There are times you just want to increase your click-through rates. You might need to raise it to help Quality Scores, increase traffic, or gain visibility for a new product.

Often by just raising click-through rates, you might not be raising your conversion rate. You can even decrease your conversion rates with ads. However, we’re going to focus on raising click-through rates regardless of how it affects other metrics.

As always, you should be testing this for yourself to see what helps your overall account’s goals.

Adding An Extension

One of the easiest ways to increase click-through rate that also helps conversion rate is to use ad extensions. Ad extensions will help you take up more real estate on the page and show additional information with your ads. You can add extensions for local, social, products, and there is even a beta contact and subscription extension.

If you have yet not added extensions, do so now.

Add Sitelinks

Sitelinks are a type of extension so this could be grouped with adding an extension except there is one big difference between all the other extensions and sitelinks.

With the other extensions, only one extension will show with an ad. You can have sitelinks show with another extension. This is another no-brainer to add. With sitelinks, you can add additional benefits or navigation into your site directly from the ad copy.

Extended Headlines

The absolute easiest way to increase click-through rates if your ads are shown above the organic results is to end your description line 1 with a punctuation mark. When you do so, the description line 1 is added to the headline and really makes the ads stand out.

Take a look at these three ads:

The first two ads have very long headlines. The third ad does not. All the third ad has to do to have a longer headline is to add a period after ‘Low Fare Guaranteed On All Flights’. That’s it. As soon as that change was made, the ad would have an extended headline.

Consider The Display URL As Marketing Copy

Your display URL does not have to be an actual URL. As long as your root domain in the ad and site are the same, you can consider the rest of the URL as marketing copy. The display URL can be 35 characters long – don’t waste the space.

You can add a product name, feature, benefit, or other aspects to the display URL to make the ad copy more attractive. To learn more about display URLs, please see the article: Everything You Need To Know About AdWords Display URLs.

Seasonal Headlines

There is always some holiday or event on the horizon. In just the United States, there are more than 40 holidays at the national level. When you starting adding regional events such as the Boston Marathon, DC Cherry Blossom Festival, state fairs, parades, and much more; the list of events becomes endless.

When you add or reference events in headlines, your ads look very timely and relevant and can often have positive impacts on click-through rates.

Use Trademarks

Many consumers are brand conscious. When someone searches for a brand, they want to see that brand in the ad copy. You do have to be careful of the legalities around trademarks; however, adding those well-recognized words to the ad can make a large difference to your CTRs.

Remove Prices & Ad Discounts

A price in an ad copy reminds the searcher they need to spend money. Often removing the price can help CTRs. It is also useful when you’re not the cheapest ad on the page.

While we don’t like to always spend money, everyone likes a good deal. Instead of putting your price in the ad, switch your offer to a discount. Instead of spending $50, someone is going to save $10. What would you rather do, spend $50 or save $10?

In many countries, people do not get the concept “just because it’s on sale does not mean it’s free.” Discounts often outperform prices in ads.

Give Something Away for Free

Who doesn’t want something for free? Put something in your ad that’s free. A free consultation, free gift, buy one get one free, a free whitepaper. It doesn’t matter – it’s free.

Test For Yourself

While these 8 methods often work – they don’t always.

I recently saw an account where when the word ‘free’ appeared in an ad, their ads had a lower CTR than if they focused on experience or value. Removing all instances of free from the ad copies and switching the value proposition to experience raised both their CTRs and their conversion rates.

The next day, I was working on account in a very similar industry and when the word ‘free’ appeared in the ad, their ads had a much higher CTR and the same conversion rates as the other ad types.

If you need to raise your click-through rates, these ideas can help you gain a solid starting place. However, always test for yourself. Only you can truly know what happens to your account’s profits as you change your ads to bring more visitors to your site.

If the account is lacking in the advanced use of features, often your conversation will be geared around education and some strategy.

While I often start with the One Minute Account Diagnosis, there are a few signals you can use to see if the account is savvy or not before you start talking to the account manager about increasing the account’s performance.

Conversion Tracking

Every account should be tracking conversions. Sometimes this is in AdWords, other times it might be in Google analytics or their own in-house system.

If the account does not have conversion tracking of some sort, this should be the very first step to getting an account on track.

Extensions

Every account can benefit from some extension. Everyone can use sitelinks. Local accounts can focus on location extensions. E-commerce accounts have product extensions. There are call extensions, social extensions, etc.

If an account does not have any extensions, then the account manager generally needs to be educated in not just extensions, but also top-vs-side performance of ads.

I find a lot of older and very sophisticated accounts often do not have location extensions enabled any longer. These accounts are often large hotel or restaurant chains that took the time to create Local Business Ads, which were retired a few years ago. However, when the ad format was retired, these companies often did not take the time to rework all of the data into location extensions.

Search vs. Display Campaigns

A properly organized account will have separate search and display campaigns. If the campaigns are targeting both search and display, you will usually need to educate the company about the display network and how to properly organize it.

Negative Keywords

Does the account have negative keywords? Are they using negative keyword lists? If yes, then at least the manager knows what negatives are and you can go beyond education to finding the words that need to be blocked.

If the account has zero negative keywords, then you usually end up in a conversation about match types and search queries.

Modified Broad Match

Is the account using all broad match? If yes, you need to have a serious talk about match types. I find that many accounts use broad match for good reason, but have never heard of modified broad match. Modified broad match is a nice middle ground between phrase and broad match.

If an account is using all exact and phrase match, the account was often set up and optimized more than two years ago when expanded broad match was spending too much money without enough conversions.

Default Bids

Are all the keywords bids ‘default’? This means that all the bids are at the ad group level and are often 0.25, 0.50, 1.00, 2.00, 3.00, etc. If so, Odds are the account has no bidding strategy at all.

There are times when you need to bid at the ad group level such as when you have a lack of keyword data. However, if you are bidding from some conversion metric, then some of the bids should be precise numbers such as 1.03, 0.29, 0.98, etc.

If all the bids are roughly the same, then you need to have a chat about bidding strategies that often ends up being about the company’s marketing goals.

Filters & Automated Rules

If an account has saved filters, automated reporting, or has set up automated rules, then usually the PPC manager is fairly educated. These are strong signals that you are going to talk to a smart person who wants a second opinion or is too overworked to get into the nitty gritty data analysis that can help out an account.

Conclusion

There are many other signals you could use to determine how savvy an account is; however, I have found these signals are indicative of how savvy the account is as a whole.

Also, you can see all of these settings in just a few minutes of time. I do recommend using the AdWords editor as that will show you all the campaigns at once so you can quickly see mobile, tablet, desktop, search, display, time of day, location, and other settings from a single screen.

Just because these items are in place does not mean the account is perfect and well run. Also, not having all of these items in place does not mean the account is poorly managed. These settings give you an indication of how many features the account is using so that you can speak to the education level of the account.

You should know your audience, and in a PPC audit – the audience is the account manager and maybe their boss. Therefore, understanding the account manager’s knowledge will help you speak to your audience so that you can make sure you’re spending your time on strategy versus education so at the end of the audit – everyone is happy with the outcome.

Marketers are willing to oblige and throw offers and discounts at shoppers. It’s party time for the credit cards. It’s also a time to break many of your tried and true marketing rules, and your remarketing campaigns are no different.

Today, we’ll examine a method for setting up and executing holiday remarketing campaigns.

Collect All The Cookies You Can

I’ve written previously about how to segment your remarketing campaignsso that your ads are always reflective of the visitor’s behavior on your site. While that strategy works throughout the year – either don’t use it, or add this strategy to it during the holiday season.

This is not the time to start overly segmenting your visitors or letting your remarketing cookies expire.

If you segment too heavily, then you have locked a consumer into a certain set of ads. During the holidays, we aren’t looking for ourselves – we’re shopping for others. Therefore, interests change as often as the Christmas tree lights burnout.

You can either create new lists that are just for the holidays with long cookie durations, or you can increase the length of your current cookies.If you’re the planning type, I’d suggest making new lists so that you do not have to remember how you’ve affected your current lists after the holidays.

Now, put everyone in this list. Yes, everyone. Those who shopped, abandoned their carts, or checked out. You might not even think of this as a remarketing list; but as another type of targeted display advertising.

During the normal year, you might exclude those who converted from seeing your ads immediately after the conversion event. However, if someone checked out on your site and had a good experience, when they need something else (and we all need something else during the holidays), then your ad is a reminder to come back to buy from you yet again. Set as many cookies as you can to increase your shopper list size.

Create Ads By Holiday Deadlines

Next, create a list of holiday segmentations based upon your offers and limitations. For each time frame, think about your offers and benefits for that timeframe. For instance:

• Black Friday / Cyber Monday – deep discounts
• From Cyber Monday for two weeks – typical discounts for the holidays
• Two weeks before the Holidays – Free shipping until December 24th
• One week before the holiday – last chance to order for Christmas Eve delivery
• The day before the holiday – forgot to order something? Buy a digital giftcard.
• Post-holiday – After Holiday Sales Special
• etc…

This is a very generic list. Take a look at your marketing efforts, offline material, previous holiday offers, and write something that is much more geared towards your business. Just remember these two facts:

• The closer it gets to the holiday, the more ‘good enough’ suffices
• During holiday seasons, the benefits should be for the product buyer, not the product user

Submit All Your Ads Now

Once you have your timeframes created, write ads for each timeframe. Then pause the ads and submit them now. By submitting them now, they will be approved (Google reviews paused ads) so that you aren’t trying to get ads approved at the last moment. Put the dates in your calendar for each timeframe. When the date arrives, pause one ad and unpause the next one. If you don’t want to try and remember to pause and unpause ads, you can create a different campaign for each timeframe and use the campaign start and end date feature.

Raise Your Frequency Caps

Lastly, raise your frequency caps. You have to be careful not to creep out your customers; however, during the holiday season, consumers are more accustomed to being bombarded with ads from every direction. Since their credit cards are sitting next to their keyboards, make sure your ad is there the next time they want to type those numbers into someone’s shopping cart.Put a reminder in your calendar to adjust your frequency cap downwards after the holiday to your typical levels.

Conclusion

The holidays are one of the most stressful times for people. We all want to give the perfect gift. We also want to find that perfect gift on sale. The only way for us to find the perfect gift on sale is to pay more attention to ads and offers during the holidays. The further the holiday is away, the lower the stress levels; and the more willing we are to look for the perfect gift and deep discounts.

As the holidays approach, the stress levels increase; and the more we want to find ‘good enough’; but we still want it on sale. Segmentation in your marketing efforts is always essential. However, instead of segmenting your remarketing ads based upon site activity; segment your ads based upon the stress levels associated with a quickly approaching holiday.

In some cases, they used to be a fan of the brand, or at a minimum would continue buying from that brand. In other cases, they had never purchased from the brand before.

These negative feelings did not derive from product usage, social media or even word of mouth.

These negative feelings had arisen because they felt the companies were haunting them. No matter where they went, no matter what they did, the ads followed them around.

If you can’t control your ads, you may no longer be reaching your customers — you might be driving them away.

I did an experiment today. I went to eight sites I suspected of not controlling their ads well. Then I wandered around the Web for an hour. Six of the eight sites showed me more than 100 ads in less than an hour.

The biggest culprit is remarketing ads. While remarketing ads are fantastic when used correctly, they can be harmful to your brand if not controlled. In today’s column, we will examine a few ways of controlling your display ads.

Frequency Capping

The easiest way to control your ad display is by capping the frequency with which you show your ads. Frequency is the number of times the same person can see one of your ads in a time frame.

By default, Google does not place frequency caps on ads. This is very simple to do: Navigate to your campaign settings. Under advanced settings, you can set a frequency cap.

If you are buying CPM from someone besides Google, make sure to set frequency cap. If you don’t, you could buy 1,000 impressions and reach a total of one person.

Use Multiple Ad Themes Or Offers

Most companies are pretty good about using multiple sizes within an ad group. However, those sizes are often for the same offer or theme, just resized to fit all of the ad format sizes.

If someone has seen the offer 50 times, the 51st impression is not going to be magical. Create a few offers, using completely different themes (look and feel of the ads) and place them in the same ad group.

Now, when you show your ad to the same person a few times (and showing someone an ad multiple times is fine; just control yourself), at least you are rotating the ad’s themes and offers. If offer one does not convert them, then maybe offer two will.

Use Topics Targeting To Refine Your Ad Displays

It is common to see someone research a cruise on the weekends while sitting with the spouse and thinking about their next vacation. Later in the day, that same person realizes their computer is getting old and they start to research computers. In another week or two, that same person might go back to researching cruises, but that could be an entire week.

While they are researching computers, they often don’t see computer ads, they are seeing vacation ads. The vacation ad impressions are completely wasted at this point in time.

These silos of research are common and sometimes are referred to search sessions. It’s common to start with one session, find an answer or postpone the search and switch to a completely different train of thought for a while.

With remarketing, you are reaching the person regardless of their current intent unless you filter your ads by topic (in this case travel) and your remarketing ads at the same time.

You can easily use topic targeting to refine your remarketing lists so you are only showing ads when they are researching similar products or services to what you offer.

Use Negative Audience Lists

In my previous remarketing article, I detailed a way to reach back to customers a month or two after they bought from you with remarketing.

However, after someone buys from you, they probably don’t want to see your ad another 20 times in the next two days. Use negative lists to stop your ad from showing to customers for a while.

It is OK to reach out to them with new ads in the future, but do not annoy them in the meantime. If your company does not have repeat buyers, then use your negative lists to make sure you are not putting your ads in front of someone who will never be a customer again.

Control Your Ads

Displaying ads is easy. It takes just a couple of minutes to add another ad to an ad group (or buy CPM from another company) and start showing ads across the Web.

Getting clicks to your site is a bit more  difficult as your ad needs a compelling offer, and needs to be shown at the correct time and place to the consumer. Getting customers from ads is even more difficult as your landing page needs to convince them to take an action.

Advertising is easy. Getting customer is not — assuming that you have a chance of even converting the customer.

If you do not control your ads, you might annoy potential customers so much that they buy from your competitors because you drove them away with your incessant advertising.

Taking control of your advertising is a necessary step so you are not just advertising; but you are acquiring new customers with your marketing efforts.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on how to manage the display network so you can spend most of your money on sites that are bringing in quality traffic. This is a quick graphic of the workflow that I still use today.

• The Discovery Campaign is one of your lower daily budgets, and its goal is to find good placements where you want to spend more money.
• The Placements Campaign is one of your higher budgets as it only contains sites that are helping you reach your overall goals.

While I find this workflow very useful, the overall problem is when do you decide to block placements?

In your AdWords account, the only data you can see for any placement is conversions and conversion rates. The problem with so little data is that if you wait until you have enough statistically significant data to make a decision, you will never find all of the good placements, and you will have spent too much money on bad ones.

There is another way to gain insight into placements with Google Analytics that can help determine whether a site is sending you quality traffic.

Evaluating Placements With Google Analytics

To have access to this data, you need to link your Google Analytics account to your AdWords account.

Next, navigate to the placements information under the AdWords reports (found under traffic sources).

If you have goals set up, then you can sort by the goal completions, conversion rates and other data points to find the sites that are doing well for you.

While this data is useful for adding placements, it can also be useful for finding placements that you want to block even if you don’t have statistical data.

Sort Placements By Bounce Rates

Instead of trying to find sites that you want to add as placements, examine bounce rates to find sites where the traffic is so poor, you don’t want to wait for statistical data.

In this case, we have a handful of sites that have sent more than 18 visitors and have a 100% bounce rate. No one from any of those sites has even gone to a second page, therefore, we will often block these even though we don’t have statistically significant data.

Please note, you don’t want to just block sites if their bounce rates are 100%. You should also double-check the ad copy and landing pages to make sure the offers are relevant for that site. If you consistently see high bounce rates for your display campaigns, then you might need to change the offer and landing page before deciding to block placements.

Just remember, a bounce in Google Analytics is a visitor who only went to a single page and then left your site. If someone gets to your landing page, picks up the phone and calls you, finishes an order over the phone and then leaves your site, they will be counted as a bounce even if they spent 20 minutes on the phone with you.

Create Interaction Goals

A quick way of seeing what sites are bringing in good versus poor traffic is to create interaction goals within Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can create goals based upon time on site or page views per visit.

If you create goals with these types of metrics, then you can easily examine what sites are not meeting your basic minimum interaction and then block those sites that are underperforming.

Conversely, if you find that sites are bringing in visitors that are spending several minutes on your site, you shouldn’t block those sites until you have enough clicks to determine whether those visitors will eventually convert.

By using interaction goals, you can gain another level of insight into the placements where you are spending money, so you can make better decisions about blocking the sites or spending more money on the sites to gather more data.

If you have various types of goals on your site, I would recommend splitting out these types of goals by goal set. You might have one goal set that is all revenue events, and another one that is site interaction. By splitting these different types of goals out by goal set, you can see one tab of just interaction goals, and another tab of just revenue goals. That way your revenue goal events will not be polluted by site interaction events and vice versa.

Conclusion

Overall, I like Google’s display network. There is a lot of traffic and conversions to be had from managing it correctly. However, if managed incorrectly, the display network can be a money pit. Therefore, you do need a system for managing the display network so it will perform for you.

However, the patience and money required to always have statistically relevant data is beyond what most AdWords advertisers have. Therefore, when you see sites that have several visits and 100% bounce rates, feel free to block them quickly. When you see sites that have some visitors, and those visitors are spending time on your site, you should be more patient in determining whether the site will eventually be a converting one for you.

By using Google Analytics to examine your AdWords data, you can go beyond just examining conversion rates to also determining interaction rates and gaining another viewpoint into the placement sites where you are spending your money, so you can spend your budget as wisely as possible.

However, organic traffic has some drawbacks:

• You can’t easily test landing pages, headlines, and templates
• You can’t get rapid feedback
• You don’t get traffic on certain keywords until you rank for the terms

This is where your paid search campaigns can help out your organic teams: testing and rapid feedback for tests.

In this column, we will examine a few ways in which your paid search account can help your organic teams get the data they need to make good decisions.

Testing Title Tags

Organic title tags serve two major purposes:

• Tell a bot what your page is about
• Serve as a headline on search result pages to get the click from searchers

Many companies are resistant to changing their headlines when they are ranking for certain keywords because it can affect organic rankings.

However, if your headline is not very compelling, then searchers will not be compelled to click on your listing in order to arrive at your landing pages.

A PPC headline’s goal is to showcase your product, draw attention to itself, and ultimately get the click when there is a good match between the search intent and your website.

The overall goals of an organic title tag and a search headline are very similar.

Most search engine organic headlines are 55 – 65 characters.

A paid search headline can be 60 characters when it is displayed above the organic results; and the description line 1 ends in a punctuation mark.

You can test your organic headlines with paid search to see which ones have the highest CTR.

With these headlines, don’t let your paid search team write them without input from the organic team. The organic team will need certain elements in the title tag for ranking purposes.

Therefore, have the two teams sit down and do some brainstorming on possible title tags. When you have a few ideas; use those ideas as your headlines in your paid search ads.

Test Home Pages

Your homepage usually receives more traffic than any other page on your site. A homepage’s goal is to identify to visitors what you do and then quickly segment them further into your site so they can take actions.

However, testing homepages is a scary proposition with organic traffic. You cannot just make a few homepages and tell the search engines to rotate where the traffic goes to on your site. You do not want all of these homepages indexed as that can cause other issues with your site’s rankings.

Yet, homepages must be tested as a slight increase in conversion rates across a site can make a large difference in your overall site’s revenue.

There is an easy solution – test with PPC. However, you cannot use your PPC landing pages to test this traffic. Your PPC landing pages are built for conversions. Your organic pages are built for both rankings and conversions.

Have the SEO and PPC teams sit down with a designer and work through some possible homepages that will help both conversions and SEO.

Then, put these pages in their own folder and use a global disallow in your robots.txt file. If you need more clarification on robots.txt files; please see my last column: What PPC Practitioners Should Know About Robots.txt Files.

Next, send your branded traffic to these various homepages to see which variation has the best lift in revenue. If you do not have enough branded traffic to test, then send some of your very specific, exact match traffic to these various pages.

Once you have the results, then you can roll out these changes to your homepage.

Testing Templates

With most content management systems (CMS), you do not make changes to a single page’s layout. You make changes to a template, and that change is reflected across all pages using that same template. This makes it difficult to test large sites for SEO purposes as the CMS is an all or nothing change.

You can use paid search to test your template change ideas. Just as with homepages, you do not want your paid search team to design these on their own as your navigation and other offers will be stripped away to try and increase conversion rates.

With your templates, you need to think about site navigation and page information for organic ranking purposes.

Therefore, create a few static pages outside of your CMS, but work with the SEO team on how the pages can be laid out so that if the new template is better, it can be implemented across the site without hurting (and hopefully, helping) your current organic traffic.

If you offer hundreds of products, do not just test a single ad group with a new template and then roll out the changes. Make sure you are testing enough different products and services to be confident that the new template will work for all of your products.

With these pages, also make sure that you are excluding them from being crawled by any bots except the PPC ones.

Mitigating Risk With ACE

While all of these tests can help your organic search traffic bring in more revenue eventually, typically while you are testing, your PPC revenue often drops. Your organic headlines, templates, and homepages usually convert lower than your dedicated landing pages.

Therefore, use ACE or AdWords Campaign Experiments for your tests.

With ACE, you can test a small percentage of your PPC traffic for SEO purposes and then keep the rest of the traffic for your higher converting PPC campaigns.

Conclusion

Organic traffic is wonderful. Ranking number one for a term can bring in a significant amount of traffic. It is difficult to test titles and page layouts with organic traffic.

If a test is done incorrectly, it can also hurt your organic traffic. Randomly changing title tags, H1s, and the content of your pages that have nice organic traffic can have detrimental effects.

However, you must keep testing pages to try and increase conversion rates. Landing page testing is essential for both PPC and SEO. It should not be kept just within the realm of PPC.

The only additional constraint you have with SEO that PPC does not need to conform to is that the page must also satisfy bots as well as humans.

SEO has lots of traffic; but rankings can be temperamental and you cannot accumulate any data until you actually rank.

PPC has lots of traffic; but it also allows for rapid feedback. You can start testing traffic immediately to see what pages lead to higher revenue.

This is where PPC can help out the SEO team. Design tests with both the SEO and PPC teams working together. Use PPC to administer the tests; and when your find better results – roll them out to your website with the help of the SEO team.

When these two departments work together, your website’s revenues usually increase; and who doesn’t want their website to generate more money?

A Note On SMX East

Over the past few years, I’ve seen many instances of SEOs messing up a company’s paid search program or the paid search team causing organic rankings to decline.

These two programs are complimentary to each other (see my recent column on Should You Bid On A Keyword If You Rank Organically For That Term?) and can help each other out in many different ways.

At SMX East, I am putting together a brand new session on  PPC & SEO: Can’t We All Just Get Along?, where Todd Friesen, Tim Mayer, and myself will look at how these two programs can be complimentary to each other and how to make them both work for you to increase your overall exposure.

SEO and PPC can help each other in many ways. They can also hurt each other if the two sides aren’t working together properly. Therefore, we will look at the best ways to make sure these two sides not only work together, but can help each other increase the entire site’s profits.

An improperly configured robots.txt file can:

• Lower your quality scores
• Cause your ads not to be approved
• Lower your organic rankings
• Create a variety of other problems

Robots.txt files are often discussed in terms of SEO. As SEO and PPC should work together, in this column, we will examine what PPC users should know about robots.txt files so they do not cause problems with either their paid search accounts or their organic rankings.

The AdWords Robot

Google uses a bot called “adsbot-Google” to crawl destination URLs for quality score purposes.

If the bot cannot crawl your page, then you will usually see non-relevant pages, because Google isn’t being allowed to index your pages, which means they cannot examine the page to determine if its relevant or not.

Google’s bot uses a different set of rules for how it interprets a robots.txt file than most other bots.

Most bots will see a global disallow, which means no bot can crawl a page or a file, and then not examine the page at all.

Adsbot-Google ignores global disallows. It assumes that you made a mistake. Since you are buying traffic to a page and have not called out their bot specifically, then they ignore the disallow and read the page anyway.

However, if you call out the bot in your robots.txt file specifically, then adsbot-Google will follow the instructions.

Usually, you don’t purposefully block adsbot-Google.

What does happen, though, is that the IT or other departments are looking at the bandwidth by robot and they see a bot they don’t know well using up a lot of bandwidth as it crawls your site. Since they don’t know what it is, they block the bot. This will cause a large drop in landing page quality scores.

The easiest way for non-techies to see this is with Google Webmaster Tools. You can create a webmaster tools account, and then see if your robots.txt file is blocking adsbot-Google from crawling your site.

In addition, Google Webmaster Tools will let you see crawl errors on your site. A problem that many larger PPC accounts run into is that they end up sending traffic to broken links as the site and URLs change over time.

You can also use a free spider to check for broken links in your AdWords account.

The Microsoft AdCenter Robot

Microsoft also has a robot that is used for ad approval purposes. This robot is called “adidxbot” or “MSNPTC/1.0″.

This robots follows the standard robots.txt conventions. If you use a global disallow to block bots from crawling parts of your site, then this bot will not see those pages and you will have ad approval issues.

While Bing also has a Webmaster Center, it does not have a way to see if you are blocking their ads bot.

Testing Landing Pages & Causing Duplicate Content

Often with landing page testing, you create several versions of the same page with different layouts, buttons, headlines, and benefits.

However, much of the content is the same between all of the pages. If all of these pages are indexed by the robots involved in organic rankings, it can cause your organic rankings to suffer. Therefore, you want to make sure that your test pages are being blocked by bots that crawl for organic purposes, but can be indexed for PPC purposes.

This is much easier in AdWords than in Microsoft’s AdCenter.

For testing landing pages in AdWords, you can simply put all your test pages in a single folder and then use a global disallow to block that folder. Since adsbot-Google ignores global disallows, it will crawl the page; however, the organic bots will obey the robots.txt file and not crawl your pages.

With AdCenter, you need to put the test pages in a folder, and then block all the standard bots except for “adidxbot” from crawling that folder.

By taking an extra step in your testing processes of blocking your test pages from being crawled by organic bots, yet being accessible to the paid search bots, you will not affect your organic rankings when you test landing pages.

Yet More Information

If you understand the basic concept of blocking the appropriate bots, yet need more help understanding how Robots.txt files work, please see this excellent article on understanding robots.txt.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen many instances of SEOs messing up a company’s paid search program or the paid search team causing organic rankings to decline. These two programs are complimentary to each other (see my last column on Should You Bid On A Keyword If You Rank Organically For That Term?) and can help each other out in many different ways.

At SMX East, I am putting together a brand new session on  PPC & SEO: Can’t We All Just Get Along?, where Todd Friesen, Tim Mayer, and myself will look at how these two programs can be complimentary to each other and how to make them both work for you to increase your overall exposure. If you want to learn more about AdWords, I will be teaching an Advanced AdWords Course at the beginning of the conference.

SEO and PPC can help each other in many ways. They can also hurt each other if the two sides aren’t working together properly. The first step your PPC department can take in helping out your SEO department is to not damage their organic rankings with your testing. You need to test. Testing is essential for your account to improve.

However, taking a few extra minutes to ensure your robots.txt file is configured properly will help make sure your paid search landing pages are being crawled correctly while not causing organic penalties at the same time.

In this column, I’m going to share some of that data and walk you through some simple calculations you can do to see if you should buy that keyword.

Running Your Own Experiment

When running your own experiment, you need two sets of numbers:

• Your traffic information when you are only in organic
• Your traffic information when you are in both

This is a very easy experiment to run, just follow these simple steps:

1. Find a term you rank number one in the organic results
2. Add that keyword as an exact match negative in your paid search account
3. Benchmark the results over a week of time
4. Buy that same keyword for a week
5. Compare:
   • Click through rates for your paid traffic
   • Organic referrals
   • Conversion rates

The length of time you need to run these tests depends on how much data you receive based upon budgets and click volume. If you have a small to medium budget, you might want to buy keywords for a week, stop for a week, buy keywords for a week, stop for a week and then aggregate all the results.

If you have a larger budget, and the search volume and conversion rates are fairly static, you might just run each test for a week of time.

As with any testing, the more data you have, the more confident you will be in the results.

The final analysis is to examine your revenue for each time period to see if your total revenue is higher for one period than another. Of course, you need to subtract your paid search marketing costs from your revenue to see accurate pictures.

Evaluate Profit Results

For this company, we ran several tests across various timeframes and keywords. The results were fairly similar for almost every test we ran. Here are the results for one keyword:

In this case, you should be buying the PPC keyword as when you do, you pay $3422 in PPC costs, but that additional spend results in $7,395 in additional profit.

Over all the tests I’ve done, in the vast majority of cases (but by no means all) being in both the organic and paid results at the same time was a good idea.

I have seen some cases where it was not a good idea to buy PPC when you rank organically from a profit standpoint (there are other reasons to do it such as demand generation). Generally, I see that happen for keywords that are early in the buying funnel and they are not high converting keywords, but more awareness and interest focused keywords.

What About PPC Cannibalization?

Another common complaint about buying paid search when you rank organically is that you will end up paying for clicks you would normally have received for free.

Again, some math can solve this problem.

In the first example, we did examine the cannibalization number. The keyword we choose had consistent week over week referral and conversion information. There was some variance, but it was less than 10% over the past 3 months. To give SEO the most credit possible, we looked at the highest referral week in the past three months.

We then calculated the maximum ‘cannibalization’ clicks at 1,421 clicks. During that time frame we received 4,123 paid clicks. Therefore, even if we had removed all of the ‘other clicks we paid for and shouldn’t have’; paid search added another 2702 total clicks to the website.

However, that number was not the one to really focus on. Instead, we want to focus on whether or not the revenue was higher when both SEO and PPC were running.

Does SEO & PPC Convert The Same?

One of the advantages of paid search is that you can create dedicated landing pages that are solely designed for actions. This is not possible (or at least very difficult) with your organic efforts.

Another big question to ask: Does SEO & PPC convert the same?

The answer: it depends.

I hate that answer as much as you do; but it’s necessary. The reason? It depends on the landing page and ad copy.

I was working with a large company that uses a lot of whitepaper download lead forms. Their marketing and design departments did not want to create PPC only landing pages because they already had lots of lead forms across their SEO pages and didn’t think it was necessary to duplicate their efforts.

The whitepapers were targeted to very web savvy audiences (like you reading this column) that knew the difference between organic and paid traffic. Since the audience understood the difference in traffic source, they didn’t think there would be any advantage to creating dedicated landing pages.

They had even done a test to see if there was a conversion rate difference being in both SEO and PPC. Here were their results:

This wasn’t a big difference in overall conversion rates based upon their traffic source (similar or same keywords). In fact, often I see larger conversion rate differences when you are in both SEO and paid search, which is often called the ‘halo effect’.

Most likely, their audience did know the difference between PPC and SEO and therefore the halo effect did not kick in as much to this type of an audience. However, I still thought they should test the difference.

Personally, I dislike when marketers say, “I think….”. I try to tell myself that whenever I say that, I should stop thinking and start testing. Not every thought is correct and only testing will give you a good answer.

After a while, I convinced them to stop staying ‘I Think’ and to create just one landing page focused purely on conversions. We removed most of the navigation, focused on some bullet point benefit statements, and a simple lead capture form. Here’s what happened:

Even Web savvy people enjoyed the conversion focused landing pages. They might be able to tell the difference between organic and paid search; but in the end, they do convert better with conversion focused pages.

The Lesson

In many cases, it is worth buying keywords even if you rank organically for them. Just create a simple experiment following the steps outlined above. If your total profits are higher when you are buying the same keywords, then keep buying them. If your profits are lower (and you are not buying words for other reasons), then do not buy them. It really is that simple.

However, creating dedicated landing pages is often a good idea – no matter the sophistication level of your audience. With SEO, your pages must have certain elements to rank well. With paid search, you can purely focus on conversion actions and not have to worry about a search algorithm’s opinion of your site.

Just remember, don’t just think about what you should or should not do: test your hypothesis and let the numbers tell the story.

There is a simple way to determine how to increase an account’s exposure that can be accomplished in less than a minute.

Generally speaking, when looking to increase your exposure, you need to know why your exposure is being limited. There are three common reasons why your ads are not being displayed:

• Budget
• Quality score
• Bid prices

In this article, we will look at how to determine what is limiting your exposure, and show how you can do this analysis in less than one minute. In this analysis, we will assume you have expanded your keywords a few times and that you do not wish to add new keywords.

Impression Share Report

Start by running an impression share report. This is a report that can be run at the campaign level and shows you why you’re ads are not being displayed. If you need help running reports or finding all the features, please see this video that walks you through creating reports.

You will now have a view of why your account is not being displayed, through either budget or rank.

Budget Loss

In this first case (above image), the biggest reason that impressions are being lost is because of the budget.

When you lose impressions due to budget, then raising your budget can help get you more clicks that should have the same quality as your current clicks. When you see that you’re losing clicks due to budget you should be careful. If you cannot raise the budget, then you are probably overpaying for each click.

For example,, if your budget is $100 per day and you are paying $1 per click, then you usually receive 100 clicks per day. If you could lower your CPC to $0.80 and still spend all of your budget then you should get 125 clicks. That’s a nice increase in traffic without doing too much work.

Eventually, lowering your CPCs will put your ad in too low of a position to get enough clicks to fulfill the budget. When that happens, then you need to find other avenues to receive more traffic.

Rank Loss

The other main reason you lose impressions is due to rank. When you lose an impression due to rank, it means that your ad rank was not high enough to be displayed on a page.

Ad rank is comprised of both quality score and bid. Therefore, when you see impressions are lost due to rank, you need to examine the quality scores. There is a simple way to view the quality scores across the account:

• Run a report that contains spend, quality score, keywords, etc
• Download the report to a spreadsheet program
• Create a pivot table that keys off quality score numbers
  • If you need help with pivot tables, please see Josh Dreller’s excellent column on pivot tables.

I added the “percent of keywords by QS” column myself by just dividing the number of keywords in each QS range by the total number of search keywords in the account.

In this case, the vast majority of the keywords are a 5 or lower quality score. Therefore, many of these keywords are not being displayed due to low quality score or low ad rank that is caused due to low quality scores.

You can now be confident that this account needs to increase its quality score to be able to efficiently increase its exposure.

There will be times when most of your keywords have excellent quality scores:

In this case, there is some quality score work that can be done but as the majority of their keywords are a quality score 7 or higher; the main reason the account is lowing impressions is due to bids.

You can now be confident that this account needs to increase its bids to be able to efficiently increase its exposure.

There are many reasons your average position can be less than 3 and you still lose impressions due to ad rank. The two most common are:

• No ads were shown on the page
• Only a limited number of ads were displayed on the page, and you were below that

Usually, when your impression share is above 90% – 95%, you are in great shape and you need to find new keywords before you can drive more traffic.

Conclusion

When you want to see account data at a very high level, the impression share report is a fantastic starting place.

It is common for accounts to see increases and decreases in overall traffic due to the natural changes in search patterns. Therefore, looking at overall traffic can sometimes give you an inaccurate picture of your search share. As the impression share report is a relative number, and not absolute, it is a good place to examine your account for changes to trends in your search share.

When examining how to increase your exposure, it comes down to: budget, bids, and/or quality score. What is your weak link? To increase your overall exposure, one (or more) of these items needs to grow larger.

This simple one minute analysis can quickly give you a starting place to determine where you should focus your time.

If you just use topic targeting, you will usually receive a lot of impressions; but not necessarily a lot of conversions. It is fantastic for reaching a large number of people; but targeting on topics alone is fairly broad.

However, you can use topic targeting in conjunction with other AdWords features to improve your content advertising performance.

Fixing The Multi-Intent Keyword Problem

There are some words that have very different user intents. Often these words are in completely different topics. Using topic targeting along with keywords can help refine your ad serving so that your ads are only shown to those you wish to target.

For instance, if you are selling Bleach, you often have a problem with targeting. There is a Japanese show named Bleach. Bleach is also used for laundry. Using the keyword ‘bleach’ is not very useful.

If you are selling Bleach DVDs (the Japanese show), you might think that words such as ‘Bleach DVD” would not be displayed on bleach cleaning sites as why would someone buy a DVD about doing laundry?

The problem is that Clorox did a large promotion with the TV show Mad Men so there are plenty of sites that mention Clorox, Bleach, and DVDs when talking about laundry.

There are many cases like this where it is almost impossible to have both a large display reach and have that reach targeted.

Enter topic targeting.

To fix this problem, you can create your display campaign as usual with keywords and ad copy. Next, navigate to the topic tab and add the categories that are relevant to your topic – in this case it would be Comics and Animation.

In addition, you can have negative topics. If you wanted to ensure that your ads were not displayed on pages associated with cleaning supplies, you can also add those categories as negative topics.

Before you are finished, you need to make sure Google is limiting your ad serving based upon topics. Navigate to your campaign settings and make sure your ads are only being displayed on ‘Relevant pages only on the placements, audiences, and topics I manage’.

Once you have followed those steps, your ads should be displayed more appropriately to an audience that is interested in the Japanese show and not to those doing laundry.

Finding More Inventory On High Traffic Sites

According to Double Click adPlanner, the New York Times has 540 million pages views per month. Very few people would want to buy ads across that entire site. However, with AdWords you could buy ads just in the travel section, which would narrow down your impressions to about 10,000 per day. If you sold airline tickets, you could also input some keywords about air travel so that your ads are only shown on the New York Times travel section when the article is about airline tickets.

While that can be nice targeting to a small to mid-sized account; it ignores too much inventory for a large account. There may be articles in the business section about travel where you would want your ads to show.

This is another place topic targeting can help.

Using placements and keywords together is fantastic targeting; however, often keywords can narrow down your inventory too much due to Google’s theme matching. Using topics with placements can help to find a larger set of relevant inventory on a placement.

To set up placement plus topic targeting, follow all of the steps in previous example except when it’s time to choose keywords – choose placements instead.

Remarket Only To People Interested in Your Topic

Remarketing is an effective way of brining people back to your website. However, what commonly happens is that a user is sent a link from a friend or an outside source and visits an article on your blog,  looks at a product for a friend, or was just curious about a product and has no intention of buying.

However, since they were on your site – they have a remarketing cookie on their browser so you show them lots of ads regardless of the site they are on. These types of scenarios lead to accounts having 100,000 impressions and 4 clicks from their remarketing campaigns.

If you only wanted to show your ad when someone was on a site about your topics; you can combine remarketing with topics.

This can help you reach users only when they are researching a product or service that you offer, and you will not show ads every time they are on a page in the display network.

To accomplish this targeting, follow all of the steps listed in the first example, but instead of adding keywords – add a remarketing list.

Please note: I would not always recommend using topics and remarketing in this way. There are many reasons to show your ads to someone regardless of the site they are currently visiting. This is a technique that some will find useful and others will not.

Conclusion

Topic targeting by itself can drive lots of traffic to your site. However, most people do not have the budget nor the desire, to advertise at the category level. Yet, topic targeting is useful in these three scenarios:

• If you are having problems reaching your market due to multiple keyword intents, topic targeting can help.
• If you like using remarketing, but your budget is small, topic targeting can improve your ad serving.
• If you want more inventory, but still want it to be relevant, topic targeting with placements is a good combination.

Of course, if you just want lots of semi-targeting impressions, you can use topic targeting by itself to serve your ads on a large variety of sites.

The most effective AdWords accounts place some restrictions around their ad serving. Topic targeting is one of those restrictions you can use to improve your ad serving, which should help increase your account’s profits.