Automating AdWords as much as possible is every advertiser’s dream, especially when dealing with the massive accounts we see in enterprise-level SEM. This article provides a few examples of how we at Top Tier Marketing have automated some of the more laborious tasks of running AdWords. Hopefully, these examples will give you some ideas for your own accounts. There’s even a full script that should work by simply copying it into your own account toward the end of this post.  Automate AdWords Ad Creation From Your Catalog [caption id="attachment_158965" align="alignright" width="212"] F [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | Google: AdWords | How To: SEM | Search Ads: General

Last week, I presented at HeroConf in Austin and shared some advanced tips for automating AdWords account management with an audience of PPC account managers. They seemed to like what I had to say; so, I’ll share a few of the more advanced scripting tips with you here. When you manage PPC accounts, you likely experience at least one of these two frustrations: You know exactly what you should be doing, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to get it done You’ve bought a tool that automates AdWords account management, but you find yourself locked into a cookie-cutter solution t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | Google: AdWords | How To: PPC | How To: SEM

I'm sure many of you are aware that Ad Rank in Google AdWords is derived from the price you are willing to pay (bid price) multiplied by relevance (Quality Score), along with other factors. This is an extremely profitable model for Google as the majority of its income is derived from advertising revenue. Since Google has a history of applying successful strategies to solve different problems, the use of Paid Inclusion was not unexpected when it introduced Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads (PLA). Retailers advertising in Google Shopping should know the definition of Google Product R [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: Retail | How To | How To: SEM | Search & Retail

The bane of most search marketers’ existence is search query ambiguity. Is a user searching for [one night stand] interested in an illicit affair or a piece of antique oak furniture for his bedroom? Does the query [internet security] reflect the needs of a consumer fed up with viruses or a CIO looking for a $10 million enterprise solution? John Battelle has called a search engine a “database of intentions,” but that database is often fuzzy, to say the least. In many cases, it would be much easier for marketers to know who the user doing the search was, as opposed to for what they w [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | Channel: Social | How To | How To: SEM | How To: Social Media Marketing | Intermediate

I’m back to writing my own controversial thoughts this month; although, if you didn’t check out the interview I did last month with Andrew Goodman and Matt van Wagner, you should, those are smart guys. Since I was thinking about PPC and how incredibly mixed up and difficult it has become, it seemed like a good time to write about it. My team and I are trying to figure out ways to look at PPC campaigns differently, finding a way to automate some of the grunt work while still delivering great campaigns. I know everyone and their brother has done this, but we’re convinced we can do it [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: AdWords | Google: Analytics | How To: PPC | How To: SEM | Paid Search

No matter what level your paid search program is operating at, whether small business or enterprise, inevitably some campaigns will outgrow the daily budgets that were set to sustain them. Aggressive keyword expansion or increasing CPCs due to competition could be two contributing factors. Until these budgets can be expanded, your campaigns will be limited. Optimizing a campaign that’s limited by budget is one of the toughest tasks for a search marketer. A limited budget not only eliminates opportunities to expand on keywords and campaigns, but can hinder the execution of other crucial [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | How To | How To: SEM | Intermediate

Branding in B2B search engine marketing is a constant topic for debate. All B2B marketers realize that online brand awareness and recognition is extremely important, and most marketers already promote their brand via PPC campaigns and organic optimization programs. To increase the effectiveness of your efforts, I also recommend implementing remarketing. A short B2B remarketing success story is given below. First, what is remarketing? Remarketing Defined Remarketing is a search advertising feature that allows business marketers to reach prospects who have previously visited your site, and [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | Channel: Search | How To: SEM

One of the hardest things to do in keyword research is to uncover related keywords. With that in mind, the tools I’m reviewing today all help identify related keywords that you may want to search in more detail. These tools are not a substitute for detailed keyword research like I talked about in my first series of articles. Rather, they may help to either identify those keywords that are most important to your competitors, or help find obscure opportunities where there may be little search volume, but there is also little competition. All of the tools I reviewed for this article are [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: PPC | How To: SEM | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content | SEM Tools: Keyword Research | SEM Tools: PPC

Keywords are important. I've heard from several potential clients recently who have talked to other "professionals" who told them keywords are no longer important for SEO, and that good content is all you really need. Here's the thing. Keywords are language. They'll always be important because words are how we communicate with each other. So until someone invents the microchip that can be implanted in your brain and read your thoughts without using words, you'll need to think about language in marketing. And I can only hope that those potential clients were told this by one seriously mis [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEM | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content | SEM Tools: Keyword Research

Keyword research can give you great insight into customer problems, needs, desires, and intent.I like to categorize keyword categories themselves into a total of *ten* funnel stages. After performing my initial keyword categorization (sort of into micro-categories), I like to categorize the categories themselves into a total of *ten* funnel stages I’ve developed, which are organized around a “problem/solution” mental model.

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: SEM | Keywords & Content | Search Marketing: Search Term Research

If you’ve been following the series on Keyword Seeds and Keyword Research over the last couple of months, I’ve been writing about how to perform really good keyword research through a series of tactics that I call the "Keyword Seed Method". Don’t bother to go look that up in Google, as I think I’m the only one in the world who calls it that. But it helps me to think of keywords as "seeds" of information that will eventually grow into a "garden of possibilities", if you will allow me the artistic license. I’ve been reading a lot of classic literature lately. I received many ema [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEM | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content

There’s no denying the synergy between SEO and paid search marketing, and paid search marketers would do well to take away a lesson or two from the world of organic search engine optimization to improve their campaigns. 1.  Keywords! Keywords! Sherlock Holmes exclaimed, "Data! Data! …I can't make bricks without clay." And likewise, keywords are the backbone, heart and soul of all search engine marketing, paid or organic. There’s a whole mess of keywords work and reports done for organic search optimization that paid search marketers can and should utilize. On the most basic level, [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEM | How To | How To: SEM | Paid Search

It’s been long known in the industry that brand term keywords garner a much higher click-through-rate. As a result, marketers often start by bidding on their own brand terms.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | How To: PPC | How To: SEM | Legal: Trademarks

Optimizing Keywords and Negatives is a task I recommend to my clients that they do regularly. In this How To, I will include some real-world experience along with the basics of how to use the AdWords Search Term View to optimize keywords and negatives. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | How To: PPC | How To: SEM | Intermediate | Search Marketing Toolbox

One of the opportunities we have as Paid Search Marketing professionals is to help business people communicate their marketing ideas without burdening them with the details of Paid Search. A few months back, I came across a tool that helped tremendously. We adopted it in-house, and tested it with a few client engagements. It is a great success. The tool helps us generate the core concepts of a PPC Account in an easy-to-understand visual layout, without having to burden business users with all of the details. We call it the PPC Planning Matrix. I'm going to gloss over the absolute basics [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | How To: SEM | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Search Marketing Toolbox

I know this industry evolves fast, but damn! Just 18 months ago, most media planners and search marketers had not heard of search retargeting, and already we are in what could easily be called version 3.0. With the agency hat back on (for today), we look at whether this tactic is living up to the growing hype. When the principle was first explained to me, I was running an agency display media team at a search agency that was focused on direct response clients; I was therefore interested in tactics that involved precise data points as a way to focus on user intent. Search retargeting seem [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: SEM | How To: SEM | Search & Display | Search Ads | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | Search Ads: Contextual

Sick of spending afternoons reviewing raw query reports? We’ve all been there— pouring over keyword expansion tools trying to identify those stellar terms that your account may be missing. Adding new keywords and refining match types is certainly important for optimization, but it’s not necessarily the fastest way to increase volume. Often, advertisers focused on growing their paid search programs pay too much attention  to keyword expansion activities. It’s not surprising that this bias persists -- given the multitude of keyword tools out there such as Wordstream, Trellian, or Adg [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | How To | How To: SEM | Intermediate

Last month, we discussed how display media has evolved to be more quantitative in Why Search Marketers Are The Future Media Planners, and ironically, how the skillset held by search marketers has become more relevant to display media than the skill set held by current media planners. Using the real-time environment of the media exchanges, ‘search retargeting’ is one of several techniques that has created a safe bridge for SEM marketers to move into display and see almost instant results, and it is the SEM budget holders that are trying it quicker than the media planners (and who often [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: SEM | How To | How To: SEM | Search & Display | Search Ads | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting

Think it’s too soon to shop online for the winter holidays? Think again. Some retailers have been promoting holiday sales since this past summer. This year, both Walmart and Target held the first ever Black Friday in July sale, offering deals on a variety of electronics, apparel, toys, beauty products, sporting goods and other essentials. The early opening of the shopping season confirms that retailers are looking to find creative ways to spark buying activity after continued lagging sales as the US economic recovery stalls. The good news is that even in this economy, or because of i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | How To: SEM

The holidays are just around the corner, and with shoppers gearing up for the holiday rush, smart marketers are already preparing their paid search campaigns for the 2010 season. By evaluating consumer trends from last year’s holiday season we found some interesting insights that will help marketers be even more successful this year, including a few observations that run counter to conventional wisdom. In general, retail search programs performed as expected: starting to increase in traffic and conversion rates in the final week in November and running significantly more profitably than t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: SEM | Industrial Strength