Advanced PPC managers should already know all of these features, but beginners and intermediate level Adwords users can definitely get some new inspiration and ideas from this list to boost up performance. In this article, I will highlight 10 features that I love and frequently use.

1.  Adwords Keyword Tool

The Keyword Tool is a great starting point when starting a new Adwords campaign.  This tool provides global and local monthly searches for the keywords you want. You easily know which keywords people are searching for the most, so you can include this in your campaigns. Also, you’ll find keywords that are not relevant for your products, so you can include these words as negatives.

2.  Insights for Search

With Insights for Search you can compare search volume patterns across different keywords, regions, time frames and categories. With this tool, you can compare e.g. how your brand is doing comparing to competitors. For example, if you would like to know what  the top searches and rising searches are for the US in the travel category, the tool also provides this information.

3.  Toggle Graph Options

This option is great for easily comparing one metric with another. For example, comparing avg. position to CTR, but also you can compare to the date range you select which is a great way to compare different periods and see how your campaigns are performing over time.

4.  Ad Scheduling

This feature you will find under the settings tab of a campaign:

The Ad Scheduling feature lets you bid more or less during certain days and hours. For example, you can see by using the segment options in Adwords (which I will discuss later) that on Monday between 08:00 – 12:00am, you are getting a lot of clicks and also some conversions, but the cost per conversion are way higher than your targets.

You may decide to bid lower between 08:00 – 12:00am on Monday, so you can bid higher on the more profitable days/times to increase conversions and your ROI.

5.  Diagnose Keywords

You can find the diagnose keywords under the Keyword Tab:

With the diagnose keywords, you can quickly filter on Ads that have critical issues and therefore are not showing.

6.  Custom Columns

The columns option lets you select the metrics that you would like to show in Adwords. Click on customize columns and you’ll see five topics to choose from depending on which level. You can easily add and/or remove columns. There is an easy drag and drop function to order the metrics just the way you like it.

7.  Filters

I definitely advise you to check out the filter option in Adwords if you haven’t used it before. It’s a great way to filter quickly on the metrics you select.

As above screenshot shows, the filter option is to the left of the columns option. You can apply filters on campaign, ad groups, ads and keyword level. For some filter inspiration, check out this great post.

8.  Download Report

In Adwords, you can easily download reports directly from the tab you are in. Simple click on  and the download & schedule report option will open.

You have the ability to choose between different formats. Also, you can include any segment you would like. If it’s a report you would like to receive weekly, use the Email and schedule option.

9.  Segment Options

Segment can give great insights as to what’s performing well in your Adwords campaign and what isn’t.

If you are running campaigns on Computers and Tablets, and you would like to know the performance on tablets, just click on segment and choose ‘Device’. You will see the results for Computers and Tablets seperated, so it’s easy to compare the performance of these different devices:

There are many other options like segmenting on day of the week, hour of the day or segmenting the ACE experiment you are running.

10.  Automate

Adwords has an automate function to create rules for campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords. If you have ten adgroups with your top products and you would like to have a minimum avg position of 2 for these groups, you can create a rule for this by selecting the adgroups and click on automate .

Your rule could look something like below:

If you use the automate function, be sure to monitor the results closely. Making rules can be a time saver, but if it’s not giving you the results according to your KPI’s, delete the rule and use manually bidding to achieve your goals.

Adwords is a playground of possibilities which keeps innovating with new features such as the newly released labels. Be sure to regularly visit the Adwords blog and Ad Innovations to keep up to date.

And if you have some spare time, dive into Adwords and play around.

When bidding on competitor brand terms, you don’t have to worry about cannibalization of your own organic results; these are terms for which you probably weren’t going to rank anyway. If you were, that means you’re using competitor brand terms on your own pages – a risky proposition from a legal standpoint.

Yes, the FTC does have some regulatory language about mentioning competitors for the purposes of a factual comparison, but the risk of doing this poorly and opening yourself up to a lawsuit or a false advertising complaint probably outweighs pursuing strategies involving comparisons.

The Practice Is Fairly Common

As far as paid search goes, in the U.S. at least, my understanding is that it has been generally accepted in the online marketing industry for several years now that it’s OK to *bid* on competitor brand terms as longs as the competitor’s terms don’t show up *in your creatives* (i.e. the ad text itself).

Run some brand-name searches yourself and you’ll see plenty of examples where this appears to be happening.

Google AdWords has copious information on this topic, the easiest place to find them is here:

• Google’s Trademark Advertising Policies

I strongly encourage you to to read all of them.

By my reading of Google’s policies, it seems that in the U.S. at least, if you bid on competitor brand terms, Google’s policy is not to investigate complaints, as long as you don’t include any trademarked terms in your creatives.

It’s important to note that Google’s policies (and local law) vary by country. Of course, Google’s policies are one thing; they don’t prevent a competitor from suing you however, so proceed at your own risk.

Disclaimer: I’m no lawyer, so you should get your own legal advice and research these issues to your own satisfaction before proceeding with any of the ideas in this article. Also, if you’re going to use competitor brand terms on other platforms such as Bing/Yahoo or elsewhere, you should fully investigate their policies first as well.

Caution: This Is Still Somewhat Up In The Air

Notably, a case involving Rosetta Stone was recently revived on appeal, so the overall question of the legality of bidding on competitor trademarks is still somewhat fuzzy.

If the courts lead to a reversal on this, then it could create a huge, painful mess for the industry and spawn numerous lawsuits, given the prevalence of the practice in the last few years. SearchEngineLand’s Pamela Parker has been doing a great job covering this:

• Question of Whether It’s Legal To Use Trademarks As Keywords Revived On Appeal

What is a Trademark?

Per the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO for short) , a trademark is:

” a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination thereof, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others….you can establish rights in a mark based on use of the mark in commerce, without a registration….Common law rights arise from actual use of a mark…”

• See: USPTO Trademark FAQs

Just because a competitor has not registered a phrase as a trademark with the U.S. Government doesn’t mean the phrase isn’t their trademark; it still might be considered an unregistered trademark.

Something to look for is whether they use the “TM” mark in association with something rather than the “Registered Trademark” symbol (the circle with an R).

If they are not putting “TM” (or “SM” for a “Service Mark”), then they aren’t doing a very good job of protecting their rights in that mark, an important fact to note if there is ever any court case around it (most marketing organizations are adamant about using “R”, “TM”, and “SM” the first time a trademark is used on any piece of collateral for this reason).

The bottom line is that if you register a trademark, it’s much easier to prove that you have rights in it. Google, for instance, has  a process you can follow if someone is using your trademark in their creatives, and if you can send evidence that your trademark is a registered one, that will go a long way to resolving a dispute in your favor. (Twitter famously uses trademark registrations as a factor in resolving situations of Twitter-squatting as well.)

If you’d like to see what a registration certificate looks like, you can do a trademark search yourself (per my instructions in the next section), then go to an individual record and click on the “TDR” button at the top, then see if you can find the “Registration Certificate”.

It should look something like the one below (full disclosure: I added the color version of the Google logo since the USPTO’s scanned black and white version was choppy and frankly, ugly.) Marks are generally submitted in black and white – this particular certificate looks like a re-registration that was issued about a week ago for the term [google].  I would not be surprised if there is another record in there somewhere in the system for the full color logo version however:

Figure 1: Google's Trademark Registration Certificate

How To Do Your Own Trademark Searches

If you’d like to see whether a competitor has registered a trademark, you can do some searching yourself. It’s important to note that the USPTO allows trademarks to be obtained for different classes of goods and services.

For instance, Hershey Ice Cream can have a trademark on the use of the word “Hershey” in association with ice cream, while Hershey (the large one you’re probably more familiar with) can have a trademark on use of the word in association with chocolate:

1. Go to http://www.uspto.gov/
2. Select “Trademarks->Trademark Search”
3. Select “Basic Word Search” (a “Word Mark” is just a phrase; a “Design Mark” is a stylized phrase or picture-based logo. If someone trademarks a word in a particular logo style but doesn’t register it as a Word Mark, then they possibly open themselves up to would-be infringers that just use a different logo style).
4. Search on the term.
5. “Live” means a trademark, or its application, is “Live”; “Dead” means either the application has expired or the trademark has expired.

Try it yourself for “iphone”; I just did and the search resulted in 37 records, some live and some dead.  The second-oldest is the Cisco-owned trademark that Steve Jobs famously convinced Cisco to license to Apple (see figure 2):

Figure 2: iPhone Trademark Record at the USPTO

4 Different Types Of Competitor Terms To Consider

Now that you have some sense of what terms your competitor has bothered to trademark and which they haven’t, there are a wide variety of terms worth exploring from a keyword research standpoint:

1.  The competitor’s company name

This is pretty much a no-brainer, many end-users typing company names are either deep into the research phase of the buying funnel; when they start investigating individual vendors, they are pretty close to converting.

2.  The competitor’s product names

Also a no-brainer, you probably already thought of this one.

3.  The competitor’s website name and variations thereof

Don’t forget that many people use browser toolbars to perform searches, and rather than typing Web addresses into the address bar, the often type them into the search bar (many people confuse the two). So you’ll find that your competitor’s website actually shows up as a keyword.

Variations worth considering include:

• foo.com
• www.foo.com
• http://www.foo.com
• http;//www.foo.com/

4.  The competitor’s model numbers, SKU numbers, or replacement part numbers

This is a very neat trick; if a potential customer is typing a SKU or Model number, it’s likely that they are even further along in the purchasing funnel than if they typed the generic brand name of the competitor. They have likely already done all their research, know exactly what they want, and they are about to convert.

An easy way to find lists of competitor SKUs (let’s say your competitor is “foo”) is to perform the following searches; if it’s a BtoB industry, distributors and resellers often put pricing lists up on their websites, and often large Government deals require publication of pricing from vendors:

• [foo price list]
• [foo pricing]
• [foo prices filetype:xls]

Don’t forget discontinued products. If you can find any old pricing lists and diff them against newer ones, any discontinued product names or numbers can be a treasure trove (and may even deserve their own creatives). B-to-B customers especially will search for old product numbers to identify a replacement product when it wears out.

ISBN numbers, UPC codes, or industry-specific product codes might be worth some research as well, if applicable.

Do Model Numbers, SKUs & Part Numbers Constitute A Trademark?

The answer is: perhaps, but in many situations, probably not. I couldn’t find much on the USPTO’s website on this, but I found a few interesting articles detailing some court cases and aspects of this question by one law firm and one legal services firm, it seems that it largely depends on how the number is used:

• Selling Letters and Numbers: A Court Stops a Company from Claiming Rights in Part Numbers And Why Businesses Should Care
• Trademark Examples: Slogans/Model Numbers/Taglines

One particular aspect I have a problem with on this is, it’s hard for me to see how someone can put “TM” in reference to a SKU in every document in which it’s used, since the whole idea is that a SKU number is a number that resellers, distributors, etc. can look up in a database and display.

So  it seems to me that it would be impracticable to show that you tried to protect your rights in a SKU or Part number when it’s all over the Web everywhere without “TM” on it.

However, if a number is used as a sort of a brand name that consumers would recognize, it appears that you actually *can* trademark it.

Here are two interesting examples:

Dale Earnhardt, Inc.,  has trademarked the number “1″ for a pretty wide variety of products including license plate holders, which seems pretty ridiculous if you think about it (aren’t something like 30-50 million drivers in the U.S. infringing this trademark every day?):

• Dale Earnhardt, Inc.”s Trademark for the Number 1

Levi-Strauss has a registered trademark for “501″ (which actually makes a lot of sense, since it really does function as a very recognizable trademark/brand name for their line of blue jeans):

• Levi Strauss’s Trademark for the Number 501

Check Keywords For Alternate Meanings Before Using

I would recommend using phrase match; that way, if a part number is 2139283423, you’ll also pick up some great lower-funnel variations like [2139283423 cheap], [2139283423 price] and so on.

However, if you’re trying to attract traffic focused on a competitor’s SKU (say, a steak knife set), and one of the variations it attracts traffic on is [2139283423 battery], that might be an indication that the term means something in another industry.

For this reason, it’s  important to test all keywords out in both Google Suggest and Google Search. If all the Google suggest searches seem to be related to the product or service you want to bid on, and the search results all seem to be related to it, then you have  a good candidate.

In a real-world example, a search of “ruby tuesday” clearly brings up the restaurant, which is great if that’s who you’re targeting, but a significant number of search results, and presumably searchers, are searching for the lyrics for the Rolling Stones song title “Ruby Tuesday”. That term may not be a great one to go after (or you could perhaps manage the situation by using negatives like [lyrics] and so on).

Often if you look in Google suggest, you can see whether the Model or SKU number means something in another industry right off the bat. Try typing the number, a space, and then try every letter of the alphabet to see what comes up.

Let’s say we’re a manufacturer of smartphones and we want to bid on Samsung’s “Stratosphere” Android smartphone. One of its SKU numbers is [i405]. Figure 2 shows the result of checking that term out in both Google Suggest and Google Search:

Google's Trademark Registration Certificate (source: USPTO)

Samsung does show up as a variation, but it’s easy to tell that many people searching on that term are interested in traffic conditions on the 405 highway in Los Angeles (I don’t know whey they bother searching, current traveling time is almost always “4..Oh..5..hours” ;-)

Checking against Google suggest can be a lot of work, but Ubersuggest is one way to speed the process. Don’t neglect doing the actual searches though, often a search will show query diversity not reflected in Google Suggest.

Typically, if you have a 6 to 9 character SKU number, it’s usually long enough to be unique, but sometimes you’ll run into another manufacturer in an unrelated field that uses a similar SKU numbering system.

As always, running Search Query Reports and put appropriate negatives in place is an important best practice regardless of the type of keywords you’re targeting.

Be Careful With Your Creatives

You might think this goes without saying as it should always apply to your paid search efforts, but I think it bears pointing out.  While it’s important to exclude competitor terms from your creatives, you should also make sure that any creatives you use are neither *misleading* nor *confusing*.

You shouldn’t trick searchers into coming to your website, even inadvertently. You certainly don’t want to attract any false advertising complaints, or create any fodder that could be used against you later in any legal proceeding.

For example, I would not personally be comfortable bidding on a competitors part number, and then using the vague creative “Replacement Parts: Best Prices Here”. I think a reasonable person would expect that if they clicked on that ad, they would be likely to be able to purchase the competitors part at my website.

A creative focused instead on the customer problem that my product or service solves, or perhaps describing my own offering in some specific way, would probably be much clearer.

Besides, telling the truth and being clear are just plain good business practices anyway! So write your creatives in such a way that they accurately represent the landing page, taking into account the keyword being searched on and the searcher’s likely intent.

What Results To Expect

Brand terms, and SKU/Models, on average, should have a very high click-through rate, perhaps twice the normal average.  They should also convert at a higher rate than the typical keyword.

In the ideal world, if you were targeting 800 competitor SKU numbers, you’d have 800 campaigns, each with one keyword and one ad group, and would include the SKU or Model in the creative, for maximum relevance, highest click-through rate, highest quality score, and lowest CPC after the AdWords auction adjusts for quality score.

In reality, you should probably not use the SKU or Model in the creative, even if a competitor has not trademarked those terms. Doing so is still more risky, in my opinion, from a legal standpoint, than just using the keywords as bidding targets. You’re likely to want to organize keywords together for convenience anyway, perhaps resulting in a few campaigns, a few ad groups, and a few creatives.

However, the low quality score you may experience as a result should be more than balanced by the fact that many of these terms are very long-tail in nature.

In my experience, the AdWords Keyword Traffic Estimator won’t return estimates for many of these types of term because the numbers are so low;  as a result, they’re relatively uncompetitive and inexpensive. If you have numerous competitors and competitor SKU numbers, the volumes should add up to a substantial number.

If you have high impression volume and high positions just about everywhere on your existing keywords, that may  indicate that increasing the budget or bids on existing keywords is not going to help much – what you need are more keywords.

If you run an analysis on keywords based on the categories above, you will often find that there is additional opportunity, on the order of 10-30% of your spend, available in those keywords. So, if you compete in a fragmented industry with many players, this strategy may be a useful way to expand an account to cover some relatively high-converting long-tail terms.

What About Your Own Terms?

Surprisingly, when you do this, you’ll often notice that your competitor isn’t even bidding on their own Website Address, Model Numbers, Part Numbers, or SKU numbers.

Are you doing so with your own? Doing so may be worthwhile, but there is also an argument for cannibalizing your competitors’ organic search traffic prior to cannibalizing your own organic traffic.

Be Careful Out There!

Again, none of this constitutes legal advice, you’re on your own with what you do. If you do decide to pursue this approach, then if a competitor complains about a particular keyword or set of keywords you are advertising against, the best policy, in my opinion, would probably be to simply stop using those keywords immediately.

If a competitor is bidding on your terms, why not at least complain, even if you’re on unclear legal grounds?

The ROI of writing up a threatening letter, putting a stamp on it, and sending it,  is probably pretty high if you can get your competitor to knock some high-converting keywords out of their campaign (unless of course, you’re awakening a sleeping giant by doing so – in which case – maybe you should just live with it).

Keep Up On The Issues As They Evolve

Shameless (but appropriate) plug for SearchEngineLand: Pamela Parker has been doing a great job covering this evolving area. If you’re thinking of pursuing a strategy like this, you’d be wise to read any SearchEngineLand coverage, going forward, particularly regarding the ongoing RosettaStone appeal.

Editor Postscript: This post was updated on 5/1/2012 to include the “Be Careful With Your Creatives” section.

If you’ll forgive me, I’ll continue the planting analogy for categorizing and mapping keywords. It seems appropriate, with spring upon us. You’ve found your seeds, planted them in little cups, and gotten seedlings from them. Now it’s time to plant them in the garden and watch them grow.

But just as you shouldn’t drop a bunch of seedlings into the ground in no particular order, you have to have a plan for your keywords as well.

Keyword Categories are like Garden Plans

In case you aren’t familiar with planting, I’ll digress briefly to explain. When you plant seedlings, you need to plant them in groups according to how much sun they need and how aerated the soil should be. You also want the plants to be visually appealing when they grow, so they need to be spaced appropriately and you’ll want to have a plan for how tall they grow and what colors they’ll be at maturity. It is actually the same with keywords.

Keep in mind while you do research that these “search volumes” that you retrieve (whether it’s from Google or some other source) are just estimates. The values are useful for determining trends and relative volume, but should never be used to estimate expected traffic.

What’s That Mean?

To begin with, you’ll need to think about what your keywords really mean. Don’t sort them into groups too early based on something arbitrary like what word they contain.

For example, don’t sort real estate keywords into “house” and “home” type keywords. Sort them according to what they mean. For example, you might have keywords that people use when they are looking for a house/home that is new construction vs. people who are looking for a house/home that is in an “established neighborhood”.

You might still have another set of keywords for people looking for townhouses or apartments. Seem too granular? It’s really not.

Patterns Take Practice

To categorize effectively, look for patterns in the way that people search. Are they looking for a specific type of something, or do they seem concerned with style, color, features? Is there a local component to their searches?

It’s actually easier to do this if you’re working on your own site because you know the subject matter so well. But if you are helping a customer, you’ll need to take time to get familiar with the subject matter first. The more you do keyword research, the better instincts you’ll have.

As you sort keywords and determine categories, make sure you do a quick search for anything that you aren’t 100% sure what it means. Put the keyword into Google or Bing and look at the results.

Do these seem like your customers? Are your competitors showing up? There’s nothing worse than wasted effort on a keyword that won’t convert to visitors and customers.

If you find a keyword like this, take an extra minute to go back and take out any similar keywords. Keep in mind that you might change categories a couple of times as you get more familiar with the patterns. It’s always better to start with too many categories and consolidate them later than to go back and re-categorize one that was too broad.

Questions Are The Key To Great Content

As you categorize the keywords in this way, keep an eye out for questions that people are asking about the topic. This is a great opportunity for you to create more content on your website later that specifically meets searchers’ needs, or to change existing content so that it more exactly matches the search terms that you found.

After you have everything sorted, take a look at the estimated volumes and make sure that they match what you expected.

For example, do more people search for “washers”, or “washing machines”? Does that match how you refer to them on your website? If “washing machines” as the technically correct keyword is searched less often than “washers”, are there ways you could work references to “washers” onto your site also?

Draw A Keyword Map

The last step is to look at the categories to see how they correspond with pages on your site. Are there perfect or near-perfect matches? Go ahead and match those up and optimize those pages for the corresponding keywords.

Are there keyword categories that don’t match anything you have on your site? Make a quick editorial calendar of content to create. Prioritize the content however you want; you might choose to do the highest profit margin areas first, or the areas where you currently have the lowest traffic, or you might even have a seasonal product/service that it makes sense to write about first. This editorial calendar will help you continue to create relevant, interesting, keyword rich content over time.

Don’t worry about creating all of the content at once; even one new piece of content per month can make your site more attractive to search engines. As you create the content, don’t forget to add it to your Google/Bing sitemaps.

Done & Done, Or Are You?

Now you have a great list of keywords that are categorized by customer intent and mapped to the right content. You even have an editorial calendar of content that needs to be created, which keeps your website fresh and interesting over time (a key component to great ranking).

So you’re done, right? Nope. You’ll need to refresh this research periodically, because people change the way they search for things over time. You’ll also want to refer back to this research each time you create a new page or add a new product or service. But it will be much easier next time, since you won’t have to start from scratch.

And that’s the seed method of keyword research! If you’re reading this out of order, be sure and go back to the other articles in the series:

• 5 Questions To Streamline Your Keyword Research
• The Keyword Research Rabbit Hole
• Tips For Growing Keyword Seeds With Excel Formulas

Photo from http://gardenthemedwedding.com. Used under Creative Commons license.

It is in some ways better than AdWords’ equivalent tools, and the Excel integration and wizard workflow are unlike anything AdWords makes available.

The adCenter team invited me to help them announce their recent innovations at Search Engine Strategies New York last week. I was somewhat surprised to learn that most Advertisers don’t even know MAI exists. I suspect that is because we don’t go looking for it.

We mostly limit our time with adCenter to copying what we have already done in AdWords; who would think of looking to adCenter for more advanced features and tools? You should. They have been quietly pushing a few features a bit further downfield than AdWords, and MAI (Microsoft Advertiser Intelligence) is one such tool.

Quick Tour

• MAI is a downloadable Add-In for Excel (download)
• Once installed, it adds a tab to Excel, with a ribbon bar full of tools
• Keyword Wizard: Walks you through using the next few buttons, all in one wizard
• Keyword Extraction: Extract Keywords from a list of URLs
• Keyword Suggestion: 3 Types
  • Campaign Association: Mine other advertisers’ keywords!
  • Queries that contain your Keyword
  • Related Search Keywords
• Traffic
  • By Month
  • By Day
• Demographics
  • Age Group and Gender
  • Search-User Location: Geography
• Metrics
  • historical & forecast trends and KPIs
  • Volume

When you take a closer look at the tool, you may notice there are other features available as well. The Quick Tour above highlights the features most useful for Paid Search Advertisers.

Keyword Generation

Keyword Generation is an important part of Paid Search throughout the lifecycle of an account. These tools help with generating keywords by starting with your “seed” terms and expanding them.

Perhaps the most interesting and effective is the “Campaign Association” feature. MAI states that it will “Generate keywords based on the bidding behavior of other adCenter advertisers.” I find this feature frequently finds new ideas that are worth testing, and that it also often shows keywords that I would not normally include in a campaign – they can be quite broad and possibly lack relevance for your account.

The tool will also expand based on related keywords and on search queries adCenter has seen that include your seed terms.

Keyword Extraction

This is a tool familiar to many SEO experts – it basically scrapes a webpage looking for relevant keywords. This is a terrific way to get seed terms and get a good starting list for new clients, or to double check your work across a list of URLs and a long keyword list.

Campaign Structure

Be careful using keyword generation tools at scale. They often do not help put things in the correct AdGroup. That organization would have to be done according to your own Campaign Buildout design.

Metrics

MAI will also produce historical and forecast traffic and monetization data (cost per click, clicks, average positions, etc.), and will break it down by match type. This is another example of where they are pushing the tools a bit beyond what is made available by AdWords, and in really useful ways.

API Access

All of the features exposed through MAI in Excel are also available directly through the API. There is a tremendous opportunity to build data-rich toolsets from these features, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this post.

Quota

Be aware that the tool accesses adCenter via the API, and the volulme of requests is limited. Individual advertisers might have success raising this limit by contacting their representatives.

Future Versions

The adCenter team is actively developing this tool, and we can expect future versions to show improved usability, more features, and hopefully more community support for Advertisers to share best practices around keyword generation.

Resources

• Download Microsoft Advertiser Intelligence
• MAI Tutorials
• Giant List of Keyword Tools

Germinating your Keyword Seeds

Using the example of Artisan Construction Services again (thanks!), we’ll walk through the process that I use to grow a single seed.

In this case, let’s use “deck”. To begin with, I want to think of the types of decks my client might build:

• Composite
• Wood
• PVC
• Hardwood
• Cedar

Then I am going to use what we learned about the client already to develop a list of verb modifiers:

• Build
• Building
• Builder
• Replace
• Replacement
• Replacing
• Construct (wait, I’m not going to use that one, see below)
• Constructing (not this one either)
• Construction

I was able to generate the list above based on conversation with the client and a working knowledge of the deck building industry. If you’re not familiar with your client’s industry, you may want to research this more – look at forums, the discussions part of Google Search, and Yahoo Answers, for example.

Categorize Keywords By Intent

After I build my list of modifiers, I go back and think about intent. I’m not going to use “construct” or “constructing” as modifiers because I think the intent behind them is DIY. Construction probably has some DIY in it as well, but it might glean several useful keywords. I’ll make a note to filter those after the fact.

By the way, don’t go above 10 total modifiers; it gets to be too much to work with.

Since the focus of this post is how-to research, I won’t go into all the modifier sets I’d use, but normally, after I did this set, I’d go back and do one for decking and maybe also for specific brands (Azek, Nichiha, etc.) When you do this for yourself, keep in mind that de-duplication will be important (see below).

Concatenation

(Yes, it is a word, and a useful one for search!)

Next, I use a tool like the one found here to concatenate (that means put together) the keyword seed with the modifiers. I prefer not to use the “concatenate” function in Excel, because sometimes it is limiting. I also find this formula to be infinitely easier to remember and manipulate:

Let’s say you have the following cells:

You want to get the phrase [build composite deck] out of this. Use the formula A1&“ ”&B1&“ ”&C1.

The &“ ”& just adds a space between the two cells’ values. If you want to lock down a value, as in the list below, so that you could get the phrase [building wooden deck]:

Use the formula the same way as above, but lock out C1 with dollar signs: A2&“ ”&B2&“ ”&$C$1.

You can “lock out” either a Row or a Column value.

Ok. If you haven’t already clicked to open the spreadsheet I mentioned above, do it now. This will show you my initial list of keywords based on the modifiers I listed above.

Notice that because I didn’t use all 10 possible modifiers, my actual keyword list ends at line 40. Just don’t use the incomplete keywords at the bottom.

Getting Search Frequencies

Go to the Google Keyword Tool. Login if you have an Adwords account; it saves you from having to enter the captcha for each search.

Cut and paste the first section of keywords from your list into the keywords field. Make sure the box that says “only show ideas closely related to my search terms” is NOT checked. Click the box on the left for “exact match” (and turn off “broad”).

Google Keyword Tool Settings

After you click “Search” and get a list of results, don’t even look at them. Just click the “download – all – CSV for Excel” link.

Repeat these steps for each modifier, but when you get the CSV’s for the other modifiers, paste them into the original Excel sheet so that you have one big list of keywords in one Excel sheet.

Once you have your full list, you need to de-duplicate.

Steps to De-duplicate

1. Make sure all of your data is in the same format. I like to find and replace (CTRL-h) all of the brackets with nothing. Find=[, Replace=nothing (leave it blank). Then repeat with “]”.
2. Sort by global monthly searches ascending. Delete any rows where global monthly searches are “0” or “-“.
3. Now sort by Keyword A-Z.
4. Go to Data – Remove Duplicates. Specify (check) only the “Keyword” Column. If you’re using an older version of Excel, it’s a little harder to do this – see these instructions to de-duplicate.

Removing 0-Value Keywords

Now we’re going to look for keyword patterns. The first obvious one I see is “how to”. Anyone using the word “how” is not interested in paying a contractor (at least not at this time).

1. Use the following formula in Column E: =FIND(“how”,A2). This will “find” anywhere in A2 that has the text string “how” and return the character position it starts at. Trust me, this is useful.
2. Now copy/paste the formula all the way down your list.
3. Select Col E and copy it.
4. Paste special for values only in Col F.
5. Sort Col F. ascending.

This brings all of the keywords with “how” to the top of the list. Simply delete out these rows, and then look for another pattern.

Hint: to easily look for another pattern, just select all of Col E and find/replace the string you’re looking for (example “how”) with the next one you need (example “design”).

When you think you’ve removed as much as you can, you will probably be down to under 100 keywords. These are the ones you really care about. Take just a minute to scroll through the completed list to make sure you didn’t miss anything and delete it.

Rinse and repeat as necessary. It takes a lot less time to do it than to explain it. You may also enjoy these easy PC/Excel shortcuts:

Shift+space bar = select an entire row

CTRL+- (that’s the minus sign) = delete an entire row

CTRL+h = open the find and replace window

ALT+e, then s, then v = copy and paste special for values only

Next time: Categorizing and mapping keywords.

Photo (http://www.women24.com/HomeAndAway/Gardening/Growing-seedlings-20090216) from Abalimi Bezekhaya.

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.

What Is Search Terms View?

The AdWords Search Terms View shows us the performance metrics on the Search Terms that matched against our Keywords (more detail on the difference between Search Terms and Keywords is coming up later in this post). Advertisers can use this data to optimize the Keywords and Negatives in their account.

Optimization in this context usually includes adding Keywords (both new Keywords on an any Match Type and existing Keywords but on a new Match Type), and adding Negatives (again, both new Negatives and existing Negatives on a new Match Type).

The data can also be used to help remove Keywords and Negatives, optimize bids and ad copy, and to inform the organization of AdGroups and Campaigns. In this article, we will focus on the two primary optimization tasks: adding Keywords, and adding Negatives.

Why Optimize Keywords? How Often?

Most of our clients are doing this on a weekly basis at least. I consider this activity to be like gardening for PPC; we want to pull out the weeds and make sure we fertilize the pretty flowers, all the while considering the overall organization and appearance of the garden… and the process never ends.

This core and ongoing practice is essential because it helps us continually refine the traffic we are paying for and improve Quality Score, and also because it helps us find new ideas for AdGroups, Ads, and Landing Pages.

Generating The Search Term View

To navigate to the Search Term View, start by logging in to AdWords, then click the Keywords tab, then click on the “See Search Terms…” button and choose either “All.” This will generate a view of the Search Terms triggered by all of the Keywords in our account.

We can optionally narrow the list using the usual navigation with AdWords, and by selecting individual Keywords and choosing “Selected” instead of “All” from the drop-down.

Recommended Keyword Selection

I recommend choosing our AdGroup with the most clicks in the last 30 days (All Campaigns, then AdGroup tab, then sort descending by Clicks), then the Keyword with the most Impressions (Click on the AdGroup with the most clicks, this takes we to the Keywords tab, now sort descending by Impressions).

We will consider other approaches for narrowing down the list later in this post, but this will do for now. Check the box next to the Keyword with the most Impressions, then click the “See Search Terms…” button. When we click the button, it will drop a menu, choose “Selected.” This will take us to Search Terms View.

Getting Back

When in Search Terms view, there is now a link to get us “Back to Keywords.” This is how we return to the Keyword list we were just at. We can also navigate away from Search Term view by any of the other traditional means, such as the tabs or the quick menu on the left.

Columns In Search Terms View

In Search Terms view, the first column will show us the Search Term, and the next column will be the (Search Term) Match Type. The next two columns will be optionally included by AdWords. If your original Keyword tab was at the “All” level or represented more than one Campaign, then the Search Term view will show a Campaign column next. Likewise, if your Keyword tab represented more than one AdGroup, then it will show an AdGroup column.

One thing to note about the Search Term view is that a given Search Term and Match Type may have matched against multiple Keywords. In this report, that Keyword detail will not be shown; Each Search Term and Match Type combination is reported in one row, regardless of how many different Keywords it matched.

For example, if we have the Keyword “bike” in our account on Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match, and many different users searched on “bike”, the report will have one row for the “bike” Search Term, and it will be Exact Match. Behind the scenes, our Keywords may have each gotten credit for some of the traffic on their various Match Types, but this report will not show that.

Search Terms vs. Keywords

Search Terms are what the user typed into Google Search. Keywords are added to our account by us, and Google matches them to Search Terms based on their Match Type. For example, if we have a Keyword “bike” in our account on Broad Match, some Search Terms that might match include: “beach bikes,” “road bikes,” “bicycle,” etc.

Match Type in Search Term View

Match Type in Search Term View is the Match Type that Google used to match the Search Term to a Keyword in our account. This is not necessarily the same as the Match Type of the Keyword in our account. For example, if we have a Broad Match Keyword “bike” in our account, and the Search Term report is showing traffic for “bike”, the Match Type in this report would be Exact Match because the Search Term is an Exact Match with the Keyword.

Customizing Columns

The remaining columns can be customized in the usual way (Click the “Columns” drop-down-button, then choose “Customize Columns.”) See references at the end of this entry for a link to get help customizing columns.

Recommended Columns

My recommendation is to start with the following columns:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conv. (many-per-click)
• CTR
• Conv. rate (many-per-click)
• Cost
• Total Conv. Value
• Avg. CPC
• Avg. Pos.

In my experience, these columns provide the information I need, in an order that makes sense to me for the task at hand.

Added & Excluded Terms

The Search Term view will also show us which Search Terms already exist as Keywords “Added” or negatives “Excluded” in our account.

Using Added and Excluded Terms in practice

While this feature is helpful, there are some practical limitations to be aware of. It does not tell us if the Keyword is “Added” to the correct AdGroup according to your account’s design structure – we need to check that ourselves.

Another limitation to be aware of is that this feature looks for literal matches. It does not consider coverage provided by the Match Type functionality in AdWords. Meaning, if we have a Phrase Match “bikes” Keyword, while it would cover the Search Term “fast bikes,” it will not be marked as “Added.” We have to check that ourselves.

As a rule of thumb, we want to be pushing mature accounts towards Search Term Reports that show every Search Term is “Added” or “Excluded.” (Note to AdWords: this would be a nice feature improvement.)

Adding Keywords

We can add Keywords directly from the Search Term View. To do so, check the box next to the Search Term(s) we wish to add, and click the “Add as Keyword” button. We will be given an opportunity to set a specific bid and destination URL. The Campaign and Adgroup are indicated as well.

The Keyword field accepts power posting syntax for Broad Match (no punctuation), “Phrase Match”, and [Exact Match] Keywords. For example, to add “fast bikes” on Exact Match, edit the Keyword field to be [fast bikes]. Click “Save” and the Keywords are added to our account immediately.

Adding Keywords in Practice

My recommendation is that we should almost always be adding Keywords on Phrase or Exact Match. This is based on my best-practice recommendation of using Broad Match to help us find additional terms, and assumes this AdGroup already has a Broad Match Keyword (or maybe a select few), that is doing that research for us. If so, then we want to run as much of our traffic as we can through Phrase and Exact Match Keywords.

Adding Negatives

We can add negative Keywords in a similar way. Check the box next to the Search Term(s) we wish to add, then click “Add as negative Keyword.” When adding Negatives, we have the option to add them as Campaign or AdGroup Negatives. Click “Save” and the Keywords are added to our account immediately.

Adding Negatives in Practice

My rule of thumb for Negatives is to always add them on Exact Match, maybe add them on Phrase Match, and to only add them on Broad Match in exceptional cases. With the tools we have available today for Keyword targeting and Search Term reporting, we have the ability to be very targeted with our Negatives. We can add Keywords on Broad Match, then use Negatives on Exact Match or Phrase Match to filter unwanted traffic.

In my experience, using Broad Match Negatives runs too high of a risk of blocking words unintentionally. For example, if we have a Keyword for “beach bike” on Broad Match, and are matching the Search Term “bike beach” (which, in this example, we do not want), then we can block that by adding “bike beach” as a Negative on Phrase Match. We would not want to add “bike beach” as a Negative on Broad Match because we would most likely end up unintentionally blocking the good searches for “beach bike.”

Pro Tip: If you have a dedicated rep, he can produce a “Negative Blocked Report” – a report showing you the Search Terms that were blocked by your negatives, and the potential traffic you are missing. It is a good idea to review this occasionally to check if you are inadvertently blocking good traffic.

For example, I recently had a situation where we copied an AdGroup and did a find/replace on the keywords, but neglected to review the negatives. The new AdGroup was blocking itself based on the negatives from the original AdGroup.

Download The Search Term View

We can also download the Search Term view; Just click the “Download” button.

Working Online vs. Downloading and Working in Bulk

Once we start working with this report, we may be tempted to start working it in bulk, by downloading it. Once downloaded we could manipulate the report, generate Keywords and Negatives and upload them in bulk via AdWords Editor, for example.

While I am a big fan of doing things in bulk in Excel then uploading them via AdWords Editor, this is one workflow that I prefer to do directly on the website. I find that I am constantly changing my view from one AdGroup to the next, changing the dates, etc., and that the instant gratification of adding Keywords and Negatives in place, instantly, works for me. our mileage may vary, of course.

Choosing Which Keywords To Work With

When choosing which Keywords to work with, there are many different approaches. While getting started, my recommendation would be to start with 30 days, the AdGroup with the most Clicks, then the Keyword with the most Impressions, as recommended above. This is a great bellweather.

If the Search Terms are all over the place here, then we have a lot of opportunity for optimization. Whereas if our biggest term is generating almost all Exact Match and Phrase Match Search Terms, then we are doing a great job keeping our Keyword Targeting tight. I like to work Keyword by Keyword in this way for my most-trafficked Keywords.

We can also work AdGroup by AdGroup, which will pool more data into the report for us to work with, while still keeping the theme tight. I do not usually find it useful to work with this report at the All or Campaign level, because the Keywords tend to be all over the place. One notable exception; It can definitely be useful to work at the All or Campaign level when adding Negatives. You may want to discipline yourself to cycle through all of your AdGroups over time.

Choosing where to go next will really depend on how much data we have in our Account, and how much time we wish to invest. As a rule of thumb, optimize 5-10% of our traffic weekly, and be sure to work through those less-trafficked AdGroups and Keywords over time as well.

Benefits of Optimizing Keywords &Negatives

The benefits of optimizing in this way should include increased traffic (and/or more targeted traffic), improved Quality Score (through improved Keyword and Ad CTR), improved bidding efficiency (we will be able to refine our bids for a tighter subset of traffic), and often improved Conversion Rate (by filtering out unwanted traffic).

We will also find this is a great way to find Keywords we may not already have coverage for, and for getting insight into how our customers search for our products, which can lead us to create new Ads and Landing Pages. Good luck out there.

Resources

• Google AdWords Help on this topic
• Daydreaming About Paid Search: How About Airtight Ad Groups?
• How do I customize the data in my tables and reports?

So what is the solution to effectively grow the market share of these challenger brands while improving their online positioning?

Turning a challenger brand into a market leader requires following a specific five step process. Each step builds on the one before it resulting in a continuous cycle – a cycle of growth and efficiency.

First, let’s review the steps:

1. Conduct a market analysis of your client’s vertical
2. Dig into their competitors using Competitive Intelligence (CI)
3. Audit your client’s program and baseline
4. Create efficiency through optimization
5. Use the room you created to test and drive growth

Rinse and repeat.

By properly leveraging this cycle, you can take a brand that is spending significantly less than their competitors in the market and incrementally increase their market share through growth and efficiency tactics.

This strategy proved highly successful for one of the current US leaders in aesthetic services –  laser hair removal, cellulite reduction. They initially committed to $50,000 in monthly spend at 2,500 leads/month. Due to the straight direct response nature of this vertical, brand growth would be determined by driving efficient leads, bookings, and ultimately patients. That’s a tough job.

In order to do it, efficiency needs to be created first, lowering CPA to make room for testing and growth. After applying the cycle of growth and efficiency over the course of the two-year campaign, their spend rose to $650,000 a month while averaging the same CPA from the day the program started while their volume increased over 11 times. They grew from a challenger brand into the market leader and maintain that position today.

Now that you have an example to reference, let’s go through each step so that you can adhere to the same process to help turn your challenger brand clients into market leaders.

1.  Conduct A Market Analysis Of The Vertical

In order to understand the potential of growth, it’s important to research your client’s vertical. To do this, you’ll want to communicate with agency representatives at Google, Bing and Facebook. They can help you understand the maximum search volume in your client’s market across search, display and social. The total impressions and clicks constitute your target measure, the goal being to efficiently reach 90% impression share.

This data can also be used to determine the maximum spend by multiplying the maximum clicks with the average CPC of a top three position.

2.  Dig Into Competitors Using Competitive intelligence (CI)

Success in the complex PPC marketplace requires a blend of paid search expertise, cost-effective budgeting strategies and the right technologically advanced tools to drive results.

In an earlier article for Search Engine Land, How to Use 3 Competitive Intelligence PPC Tools - leading budgetary, bidding and competition monitoring products were highlighted to give paid search campaigns a competitive edge.

Applications like iSpionage, KeywordSpy and AdBeat can help marketing departments manage keyword costs and click-through rates while identifying efficient strategies the competition is implementing. Utilizing these competitive intelligence tools will maximize campaign effectiveness for your client.

3.  Audit Your Client’s Program & Baseline

It’s critical that you record the current baseline of your client’s program across multiple KPI’s and factors.

These include:

• Bid strategy:  What is the logic behind the determined bids?
• Keyword portfolio:  The number of keywords, match types and search query report
• Campaign structure: What is the geographical and demographical structure of the program? How many ad groups are there? How tightly themed are they?
• Ads: Consider the CTR and conversion rate analysis of existing ads. Are these ads tightly themed with the keywords in the ad group?
• GDN Placements: Evaluate placement reports and plan accordingly
• Landing pages: Are the ads being directed to relevant pages? Should they be optimized?
• Path to conversion: What keywords drive assists?
• Cross-channel attribution: What other channels, traditional and/or digital, are influencing conversions?
• Segmentation: Laptop vs. mobile, day-parting, geographical, demographical – select the setting that’s best for your goals

4.  Create Efficiency Through Optimization

Improvements in efficiency are gained through continuous tracking and optimizing of performance. These are some of the tactics used for improving campaign efficiency.

• Time of Day/Day of Week segmentation:  Analyze and then increase or lower your bid based on time of day/week data
• Creative (Ad Copy) testing and tracking: Split test new ads and continually retest to drive the best results
• Separation of search and content network campaigns: This is basic. Still, no campaign should target both Google search and content  – split them out
• Competitive monitoring: Employ technology to make sure you’re alerted when others bid on your brand
• Rule alerts: Setup alerts to email your strategists if thresholds like CPA go up or volume goes down to tend to the situations manually
• Addition of negative keywords: Improves CTR by reducing the appearance of brand damaging terms
• Addition of broad match modifier: Improves CTR and gives you more accurate bidding control
• Run search query reports: You’ll be able to find negatives and new exact matches
• Multivariate Testing(creative and landing page together) : Once a user clicks, it all comes down to the landing page and the path the user goes down. It’s important to leverage technology to test and optimize
• Geographic segmentation: It’s one of the best ways to create efficiency. For example, bids in NYC are higher than mobile bids)

5. Use The Room You Created To Test & Drive Growth

Once efficiencies have been achieved, it is time to grow the overall number of conversions at a favorable return rate.

Extended reach and increased volume are accomplished through the targeted implementation of:

• Keyword expansions: Leverage the search term suggestion tool and competitive intelligence to add new keywords to the mix
• PPC engine expansions (Bing/Yahoo/Facebook): Are you only on Google and Bing? Try new platforms like Facebook and Local Pages
• Content expansion: Test new placements on the content network
• Remarketing: Create remarketing campaigns to bring users back to the site for additional conversions
• Bid elasticity testing (position): Bid-up on those keywords averaging position 5 or higher as well as those with a good CPA or assist count to increase volume.

Regardless of the scale and scope of a client, driving simultaneous growth and efficiency is no easy task. But there’s no question that for challenger brands, it is doubly difficult.

However, digital marketers needn’t look outside the box for a solution to transform challengers into market leaders. Integrating a growth and efficiency cycle into your next PPC campaign will bring your client five steps closer to the pinnacle of market leadership.

Kids with crayons to employees with goals, the “doing more with less” saying has certainly achieved epidemic proportions. No department has able to hide from its grips and CMOs ensure every last penny is squeezed from each marketing initiative.

Yet, savvy marketers still search for additional opportunities. Check out the insights of how mirrored exact and broadmatch PPC campaigns open the gate to truly deliver more without effect to your budget, while also expanding your reach.

In my experience, B2B marketers are often challenged with finding the right audience, choosing the proper message and ensuring they are continually driving new leads to fuel the sales funnel. Using mirrored broad and exact match Google PPC campaigns will solve all of these B2B challenges.

The approach is tiered; it will allow your campaigns to capture conversions at a more effective CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) through the exact match campaigns. Meanwhile, the broadmatch campaigns provide the opportunity to further curate your keyword set.

Check Out This Old Dog’s New Trick

A very successful B2B software services firm was recently faced with the challenge to increase leads, reduce their CPA and maintain the same budget.

Unfortunately, David Copperfield was busy, but in one week’s time, their equally magnificent account team was able to reduce their CPA by 50 percent.

They also saw their lead volume increase by 183 percent, the result of launching mirrored broad and exact match campaigns.

Had the same lead volume been achieved on the old CPA, the marketer would have been required to spend an additional $9,000 that week.

How To Launch Your Mirrored Campaigns

Step 1: Duplicate all your campaigns. Clearly label the duplicate campaigns as broad match to avoid confusion. Be sure to include all adGroups, keywords and negative keywords. Assign the broad match type to all keywords within the broad match campaigns.

Step 2: Change all the keywords in the initial campaign to exact match. The exact match campaigns should serve as your top converters; this action ensures the historical keyword data within Google remains intact. Mirrored campaigns work best after the initial campaign has been running for a period of time allowing for both budget and historical keyword data to build. At least one month of data is suggested.

Step 3: Create a negative exact match keyword in the broad match campaigns, one for every keyword in the exact match campaigns. This will ensure that your exact match keywords ads are triggered only from the exact match campaigns.

Step 4: Increase exact match campaign CPC bids. Depending on how often you are required to optimize bids to maintain your desired position, increase exact match campaign CPCs 50-75 percent more than the broad match campaigns. This will further ensure your exact match keywords serve first.

Step 5: Spread your initial budgets between the two campaigns, apply a higher budget level to the exact match campaign—try a 60/40 split to begin. Once your campaigns have been running for a period, apply budgets to the exact match campaigns, which are one to two times the initial campaign’s budget.

You want to ensure that your exact match campaigns have enough daily funds available to serve an ad each time a query triggers one. If you find your exact match campaigns are reaching their caps, apply additional budget until there is budget to spare. After a few weeks time the exact match campaigns will level out and daily spend will rarely change.

Step 6: Refine and Optimize. While your CPA will decrease and leads will increase as a result of the exact match campaigns, you will want to continually pull search query reports (SQRs) on at least a weekly basis, if not more frequently. You will find that the broad match campaigns will reach their daily spending caps, though not all queries mapped to this campaign are good queries.

The SQR reports will show you which keywords drive clicks and spend but do not result in leads, meaning they should be applied as negative keyword in the broad match campaigns. Keywords that are producing conversions should be added to the exact match campaigns as exact keywords, they should also be added to the broad match campaigns as negative exact match keywords. This again ensures keyword phrases are being triggered from the correct campaign, driving the reduced cost conversions.

Step 7: If you are unsure which campaign is serving for a keyword phrase, test them. Use the Google Keyword Tool while signed into your adwords account. Simply enter one keyword phrase and hit search. Below the search button, Google will identify exactly which campaign would serve an ad for that query.

Step 8: Measure your success. Combine the conversions and spend of each exact match campaign with its broad match counterpart. Review the number of conversions and calculate the CPA. Compare the results witnessed with the broad and exact combined campaigns to that of the original unduplicated campaign to examine the success of this initiative.

Mirrored broad and exact match campaigns are not limited to tough economic times; it’s truly a best practice one should employ at all times. While you go on to recycle your search campaigns to produce additional leads and lower your CPA, I’m going to finish showing my nephew a few new crayon color combos to liven up the refrigerator.

Image from Shutterstock, used under license.

It’s true that Google doesn’t strike gold every time it releases something new into the wild (Google Radio Ads, anyone?) but when it comes to tools for optimizing your AdWords campaigns, they normally get things pretty dead-on.

Here are three of my favorite AdWords tools for retailers, along with some hints and tips on how to leverage them for your campaigns.

Conversion Optimizer

Paid search bid tools have been the topic of hot debate over the years. When they first started coming out, they were hailed as the savior of search marketers everywhere, promising to save hours of campaign management time and increase efficiencies many times over.

Later, when Google introduced “Quality Score” into its paid search algorithm – and bidding was no longer just a simple case of getting $0.01 above the next guy – people declared bid tools were dead.  This new “opaque” landscape was too complex for the tools…there were too many variables.

Well, this has proven not to be the case. Paid bid tools like Marin, Kenshoo and DoubleClick are being used to great effect by search marketers around the globe. However, there’s a free bid tool out there that’s also very powerful, and is contained right within the AdWords interface – Conversion Optimizer.

Conversion Optimizer is very easy to use. You simply go into your campaign settings, select edit bidding option, select the radio button next to “Focus on Conversions”, then whether you’d like to use a max CPA or an average CPA (think keyword vs. portfolio bidding here).

Within the UI, you will then notice your bid amount is now at ad group level, not keyword, and it’s your CPA you’re inputting, not your CPC. Once this is done, the system will then start auto-optimizing all ad groups within that campaign to hit that goal.

One thing to keep in mind here is that you must have recorded 15 conversions in that campaign over the last 30 days to be eligible for Conversion Optimizer (that’s the minimum amount of data required to make bidding decisions in the system)

What makes Conversion Optimizer different from other bid tools? Aside from being free? Well, it’s the depth of data available.

In addition to historic CPC, position, cost, orders, revenue and all that other good “surface” data, Conversion Optimizer has access to additional data points like user location, user search history, actual search query used (vs. just the triggering keyword), and whether the search is being done on Google.com or a partner site.

All this data helps the system make more educated decisions, and further reduce that cost per sale.

AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE)

Continuous testing is one of the most important aspects of paid search management. Ad copy, landing pages, bids, budgets, ad positions, match types–you can test almost anything within your campaigns. However, the flipside to this great breadth of testing opportunity is that you can easily find yourself drowning in data and overloaded with variables.

So, with this in mind, how can you keep tests manageable, valid, and really measure the impact your changes are having on your results? The answer is AdWords Campaign Experiments, or “ACE”, as the kids are calling it.

This handy little tool can be used to split test ad copy, landing pages, identify the most profitable positions for keywords, and more.  It does this by splitting the number of impressions and clicks that go through a “Control” group, versus an “Experiment” group. No need for separate ad groups, moving keywords around, or any of the other nonsense.

Initiating an ACE test is actually quite simple. Start by clicking the Settings tab in the desired campaign, scroll down to Advanced settings and click the + Specify experiment settings button to name your experiment.

Then, select the desired traffic split between control and experiment, and set desired start and end dates or start manually.

To add keywords to the experiment, under the Keywords tab click Add Keywords enter keywords as you normally would, though check the Add as experiment only keywords box at the bottom of the page and save.

To adjust bids and compare results, simply click the Segment drop-down and then Experiment.

ACE testing gives marketers the ability to conduct highly valuable, statistically relevant A/B testing with accurate and easily accessible results. Like the Conversion Optimizer, ACE testing is also free and, if you’re lucky, your Google account team will aid you in identifying prime testing candidates.

Use ACE testing to identify the most profitable positions for KW’s, highest converting landing pages, optimal ad copy elements and more.

Google Insights For Search

For forecasting, trend analysis and competitive insights, Google Insights for Search is just a great tool. Its core function is comparing search volume patterns over time. You can compare up to five keywords at a time, and see how their search popularity has trended – all the way back to 2004.

Some key questions Google Insights can help with include:

• Is my offline or online display marketing effective? If searches for your brand terms rise while you’re investing, chances are that marketing campaign is the catalyst. If they don’t, perhaps you need to adjust your strategy.
• Am I making market share gains on my competitors, or am I falling behind? Search volumes are a great way to assess brand demand and popularity. Comparing your own brand search demand to your closest competitors will provide context to results, and alert you to trending competitors in your space.
• How much budget do I need to allocate to my non-brand campaigns during the next quarter? Knowing whether search demand goes up, down or stays consistent in the coming months can be a great budget and forecasting tool. The below graph shows that demand for laptops is highest during back to school and holiday, but that May/June are also key research periods.
• Why are clicks or conversions up/down within a certain category in my AdWords account? This could of course be down to a number of reasons, but if you haven’t changed your site or pricing, then a seasonal or market-wide drop in search demand could be to blame. Our laptops example below shows that search demand for laptop computers is down in 2011 vs. 2009 and 2010, which could explain a decline in recent performance on that group of terms.

Arming yourself with this knowledge will help you not only optimize your campaigns, forecast traffic, sales and spend volumes, but it’ll also be a huge help when you (or your boss!) are looking for answers when a certain category within your AdWords account is trending a certain direction.

If you haven’t tried the above tools, I’d recommend starting now. Once you do, you might just find they become a staple in your campaign management strategy.