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?

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 of Campaign creation, and aim for a quick “How to Get Started Using the PPC Planning Matrix Today” entry.

If you are an expert with Paid Search, this tool may help you work with your customers to generate great PPC Campaigns. You might notice that while this tool covers all the required basics, it leaves room for your own additions and fine tuning. The real value in this tool is that it helps visually organize and collect what is needed to create PPC Campaigns.

Even if you are not a Paid Search expert, this article is still for you. This tool will help you organize your Account into meaningful Campaigns and AdGroups, and produce a bulk sheet that can be pasted into Google AdWords Editor or into adCenter Desktop.

AdGroups & Campaigns

Campaigns are like an organizational folder for holding AdGroups. In addition to the Campaign Name, the one obligatory setting is the Campaign Daily Budget. The tool provides a default of $500, which you are free to override.

Campaigns also provide the ability to change some advanced settings like geography targeting, or device targeting (i.e.: computers or mobile devices), which you are free to adjust after the tool generates a Bulk Sheet for you.

AdGroups contain Keywords and Text Ads. The one compulsory setting is the default Maximum CPC. This will apply to all of your keywords. If you apply a Max CPC for any keyword, then it trumps the AdGroup Default. The tool provides a default AdGroup CPC of $1.00, which you are free to override.

If you want to set keyword level CPC’s you can edit the bulk sheet when the tool is done.

Ads

Ads are what your customers see on their Search Results Page. You provide the Headline, the two lines of Description (combined into one for adCenter), a Display URL that your customers will see, and a Destination URL that your customers’ browser navigates to when they click on your ad. The tool provides some examples.

AdWords restricts the length of the various fields in an ad. The tool will highlight them red if they are too long. You can add up to 3 ads per AdGroup in this tool (AdWords allows more and you can add them later).

Keywords

Keywords are what AdWords and adCenter use to match your ads to actual user searches. Add keywords that are related to the AdGroup you are creating, and the Ads you already provided. The tool supports “Power Posting” keywords (I’m dating myself, for those of you who remember when Power Posting first came out).

You can add Broad, “Phrase”, [Exact], or –negative match keywords directly in the tool, and it will parse them into the bulk sheet as expected.

Errors?

The tool tries to help you fill it out by highlighting errors like a missing Campaign Name, missing Ads or Keywords, etc. The tool is also “protected” to prevent inadvertently breaking things. The adventurous at heart can use the password “StoneTemple” to unlock the worksheet.

Generate Bulk Sheet

Click the button. If nothing happens, be sure you have enabled macros. Change Macro Settings in Microsoft Excel

Import into AdWords Editor

Choose: File | Import CSV | Paste Text… Review and Accept the Proposed Changes. Don’t forget to Post your new Campaigns!

Import Into adCenter Desktop

Desktop doesn’t yet support importing from the Clipboard. You can save the bulk sheet to a new CSV file, or as of Desktop Editor Version 8.1.11291.0, you can import directly from AdWords (Beta).

Choose: Import | From Google Select Import From a File, and browse to the file on your Computer. Verify the columns line up and click “Import.” Don’t forget to Post your new Campaigns!

Take It For A Spin

If you would like to get started with the PPC Planning Matrix, please feel free to send me an email. You will get an automated response with a download link and you can get started right away. You could also adapt these ideas to your own tools. Have fun out there.

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 seemed to fit the mold perfectly: target just those individuals with display ads who have actually searched for the terms that were relevant to the client, eliminating nearly all wastage from the plan.

We were building what we called the agency’s “foundation layer” of display: site retargeting to fix on-site conversion, search retargeting to prospect and plug the leak from SEM, and social retargeting to add further scale to the audience. So we picked five clients who had a pre-agreed testing budget and rolled out search retargeting with an early vendor, only to see four out of five of the campaigns bomb!

The primary reason was that in Search Retargeting 1.0, there was no scale in the data and little effort invested in the media placement. The campaigns were great when spending $100, but as soon as the vendor tried to scale to fill the budget, they would have to broad match and lose the relevancy, and of course the ROI.

Growing The Data – Search Retargeting 2.0

But sticking with it, campaigns began to perform better over time, and in almost direct correlation with the quantity of data that was available. Now we could focus more on the relevant terms and ignore some of the broad head terms. And as any search marketer can tell you, volume comes from the broad terms, but ROI comes from the specific. With data volume no longer such a problem, search retargeting 2.0 was on the horizon.

The theory states that search retargeting should outperform most other display placements because of its accuracy, and even come close to the performance of your search marketing efforts — as an industry it simply was not there yet.

But with the intersection of search and display looking like the future of digital, I left the agency to go help make this work.

The Data High

Too many marketers went through a phase of being high on data, believing that a single reference point was all that was needed to generate great DR results. They lost sight, in their excitement, of the continuing importance of creative messaging and the context of the media placement. Knowing who to talk to is important, but doing that in the right environment and with the right story really matters.

As popularity in search retargeting grew, so did the funding, which allowed the successful players to build their own DSP (Demand Side Platform) technology to manage the quantity of data and build in these essential elements. Marrying thousands of keywords with thousands of potential ad placements is not easy though, particularly when you have to do it in real time and at the keyword level.

Advanced Optimization — Search Retargeting 3.0

In a recent Chango search retargeting campaign from a large retailer, the need for keyword level optimization is clear:

Search retargeting example 1:

• ‘clothes shop’ — CTR of 0.87%
• ‘clothes shopping’ — CTR of 0.25%

Search retargeting example 2:

• ‘shoes mens’ — 0.16%
• ‘mens shoes’ — CTR of 0.21%

The search marketer is used to a world where this type of analysis is commonplace, but what is different is the choice of media sources.

In SEM, you choose from two major engines and then can add the extended network, usually by just ticking a box and forgetting it. But with real-time display, including search retargeting, we can buy in excess of 100,000 QPS (Queries Per Second — a simple measurement of media capacity).

Therefore managing search retargeting campaigns today is complex. Typically a campaign will need to be optimized manually once a day, but then “machine learning” must be used to balance the multitude of options available.

In our examples above, the term “clothes shop” clearly had a better type of intent that “clothes shopping” for our client, but that could only be determined by analyzing the placement on tens of thousands of sites. The balance of people and technology provide the scalable solution (but interestingly also blur the line between agency and vendor).

In addition, search retargeting 3.0 leverages dynamic creative, but unlike a typical dynamic setup, there is actual search data to work with, producing richer and more relevant experiences for the end consumer. Search retargeting sprang out from a sea of providers buying on the exchanges, but now seems to be leading in terms of what can really be achieved.

A Blessing & A Curse

Search retargeting would probably not be the name our micro-industry chooses if it got to choose again. When media planners hear it they immediately get excited, as they know a good media plan should always include some type of retargeting. But their first assumption is that it targets their existing site visitors. Many conversations begin by saying this isn’t the retargeting you thought it was!

But once marketers understand, they see its value for the long term. Like site retargeting and the SEM program itself, it typically becomes an evergreen program, running continuously as a reliable source of revenue.

In Summary …

Search retargeting arrived on the media scene less than two years ago, and less than one year ago for most media planners. It leverages the power of search and executes it with the scalability of display. It is enormously complex because of the volume of both keywords and media placements, so early campaigns were often not successful (v1.0). But as the industry grew, so did the data, and with it came a certain amount of reach (v2.0).

Today, major brands invest hundreds of thousands per month on evergreen and seasonal campaigns in search retargeting thanks to the results that in-house DSP bidding technology allows for true keyword level granularity. Machine learning, dynamic creative and lots of experience means that version 3.0 is upon us … and growing.

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 Adgooroo, each promoting their unique flavor of keyword data.

Once you’ve built out your core search program, however, adding long tail terms often requires a massive expansion to have even a small impact on traffic volumes.

Before you embark on a long-tail keyword expansion effort, ask yourself: have you done everything you can to maximize the volume from your existing keywords?

Here are a few tricks outside of keyword expansion that I have seen have a great impact for search marketers.

Don’t Let Budgets Constrain Top Performing Keywords

You never know when something Oprah mentions is going to increase traffic on a particular keyword four-fold overnight. Budget settings are important because they prevent situations like Oprah, from causing advertisers to blow through a month’s budget on poorly converting traffic.

However, on a regular basis, budgets shouldn’t be limiting volume for top performing campaigns. In general, if keywords are delivering positive margins, you should want to take advantage of all of the profitable traffic that is available.

In order to maximize volume, regularly review top performing campaigns to ensure that impressions aren’t being limited by budgets.

To identify campaigns that meet these criteria, pull a report that includes the previous month’s daily cost, budget, and margin.

If campaign spend tends to be at or above the budget for strongly performing campaigns, increasing the campaign budget will most likely drive additional high performance traffic.

For example, in the spreadsheet below, the advertiser had four campaigns that were performing better than their target margin of 25%, but they weren’t taking advantage of all of the volume that these campaigns could have delivered.  

Try Out “Accelerated Delivery” for More Volume

Many advertisers don’t realize that the Google delivery method setting can affect the rate of traffic campaigns receive, even if their budgets are significantly higher than expected traffic.

With Google AdWords, we’ve observed that selecting the “standard delivery” option instead of the “accelerated delivery” option with the same budget, results in fewer impressions.

After ensuring that top performing campaigns aren’t budget limited (step one), turning your campaign settings to “accelerated delivery” could provide incremental impressions and revenue.

Expand Your Reach With Keywordless Ads

Rather than trying to mine the long tail by adding keywords by hand, consider taking advantage of Google’s Keywordless Ads. While this feature is still in “beta,” we’ve worked with a number of retail advertisers who have opted into Keywordless Ads (now known as “Dynamic Search Ads”) and seen a lift in conversions and revenue.

The feature basically turns Google loose on your website, allowing them to target your ads to keywords they think match the content on your pages.

Be careful when setting it up to apply negative placements to the non-commerce pages of your site such as support pages, careers and management pages, or about us pages. Excluding these pages will help Google match your ads to the right queries, and save you some unwanted clicks.

To sum it up: while continually adding keywords is important, don’t forget the other settings and tweaks that can impact volume on your SEM campaigns. Taking some of the steps above could get you one step closer to unlocking the full potential of your program.

Do you have some easy to implement tips that have made a big change in your paid search volumes? If so, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

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 sit in the same agencies!)

Source: Chango.com

This week, we are going to explore the use of search retargeting in more detail and why the optimization work you have already done in your SEM program can be used to drive significant results from a display campaign, save you budget and find new prospects.

As an example, we have a client today who is in the final stages of constructing their back-to-school campaign. They are new to this particular market and so have no real SEO presence, a budget that doesn’t allow for a heavy presence on SEM head terms and they don’t yet understand the dynamics of their new customer.

Building The Campaign Structure

Like any good SEM program, structure for search retargeting is critical to getting the best results. The goal is to create manageable sets of keywords that mirror to your business, facilitating budget decisions, optimization strategies and measurement. Where some keywords might be on an evergreen strategy, others might be seasonal or receive only occasional funding.

For our back to school client, they have a layer of critical terms that are ‘always on’, but will soon be activating a new set of campaigns to hit this seasonal window – Backpacks, School Supplies, School Clothing and Small Electronics for College Students.

There is no need to duplicate your previous efforts though. In this case, all the campaigns and ad groups can be imported directly, overcoming 80% of the work.

Next, the program must take into account the areas where search retargeting behaves differently to your search program. In a recent infographic by WordStream, the top 20 most expensive terms on Google AdWords were listed and ranged from $27.80 CPC (for ‘cord blood’) to $54.91 (for ‘insurance’). But, these are all terms available for between $0.50 and $3.00 CPC in the less competitive world of search retargeting.

With testing, there will be head terms such as these that no longer make sense to include in an SEM program, consuming large percentages of the budget. Instead, they can be moved to this new type of targeting, creating a presence in the mind of the searchers on contextually relevant sites.

For the back to school client with small budgets, terms like ‘school’, ‘term’, ‘clothes’ and ‘laptop’ have been moved over completely.

Compete With The Big Boys & Build Brand Cost Effectively

We know that customers are already shopping on the big name sites for common school items like backpacks and clothing without giving our client a second thought. By adding in competitor brand terms, they can build a presence during the research phase cost effectively and steal some of those dollars.

However, that alone will not be enough for them. When I was on the agency side, we would regularly have requests to ‘build a national brand campaign for a new audience’ using a budget that was painfully too small!

Whilst a true ‘branding’ campaign costs real dollars and a sustained period of time, search retargeting can be used to create a short awareness program for a fraction of the cost of other techniques. Display planners have long used the ‘takeover’, the idea that a single website can be owned for a day, giving the campaign a big hit in one go. These are costly though, and contain a significant amount of wastage.

By selecting a core set of terms, you can build an ‘Intent Takeover’, creating a heavy presence in front of all those people who are actively in market for back to school products. You can have the benefit of the page or site takeover, but for a fraction of the cost.

Learning From Search Retargeting

For a new client like ours, there is much to be understood about who their customer actually is, and so learnings are very valuable.

With keyword level reporting for search retargeting, a client like this can test many approaches at low cost by building out large keyword lists and seeing how the audience responds. This data can then be fed back into the SEO and SEM strategy.

In a recent retailer example, the term ‘vintage clothing’ was a surprise winner, and with the back to school client, early tests are showing video game terms are getting them in front of the right people.

Use What You Have

As a search marketer, you are armed with all the right tools and skills to jump into display, and techniques like search retargeting will be most familiar, and will capitalize most on the hard work you have already done.

Start by setting up your campaign using your SEM ad groups and insist on optimization at the keyword level – just as with SEM, each keyword carries a different message of intent and naturally has to be treated uniquely.

Next, look at creating new groups of keywords that lack a proper presence in your search program, such as competitor brand names or broad head terms.

Once the campaign is live, data will start to flow back showing the sites and keywords that are driving the best results – go back to your SEM program and use this information to your benefit.

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 it, holiday online activity will likely be higher than ever. In 2009 online retailers saw a whopping 51% increase in sales, and bets are on that this trend will continue this holiday season. In fact, four in ten consumers (41.3%) plan to spend more online this holiday season due to a positive shopping experience last year, according to eDigital Research.

Even if some consumers don’t actually buy online, many check the web for comparison shopping, product availability, reviews, prices, special deals and promotions. Driving targeted consumers to retailers’ sites with effective, timely ads can increase the possibility of monetizing this behavior.

Paid search advertising can be a highly successful and cost-effective tool for maximizing marketing dollars, especially if e-tailers have the data they need for precision targeting and the technology to quickly update ads to reflect real-time inventories and promotions and respond to competitive pressures.

With these five recommendations, savvy retailers can leverage the rising online buying trends to bring stellar sales revenues home this holiday season.

Streamline Campaign Management

Automating many of the daily time-consuming campaign management processes reduces labor and saves valuable time, freeing advertisers to focus on more strategic issues. Managing multiple brands over several search engines and social media channels using the same system streamlines campaign management for additional efficiency.

Through automation and mass management one retailer increased the number of accounts that they were able to manage by a scale of 6 and the number of campaigns from 34 to over 140. Another retailer reported a 300% increase in workflow efficiency.

Keep Ads Relevant With Real-Time Inventory Updates

For e-retailers managing hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of SKUs, the ability to keep online ads in sync with specific daily or hourly sales objectives and actual inventory availability is challenging. What good is it to drive someone to buy an item if it is sold out? And why waste advertising spend on items that are mispriced against the competition?

Continuously updating on-line ads with feeds from back office systems enables retailers to advertise the most recent prices and promotions while ensuring that all available stock is advertised. The added bonus is the low cost per click and higher conversion rates that result from more relevant landing pages.

Use Automation To Make Quick And Easy Campaign And Promotion Changes

Year-end holidays follow one another quickly. The ability to update or pause ads on multiple campaigns and distribute those changes across various channels at one time can have a significant impact on performance. With automation solutions, advertisers can push or pause an ad across all engines at once, or can select the channels or networks of their choice and reduce the amount of heavy lifting traditionally needed to adjust to seasonal changes.

Using bulk editing across search engines and campaigns, one retailer managed the updates and changes required from Thanksgiving to Christmas through New Years in a matter of hours vs. weeks, while reaping the benefits of fully synchronized promotions.

Experiment With Conversion Attribution Models

Understanding the path to conversion is key to ensuring proper ROI measurement. Capturing that knowledge across multiple advertising channels will help in minimizing skewed data and avoiding the mistake of under estimating the value of contributing keywords. Potential customers can reach you across a variety of touch points. Why should the last click always be given total credit? Attribution models can include equal distribution to all keywords in the path or assigning equal weight to the first and last. Having the ability to test and report on these and other attribution models will allow a retailer to create campaigns that reap the most conversions and to understand which keywords are contributing to each sale.

With a more sophisticated attribution model, one retailer was able to create campaigns and keyword lists that resulted in a 100% increase in click through rates.

Optimize Generic Keywords To Attract And Convert The Most Targeted Prospects

For some retailers, generic terms can be the most effective if managed properly. By analyzing not only the last click but also each stop across online sessions and search engines, retailers can have a clear picture of each keyword that brought in new customers, including generic terms that were part of the initial search.

For example, last Christmas season one retailer added “holiday gifts” to their keywords, which contributed to a significant boost in end of the year sales.

The Bottom Line

Paid search marketing program strategies which incorporate a combination of automation, experimentation and real-time inventory intelligence can enable marketers to achieve remarkable results this holiday season. Taking into consideration that some retailers can bring in up to 80% of their yearly revenues over just these few key months, the impact of on annual sales can be significant.

If online shopping continues to grow as predicted, adding a level of sophistication to campaign management can pay off more than ever, making this a bright holiday season for savvy retailers.

Here is a normalized graph of the total number of daily conversions from paid search across a sample of retailers last year.

Daily Conversions in November & December 2009

Several interesting trends to consider as you plan your paid search campaigns for the coming holiday season include:

The peak week beats cyber Monday. According to Shop.org, the Monday after Thanksgiving—known as cyber Monday—is one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. While this may be true of online commerce in general, for paid search cyber Monday is only the beginning of a trend.

As we evaluated the traffic from last year’s holiday season, cyber Monday accounts for the biggest one day jump in conversion rate but overall revenue and conversion rates were even higher during the first week of December. In 2009, the week of Sunday December 6th through Sunday December 13th was the period that demonstrated the highest level of profitable activity throughout the holiday season. This “peak week” delivered 24% of the impressions, 18% of clicks, and 25% of the profit generated for all of November and December. For all of the hype associated with cyber Monday, keeping a focus on December can count for even more. Planning your program around this “peak week” of conversions should include everything from increasing budgets and bids to keeping an eye on inventory levels.

Buyers may shop early, but they buy late. Each year, there are projections that consumers will be shopping earlier and, the expanding internet retail landscape definitely enables this pattern. However, when we look at last year’s retail paid search data, while shoppers may have been thinking about shopping earlier in 2009, crowds weren’t actually making more purchases online until the black Friday starting gun fired.

As a search marketer, here are two suggestions for ways that you can adapt to this behavior:

• Make an effort to encourage early buyers: advertising pre-season promotions and shipping discounts in your paid search ads is a great way to encourage browsing consumers to make purchases early. Perhaps the pre-Thanksgiving, cyber Monday searchers each deserve different promotional messaging than consumers coming to your sites during the “peak week”?
• Track and measure early funnel activities: tracking consumer activities that are part of the shopping process such as product views, reading reviews or wish-list activity can give you valuable insight into consumers who may make purchases later on. This traffic may help you pinpoint which items will be hot in the coming holiday season as well as helping you understand common click-paths that lead to conversions later on.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Research shows that online shoppers tend to do the most buying on Sundays and Mondays. Throughout the holiday season, Sundays outperformed the other days of the week in terms of average daily conversions, conversion rates and overall profit generated. As a search marketer, keep this pattern in mind as you are evaluating weekly data because the revenue or conversions you get each Sunday may not be a direct indication of the traffic of the week to follow. Be cautious about reacting to jumps in conversions on Sunday before seeing how much the traffic drops again when the work week starts.

It’s not over ‘til it’s over. While we’ve seen that online traffic and the rate of conversion drops the week before Christmas due to the shipping cutoff date, there is a rise again after the holiday. Consumers are looking to take advantage of end-of-year bargains, and you don’t want to let the valuable traffic from this period go to waste. During the period between Christmas and the end of the year in 2009, clicks fell significantly, but conversions increased, giving the 2009 holiday season a profitable finish. In anticipation of this profitable traffic, make sure you adjust your Christmas focused creatives to capture this crowd (you don’t want them to search for “sale sweaters” and get a creative that says “great deals on sweaters for Christmas.”

The basics: add site exclusions & managed placements

The AdWords Placement Performance report is available in the Reporting tab in AdWords. The primary purpose of the report is to provide data on the performance of display network (aka content targeting) sites in Google’s AdSense network. AdWords advertisers can see impressions, clicks, CPCs, etc for individual URLs and overall domains where their display ads have appeared.

Advertisers can review the Placement Performance data to monitor display network quality and add Site Exclusions for any sites that are poorly converting. Likewise, for any sites that convert well, Managed Placements can be added to the AdGroup. Adding the sites as Managed Placements allows a search engine marketer to specify higher bidding for these higher quality sites, as well as some extra insurance to continue displaying the ad on the Managed Placement site.

Business development & competition

Placement Performance reports are also a great source of new potential partners for business development efforts. If an organization operates an affiliate or partner program, many high quality sites that appear in the Placement Performance report would be great potential partners. Additionally, performance metrics from the Placement report can help model possible traffic volumes and conversion rates for a partnership, aiding in determining the appropriate business terms for the partnership.

Placement Performance reports also can highlight competitors. Not all sites that run AdSense are great at monitoring and excluding competitor’s ads from appearing on their sites. Within the Placement report a search engine marketer may be able to identify competitors to monitor, and opportunities to specify more aggressive Managed Placements to have their organization’s ads appear on competitor sites. Who wouldn’t like to run an ad on their competitor’s site? In some cases, it might be worth creating a different ad specifically for competitor Managed Placements.

Search engine optimization tactics

Perhaps the most valuable leveraging of the Placement Performance reports is in assisting search engine optimization efforts.

As noted, many high quality sites that appear in the Placement Performance report could be great potential partners. Similarly, these sites are also great opportunities for link building. There is already an existing advertising relationship to help break the ice and start a conversation with the site about link building.

Historical Placement Performance report data from more than a year ago can also be valuable from an SEO perspective. In outdated reports, search engine marketers can discover sites which are now defunct, for sale, or not maintained. In any report over a year old, there are likely to be a few of these gems, which might be worth picking up as an SEO asset.

Reviewing the websites listed in the Placement Performance report can be a fruitful source of new content ideas. Many display network sites are content sites; e.g., guides, blogs, review and photo sites. Marketers may find inspiration for creating their own unique search engine optimized content from these sites.

Slogging through the sometimes massive Placement Performance report data can be a monotonous chore, but if search engine marketers do so bearing all the possible uses in mind, the data will yield great opportunities beyond their AdWords display network campaigns.

Onsite behavioral targeting enables you to customize your website to create the most welcoming, enticing destination for your visitors, ultimately engaging them more deeply in your site. So-called machine learning engines provide a means to automatically offer the most relevant content to individual users based on real-time behaviors and predictive attributes. Such solutions collect and use hundreds of anonymous data points, and self-learning algorithms can draw out the most pertinent attributes for each visitor, track activity in real time and record and cluster onsite activities. The end results are the same ones you might see if you had the time and resources to speak directly with each and every customer: increased loyalty, engagement and revenue.

To get the greatest ROI from behavioral targeting, employ it on pages where visitors choose where to go next, such as the homepage or category pages. These can be crucial intersections for those who are not necessarily sure of what they would like to see. Onsite behavioral targeting is useful in determining their source of interest and matching the experience to that interest. Once you set several distinct options, each calling for a different need or interest, the personalization engine will find the group of visitors for whom it is most suitable. Using these analytic and predictive capabilities enables you to promote various offerings on your site, engaging your visitors and encouraging them to learn more about your products and services.

Optimizing onsite behavioral targeting

Onsite behavioral targeting is a powerful solution for increasing the ROI of your website efforts, but you shouldn’t jump into it without some pre-planning. Before you start running behavioral targeting on your site, spend some time designing your approach and clarifying your goals.

What is the objective? Conversion? Reduced ad spend? To build engagement and loyalty?

Which page or pages will you choose for behavioral targeting optimization? You should seek out pages with the following characteristics:

• Diverse user traffic and numerous navigation routes. Over time, behavioral targeting will guide each user to the best location.
• High-traffic, high-visibility and page location such as a landing page, homepage promotion banner or category page.

Onsite behavioral targeting gives you the opportunity to test-drive some so-called “crazy” ideas. You can try out diverse variations on the same offerings if you are not sure what the best message should be, allowing you to free yourself to think outside of the norm. Select the products, services, promotions or content that you wish to promote on your site and have some fun with different campaign options.

Your next task should be selecting your conversion page(s). The conversion page represents the completion step of the optimized funnel or business flow. This may be the page where your user completes a purchase (the “check out” or “thank you” page) or a quote request, signs up for a newsletter, or downloads a file. It is the page or pages on which the target for the offering was reached.

Are there particular user segments you wish to target? Determine the traffic to which you will be serving personalized content, and choose which segments will view the optimization. Keep in mind, though, that if you do segment, you are limiting the behavioral targeting engine from learning about other parts of your traffic, reducing the overall effectiveness of the optimization. We recommend that you only use segmenting when the participating offerings are displayed to a restricted audience, such as unique content for new and returning visitors.

Three rules to live by when optimizing behavioral targeting

Variety is the spice of behavioral targeting. Running similar promotions for behavioral targeting is a waste of time and won’t help you make the most of your behavioral targeting capabilities. Don’t limit your ability to learn about your site visitors’ needs. When you offer a great variety of options, behavioral targeting is much more effective in serving relevant content to your visitors. Diversity is key!

Not all surprises are good. Preview your offerings: simulation tools enable you to preview your content variations and check out how the different offerings work on your page before you actually go ahead and run them on your live site. Don’t skip this step.

Learning takes a bit of time, but it’s worthwhile. Onsite behavioral targeting solutions study your users, and therefore, it may take some time before you see effective results. The amount of “learning time” is dependent on the quantity of traffic, as well as the diversity of offerings and traffic. But as the technology learns your visitors’ behavior, it will fine-tune matches between offerings and visitors and produce better results.

Five easy steps to successful onsite behavioral targeting optimization

Here are the fundamentals you’ll need to get started with onsite behavioral targeting:

Define your settings. The first step in creating an onsite behavioral targeting optimization is defining general setting information.

Determine the breadth of your optimization. Where and for which audience will your optimization run? Select both the page on which the customized content will be displayed and your “conversion” page or pages (these represent business results).

Consider design variations. Create the actual variations of content you plan to offer visitors, such as the promotional copy or banners you wish to display on your site.

To add these variations, you will need to define the page elements in which the offerings appear. You may choose to display offerings in several elements on your page or only dedicate one page property for them.

After the elements are added, you can continue to create the variations for each page element.

Integrate JavaScript tags to your site. Tags perform several functions, including collecting information, displaying optimized content and tracking the visitor behavior for reporting. These are simple JavaScript tags you will embed into your site’s HTML code so that your behavioral targeting platform will be able to display customized content versions to your site visitors. Remember that correctly installing tags will only maximize your site’s optimization.

Activate and reap the rewards. Once you follow the above steps, its time to go live with your behavioral targeting. You will soon realize the advantages of leveraging user data to capture matching of the most relevant content to individual visitor micro segments.

Ready to get started? For a general overview of behavioral targeting platforms, refer to the Wikipedia article on providers of onsite behavioral targeting platforms.

Upon taking these steps, SMB owners will wait to see their results on search engines, make the necessary tweaks, and eventually reach a higher position in online search results.

If you do your homework, the process seems fairly straightforward. Here’s an example of a plumber in Chico, CA who comes up #1 on Google:

We found Earl’s Performance Plumbing on page one for 15 relevant keywords:

It looks like Earl is doing a fantastic job. But one has to remember that it’s important not only to rank #1 but to rank #1 for the right keywords. As Stoney G. deGeyter said, “All search terms are not created equal.”

One great way to check if you’re missing critical keywords is, as Mike Moran suggests, by comparing against your successful competitors’ keywords.

To help facilitate this effort, we released a new data version for a couple million businesses in the southwest on AmIVisible, showing which keywords their competitors come up for but they do not.

We looked at all of Earl’s competitors in Chico (about 100, across 8 categories) and found the following keywords that Earl’s competitors came up for but he did not:

This is quite an eye opener. While some of these missing keywords may not be relevant for Earl, others certainly are. For example, he comes up for “sewer” and “plumber”, but he does not come up for “sewers” or “plumbing services.”

Even a business like Earl’s Performance Plumbing, which comes up #1 on Google for several keywords, should not be complacent about their online presence. Whether you resort to using a monitoring service or tool, or do it yourself manually, you should always remember to check results against your competitors to be sure that you’ve got all your bases covered.