However, these new features are not necessarily what advertisers really need to pull additional revenue from their campaigns.

In today’s column, I’m going to talk about my wish list and why Google should be implementing these features instead of adding yet another ad extension.

Cross Campaign ACE

AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) was a blessing when it launched. Suddenly, you had the ability to test ads, match types, ad groups, and much more while controlling your overall risk.

The beauty of ACE is the simplicity of testing. However, there are two main problems with ACE:

• Some advertisers see their overall impressions drop significantly when using ACE (uncommon, but really bad bug)
• You can’t test campaign settings

Some campaign features such as CPA bidding are very useful when they work; but they do not always work. An experiments feature that allows you to test campaign level settings or just one campaign against another one will let you get to a level of testing that will increase your overall efficiency.

True Ad Rotate

Google recently announced that the rotate setting would be changed. This lead to a lot of controversy from the community, so I went and chatted with some people in-the-know about this; and the most common theme was, “rotate has always been broken, so why does this change really matter?”.

Rotate has always been broken because of quality score and other reasons, but at least it was directionally correct. In my opinion, if something is broken you don’t change the idea behind the feature – you fix the problem.

With the new setting, it will be impossible to conduct a lot of tests within AdWords without working around the system. Testing is so important that Google should fix the problem and just launch a true ad rotate feature.

Search Partner Control

There was much rejoicing when Google finally allowed advertisers to control the display network by targeting placements and by blocking publishers. Those control settings were launched several years ago, so Google obviously knows how to control and block ad serving by site.

Why do these settings not appear for search partners?

I have some accounts where search partners outperform Google, and I’d love to spend more on them. I have other accounts where search partners are doing very poor. Now, I’m sure that what’s really happening is that some partners are performing well and others are performing poorly.

The problem is, I have to turn on or off all partners. If Google gave me more control over what partners my ads appear on; then overall, my search partner spend would increase.

Accurate Local Search Estimates

In local search, I don’t mean country – I mean a city, region, state, etc. The local search numbers are terrible. You can use the traffic estimator tool and estimate traffic at a metro level; however, I find that the numbers can be between 100%-1000% off. Yes, more than 1000% off is possible.

I was recently working with a company and the local estimates were showing about 0.1 clicks per day; in reality, the keyword receives more than 100 clicks/day. The difference of 3 clicks vs 3000 clicks a month is quite significant.

Normally the estimator is not this far off; but seeing the estimator 300-500% off is fairly common.

If Google really wants to support local businesses, they need to fix the estimates of how much traffic a local business can really receive through AdWords. These estimates just compound the problems that sales reps have in selling and support local businesses.

Detailed Relative Quality Score Numbers

Google recently started showing more information for the quality score; however, in many cases it makes no sense. You can have a keyword that is below average have a 10; you can have a keyword that is all average be a 4; or you could have a keyword that is slightly above average be a 4.

Part of the problem is that the ranges are: average, below average, above average. If average is 1, is 0.99999 below average? If so, then 0.99999 and 0.00001 have both the same message: below average. Showing a more detailed level of relativity would be useful.

Google doesn’t like to show numbers for quality score factors often, so even if the range were: Excellent, good, average, poor, terrible; and each of those was a defined range; then the relative quality score numbers would be useful.

Account Budget

I have many accounts where there are tens or hundreds of campaigns. For each campaign, I have to control the budget. In reality, I set the campaign budget to the most I want to spend on a campaign, but I often don’t care if one campaign goes over or under by 10%. What I do care about is the entire account budget.

This has been on my wishlist since 2002 when AdWords launched. For a while, I was using invoicing as an account level budget control as Google wouldn’t spend over the defined spend. It wasn’t ideal; but it was a workaround that worked. What advertisers really need is both a campaign and an account budget.

Ad Group Level Extensions

The idea behind extensions is a great one: append more information to a plain text ad and give consumers additional details or options about a business. Of course, extensions also help CTR so Google is reaping the benefits of more ad clicks.

However, extensions are only at the campaign level. This means that if you really want to control sitelinks, or you are advertising for several business locations, you end up with more campaigns than you want. And because there’s no an account budget, you end up in a budgeting mess trying to control overall budgets.

If Google just allowed ad group level extensions, this would all be fixed. They could even take some inspiration from adCenter and use the cascading rules. Allow an extension to be at the campaign level. If ad group also has extension, use the ad group extension. If the ad group does not have an extension, then use the campaign level one.

Google has been very innovative with their extensions; however, if they go a step further it would transfer a lot more control; and therefore better ads, to the advertisers.

Fix Google Analytics Integration

When I first tried to see AdWords data inside of Google Analytics, I was really excited. Finally, I could see interactive data that would help make decisions about keywords and placements. I was examining how I could trigger CPA bidding off of events. The list of possibilities was endless.

Until I realize the integration is often broken.

If the integration works (and it doesn’t always work); then you can usually only set AdWords conversion information off of the first goal in a group. While you can work around this by moving your goals around; the more concerning issue is the data.

Sometimes the analytics data matches the AdWords data closely. Other times, the data is completely different. When the data is different, then you lose faith in the system. The possibilities of being able to set bid rules based upon analytics data is endless. I’ve always thought the best bid managers would be part of your analytics data. However, that has not proven true over the years – and much of it is due to data integration.

Google, you own both AdWords and Google Analytics. Your ability to provide consistent data between the two sources should be something you could accomplish better than any 3rd party provider. Why are you not better at it?

Conclusion

I don’t want this to seem like Google bashing. Google has been fantastic over the past few years about launching features. The additions of extensions, display campaign optimizer, ACE, modified broad match, and more, have often lead to more advertiser control and options.

In some cases, such as modified broad match, they were fixing something they broke when broad match became expanded broad match.

In other cases, such as extensions, these were brand new features that helped advertisers accomplish marketing goals.

Google cannot stop innovating, but they do have a difficult balancing act between giving advertisers control versus maintaining an ecosystem where small advertisers can still do well.

However, if they would just launch (or fix) these features; advertisers would be happier with the inventory. Happy advertisers spend more money. So Google, are you ready to help us spend more money by launching some of these features?

Normally, when you hear about a company doing a PPC audit, it’s a consultant or an agency auditing an advertiser or occasionally a consultant auditing an agency.

However, even if you are in-house managing your account internally, an audit can give you insight that’s easy to miss because one of the points of an audit is to step away from the small nuances of an account to see larger trends and feature usage.

In today’s column, I’ll tell you why you should regularly perform an audit. In the next column, I’ll give tips for performing an audit.

How Often Should You Perform An Audit?

If you are running accounts in-house, then doing both a quarterly and year-end analysis is a good idea. The quarterly analysis can help you plan out your activities for the next quarter so you are no just maintaining your account, but growing it as well.

If you are an agency, it can be useful to always perform an audit when you are first taking on a client as it can help set your engagement strategy and understand how the account functions. Some agencies require an account go through an audit before they will ever give pricing information to the client so that everyone understands the scope of work.

Once an agency has a client, doing a quarterly analysis might seem like overkill as your job is to stay on top of everything within the account.

However, doing quarterly audits followed by deep planning sessions with the client can help strengthen the account and client relationship. Some of the most common complaints advertisers have about their agency are:

1. Too slow
2. Not enough results
3. Poor communication

A quarterly audit can help with points 2 and 3.

Even if you decide not to perform a quarterly audit, you should do an audit before a peak season (Christmas, holidays, summer vacations, etc.) for the account and on an annual basis; which is often when the contract is up for renewal.

An audit should quickly spot areas where your budgets are not in alignment with your overall goals – this is especially useful when heading into peak seasons where you need to ensure your budgets are not constraining your sales.

Who Should Perform The Audit?

Anyone with a high degree of competency within the company can perform an audit. However, the person who does the day-to-day management should not do the audit.

In the world of development, you should never let your developers QA their own code or work. A designer should not be in its own user testing group. The person who does the day-to-day management should not do their own audit.

The reason is perspective.

A day-to-day PPC manager knows how the account is supposed to function and why decisions were made.

An audit should look at the big picture and trends. An audit should examine both data and best practices. An audit should challenge why decisions were made.

Should You Hire A Consultant?

You don’t need to hire a consultant to do an audit. If you are an agency, then your PPC managers can audit each other’s accounts.

If you are in-house with a large team, often you will have different people managing different accounts. In that case, just switch accounts and have each other audit each others account.

As with all decisions, there are pros and cons of using your own team.

The pros are:

• No additional costs.
• Data doesn’t leave the company.
• No lost time in training a 3rd party about your company or business model.

The cons are:

• Easy to push off the due date because of other priorities.
• Don’t have an outsider’s perspective.
• Might not make suggestions because the auditor may feel the work won’t be done.
• Personal connections between employees can make it so the audit isn’t as honest as it should be.

Of course, there are also pros and cons of using a 3rd party to audit your account.

The pros are:

• Is not clouded by personal connections, internal politics, or other internal issues.
• Has an outside perspective. Looks at what can be done, not what the company could actually do.
  • This is a very common reason to hire a consultant if you are trying to win an argument with your superiors. You will use the consultant’s data/findings to make an argument to your boss about budgets for mobile sites, display campaigns, etc.
• Can bring in more expertise than many companies have in-house.
• Doesn’t take your employees away from their regular job duties.

The cons are:

• Consultants cost money beyond your normal payroll.
• You must train them in your company’s business model, account, etc.
• Hiring competent consults is hard. You must do some due diligence, so it takes you more work than handing off the audit internally.
• A good consultant will often give you more work that you want – you must be prepared to execute.

An audit should spot ad copy trends across the entire account to help give ad copy testing a direction across the account. By being further away from the data, a 3rd party audit should give you an analytical view of the data that is free from preconceived notions of the industry or company.

What Should You Receive From The Audit?

First and foremost you want recommendations from the audit.

The audit will generally be many pages of analysis and best practices. However, all the pretty charts and graphs spread throughout the audit are really only supporting evidence for what you really want: wins (also known as recommendations).

The audit should not just give you a chart of how you are doing. It should contain information and direction for how to make the account better.

If you can’t take the information and do something with it, then it was not a good audit.

So, before sending a current staff member or hiring a consultant to do an audit for you – make sure that they will not just analyze the account,  but that you will have a to-do list of items once the audit has been completed.

Wrap-up

If you run your own account; then you are too close to the data and corporate politics to see the big picture.

Your job is the day-to-day management of the account. You make sure the account maintains it current profits and hopefully has a nice and steady growth.

You aren’t looking to take big risks, or often suggest big risks to upper management – that’s not your job. Your job is to maintain and grow at an acceptable pace.

Having someone else, a colleague, analyst, or consultant do an audit is necessary. They can suggest the big items, take the big risks, and most importantly – view the account free from preconceived notions of how it should be, and they can focus on what it could be.

Regardless if you are in-house, an agency, or just someone who got stuck managing the account – you can benefit from having your account audited on a regular basis. Just make sure you receive actionable data so that once the audit is complete, you have a path to making the account even more profitable.

Best practices are called such because in most cases they work. In the PPC world, they are a set of processes or layouts for which conventional wisdom has concluded they are the best method for creating or managing accounts and landing pages.

Conventional wisdom is an idea that is widely accepted because it is usually true.

Just because it is usually true does not mean its correct for you. You should question conventional wisdom to see if it holds true for your situation.

In today’s article, I will examine some cases where conventional wisdom was inaccurate so you can start to judge your own accounts outside of the standards of conventional wisdom.

Never Force Account Creation Before Shopping Cart Checkout

In the vast majority of cases, forcing account creation lowers conversion rates. The goal for an ecommerce site is to put as few barriers as possible between viewing a product and processing a credit card. I’ve seen companies increase revenue as much as 40% by just removing the account creation process from before checkout to after checkout.

Then there was the time that decision was unwise.

I was working with an etailer and when we removed the forced account creation; the conversion rate did go up as expected. However, the lifetime revenue of the customer declined. When a user had an account and could save credit card, address, wishlists and other information within their account, users were more likely to buy a second and third time on the site.

After doing some testing and a lot of math, we realized that the total revenue was higher when users were forced to create account even though the initial conversion rates were lower.

Forced account creation was put into place on purpose.

Always Put Calls To Action Above The Fold

There are numerous studies showing how the most valuable real estate on a page is above the fold. That just by changing the call to action or moving a checkout button to the top of the page can have a dramatic effect on conversion rates.

And then there are the exceptions.

For a lead generation site we had a nice tight form with benefit statements alongside and it was doing quite well. The design team had created lots of media for some offline promotions and really wanted to showcase some of their design on the landing pages. After some debate, the media was added to a test page which forced the conversion actions to below the fold.

The conversion rates went up.

Next, the media above the fold was shrunk to move the calls to action above the fold. The conversion rates went down. After over a dozen rounds of testing, a very clear pattern emerged: conversion rates were higher when the call to action was below the fold.

No one could believe the findings. So another dozen rounds of tests were implemented. The results did not change. I haven’t seen this often; but I have seen a few cases where conversion rates are better when the main call to action is below the fold.

Never Send All Traffic To The Homepage

This is usually PPC 101. Find the page that answers the searcher’s question and send the traffic there. If you can show geography or industry (or both) information on the landing page the conversion rates will be even higher.

I have seen this overall concept fail a few times.

The first time was for a site buying a lot of paid search. They had a geographic aspect so we created lots of landing pages that showed the city skyline, actually product examples from that city, etc on the landing pages.

They did wonderful for the display network.

They totally failed for the search network.

After many tests, the company could not beat their homepage for search. All their search traffic goes to the homepage. All their display traffic goes to pages created for an easy conversion funnel.

This concept is sometimes echoed in lead gen sites where even though there are queries (such as Chicago insurance) the landing page chooses to ignore the geographic data and asks a simple ‘zip code’ question on the landing page.

Often, this works because it gives someone a very easy first step to try and get them invested in the process of moving through the form fills on a site.

Other times, that does not work and geographic pages work best. In either case, test them out for yourself.

Broad Match Will Not Convert Better Than Exact Match

So technically this is always a true statement. However, in reality it does not always work so smoothly.

If you have several low volume terms that you add as exact match and then receive the warning ‘these terms are not being displayed due to low search volume’; then you need to keep a phrase or modified broad match of a similar keyword in the account to catch these terms.

I was working with a medical company where the misspellings outnumber the correct spelling for many of their keywords. Few of the misspellings had enough volume to be displayed. Google was not matching the modified broad match far enough to capture all of the misspellings. It’s amazing how many ways even common words can be spelled, let alone medical jargon terms.

Therefore, the only way to capture all of the misspellings was to include broad match terms. The misspellings had higher conversion rates than the proper spellings. In the end, the broad match variation of the word had a higher conversion rate than the exact match.

The broad match is now in its own ad group with a plethora of negative keywords, including the negative exact match, yet with a higher CPC than the exact match version of the same word.

Conclusion

There are many more examples of best practices failing:

• Pages with no calls to action performing better than pages with calls to action
• Ads for expired holidays outperforming other ad tests (yes, there are still Valentine’s day and Black Friday ads running on purpose)
• Autoplay video working in a B2B environment
• 15 minute YouTube videos with lower CPAs than 3-5 minute videos
• And the list goes on…

When you are first starting, following best practices or conventional wisdom is a smart move: Learn from the mistakes of others.

However, once you understand not only what the best practices are, but why they are best practices – then you can test and judge these assumptions for your own account.

It’s only through testing everything for yourself that you can move beyond the conventional wisdom of others to relying on your own set of best practices.

This leads most people to just make huge todo lists of items they either should be doing, or want to eventually do inside their account. The problem with to-do lists is that they are easy to ignore. There are still items on my to-do list from last decade. Of course, I don’t delete them as someday, I might get to them. We all know that’s not true – but we keep telling ourselves it could happen.

When your PPC accounts are run like to-do lists what happens is that every few weeks, you scamper around like crazy for two straight days trying to figure out what went wrong, what you should be doing, how to fix it all, then you do not touch the account again for another few weeks.

The other problem of to-do lists is that there is rarely that feeling of accomplishment that your day is done as there is always something else to take its place. It’s a depressing, never-ending list of items where you have to spend your precious time.

Most accounts (and by no means all of them) can be managed in just a simple hour a day of attention (if you know what to do) and you actually do it.

The problem is getting organized. Many people either spend too much time getting organized and not actually doing anything or they chase their tail all day instead of taking a step back to get organized.

If you are running your AdWords account like a to-do list, we’ll look at two simple ways to change your style. One is useful if you are the only one running the account and another is useful for companies who have multiple analysts or agencies that have multiple clients.

Determine What You Must Do Every Month

The first step to getting organized is to determine what must be done every single month. Write down what you would like to do each month (this is not an exhaustive list):

• Change search bids on Tuesday and Thursday
• Change placement bids on Monday and Wednesday
• Add new keywords the first week of every month
• Examine search queries for negative keywords every other week
• Test new ads every other week
• Test a new landing page every other week
• Create monthly reports the first week of each month
• Do quarterly reviews of geographic data
• Do quarterly reviews of time based data

The list goes on. Based upon your account and team size, you may do these items, and others, less or more frequently

Choose An Organizational System

The next step is to choose where you will be organized. If you are managing a team, are part of an agency, want a centralized place to keep and store data, or others may want insight into what is being done, what has not been done, and what’s next – then use a project management system.

If you are running the account by yourself and no one needs any insight, then use a calendar.

Turning Your PPC Account Into An Ongoing Project

If you are a project manager, you probably hate this headline. There is no such thing as an ongoing project. Projects have start dates, end dates, milestones and tasks in-between.

However, for those who do not live in the world of project management, this is the easiest way to think about managing PPC accounts – a month-to-month project.

Next, you will want to choose a project management system to input your data so you can easily track it. I find there are two types of project management systems:

• Those that have reoccurring tasks and are used as both project management and business management
• Those that do not have reoccurring tasks and try to be pure project management software

If you choose software that does support reoccurring tasks (such as Deskaway or Podio) then input your tasks and mark them as reoccurring so the tasks show up on the appropriate dates.

If you choose a software that does not support reoccurring tasks (such as Basecamp) then your only choice is to make sure it supports templates. This is not as good as software that does support reoccurring tasks, as most project management software does not allow you to have a project go live on the first of each month automatically.

Therefore, you often create a template, manually set it up, and might have to manually fix some due dates. It is still better than living in to-do lists, but not as eloquent as software that supports reoccurring tasks.

If you have multiple clients, set each one up as a different project. If you have multiple team members, then assign the tasks as necessary to the various team members. If new items come up, you can add them as a new task list for that month if they are one time issues  or as a new reoccurring item if they need to be done over and over again.

Once you are set up on a project management system, you then can see what needs to be done each day, do it – and when you do it, you will have a sense of accomplishment as you can actually be done for a day. That is a satisfaction that to-do lists cannot give you as there are always more items to take the place of what has been accomplished.

Now, your boss can see what you’re doing and have done. If you are a very transparent agency, you can even let your clients login and see all the work you are doing for them so they no longer question your work.

Using A Simple Calendar To Track Your PPC To-Dos

If you are managing a single account, you are the business owner, or PPC is not your life – it’s that other task you were stuck with, then project management software is often overkill. Just use a calendar instead.

The upside to a calendar is most people already use a calendar on a regular basis so there is no need to have yet another place where you are logging into on a regular basis.

In addition, calendars are built to have recurring tasks, so there’s no need to evaluate project management systems to find what options it supports. The downside of a calendar is that it is difficult to keep notes of previous activity or give others insight into your work.

If you wish to use a calendar, take your lists of items and place them into your calendar. When you put the items into your calendar, estimate how much time a task should take and block off your calendar for the allotted amount of time so that you can accomplish your tasks.

Wrap-up

If you aren’t careful, your PPC accounts can either consume your entire day, or they never get better because you never spend the proper amount of time to nurture and grow them.

By finding an organization structure that works for you and your company, you can manage and grow your PPC accounts in a reasonable amount of time so that they can be profitable, you can feel productive, and everything you want to do actually gets accomplished.

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.