AdWords Negative Keywords – Stop Being Robbed!
Posted by admin in AdWords Management on March 4th, 2010
A lot of articles and blog posts have been written regarding the importance and use of negative keywords and I guess this is just one more, but we took on a client over the last few weeks that provided some incredible examples of two things:
- How loose the AdWords algorithm can be when matching a search string to actual keywords.
- How often those clicks can cost you big money.
OK, so let’s use what is hopefully the most outrageous example in this account, but one that should really get your attention.
Our client sells package ecommerce storefront solutions. One of the keywords we bid on is ".net store".
For those of you that don’t know (and this may in fact turn out to be Google) .Net is a software framework or code that was developed by Microsoft and used by web developers all over the world.
As part of our normal PPC campaign management, we run frequent checks on which search strings are actually causing our ads to appear.
AdWords provides a very handy tool for this, all you have to do is go to the Keyword tab in a campaign and click on the See Search Terms button.
When you click on that button you will get a choice to look at all terms or selected. In this example I chose selected and clicked the box next to the ".net store" keyword.
The next page will show you a report that looks like this:
Incredibly these are some of the terms that AdWords felt were close enough to the keyword ".net store" that they showed our ad. BTW, this was in just one week and this is only a partial list of these types of words.
The second part of this is probably more incredible…at least to me. Larry Winget wrote a book called "People are Idiots and I Can Prove It" (http://www.amazon.com/People-Are-Idiots-Can-Prove/dp/1592404375).
Maybe this will be in his sequel…..anyway, some software at AdWords might have matched up these keywords to our ".net store" keyword, but then someone actually clicked on the ad when they saw it.
Remember, someone types "ross department stores com" in the Google search engine and then clicks on this ad when they see it:
*I have the customers permission to use this data, but I covered the URL.
It’s hard to believe….but that kind of traffic was costing our customer $30/day…or $10,000 per year! So check your keyword traffic regularly, use negative keywords to block this traffic and don’t let trash clicks steal your profits!
AdWords Quality Score…. What is Relevance Anyway?
Posted by admin in AdWords Management, Search Engine Marketing on February 17th, 2010
Occasionally I can actually find time to work on my own AdWords campaign. And like everyone else I have to work with, in, and around the infamous Google AdWords quality score.
And like everyone else I come up with some real head scratchers occasionally. Here is a good example.
I have a FaceBook keyword campaign. In one of the ad groups, I bid on the keyword(s) — [facebook ad management]. So obviously I was disappointed and a little irritated when I saw that Google had determined that my quality score for that keyword was 2.
Hang in there, I promise this will get interesting in just a couple minutes.
Here is the basic information that I saw:
As any Google rep will tell you, the quality score is primarily influenced by CTR, but is also affected by ad copy, and website landing page. Since the CTR for this one was pretty good (11.11%)…the ad copy and the landing page must really be bad….well take my word for it, the ads were OK and in fact one of them actually had the terms FaceBook Ad Management in it, so we are probably not too far off there.
Normally when you get a 2 quality score something has to be really bad. So I slid my mouse over the little dialog box in the status column and got this typical message:
So the Google AdWords algorithm has determined that the relevance for that keyword is poor. It must be that the relevance for that keyword to my landing page is very poor….right? (Remember that the CTR was pretty high, so the ‘relevance’ to the searcher must be OK).
Here comes the head scratcher…..if you do a Google search on the exact term FaceBook Ad Management you will see that my site comes up high in the organic search results….in fact at the time I wrote this blog it was in the #2 spot.
Like I said, I am still scratching my head….if anyone has a good explanation, I would love to hear it!
Facebook Advertising – Conversion Beta Testing
Posted by admin in Facebook Advertising on February 11th, 2010
The long awaited FaceBook Conversion tracking is here in Beta test!
The actual Beta test managers and clients are not allowed to comment on it yet, but the general word is out.
This is a big move for FaceBook and another step in becoming a premier advertising platform. And Facebook is becoming more important to many professional PPC managers.
At our company FaceBook advertising accounts for about one third of the total advertising spend that we have under management –and we manage over seven figures in advertising per year.
We’ll have more on FaceBook’s conversion tracking as soon as it is officially announced.
Stay tuned!
Shopping for PPC Management? Watchout for these Pitfalls.
Posted by admin in AdWords Management on January 22nd, 2010
1. Low cost for set up and management-
If you have been shopping for PPC management , you have seen the ads for $199 (or lower) pay per click ad management. They seem like a bargain, especially for businesses that have relatively small ad budgets (say under $2000/month). But are they really a bargain? We have had several customers come to us this year that have tried those services, so I have firsthand experience with the work. From what I have seen, they pretty much throw every keyword they can think of and hope for the best. The result is that the customer wastes the majority of their advertising budget on keywords that do not convert. The bargain quickly disappears with the wasted spend.
It’s like the auto paint jobs for $79….they might look good for a month, but is that really what you want?
Remember, a bad campaign really does cost you money…both in wasted ads and the time and effort lost in dealing with poor leads. Shop carefully.
2. No ownership of your account -
Again, we have had customers come to us with these issues, so this is fairly common. This issue usually appears in two different forms.
The most common way this happens is that the customer agrees to let the PPC Management firm buy the ads and then bill them later. This is bad for the customer for at several reasons:
- First, the management firm is most likely marking up the ad costs by at least 20%…any maybe as high as 100%. As a consumer, how will you know? And despite what they might tell you, they can’t buy ads any cheaper than anyone else. Including you. So you are just paying more for clicks than you should.
- You don’t actually have a PPC account…the management company does. So you are only getting the benefit of advertising, not marketing knowledge. More on that later.
- You are limited to the reports and info they want to show you.
- If the company fails, so does your ad campaign. Again, the ad campaign is not your asset, its theirs, you just pay for it. But if they don’t pay their bills, or go out of business you have nothing.
The other situation that we have seen lately is similar, but the outcome is basically the same. In this situation, the customer is uses their credit card to pay the advertising costs, but the PPC management company still treats the account and campaign as theirs. Here the pitfalls are similar, but slightly different:
- Again, you don’t own the PPC account, the management company does.
- You don’t even get the benefit of using the management companies money for a few days, since the advertising is being charge to your credit card.
- You are limited to the reports and info they want to show you.
- And again if the management company fails…you have nothing.
Why is this important? A pay per click campaign is your company or personal asset. You are paying a lot of money for these ads and they are providing you with both leads and data. The data you are collecting is valuable and should be yours. By data I mean things like: which keywords work, which ads work best, etc.
These firms don’t want you to control the data because that makes it much tougher for you to leave…you essentially have to start from scratch again. That usually is very expensive, so often you just stay and put up with mediocre (or worse) results.
So a crucial question that you want to ask before signing up with any PPC Management company is this:
if we decide to change firms or run the account ourselves, do I have access to the PPC data for the account and campaigns?
If the answer is no, I would keep shopping.
PPC Predictions for 2010
Posted by admin in AdWords Management on January 15th, 2010
It seems like everyone in the business is making predictions for 2010, so I thought, why not? Here are a few predictions for 2010 that may affect your business:
1. Pay Per Click on Google AdWords will become more expensive.
Anyone could have made this one, right? Probably, but there are a few things that will nearly guarantee it. First, the economy is most likely going to get better. That will stimulate consumer demand and that will entice businesses to advertise more. For right now, Google is essentially a monopoly, so that means more competition for those coveted first page ad positions. And the corresponding increase in price.
But, just in case the economy is flat, Google is hedging its bets. Google has announced several AdWords features in 2009 and early 2010 that will be available to only a select number of advertisers. The latest that I am aware of is the Contact Form Extensions on AdWords. Again, this is just in Beta now, but the gist of it is that if you meet their ’select’ criteria and bid high enough to garner the number one ad position on the search results page….they will reward you with an automatic contact extension on your ad and the corresponding benefits. (For more on this, check this link New Contact Form Extensions Beta from Google. A cool feature, yes, but these bells and whistles also have the effect of driving up everyone’s bids as a trickledown effect from the bidding war for the first position.
And competition for Google AdWords in the form of Bing/Yahoo is still months away….probably the earliest is late Fall of 2010. I sure hope the Bing/Yahoo engine brings some real competition to the market place. I think Bing, combined with sites like Facebook, may slow the Google costs down a bit.
2. Facebook will redesign the site to allow for more advertising.
Facebook is one of the real hidden gems in online advertising, but it won’t stay that way for long. Soon the demand for Facebook ads will drive the price up on that site. So, hopefully it won’t be long before they start displaying more ads to gain additional revenue. I used the word hopefully because I am hoping that this is a win-win for both Facebook and advertisers….they get more revenue and the advertisers get more real estate and a small drop in ad costs. If that sounds like a paradox, drop me a line and I will be happy to explain in more detail.
3. Yahoo will launch their equivalent to AdWords Editor.
Sorry…just kidding. I just put that in there for yucks for the professional campaign managers. However that is one of the reasons that I am hoping for the Bing/Yahoo merger to happen. At least Bing is trying to provide an offline editor. Here is a marketing suggestion for Bing/Yahoo….offer a Universal PPC management software package that we could use for Bing and AdWords. It may cause managers to give Bing a look and recommend Bing to their clients.
Well I better quit just a few predictions….Happy New Year everyone and good luck in 2010.