For example, cost-per-click (CPC) in New Delhi is much cheaper than CPC in New York.  If a marketer were to create a Campaign that targets both India and the United States, Quality Score may suffer as marketers overbid for positioning in New Delhi but underbid for positioning in New York. 

Again, MCC’s and multi-tiered MCC’s can resolve this issue.

Summary
MCC’s and multi-tiered MCC’s provide marketers the opportunity for advanced segmentation.  Advanced segmentation allows for better analysis of subsets of ads and keywords, the ability to separate accounts based on geographic region, product category, promotion, etc., and avoid cross-contamination of poor-performing keywords.

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Mike Nierengarten is an Account Executive with Anvil Media Inc. in Portland.  Mike began work with Anvil in 2008 and has managed paid search accounts for a wide range of budgets and clients including an email marketing service provider, online school, and online psychic network.  Previously, Mike worked for Direct Entertainment Marketing, a lifestyle promotions company based in Las Vegas, where he managed social media and promotions for clients such as MGM Nightlife and Harrah’s.