It’s always better in a paid search world to rely on math instead of guessing to help you make good decisions about your CPC and conversion rates.

The first step is to determine how people buy from your company and the decisions they make along the way. This knowledge is essential for any business who wishes to optimize not just their paid search campaigns, but their entire business processes. If your sales process is to buy a click to your website and then hope the prospect calls you within three to six months, there’s definitely a better way: add touch points all along the sales process. You will also hear touch points referred to as mini, micro or intermediate conversion events.

These intermediate conversions steps do not generate revenue but help your prospect continue through the sales cycle to make a final purchase. In addition, these steps allow you to track behavioral data so that you can optimize these touch points.

Consider a scenario where the entire conversion process is:

• Advertiser buys clicks to website
• A whitepaper download is offered on the landing page. Customer must enter name and email address to receive the whitepaper.
• An email is sent out inviting registered customers to attend a free webinar. To attend the webinar the customer must add a phone number as well as some additional data about their company.
• After the webinar, a sales person calls every customer who attended and attempts to sell them a product.
• If a sale occurs, then revenue is generated.

While tracking these intermediate steps might seem like more work, the additional data you receive will allow you to optimize not only your PPC account, but also your own business processes.

In this example, if you spent $1000 on PPC to generate 1000 clicks and manage to track the conversion rates from each touch point to the next, here’s how the data might look:

Once you have tracked this entire process, you have a clear picture of how the sales cycle relates to the conversion process, you can identify touch-points to optimize and test. These include:

• Test whitepaper download landing pages
• Test different invitation messages to see if it increases webinar signups
• Test webinar reminder system to increase webinar attendees
• Test webinar benefit messages to increase webinar show rate
• Test phone scripts to determine close rates

In fact, if this was my company I wouldn’t even look at click cost first. There is a much bigger issue to fix. The sales team is contacting individuals who have both downloaded a whitepaper and attended a webinar. These consumers have had multiple touch points with the company. The sales team’s 10% contact rate seems exceptionally low in this case. I would first look to examine the sales contact process and see where it can be optimized. If you could double that contact ratio, then you could double your sales.

You do not need sophisticated systems to build this type of tracking. Even if each system you used is not integrated, by combining the information into a single spreadsheet, you will have the necessary data to being optimizing not just your PPC process, but your entire marketing process.

Sometimes the best optimization occurs outside of your PPC account. Marketing optimization is just as fundamental as PPC optimization. Only be building a picture your entire marketing process can you see where you can improve conversion rates and continue moving searchers through the buying cycle to become customers.

The problem is that often these two pieces of advice can be contradictory.

If you start using keyword phrases with exact and phrase match that are five, six or even seven keywords in length, you can start to either run out of possible keywords you are allowed to have in your account or you can miss a large number of impressions due to the vast number of ways that people search.

This quote from a Google blog post says it all:

Did you know that 20% of the queries Google receives each day are ones we haven’t seen in at least 90 days, if at all?

When you couple that Google fact with Hitwise’s latest numbers that more than 18% of searches contain five or more keywords, it can be a daunting task to try finding all of these keywords. After all, if you have a basic AdWords account you are limited to 50,000 active keywords.

How can you use long tail keywords and constrain broad match? The answer is easy: use negative keywords.

Introducing negative keywords

Negative keywords are filtering words that stop your ads from showing.

Let’s say you sell coffee mugs and you have tens of thousands of words pertaining to coffee mugs in multiple match types. You then run a search query report (a report that allows you to see the actual search query that caused your ad to be displayed) and find that when the search query contains the word “Starbucks,” such as “Starbucks personalized picture blue coffee mug,” your conversion rate is 0%. All those clicks you are paying for are a waste of money. However, “personalized picture blue coffee mug” is already a long tail keyword, and you have thousands of these words, so how do you still use these word in phrase or broad match yet not pay for the clicks when the search query contains “Starbucks?”

The answer is simple: add the negative keyword “Starbucks.” Now, when someone types a search query that contains “Starbucks,” your ad will no longer be displayed. You will not accrue any impressions or pay for any clicks. Your ad simply will not be displayed.

Negative keyword match types

Just like regular keywords, negative keywords also have match types. Exact match and phrase match keywords work just like their regular keyword counterparts. If you use an exact match negative, the search query must be the exact same as your negative keyword for your ad not to be displayed.

However, broad match negatives are different than broad match keywords. Broad match negative keywords do not match to misspellings, plurals, or similar words. Therefore, if you found that your ad was being displayed for both search queries that contained the word “Starbucks” and “Starbuck,” you would need to use both negative keywords.

Negative keyword reach

You can add negative keywords to either an ad group or to a campaign in AdWords.

In Yahoo Search Marketing accounts negative keywords are called excluded words and can be at the account or ad group level (here are instructions for adding negative keywords to your Yahoo account).

At Microsoft adCenter, they are called negative keywords and can be added to an ad group or campaign (here are instructions for adding negative keywords to your Microsoft adCenter account).

When you add a negative keyword, it will affect all settings below the level you add it. For instance, in Yahoo, if you include a negative keyword at the account level, it will affect every campaign and ad group in the account.

At adCenter and AdWords, if you add a campaign level negative keyword it will only affect the ad groups in that campaign.

At all the engines, if you add a negative keyword at the ad group level, it will only affect the keywords in that ad group.

To continue the Starbucks example, since the word “Starbucks” does not convert anywhere in the account, you would add this negative keyword to each campaign. However, if you happened to have one ad group that was focused around “Starbucks Coffee Cups” then you would add the negative keyword “Starbucks” to all the ad groups except the one focused on selling Starbucks coffee cups.

Conclusion

Before I get flamed for advocating broad match, let me just say that as with most things, moderation is your friend. Broad matching a keyword that only contains one, two or three words can lead to very poor results and should be approached cautiously. However, broad match is not inherently bad, especially when applied to the long tail and controlled with negative keywords.

Follow these 3 simple steps to use broad match effectively:

• Measure broad match using the search query report
• Refine broad match terms by adding exact and phrase match equivalents to higher search volume terms and higher priced terms
• Control broad match by adding negative keywords.

You should spend time on negative keyword research just like you do on regular keyword research. By growing your negative keyword list, you can refine your ads and keep them from being shown on irrelevant queries. This will help raise your CTR, increase your conversion rate, lower your cost per action and ultimately save you money by not paying for irrelevant clicks.

Here are my PPC resolutions for the upcoming year.

Track everything

We all know we should track everything, but are you really tracking all the conversion signals and conversion types across your website? The most overlooked leakage is call tracking. But really, you can track just about anything. Do you know the average profit received from someone who signed up for your newsletter via a PPC click? Are those email subscriptions valuable or a waste of marketing dollars?

This year, I will segment traffic to learn what is making money after non-revenue conversions occur.

Lose the long tail weight

It is easy to run a report for the previous year and note that a keyword has received 300 impressions, 2 clicks, $2 spent, and no conversions. Due to the lack of data, you just let the keyword continue to run.

If you have 10,000 keywords with the same metrics, then you haven’t lost just $2, but $20,000. Find ways of combining the data from long tail keywords to ensure that the tactic is still brining in revenue. Those keyword groups that are not converting? Delete them.

This year, I will combine and manage more long tail keywords to ensure they are making money.

Try more rich media ads across the content network

Over the past three years, I’ve found a lot of success across the content network. I’ve also found that on a global basis, rich media outperforms text ads. However, it takes more time to create a video ad than a text ad, and hence these ads are often relegated to the “some day” list of things to do.

This year, I’m going to create more video and image ads, especially for placement targeted campaigns that I wrote about earlier this year.

Increase mobile reach

Mobile usage has been steadily increasing for several years. However, ecommerce transactions have lagged behind traffic. This year eBay reported that 1.5 million items were purchased on their mobile site over the holiday season, triple what they sold last holiday season via mobile devices. Creating a mobile campaign is not difficult, and with a little WordPress hacking its easy to test whether a site is mobile compliant.

This year, I will create more mobile ads and landing pages.

Focus on post conversion communication

I walked into an Austin restaurant last year and the first question the waiter asked was, “have you been here before?” I said no, expecting to have the menu explained to me. About five minutes later the manager walked over and thanked me for coming, offered to buy me coffee and desert, and then informed me that if I knew anyone who might like the restaurant to just let her know that it was their first visit and she’d do the same for them. I told this story to over a hundred people at an AdWords Seminar across the street and the next evening they were flooded with new customers.

Hand written notes tucked into packages, personalized welcome messages, a free gift for a friend and even the typical newsletter subscriptions can help increase not just word of mouth marketing, but lifetime visitor values from your PPC clicks. If you can increase your lifetime visitor values, then you can significantly increase your bids while maintaining the same margins. This is an important consideration in today’s economy.

This year, I will reach out to more customers to offer my thanks and incentivize them to become repeat customers.

Be more creative

Doing PPC by-the-book is not difficult. However, being creative by using demographic targeting, day parting, testing CPM with placement targeting, or anticipating changes can have dramatic effects on the returns from your account. With paid search, if you ever wonder if something can be done or what effect it would have on whatever variables you’re measuring, test it. PPC makes it easy to test new ideas and then apply those ideas to other marketing channels.

This year, if I have a new idea, I won’t procrastinate: I’ll just test it.

Remember, before you start to focus on 2010’s goals, it is a good idea to clean up your account from the previous year.

Welcome to 2010. Happy New Year!

Tools to help increase Quality Score

Working with Google’s quality score can be painful at times. Blocking-and-tackling steps include reorganizing your account and choosing the correct landing page. After that, your quality score comes down to clickthrough rate (CTR) and Google’s deliberately ambiguous “relevancy factors.” While it is not necessary (and sometimes harmful) to have keywords in ad copy, it can be difficult to find other related words to substitute to see which subtle variation leads to an increase in quality score while maintaining a healthy CTR and conversion rate. Here are a few tools that can help.

Google Sets. Google Sets allows you to create lists of related words. Just input a one or more words and Google will suggest related keywords. While these suggestions are not great keywords, they are often good modifiers for keywords or for making subtle changes to your ad copy.

Run a set of words, and then choose a word or two that are closely related to your products and run test ad copy with the substituted words to see if those ad copy variations help increase your CTR and Quality Score.

Tilde search operator. Using advanced search operators on Google can allow you to discover related words. Often, using a related word in ad copy can help improve its relevance. This is especially useful when adding your keyword to the ad copy actually reduces your Quality Score, which is not uncommon for keywords that have ambiguous or multiple meanings. There are three important points to understand how this search works.

• Google’s tilde (~) command shows you words related to your query term(s).
• The negative (-) search operator allows you to remove results from search results.
• When you conduct a search on Google, your query terms are bolded in search results.

To use this effectively, build a search query that uses the tilde command to find related words, the negative search operator to remove the actual keyword searched, and then look for bolded words in results. You can then add these as additional negative keywords to find other bolded, related keywords. These related words can be useful to test in ad copy if you are receiving “non-relevant ad” messages in your Quality Score information.

Where in the world should you advertise?

Many companies that offer services nationally, or internationally, insist on choosing every possible location to serve their ad regardless of their budget. This is not necessarily the right choice. Instead of being everything to everybody, be the company in a smaller region. One of the easiest ways to determine where people are searching for your products is by analyzing Google Trends.

Google Trends. The regional information displayed by Google Trends does not show absolute search volume. Instead, it shows a ratio of total searches in a region compared to searches for your keyword. This is an indication of the likelihood of someone in that area to conduct a search for your keyword. When interest for your products is higher in a particular region, they are good areas to target when trying to narrow down your geographic focus or test specific markets.

Ad preview tool. Do not use the Google search engine to look for your own ads, instead, use the Google ad preview tool. Why? If you continuously search for your own ads and never click on them, Google may determine your own ads are irrelevant to you and stop showing them to you.

This tool will allow you to see ads in any geographic area without your account accruing impressions. If you ever want to see your own ad, or look at ads outside of your geographic region – you should be using the ad preview tool.

Reaching your audience

Demographic Prediction. Did you know that for the past several years the most common searchers for the word bleach are people who are not doing laundry? A college age male is the most common demographic searching for the word bleach. Bleach is a Japanese Magna (which is a cartoon style) that is popular with the college crowd and has completely changed the search results for this word.

Microsoft adLabs has a suite of excellent tools, one of which is known as demographic prediction where you can enter a keyword or URL and see the demographic makeup of those searching for your products. It is useful to know who is searching for your products, and this is the place to start learning that information.

Detecting Commercial Intent. Understanding where your customer is within the buying cycle can help you target both ads and landing pages around the customer’s knowledge and intent so that you can keep moving them through the buying cycle towards eventually doing business with your company. Determining how commercial any keyword is can be a daunting task, until you start experimenting with another adLabs tool, detecting online commercial intent.

If a word is mostly non-commercial, you should treat the query as an information query and ensure the searcher can find out more information about your product or service. If a keyword is highly commercial, then you will want to use a transactional landing page. You cannot jump a searcher past any stage in the buying cycle—it must be a natural progression. This tool will help you determine where your keywords fall in the buying cycle.

And a great, overlooked keyword research tool…

Thesaurus.com. While the AdWords keyword tool is one of the most recognized tools on the market, often its full power is not unleashed for PPC accounts. The tool has an option to spider websites. While many marketers will spider their own site in search of new keywords, almost any site can be spidered. This includes Thesaurus.com.

Do a search for your keyword on Thesaurus.com, copy the URL, and then paste it into the AdWords keyword tool. You will quickly be presented with a list of related keywords and associated stats. Anytime you are browsing the web and come across a page related to your products, take thirty seconds and spider the page for new keyword ideas.

There are many free tools available online. Many of these tools have a primary purpose, but also can be used in other situations to effectively discover specific pieces of information to help fix a problem. By experimenting with these tools, you can find new and interesting ways to optimize your PPC accounts.

Now you can more effectively bid on early buying cycle keywords, or keywords that you want exposure for, but do not have direct returns by combining the new Google Analytics goals with a budget optimizer campaign.

Google Analytics changes explained

Google Analytics expanded the number of goals you can track from four to 20. However, it looks a bit different as you now have “goal sets.” Where each goal set has 4 goals, and you can have 5 sets per profile.

Second, Google added two additional goals:

• Page views per visit
• Time on site

Please remember with Google Analytics, time on site actually means time on site minus the last page visited, as Google analytics only tracks data when there is a click. For instance, if your site visitor exhibited this behavior:

• Page 1: Time 5:00
• Page 2: Time 2:00
• Page 3: Time 1:00
• Exit via closing the browser window

In this example, Google does not know the browser window was closed and that they should stop tracking time on site. Therefore, Google Analytics would report 3 page views and 7 minutes on site for this user.

Using goals to measure branded or early buying funnel keywords

I’m a fan of bucketing keywords by where they fall in the buying cycle. If someone is in the learning phase of the buying cycle they need an informational page. If they are in the buy section of the funnel you need to monetize the click by encouraging them to buy.

This creates situations where keywords (and often display or content ads) reach a user who is at a different point in the funnel than the ads you’re displaying and you might not be able to monetize the user—at least for now.

For instance, the keyword “plasma vs LCD TV” is a learning cycle keyword. Buying a high-end electronic device is expensive, and takes thought and time before even beginning initial searches, much less actual purchases. Therefore, this keyword will rarely lead to a purchase as its a research oriented search. However, that does not mean it’s a bad keyword. When you have keywords that describe your products or services, but cannot be directly monetized, you have three options:

• Set a different conversion goal for the keyword, such as a newsletter subscription; and then set a value for what a newsletter subscription is worth
• Use an attribution management bid system
• Use a budget optimizer campaign

Use budget optimizer campaigns to increase your exposure

The budget optimizer works by your giving control of your bidding to Google in an attempt to maximize the traffic you receive. The optimizer does not care which keywords get clicks, it just cares that your budget is spent and that it gets you the most clicks possible.

The benefits for a publisher who measure RPV (revenue per visitor) are obvious. As long as your RPV is higher than your CPC, you want as much traffic as possible on those keywords. However, for those who sell a product or service, there is a unique way of using the budget optimizer to maximize your company’s exposure.

If you set ROI or profit based bids by keyword then do not use budget optimizer.

If you consider words to have unique values, then do not put those words into a budget optimizer campaign.

However, if you have keywords that, are early in the buying cycle and do not directly lead to revenue, describe your industry and products well but are hard to monetize and you want exposure on because they are words in the news, branded terms or for other reasons then putting these keywords into a budget optimizer campaign can be a useful way to maximize your exposure on non-direct ROI keywords. With the budget optimizer campaign, set a “branding or exposure” budget. The goal of this campaign is to move searchers into your buying funnel so you can monetize them at a later date.

However, you still need to make sure that these keywords are helping you reach goals.

Setting goals for budget optimizer campaigns

If you set a goal for these keywords such as a newsletter subscription or contact, then you should be able to determine what those conversions are worth and then set keyword bids. Therefore, words that lead to those types of conversions should not necessarily be in a budget optimizer campaign.

A few metrics for measuring budget optimizer campaign keywords are:

• Page views per visit
• Time on site
• Video views
• Bounce rate
• Send to a friend
• Bookmark
• Print this page
• Tweet This (or other social actions)
• Download product specs

The above goals do not directly lead to revenue; they lead to exposure and show levels of consumer engagement.

It just so happens that the new analytics goals will let you measure these items much more easily. Follow these easy steps to be able to measure the effectiveness of these early buying cycle keywords:

1. Set goals for the budget optimizer keywords, such as 3 page views per visitor.
2. In Google Analytics, set goals for time on site, page views per visitor, or use one of the expanded goal sets to track the social sharing items.
3. Add early buying funnel keywords to a budget optimizer campaign.
4. Let the budget optimizer campaign send you traffic. It may take up to two weeks for budget optimizer to really get going; have a little patience here.
5. Examine your analytics to optimize your budget optimizer campaign
   • If a keyword is not meeting your goals – delete it
   • If a keyword is meeting other goals (such as newsletter subscriptions) then move it to your normal max CPC or conversion optimizer campaign
   • If a keyword is meeting your budget optimizer goals, but no other goals, then leave it where it is
6. The last step is to measure if your overall revenue is higher while the budget optimizer campaign is running. If yes, then as long as the increased revenue is higher than the money you are spending in the budget optimizer campaign, then you are in good shape. If not, then lower the budget optimizer”s budget.

Every keyword, ad copy and landing page should increase revenue. If it does not, it needs to go away. However, you cannot always measure direct revenue for every keyword or traffic source.

Therefore, you should set appropriate goals for a keyword regardless of where it falls in the buying funnel to make sure your entire budget is working toward turning a searcher into a customer.

Engage consumers early in the buying cycle, so when they are ready to buy your company has already been part of the conversation. However, do not just spend money to receive clicks. Make sure every single click is helping to increase your overall profits.

Setting Max CPC

If you use the AdWords conversion tracker you can see your conversion metrics, such as cost per conversion, ROI, total conversions, and so on for every single keyword. This is the data that you will use to set max CPCs for every single keyword in your account.

My favorite column in the report is called value/click. This is the total revenue that a keyword brought to your company divided by the number of clicks that the keyword received. Essentially, it’s your break even CPC cost. If you bid based upon ROI, then the formula for setting a bid is:

Max CPC = (value/click) / desired ROI.

For instance, if your value per click is $2, and you wish a 200% ROI on your account, then the formula is:

$1 = ($2) / 2

If you have a hard cost of goods, then you need to take margins into account before you see your true value per click. If you are a profit based bidder, you will use different formulas for determining your bids; however, the starting data is the exact same as ROI bidding.

When you are making bid changes, you should do so based upon hitting your goals. The easiest way to see how all your keywords are performing is to use the keyword report combined with the AdWords conversion tracking script.

Understand your Quality Score

There are many times it is more profitable—and smarter—to work on raising your quality score over raising your bids. If your quality score is under 5, then you shouldn’t even be worrying about your bids. If your quality score is five to seven, then you should be working on both. If your quality score is seven or higher, then you will have to make most of your rank changes based upon changing your max CPCs; however, you should also be testing ad copy for both quality score and conversion purposes.

Quality Score is kept at the keyword level for search. If you have a large account, it can be difficult to find the best places to start working on Quality Score. This is where pivot tables can help. Run a keyword report and include a minimum of keyword, quality score, impressions, and spend. Next, put the data into a pivot table so that you can see the average of quality score and the sum of cost for each ad group:

Please note that this is an average of all the keywords within an ad group. If your keywords have very different impression rates in an ad group, rather than using the average of all the keyword quality scores, instead add a column to your keyword report that is call Real QS that is calculated by the formula (quality score * impressions). Then in the pivot table, divide impressions by Real QS. This will give you the average quality score for your ad groups, normalized by impressions.

Now, look for ad groups with low quality scores and high spends. In the above example, you would make much better use of your time working on the ad group that has spent $20,874 with a quality score of 5 than ad group 1 which has spend of just $25 or ad group 12 that has an average quality score of 7.12.

When you find ad groups that have high spends and low quality scores, examine the quality score factors to see which ones you can improve. If you can raise your quality score from 5 to 7 in ad group 11, you could save yourself a few thousand dollars.

Please note that this one of my experimental accounts. Yours should not look quite so consistent with so many ad groups having exactly a 5 quality score.

First page bids

The first page bid is an estimate of how much you need to bid for your keywords to appear on page one in all the geographies your ad appears. If you are advertising to a small region, then the first page bid is fairly accurate. The larger your geography, the less accurate the first page bid becomes. For instance, if your first page bid is $1 in Fargo, ND but $3 in Chicago; and you only bid $1.25, then your ad will be on page one in Fargo, but beyond page one in Chicago.

Unfortunately, you cannot see first page bid broken down by geography—Google provides just a single number per keyword. In the above example, Google would display $3 as the first page bid as that this the highest number across all geographies even though a lower bid would make your ad appear on page one in less competitive geographies.

While you should set bids from performance data, and not just raise bids so that your ads are on page one, there may be cases when your keywords never get enough page one exposure for you to know if those keywords would perform well on page one.

Use this report to look for places where your first page bid is below your max CPC. You can use conditional formatting in Excel to easily see what keywords are not on page one.

Deciding what keywords to pause, delete or move

If keywords are not performing, then you should pause, delete or move them to a budget optimizer campaign. If you set bids by ROI, these would be the keywords whose bid would have to be at or near $0.00 as they do not directly lead to conversions. Please note, just because a keyword does not directly lead to conversion does not mean its a bad keyword. You will have keywords that start someone down the buying funnel, but as they are not the last keyword clicked the words will appear to have a zero ROI.

If you see the message, “This account is nearly an unmanageable size,” it is an indication that your are reaching your account’s keyword limit. If you wish to keep adding keywords, you need to pause or delete some first. When you run a keyword report, there is an option under “filter your results” to include keywords with zero impressions. Run a report over a long time span and then look for keywords that have never received an impression. These are the keywords that you would want to delete in order to make room for new keywords. If you have a seasonal business you may wish to pause seasonal keywords instead of deleting them so you can unpause them when their season returns.

Each keyword you choose to use in your account should help you reach your marketing goals. It is essential to understand how each keyword performs, converts and helps you achieve your goals. When you want to know detailed information about any keyword, the keyword report should be the first place you look to see the appropriate metrics. The one exception to this rule is when you want to see the search query that triggered your keyword. For that information you should use the search query report.

You can have these reports automatically created and emailed to you as a reminder it’s time to examine keyword level data. You should regularly examine your quality scores, first page bids, and max CPCs to learn from your account, and make adjustments as necessary so that you can extract the most value from your AdWords account.

There are six reports that, when used effectively, can give you the majority of insight you need to analyze your accounts on a day-to-day basis. In part 1 of this two-part series, I’ll take you through these reports to find insight into your accounts. In part two, I’ll take an in-depth look at the keyword report to create actionable items from the data.

While these reports are easy to run they are most effective when combined with the AdWords conversion tracking script. This is a different feature than what you find in Google Analytics. The conversion tracking script sends data from your website back to AdWords so that you can see conversion information in your AdWords reports. In walking through these reports, I’ll make the assumption that you are using this script. If you are not, then you can still use these reports; however, you should marry up the data with the analytics package you are using to track conversions to get a complete picture of what’s going on.

The keyword report

The AdWords keyword report should be your starting place for analyzing keyword data. This report shows metrics by individual keywords within your account. For instance, the main data points to examine when reviewing information by keyword are:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR
• Conversions
• Cost per conversion
• Conversion rate
• Value per click

There are three main uses of this report:

1. Set bids based upon cost per conversion or other metrics with your established bid methodology
2. Find low quality score keywords with high spends so you can optimize for quality score (note: it can be useful to use a pivot table to find AdGroups with high spend and low quality scores. See Josh Dreller’s In The Trenches column about mastering pivot tables for more info).
3. Find keywords that are not on page one (where the first page bid is higher than your max CPC). Remember, though, that just because your keyword is not on page one does not mean you should raise your bid to be on page one. If you cannot be profitable on page one, then you need to decide if this is a word that can be on page two; if not, you need to optimize the landing page, ad text, or other factors for this keyword before you raise your bid to be on page one.

In part two of this article, I’ll take a deep dive into the keyword report to show various ways of working with the data it produces.

The search query report

The search query report will show you the query that was actually typed into a search engine that caused your ad to be displayed. For instance, if you bid on the broad match “coffee mugs,” your ad could show for “yellow coffee cups,” “blue coffee mug” or possibly even “tea cup.”

Use the search query report to find words that are not converting yet are consuming your ad-spend dollars. When you find such words add them as negative keywords.

Then use the report to find words that are converting and are not keywords in your account—consider these to be Google’s gift to you to help you improve the overall importance of your campaign. Add these words as keywords so that you can bid on these words based upon their actual returns. Remember, your broad match keywords will never convert higher than your exact match keywords.

When you conduct keyword research, you should always consult the search query report as part of your keyword expansion methodology.

The placement performance report

The placement performance report is only useful if you’re advertising on the content network. It shows you the sites and individual URLs where your content ads have been placed. The first time you run this report, include the actual URLs where your ad has been shown. Click on the URLs and look at the actual pages where your ads have been shown. If your ad is not being placed on the correct types of pages, then you should examine the keywords triggering your content ads.

If the ads are being placed on appropriate pages, run the same placement performance report again, but do not include individual URLs. By excluding the individual URLs, it is easier to gain high level perspective on how each web site where your ads are being displayed is performing for your business. Alternatively, you can also use a pivot table to examine the domain level information from a report that includes URLs. When you find a site that is bringing you high quality traffic that meets your business goals, add it as a placement targeted site so your ad is always shown there. When you find sites that are costing your money, but the traffic is not meeting your goals, then block the site from showing your ads in the future.

The entire work-flow process for managing content sites can be found in this Search Engine Land article.

The ad text report

The ad text report will show you all the ads that your are using along with associated metrics such as cost-per-conversion or clickthrough rate. Use this report when running any ad copy tests.

In addition, run this report on occasion to find ads that are performing below the averages for your account. Then go to those ad groups and write new ads to test which ones perform better. As you can have multiple ads running in any ad group, you should continuously be testing various ad copy. In addition, if one ad suddenly gets disapproved, you will have at least one more ad running so you will still maintain exposure in those ad groups while you fix the issue.

While most PPC marketers are always looking at text ads, do not forget your video or image ads. Use this same report to see the metrics for your other ad types. If you are running video ads, then you should be uploading multiple static images (with the same video) to see which opening image has a higher play rate, clickthrough rate, and cost-per-conversion.

The URL performance report is similar to the ad text report. It will show you where ad traffic is sending searchers on your website, and the associated cost-per-conversion and other metrics for that landing page. Analyze the URL report just like the ad text report. Find landing pages that are not meeting your goals, and test different landing pages and landing page layouts.

The geographic performance report

This is one of the more overlooked reports in AdWords. This report will give you information about where your ads are being shown and the associated metrics by geography. Even if you are a national advertiser, it can be beneficial to write ads for specific local areas.

One of the quality score metrics is clickthrough rate in a geographic region. If your ads do well in San Francisco, but poorly in New York City, then your ad will be shown more in San Francisco and less in New York City. As the New York City metro area makes up more than 10% of the entire United States population, a lack of exposure in that geography can significantly lower your total consumer base.

In the report, look for regions where you are not doing well and that have significant populations. It’s easy to overlay percentage of population data with the report to spot these regions. For instance, create a chart that shows:

• The regions where your ad is displayed
• The percentage of impressions and clicks you receive from that region
• The percentage of the population that lives within that region

Always take other factors into account when examining population data in isolation. For instance, say you have a physical location in Miami and your ads are not doing well in either city. It’s likely more worthwhile to work on getting your ads to perform better in your local market, Miami, before spending time tweaking your Los Angeles campaign, even through Los Angeles has a much higher population.

When you find underperforming regions, and those regions have a high enough population that you are willing to create a campaign just for that region, follow these steps:

• In your original campaign, exclude your ads from being shown in the new geographic area that you want to target
• Duplicate the existing campaign with the AdWords editor, and then change the geographic area to be the new region
• Write ads that are compelling for that region

If the region is not large enough for you to create a specific campaign for a region, conduct keyword research to see if consumers are using location specific words (such as Los Angeles plumber) in their search queries. If they are you can create an ad group that uses geographic keywords with associated geographic ad copy.

The impression share “report”

Technically, there is not an impression share report. The impression share report is an unofficial name that advertisers have given this report. To see impression share data, you need to run a campaign report, and in the reporting options select these options:

• Impression share
• Lost IS (rank)
• Lost IS (budget)
• Exact Match (IS)

Once you have the report, you will see how many impressions you are losing and why you are losing impressions.

If you are losing impression due to budget, then you can easily determine how many more impressions you would receive if your increased your budget. This is very useful for determining what your account could spend based on the current keywords in your account. If you are losing impressions due to rank, then you need to improve either the bids or the quality score to receive higher placement so these ads are shown.

Setting an AdWords reporting schedule

There is more information available in AdWords reports than you could ever hope to analyze and take action upon within any day. To cope with information overload, first define your business goals. Next, define what metrics will give you insight into attaining those business goals. Once you have defined those two items, then run the AdWords reports which will help you gain insight into those goals so that you can find areas where you need to improve your account.

Then create a reporting schedule based upon when you want to see and act upon the data. You can set AdWords report to be automatically created and emailed to you on a daily, weekly (Monday), or monthly (first day of every month) schedule. If those options do not meet your needs use your calendar to remind you to create reports.

Here’s a recommended schedule that’s easy to work with—though remember, based on your goals, budget and time, your schedule might differ tremendously.

Keyword report:

• Daily – examine changes in cost per conversion, conversion rate, and total conversions.
• Every Monday – examine changes in quality score, find areas of low quality score, work on improving your quality score.
• Every Monday (or daily for large account, highly competitive industries, or volatile bidding environments) – examine keywords not on page one.

Search query report: Every other Tuesday. Conduct additional keyword and negative keyword research.

Placement performance report:

• Every Wednesday. Examine changes in cost per conversion, conversion rate, and total conversions for bid changes purposes.
• Every other Wednesday: Examine sites you wish to block or add as placements.

Ad text report /URL report:

• Every Thursday. Finalize tests or create new text ads.
• Every Friday. Finalize landing page tests, create new landing pages, create new landing page tests.

Geographic performance report: Once a month (assuming you are not a regional specific business, then weekly might be more appropriate).

Impression share: Once a month (weekly or daily during high peak seasons) to help create next month’s strategy of how to improve your account.

Always conduct in-depth audits beyond these reports and use the other reports and tools as necessary. Google offers a tremendous amount of data that you can extract from your account. While these six reports will not give you every detail you will ever need to optimize your account, these six reports will give you 90% of the data necessary to improve your account’s performance.

You can save yourself lots of time and money by examining the mistakes of others so that you do not fall into the same traps of creating unprofitable PPC campaigns. Here are seven of the most common mistakes I see new advertisers make—and more importantly, how to avoid them.

Not setting & measuring campaign goals

Before you start any advertising campaign you should set the goals for what you wish that campaign to achieve. If you do not have goals, there is no way to know which keywords, ad copy or landing pages are meeting your goals or just wasting money. A conversion goal is a metric your define for your account. It could be a form fill, a phone call or an eCommerce checkout. First, set your account goals. Second, find a way to measure those goals.

All of the major PPC engines have conversion tracking scripts that you can put on your website. When these scripts are triggered, it sends conversion information back to your reports so that you can see what keywords are converting and which are wasting your money.

These scripts are useful to use with Google Analytics or other analytics systems as they put data back into your PPC accounts directly. This makes it easier to see conversion data in all the reports you run within your PPC account.

Poor account organization

The most time consuming aspect of PPC accounts is the organization of keywords and ad copy within an AdGroup. The most basic, yet fundamental notion of an AdGroup is that the keywords in the AdGroup only trigger the ads within that same AdGroup. The ad copy within an AdGroup only show when a keyword within that same AdGroup is matched to the search query. Yet many beginners either stuff their AdGroups with too many, or unrelated keywords.

While your ad copy does not have to contain the actual keywords, the closer your ad copy reflects the intent of the keyword search, the higher your clickthrough rate and conversion rates will be.

Use this exercise to organize your AdGroups:

1. Write an incredibly specific ad copy with exactly one search intent
2. Examine the keywords in the AdGroup
   • If the ad copy reflects the keyword, leave the keyword in the AdGroup
   • If the ad copy does not reflect the keyword, put the keyword in another AdGroup

It is better to have ten AdGroups of ten keywords than one AdGroup of 100 unrelated keywords. There isn’t a magic number for how many keywords should be in an AdGroup—at least if you’re targeting the search network. Google says that for ads appearing on the content network, only the first 50 words in an AdGroup are used to determine its theme.

No doubt, organizing your account in this granular fashion is time consuming. However, it will make your ads and keywords more relevant, which will lead to higher quality scores, higher clickthrough rates, and ultimately, a greater payoff for your efforts.

Focusing on traffic rather than conversions

Every day someone adds a very general keyword such as “TV” to an account. What does that keyword even mean? Is the searcher looking for TV listings, Plasma TVs, online TV or something else? The word does not have a defined search intent. While these general keywords can drive a lot of traffic to your website, the purpose of search advertising should not always to drive more traffic for the sake of getting more eyeballs to your website.

Start by focusing on more specific keywords that have a defined search intent, such as:

• Samsung DLP TV
• Buy Samsung TVs
• Samsung hl66sw

While general keywords will drive a lot of traffic, they can also waste a lot of money as they usually have low conversion rates and do not pay for themselves. Using general keywords is OK once you understand how they affect the metrics in your account. However, when you are first starting PPC advertising, use specific keywords until you understand how different types of keywords convert.

Ignoring match types

By default, Google uses “broad match” to trigger results for a search query. Broad match by definition is a loose fit, so a general keyword such as “coffee mugs” can match queries such as “tea cups,” “Starbucks coffee mugs” or “collector coffee mugs.” Those searches are conducted by individuals looking for very different items. This happens because a broad matched word can be matched to similar, misspelled or plural words. In this case, tea is similar to coffee and cups is similar to mugs—that’s why it is possible for your “coffee mug” keyword to be displayed when someone searches for “tea cups.”

There are three match types in Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter that determine what variations of the search query will match to your chosen keywords and cause your ad to be displayed.

Broad match has its place, but if you exclusively rely on it you will lose control of ad serving. Broad match keywords will never convert higher than your exact match keywords.

In addition, you can use negative keywords in your account to stop your ad from showing. In the above example, if you sold coffee mugs, but you do not sell Starbucks coffee mugs, you could use the negative keyword Starbucks so your ad would not show when someone searched with the word Starbucks.

Negative keywords allows you to control when you do not want your ad to show. This in turn leads to higher CTR, conversion rates and more profit by not paying for clicks that will not convert for your company.

Failing to separate content and search campaigns

There are two different types of advertising that you conduct within the major PPC accounts. The first is search. With search, your ad is only shown when someone actively searches for your keywords.

Your ads can also be displayed across the content network. With the content network, the search engine examines all the keywords within your AdGroup to determine the theme of your AdGroup. Then, Google places your ad on a web page with content related to the theme of your AdGroup (such as NYTimes.com).

Because there are very different ways that the keywords in your AdGroups trigger search or content ads to be shown, and very different user intent (active searching vs. passively reading an article), you should separate your content and search campaigns. You should also use different keywords so that your ad is triggered appropriately and you can optimize the content network.

Google’s matching of ads on the content network has vastly improved in recent years, but it can be difficult to use effectively when first starting your PPC campaigns. I recommend start with only search, and once you have fine-tuned your keywords, ad copy and landing pages, then turn to the content network to further the reach of your accounts.

Sending all traffic to the homepage

Searchers, by definition, are looking for a specific piece of information. Usually a company’s homepage has lots of information about a company, or speaks broadly to their products, but does not speak to any particular search query. If you send searchers to your homepage from your ads, and they have to hunt for the information they’re looking for, you will see people quickly abandoning your site. You should send traffic to:

• A landing page created for a specific search query
• The page that is the furthest, logical step in the buying cycle for your website

Examine the conversion rates by keywords and landing page. Look at bounce rates for keywords and landing pages. When you see high bounce rates and low conversion rates, then the traffic needs to go to another page or you need to optimize the page to increase conversions.

Not testing

The PPC engines allow you to have multiple ad copies in a single AdGroup. Each ad copy can also go to a different landing page. It is very simple to test different ads and landing pages to see which ad copy or landing pages increase your primary search metrics, such a clickthrough rate and cost per conversion.

It is not difficult to get to metrics such as profit per click to see which ad copy and landing page combination leads to the highest most profit for your different keywords and ad copies.

When creating a new AdGroup, always create at least two ad copies. After you have enough data to reach statistical significance, then you can run reports to see which ads, landing pages and keywords lead consumers to do business with your company.

Conclusion

These deadly mistakes should be taken to heart by all new advertisers. However, remember that the more you learn about PPC marketing, the more you can deviate from these basic rules as there will be times when you need to break them to reach particular objectives.

However, learn from the mistakes that others have been making so that you do not fall into the same trap which has caused many PPC accounts to become unprofitable, or worse, fail entirely.

There are several companies that offer different types of call tracking solutions. Some of those solutions are quite expensive, and others lead to data loss. Understanding the different ways of tracking phone calls is important when either selecting a vendor or instituting tracking on your own.

There are five main ways in which you can track phone calls. Of course, there are other methods and variations on these methods.

Unique phone numbers

You can have a unique number for each keyword, ad group, campaign, or account.

With this method, the first thing to determine is if you want to use a static number or a dynamic number. With a static number on the page, you will hard code the number into that page. If you hard code the number, then you will want to make sure that there are not additional ways of navigating to that page. If someone can enter your site from the main page and navigate to that page, then you will not have accurate information about which traffic source led to a phone call.

With dynamic numbers you will first have to determine a way to know what account, campaign, ad group or keyword initiated the traffic. The most common way of isolating these variables is to add parameters to your links that your system will read and display the corresponding phone number.

To further improve the tracking, you can set a cookie that corresponds to the traffic source. Then, regardless of what page someone navigates to on your website, you can display the phone number that is associated with that cookie. This is also useful if someone leaves your site and returns later. Since the cookie will still be set, you can still serve the call tracking number associated with the click to determine the quality of those clicks.

Pros: If you use dynamic parameters and cookies, this is one of the most accurate call tracking solutions that is possible. You will have very little data loss. However, you will have to decide additional business rules (for example, if someone clicks on a second ad, do you set a new cookie with a new phone number or keep the first cookie and the original phone number?). These types of rules will affect the type of optimization you can achieve.

Cons: The biggest disadvantage to this method is that it can become very costly. If you need thousands of numbers you could end up with some hefty phone bills. This method also requires some coding. If you are using a third party vendor, it might be as simple as dropping a script where the phone number appears. If you are coding this in-house, then it can take a bit of development work to coordinate the phone numbers with the ad copy, keywords, ad group or inventory source.

Phone extensions

This method is identical to the method above, except instead of using a unique phone number, you will use a unique phone extension. The same rules apply with regards to static versus dynamic phone numbers and additional business rules.

Pros: This method can be much less expensive than using unique phone numbers. However, it can be just as accurate since you are using a unique extension for each ad group, keyword, or campaign.

Cons: The main disadvantage of this method is that not all phone systems support endless extensions, and adding new ones can be difficult or require the intervention of a different department. If your system does not support endless extensions, it might be less expensive to use another method that institute a new phone system. In addition, some consumers could be turned off by calling a number and then having to enter an extension. You should examine how many people call your number but do not enter an extension.

Code identifiers

With this method you will generate a unique code that sits just below the phone number. When someone calls your office, the person answering should start with the dialogue, “To best direct your call, can you please read me the code below the phone number?” That person will then record that number (or punch it into the phone system) and then continue the call as normal. This method also relies on either generating a unique code (instead of phone number) listed in the unique phone number above by examining the link parameters or by hard coding the code into the page (which leads to some data loss).

Pros: This method requires a little bit of developer time, which is the same as any of the above methods, but the cost should be lower than buying a large amount of numbers that you pay for each month.

Cons: The biggest challenge of using this system is training those who answer the phone to ask and accurately record the codes.

Search engine conversion tracking script

All of the major engines have a conversion tracking system that allows you to see conversions within your account. However, those actions rely on someone viewing a page of your website that contains the code. If someone is calling you, then they are not viewing pages of your website. However, if you can be creative and get the caller back to a page on your website, then you can trigger the script to record the action. The easiest way to do this is to generate online receipts. When someone views their receipt, then the script is triggered and you can potentially tell which keyword, ad copy and landing page generated the conversion. However, you can also use methods such as receive a coupon, take a survey, etc.

Pros: The biggest advantage of using the engine’s conversion codes is you will be able to see phone calls in your PPC reports. The second advantage is that it requires very little additional coding (beyond adding a simple conversion script to the pages which the engines will walk you through when you sign up to receive the code). This is one of the least expensive solutions.

Cons: The biggest disadvantage is data loss. There will be people who will not revisit your website that triggers the code, or will do so from a different computer. Although this could be seen as a disadvantage, the silver lining is that you need to be creative to get someone to visit specific pages of your website. However, by sending someone back to your website, you do have an other opportunity to continue to engage the caller.

Confidence factors

If you have 10,000 keywords, yet only one phone number (or even 100), how do you get keyword level call data? You use confidence factors to determine which keyword is generating the call. For instance, if you time stamp every click, and then track the time that each phone call came through to your business, you can start to see patterns that if this keyword is clicked, there is a percentage chance that our phone will ring in the next ten minutes.

This is a really useful solution for aggregators. Consider a company that does marketing for 1000 plumbers. While each plumber might have a unique phone number, it hurts margins to use multiple numbers for each plumber. While each plumber might only receive 20 calls a month, with 1000 plumbers, you could track 20,000 phone calls per month. In this case, that is enough data to begin learning which keywords, ad copy, keyword, and engine are generating the phone calls. You could even learn that keyword one generates phone calls in Seattle, but keyword two is more likely to generate phone calls in Miami.

If you generate 100 clicks and one phone call in ten minutes, then any one of those keywords could generate the phone call. If in the next ten minutes, you have another hundred clicks, but only two of them are from the first set and you have another phone call, then there’s a higher chance that one of those two keywords generated a phone call, but of course, this is not enough data to make a decision. This method does require a significant amount of phone calls to be able to confidently understand what keywords are leading to calls.

Pros: One of the advantages of this method is that it enables aggregators to affordably understand which keywords are leading to phone calls. Another is that you do not need a significant number of call tracking numbers, which makes this method more affordable than other solutions.

Cons: This method requires a lot of phone calls to gain confidence that a particular keyword is generating phone calls. If your PPC advertising does not generate a significant amount of phone calls, this is not the method for you. In addition, as you are creating confidence numbers, but without a one keyword to one phone call ratio, your data will not be completely accurate. The goal is to understand that when a particular keyword is clicked, you receive a phone call a certain percentage of the time so you can set bids based upon returns.

Note also that this method does not work well with long tail keywords. Long tail words might not have enough traffic for you to be confident in their ability to generate a phone call. In these cases, you might track at the ad group level instead of the keyword level.

Phone number pools

The last method is to keep a pool of phone numbers. This pool is smaller than the total number of items you wish to track. When a click occurs, you dynamically assign that keyword or ad group a phone number. That phone number will be associated to that keyword or ad group for a certain amount of minutes. After a while, that number goes back into the pool to be used by another keyword when necessary. All of the numbers in the same pool should be assigned to the same advertiser so even if a number expires in the tracking system, the number still rings to the correct advertiser. If you are an individual advertiser and like the idea of confidence stamping above, then this is a solution you should investigate.

Pros: Phone number pools work very similarly to the confidence factors (above) at the keyword level, but do not require nearly as much traffic. The more phone numbers you have, the less total traffic you need. This allows you to receive better data on long tail keywords, and have a higher confidence on low to medium trafficked accounts.

Cons: Whenever you use confidence factors, you will have false positives. If you have a lot of traffic and keywords, then you need to buy quite a few phone numbers. While this is not nearly as expensive as the unique phone call method, it can become pricey. Ask the provider what their error rate is in determining what keyword generated the phone call. Then ask their competitors what their error rate is. Hearing a 30% error rate is not uncommon. However, the larger the pool of numbers, the lower the error rate should become over time.

Helpful hints when buying call tracking numbers

Some companies will use one of the more expensive techniques, such as unique phone numbers or phone number pools, for a few months to gain enough data to make reliable bid decisions. Then they will turn off the call tracking for a while to save on expenses. After a while, they might then turn on call tracking again to see what has changed with their phone call leads.

When buying one or more numbers from a call tracking company, one of the most important questions to ask is how long a number been “cleansed” or not used by another party. Do a search for your number and see if that number appears on many web pages. A number that keeps receiving old calls is often called a “dirty number” and can ruin your tracking. Having a number out of commission for 90 days between users is fairly standard. If you receive a significant amount of bad calls from your call tracking number, do not hesitate to inform the call tracking company and request new numbers.

The other conversation to have is how additional minutes are pooled. When you buy a number, you usually pay a flat rate for that number per month and that number comes with X number of minutes each month. If you go over that limit, then you pay a per-minute overage charge. Some companies will keep those limits at the phone number level, meaning you might have one number go over and another under the limit but you still need to pay an overage charge.

A way to control your minutes is to create a pool. Instead of a single number having 30 minutes of talk time, having 20 numbers and 600 minutes of talk time, regardless of the number called, can help lower total costs.

Some other features that are common to see are call recording, API (if you want to hook up the call tracking to your system), call length, number of rings (useful for seeing how fast the phone is being answered), caller phone number (useful for finding patterns, such as telemarketers and blocking those numbers), and call block. Most features that are available on land lines are available with call tracking providers.

It is helpful to first determine a budget and a required feature list before evaluating vendors. As many vendors methods vary, having an idea of your preferred method, budget and features can help you evaluate who is a best fit for your needs.

Conclusion

Call tracking does not have to be an expensive or difficult proposition. At the least, you could buy a call tracking number (or use a Skype, Vonage, or Google Voice number) and use a different number per inventory source (one of adCenter, Yahoo, and AdWords) to understand if your PPC campaigns are generating phone calls. While this method will not give you enough data to set different bids by ad group or keyword, it will give you a high level picture of whether you are even receiving phone calls.

The more you want to track, the more expensive the tracking proposition becomes. If you are buying a large amount of numbers, do not be afraid to negotiate the call tracking costs.

Do not optimize your account for just total calls. You should enter the call information into your system to not just evaluate total calls, but also sales. If you receive a hundred calls a month and no sales, were those really good keywords or phone calls?

Once you have instituted call tracking, then you can use that information to set budgets and bids based upon returns. You can split test ad copy, ad groups, and different video or image ads to determine what is really working for your company. You can even use different numbers for your newspaper, yellow pages, billboards and other media buys.

If you conduct sales over the phone, you should use some level of call tracking to understand the returns you are receiving for your marketing spend. Do not bid blindly. Rather, bid based upon the profits and marketing goals your campaigns achieve.

Showcasing ads to mobile audiences is excellent for companies who are searched for while a user is out in the community without a computer, such as:

• Department stores (show driving directions)
• Towing companies
• Locksmiths

Or to reach users who are looking for mobile software:

• Mobile applications (such as iPhone apps)
• Ringtones

There are other company types that will find mobile advertising useful. As most users on a phone are not going to visit many pages on your website, think about what a user would want to accomplish while on a small device and direct your traffic to such a page.

After we discuss the options for reaching an audience, we will showcase an easy way to test mobile campaigns if your website is not mobile compatible.

AdWords has ways of reaching audiences regardless of their phone type. However, there are different techniques for putting your ads in front of a consumer based upon their mobile browser type.

Reaching users with full Internet browsers

To reach a user with a full Internet browser, the steps are quite simple. In the settings tab for your campaign, you have options to display your ad based upon the user accessing the Internet via:

• Desktop or laptop computer
• iPhones or other devices with full Internet browsers

(Click image to view full size at Flickr)

You can choose one or both options.

If you choose to display your ads to users with a full Internet browser, check to see how your ad renders in that browser. Some full mobile browsers do not render flash or java correctly. If your images, flash files, or script files are large, it might take quite some time for your website to render on this device.

If you use Google Analytics, you can segment your current audience metrics for those users coming from an iPhone.

While this will not show you everyone coming to your site from a full HTML browser, it can give you directional information about how iPhone users are interacting with your website. Examine your bounce rate. If the keywords are relevant to your website, and your bounce rate is high, it may be an indication of a slow loading site on a browser.

Reaching users with mobile browsers

To reach users that are not using iPhones, or other full HTML browsers, there is a different technique. Google has another ad type called ‘mobile ads’. Navigate to the ad tab within your ad group and click ‘New Ad’, followed by ‘Mobile Ad’.

Mobile ads are much smaller than text ads. They contain only two lines of eighteen characters. As the display screen on phones is smaller than a typical browser, so are the text ads.

The real decision about this ad types comes from deciding what options to give the user. You can give the user three options upon seeing your ad:

• Click the ad to visit your website
• Click the phone number to initiate a phone call
• Give the user both of the above options

You must have a mobile compatible site to send users to your website. If you do not have a mobile compliant site, your only option is to use the click-to-call feature of the ad.

In addition, you can choose which network you wish to display your ads on. For instance, if you have created a app that only works on T-Mobile phones, you would only want to display your ad to T-Mobile users. For most advertisers, feel free to show your ad to all carriers.

Mobile ads are only shown if the user meets your other campaign’s restrictions, such as geography or time of day. Therefore, you can create click to call ads for a locksmith that are only shown in the city that you service.

Creating mobile pages

Google use to offer mobile landing pages that you could create within your AdWords account. Those were retired a few months ago due to low usage, and they will not be missed as there were not formatting options.

If you want to test mobile advertising, but do not want to pay for the development for a full mobile site until you are certain you wish to utilize mobile advertising, there is a very easy way to create a test site using WordPress. WordPress is an easy-to-install blogging platform. However, you do not have to use it as a blog. You can install the CMS and create a couple landing pages to test out for your mobile ads instead of starting a full blog. In addition, WordPress supports many plug-ins. One of these plug-ins makes WordPress mobile compatible. Therefore all you need to do to test out mobile advertising is:

• Install WordPress
• Install the mobile compatible plug-in
• Write a few pages for mobile users
• Send traffic to those pages via AdWords

Here is a full instruction guide to creating WordPress mobile pages.

Previewing mobile search results & websites

Google has a mobile preview tool that will let you view mobile results from within your desktop browser. Navigate to the http://www.google.com/m/adpreview and conduct a search. You see results in several countries, and even by carrier in the US.

You can also do a search at Google mobile to see the organic results, but Google mobile rarely shows ads even for results that should display ads when you are on a desktop.

Google also has a mobile proxy tool that will adopt any page to be viewed on a mobile device. It is useful if you are on a phone and the page uses scripts that your device cannot render, which is its primary purpose. However, it can also be used to get an idea of what your site might look like on some mobile devices.

That tool can become tedious to use over time. An easier way to see what your site will look like in a mobile browser is to use the FireFox plug-in wmlbrowser that will simulate WAP browsing from your desktop.

Conversion tracking

The AdWords conversion tracking script supports both mobile and desktop browser usage. You may have different conversions based upon a user coming from a mobile device compared to a desktop device. Therefore, set your goals appropriately.

It can also be useful to have completely separate mobile versus desktop campaigns. As you might send traffic to different pages on your site for the same keywords based upon their device, or have different conversion options, use the AdWords editor to quickly duplicate your campaigns and then set one for desktops and one for mobile devices.

Conclusion

Mobile usage is climbing, although it has definitely not hit its peak. There will still be many growing pains for mobile advertising and mobile usage. In addition, the volume of clicks for most businesses is still low from mobile devices. However, conversion rates for phone calls and driving directions are often higher than desktop browsing for many industries. If you are locked out of your car, you do not comparison shop locksmiths. Most users find one locksmith and then place a phone call.

Testing mobile advertising is not a difficult proposition. It will take you only a few minutes to create mobile ads or change your campaign settings. If you are technically minded, it will take only an hour to install a new WordPress site and write the content for your new mobile landing pages.

As with most new advertising techniques, the hard part is choosing to try out the new medium and setting aside the time to actually accomplish the changes. Take an hour one day and test out mobile. The results might surprise you. Even if it doesn’t work well due to the low volume of clicks, leaving the campaign running will let you see the stats for when mobile adoption is starting to hit your industry so you can be in front of the curve in mobile adoption.