Cyber Monday is one of the most important (if not the most important) day to paid search professionals in America, and I’ve got some great tips and tricks to share on how to make the most of it.

But first, I thought I’d share some history of the term I found at Wikipedia:

The term “Cyber Monday” is a neologism invented by Shop.org, part of the U.S. trade association National Retail Federation. It was first used within the e-commerce community during the 2005 holiday season. According to Scott Silverman, the head of Shop.org, the term was coined based on research showing that 77% of online retailers reported a significant increase in sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2004. In late November 2005, the New York Times reported that “The name Cyber Monday grew out of the observation that millions of otherwise productive working Americans, fresh off a Thanksgiving weekend of window shopping, were returning to high-speed Internet connections at work Monday and buying what they liked.”

But is it actually the biggest spending day of the year? Some claim the term is inaccurate and just a clever marketing strategy.

From Business Week:

Contrary to what the recent blitz of media coverage implies, Cyber Monday isn’t nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher comScore Networks. It’s not even the first big day of the season.

For most online retailers, the bigger spending day of the season to date was way back on Nov. 22, three days before Black Friday. What’s more, most e-tailers say the season’s top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15.

Interesting…Regardless of what Cyber Monday actually represents, the reality is that the holiday season is upon us and, as paid search pros, we need to be prepared to take advantage of this highly lucrative e-commerce period.

I spoke with Chris Lien, CEO of the SEM management platform Marin Software, to find out what tips and tricks they’ve been sharing with their customers on how to do paid search correctly for the holidays.

Q. So, what does Cyber Monday mean to you?

Chris: It’s when consumers begin their heavy holiday shopping on the Internet–the official kickoff to the online holiday season.

Q. How do you think online sales will go this year?

Chris: Well, due to the economic environment we’re in, I think we’ll see a lengthening of the online holiday promotion period in order for retailers to get every last dollar they can from consumers. I noticed Macy’s has already started some pretty aggressive advertising and it’s only mid-November.

Q. Studies show that over half of people begin researching gifts before Thanksgiving, but the majority of purchases don’t occur until mid-December. How does that affect paid search pros?

Chris: Make sure to take these “early researchers” into account. Set your tracking cookies to 30 days or more to capture delayed conversions.

Q. Are there any specific keyword expansion tips you have?

Chris: Make sure you’re not just running on the same terms you have all year. Include holiday terms as well. Some 69% of shoppers plan to purchase gift cards this year (according to Google research) so don’t forget to promote gift cards in your search campaigns. Examples of potential keyword ideas to add include: “electronics gift card,” “best gift for dog lovers,” and “great gifts for under $25.”

Q. Yikes! I bet “gift card” terms just spiked in the engines. So there will be more volume on most search terms for the next six weeks, what can search pros do to make sure they don’t spend on inefficient terms?

Chris: Negative match is an important tactic to utilize. Use query mining early in the holiday season to see what unrelated searches might be triggering your ads so you can make good optimization decisions. For example, a retailer might add “gift registry” to their campaigns, but then needs to exclude the most popular registry searches which are for “Windows,” “Software,” and “Cleaner,” each of which have nothing to do with the holidays.

Q. Okay, got it. How does all of this affect bid strategies?

Chris: Historical data shows that users are much more likely to convert during the holiday season. Be prepared for increased conversion rates, and use insight to bid accordingly. Try using year-over-year data from the last few holiday seasons to understand how users will engage your keywords, ads, and sites. Of course, watch your accounts early to see what’s happening so that you make good decisions throughout the campaign.

Q. That’s good to know. Any last things to think about?

Chris: Everyone knows they can find great deals starting December 26th. So make sure to create sale-specific campaigns, keywords and creative ahead of time and schedule the campaigns to launch automatically on December 25th at midnight.

Great tips and tricks, Chris. Thank you for you for sharing. I think the biggest takeaway here is to make sure to scrutinize your paid search accounts much more often than usual during this holiday push. You want to take advantage of positive trends you will find as well as weed out inefficiencies. For many web retailers, the upcoming six weeks represent more than half of their sales, so it’s important to win now more than ever.

Pacing may be the most important task for the search marketer. Ending an account overspent means you might have blown through money the client just doesn’t have and you could be on the hook for the difference. Ending a campaign under budget can be worse based on the missed opportunity. I remember years ago on one campaign, the client calculated the ROI of the underspend and tried to charge the agency for the loss. Either way, under or over, bad pacing is just unacceptable. It’s an amateur mistake, and believe me, you don’t want to go down that road with your client or your manager.

Pacing can be a surprisingly complicated thing to accomplish and I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a pacing tool integrated into an SEM management platform yet…it would seem to be a no-brainer. This world-wide economic recession has made all marketers, including SEM pros, more savvy. Our paid search accounts are more optimized than ever before and there’s very little fat to trim or ad groups to pause. If the search volume on our terms drastically fall, we may not have the option to simply unpause under-performing keywords or ad groups [without justification] to make up the difference.

Some of the issues that affect pacing include:

Usual Spikes and Dips

Search is a pull medium. Inventory is not guaranteed nor is it easy to accurately predict. First of all, there are seasonality shifts in any business (”prom dress” starts to spike in February and dies in June). Of course, over time, the product or service may natural phase out or become out of fashion – ever wonder what the volume on “sony walkman” is? If you or your competitors run any other large advertising campaigns, online or offline, seasonality may spike your traffic. There’s also unique variables to every paid search account.

For example, we have an entertainment client that sells tickets to their shows. We’ve learned over time just what the search volume curve looks like and we know it spikes three weeks before opening night and dies almost ten days afterward. It’s almost like clockwork, and we’ve been able to master budget allocation on this account over time.

Unusual Spikes and Dips

Michael Jackson’s recent passing comes to mind as a perfect example. Google received so many queries that they thought it was an attack on the system. Can you imagine if you were selling something Michael Jackson related that day and didn’t have budget caps on your account and suddenly wasted your entire quarter’s marketing budget in twelve hours? Or imagine if you had very tight budgets and didn’t take advantage of that opportunity to sell to real fans?

In a personal example, I was working on the paid search account of a Fortune 500 company a few years ago that was involved in a criminal investigation. Overnight, their branded term traffic spiked exponentially with “[company] scandal” and [company] problem”. We immediately had to add more negative terms to their campaigns to avoid that traffic. These crazy spikes and dips happen all of the time.

Enormous Campaigns

Hundreds of thousands of keywords, three or more engines, hundreds of campaigns, thousands of ad groups…that’s a lot to keep track of. Especially if there are promo campaigns flighting in and out, new product groups entering the picture, etc. It’s just a lot of moving pieces and it can sometimes be difficult to handle.

Technology Flaws

One of the common SEM rookie questions about AdWords is, “Why did my campaign go over budget yesterday?” Well, as we know, daily campaign budget caps are about as firm as a wet paper plate. Google’s policy is that it won’t spend more than 30 times your daily budget in 30 days. So, if you go over $20 your first day, you may see your account spend $20 less the next day to even that out; so, even Google has trouble staying within budgets. They have so many ads running that it would be virtually impossible to stop one account on a dime. That being said, Google won’t charge you anything over your account budget, but that doesn’t help you if you have multiple campaigns starting and stopping in one account.

Fees

Not only do you have agency fees, but there are third party costs as well. Your bid management platform may be 2-5% of your media spend and critical competitive tools such as AdGooroo, Compete, SpyFu, etc. have their own subscription fees. You have to keep track of all of those things and make sure you back them out of your media spend. Years ago, at another agency, I remember there was an account where the team spent the budget for six months until they realized the agency fees hadn’t been taken out — they basically had given the client a half year of free work because of this mistake.

The scrutiny level for pacing varies with each account. Sometimes you’re pacing daily, but usually weekly is fine. Most accounts have an even spread of the budget over the length of the campaign so it’s a simple thing to compare what percentage of the account you’ve spent versus what percentage of account has passed in time. At the beginning of the campaign, it’s usually okay to be as much as 20% over or under, but any more than that and you should try to make up the difference as quickly as you can and then pace back to normal levels.

Pacing really becomes more serious as the end of an account nears. I direct my team to try to be just about done by the last week and only leave what they know they can spend for the last seven days (basically 30% or so of the current daily average). This way, they can put on daily budget caps because they know the engines will have no problem spending the remainder.

Underpacing is usually harder to fix efficiently than overpacing. When you’re overpacing, there’s immediately an opportunity for you to optimize out of the poorest performing ads, keywords, and ad groups. This usually leads to a better account. However, when you’re underpacing, that means you’re going to have to open up the account which could lead to lower overall performance. There have been many times where I’ve had to go back to a client and tell them that we can’t spend their money efficiently at the budget goal that has been set. I don’t like to do that, but you serve your clients better by telling them then truth than by just flipping the switch on high-volume general terms that don’t necessarily help meet their objectives.

Tips if you’re underpacing

• Increase bids
• Increase budget
• Use Content (and/or Placement in AdWords)
• Use more Broad Match to create a “wider net”
• Wider geotargeting, dayparting, etc
• Expand your keywords. How about topics similar to yours but not specific to you? For example, if you’re selling surfing gear, what about bidding on “Hawaii Travel” or “Beach Vacations”?
• Raise your CTRs on your ads to get the most clicks from the available impressions (see above on raising CTRS)
• Use other engines such as Ask
• Take out negative words (when it makes sense to do so)
• More general ads vs. specific but don’t kill your quality scores by doing so

Tips if you’re overpacing

• Decrease bids
• Decrease budget
• Get off the Content Network (usually has a lower ROI than Search)
• Don’t use Broad Match
• Tighter targeting. Find the highest performing geo- and day- parting segments and move budget away from the rest
• Use more negative terms to filter your ad triggering

Already its own specialty of digital marketing and now almost 50% of all online advertising budgets, paid search has fully grown into its own channel. A quick bit of research can quickly uncover a multitude of blogs, books, tools, companies, etc. all focused on the topic and within this channel, there’s even more fragmentation and specialization. From account creation to conversion optimization, paid search has a suite of sub-disciplines to master.

Not all search marketers have equal strengths in every area of the medium. Some SEM pros are great at keyword expansion, managing bids and rules, or analyzing heavy pivot tables for actionable insights. Still others find their talents lay in copywriting the three line text ads. For frequent readers of this column, you know my focus as a paid search marketer has been on the technology that can affect your efficiency, accuracy, and optimization success. I believe that those SEM folks that can fully embrace and leverage the tech of search will be the ultimate winners for their companies and clients.

There are certainly a bunch of tools on the market, but Google is in a unique position as the industry’s eight hundred pound gorilla to provide technology solutions which leverage their giant mass of search data. Certainly Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and Conversion Optimizer are awesome additions to any SEM pro’s tool box, but for today’s post, I’d like to highlight those free Google tools available outside of the AdWords platform.

Gems in the Google SEM toolbox

Google External Keyword Tool (Google Help Center) – This was literally an industry turning point when it was released a few years ago. Finally, to be able to get search volume and trends on keywords! What a concept, right? For years, Google held onto this data like a leprechaun and his gold. Thankfully, though, they opened the doors and let us all in. I’m still not one hundred percent confident in this data, but it’s really the best data we have for keyword volume…and best of all, it’s free!

Here are some advanced tips from the Google Help Center:

• Find keywords based on your site content. Instead of entering your own keywords, try using the Website Content option. It lets you enter the URL of your business website, or of any site related to your business. The AdWords system will then scan your page and then suggest relevant keywords. (This feature is available only in some languages.)
• Create new, separate ad groups with similar keywords. We recommend creating several ad groups in each campaign, each with a small, narrowly-focused set of similar keywords. Use the Keyword Tool to discover relevant keywords, then divide them into lists of 5 to 20 similar terms. See examples of ad groups promoting a single product or service and multiple products or services.
• Identify negative keywords. The Keyword Tool can show you off-topic keywords that users may be thinking about. Suppose you sell cut flowers and you give the Keyword Tool the keyword ‘flowers.’ It may suggest the related term ‘gardens,’ and you may want to add that term to your ad group as a negative keyword. That will keep your ad from showing on searches for ‘flower gardens’ or similar terms. This helps make sure only interested customers see your ads.
• Find synonyms – or not. The Use synonyms box in the Descriptive words or phrases option is always checked by default. (This means it might suggest ‘bed and breakfast’ as a synonym for the keyword ‘hotel.’) If you uncheck the box, the tool will suggest only keywords that contain at least one of the terms that you entered.
• Specify a language and location. If you’re using the Keyword Tool while signed in to your account, you may see an option to tailor results to a particular location and language. If you happen to be targeting Spanish speakers who live in France, make sure you set the Keyword Tool to that language and location.
• Start broad and then get specific. Try broad terms like ‘flowers’ in the Keyword Tool first. Then try specific terms like ‘red roses’ or ‘miniature cactus.’

Google Search Based Keyword Tool aka the “sktool” (Google Help Center) – This tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords campaigns. The tool goes one step further by tailoring the keywords and other data (such as the amount of competition for the keyword, the suggested bid, and more) based on your language or country/territory settings.

Originally, this was an internal tool that the AdWords account team had for years before releasing to the public. The way it was pitched to me was that it found organic search terms that were bringing traffic to your site and compared that list to your AdWords list. Of course, these terms may not be useful to your paid account, but the good point here is that the tool matches these organic terms with the “best landing page”. The fact that Google endorses those pages may be a direct correlation to the keyword/landing page Quality Score criteria as well. If you haven’t used this tool, I highly suggest you give it a try.

Google Insights for Search (Google Help Center) – Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. You can choose to see data for select Google properties, including Web search, Images, Product search, and News search (certain properties aren’t currently available in all countries/territories).

On the results page, you’ll see:

• A graph with the search volume, indicating interest over time (GMT) for your terms, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms (read more about how we scale and normalize the data)
• A breakdown of how the categories are classified
• Lists of the top searches and top rising searches
• A world heat map graphically displaying the search volume index with defined regions, cities, and metros

Keep in mind that Insights for Search uses data aggregated over millions of users without personally identifiable information, and is powered by computer algorithms. Additionally, it only shows results for search terms that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool.

Google Trends (Google Help Center) – With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.

Google Trends for Websites (default site is “wikipedia.org”) (Google Help Center) – With Google Trends for Websites, you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of your favorite websites. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one. When you enter the address of a website into the search box, Trends for Websites shows you a graph reflecting the number of daily unique visitors (the number of people who visit a website) to that website. You can see these numbers on the graph after you’ve signed into your Google Account. Under the graph, you’ll also see a list of regions where visitors originated from, other websites that they have also visited, and terms they have also searched for.

Google Ad Preview Tool (Google Help Center) – The Ad Preview Tool (APT) enables you to view your ads as they would appear on a regular Google search results page, without accruing extra impressions for your ad. I’m still shocked that the other search players haven’t created a feature like Google’s APT that allows you to see your ads even if they appear outside your geo-targeted area.

In the offline world, when a campaign runs in a magazine or newspaper, those ads are actually cut out and sent to the advertiser as proof the ads ran. Our agency normally takes screenshots of ads to send to our clients and sometimes, when we run on Yahoo or MSN outside of our home base of Chicago, we end up sending an email to everyone in the agency to see if they have friends or family in those areas that can trigger our ads and send us screenshots. The problem is, if you don’t use the APT, when you search for your ad multiple times on other engines, it can affect your ad position by racking up many ad impressions and lowering your click-through rate (CTR).

Google Traffic Estimator (Google Help Center) – The Traffic Estimator is designed to give you keyword search traffic and cost estimates at a glance. (The estimates are for search on Google and search partner sites only; they don’t include estimates for the number of clicks your ads might receive on placements you choose or on the rest of the content network.) This was once only available inside the AdWords platform, but now can be accessed even without an AdWords account. It’s had the reputation as not the most accurate tool in the world, but it can be quite handy when you need some quick insight into how much volume and cost would be associated with a short keyword list.

I found an interesting post by Seer Interactive in which they tested the accuracy of the Traffic Estimator and found it actually had some good results.

Google Ad Planner (Google Help Center) – Google Ad Planner is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.

With Google Ad Planner, you can:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests.
• Search for websites relevant to your audience.
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
• Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

For use with Adwords, you can filter the sites you discover with the tool to help uncover ideas for new Content or Placement targets. As well, the Ad Planner provides a ton of competitive data. For example, you can “reverse engineer” the data to help find ideas for messaging if you know that the sites in your category are skewed male not female or 18-24 not 34-50.

Google Alerts (Google Help Center) – Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts – ‘News’, ‘Web’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Comprehensive’, ‘Video’ and ‘Groups’. Although Google Alerts isn’t specifically a search marketing tool, I urge all SEMers to setup alerts for their clients’ head terms and top branded keywords. Part of being a great search marketer is understanding your client’s business and industry. Remember, SEM is not in a vacuum. If a new competitor enters the landscape, you need to know. If new terms are introduced into the marketplace, you’ll probably want to add them to your list.

I took a lot of notes at SMX Toronto earlier this year and posted them in this column as Golden Nuggets From SMX Search Analytics. Looking back at them now, the evidence undeniably reinforces my memory of how much I learned, and I’m glad to say that three days at SMX East this week was just as fulfilling.

Instead of going through my own notes this time, I thought I’d utilize the tool du jour, Twitter, and see what great nuggets I could find marked with the #SMX hashtag. I’ve pulled out tweets that represent some of the hottest topics, tips, and tricks from the show.

So, without further delay, here are my golden Twitter Nuggets (and my takeaways) from SMX East:

Day 1

@dannysullivan: google announced cross domain canonical tag coming by end of year

Takeaway: This was probably the most retweeted topic in the SMX hashtag on Twitter. I saw literally hundreds of comments about this news. For more information, check out the good coverage on this by Chris Crum at WebProNews.

@KimToomey: Using DKI in ad text you can get away with a 28 character headline in Google.

Takeaway: Dan Soha from Five Mill presented this tip in the Amazing PPC Tactics session.  According to Dan, the alt text in Dynamic Keyword Insertion can actually exceed the headline character limitations of AdWords from 25 to 28. He made the point that this could be a crucial loophole for advertisers on vital headlines such as “Affordable Health Insurance” (27 characters). Nice tip, Dan.

@smec: use the geographic report in adwords backend for a good start for restructuring your ppc campaigns.

Takeaway: This is a really smart observation because if you forget to address important geotargeting segments in your account, you could really have a lot of work to go back and do.

@LauraLacy: Google says not to use disallow in robots file to manage duplicates. Use canonical tag.

Takeaway: Stephan Spencer from NetConcepts helped me understand this – if you disallow duplicate pages, you lose those page values vs. using the canonical tag will still let you garner value in the eyes of the engine.

@chiefmartec: web analytics will be a $1 billion industry by 2014 (Forrester) yet many companies still don’t have the basics right.

Takeaway: This is huge, right?  Here we are…the most measurable channel in advertising and the industry is still lagging behind the proper use of analytics. We need to get our act together as an industry— especially in this tough economic time.

@juliepower: “80% of searches on the Web are non-commercial,” Chruchill quotes Jim Lanzone of Ask.com

Takeaway: Nothing shocking here but the first time I’ve really seen this data presented and a good stat to tuck away for a rainy day.

Day 2

@joemescher: Yahoo confirms (with Bing, Google) that the meta keywords tag doesn’t influence their ranking algo #icrossing (via @esidone)

Takeaway: This was certainly the biggest #smx Twitter topic of Day 2. Based on the tweet reaction from the search engine community, you can count this moment as the final nail in the coffin regarding the meta keyword value debate.It’s over folks. Don’t waste your time.

@jamiekeaney exposure to social brand pages early in the conversion funnel leads to a 15% increase in branded searches

Takeaway: One of my favorite sessions of the conference was The Interplay of Social Media and Paid which Andrew Goodman, Chris Copeland and Graham Mudd examined the recently released study between comScore and Group M where they tracked the lifts on Paid Search from Social campaigns. I highly recommend that white paper to everyone involved in either search or social media.

@staceymsmith: SEO tip: The easier a link is to get, the less value it will have to a search engine – @EricWard

Takeaway: From the Ask the Link Builders session with heavyweight SEO folks. Eric’s point hit home with many of the attendees. Eric Ward is straight money, folks.

@alpern: Danny Sullivan SEO tip at : Put your press release on your own site before distributing it elsewhere 2 get your URL indexed hi 4 that PR

Takeaway: This is a great tip! This is just another way to think about how you handle your own digital content online and how a small change in your process could have valuable results. This is the kind of tip we leave our families to find at conferences like SMX.

@springkeeper: In 2008, $23 Billion spent on online ads, only $250 million on site optimization and site-side behavioral targeting. 80 to 1 ratio!

Takeaway: Yet another sad, yet true, benchmark of our industry. Sometimes we can’t see the forest through the trees. I still can’t believe there are literally thousands of search pros out there that still send their traffic to their home page let alone using advanced optimizations that can truly mean success for their accounts.  It boggles the mind!

@demicco Search marketing success is all about learning what the INTENT of the qualified user is when searching.

Takeaway: I don’t know if this came up during a session or if demicco just wanted to reinforce this simple, yet powerful, point that search marketers must always remember. Either way, I’m glad someone keeps reminding us. Thanks, demicco.

DAY 3

@exclusivetweet Domain name length appears to barely matter for rankings (but more than 11 characters may be unwise)

Takeaway: I just hope you SEO folks recognize this Paid Search guy remembered to pull a nugget for you too.

@KimToomey Search & Display together will create a 173% increase in purchases on site & 124% increase in $$ (retail only)

Takeaway: We’ve seen many of these studies over the years and it’s always the same…search and display work great together. I wonder when it will finally stick in people’s minds that an ad exposure, even a lowly banner ad has some affect on a user. If a banner doesn’t work, then a billboard, a television commercial, a radio ad, etc doesn’t work either, but a half century of modern advertising proves that it does. Wake up Search Industry, banners are your friends—stop fighting and get along.

@jamiekeaney HTTP Fox add-on for Firefox is good way to show how HTTP status codes are being used

Takeaway: If I put add one more add-on to my Firefox, I don’t think my computer will be able to reboot again. Just kidding. Love those plug-ins and this is a cool niche tool to use.

@bogrady Damn: idea for the day – when your competitor drops $$$ on a big display campaign, squat on their brand keywords and say Thanks!

Takeaway: See my banner ad rant two tweets up this post for why I love this idea. 

@bonniesituation tip: When changing URLs DO leave old URLs in sitemap.xml till search engines hit redirects.

Takeaway: Seems like a no brainer but sometimes it takes someone saying it to become a best practice tool for my digital marketing toolbox.

Friday fun tweets I just had to share:

@adamandeve: Oh…the guy sitting next to me is wearing the same cologne as an ex.

@smec: “creating more landing pages won’t harm the rain forest!”

@w2scott “Facebook is like the other internet, but worse” said by @dannysullivan

@clickequations: At the booth candy was worse this year, the t- shirts slightly better.

@joshgister: Just walked by a guy wearing a “your mom links to me” t-shirt. Ah yes,

@mestrich “If Jackson Pollock was a web marketer, he’d be a spammer.” -funny but powerful analogy with visuals by Eric Ward

@clickequations: Javitz center holds tens of thousands. Mens room accommodates one. Conversion fail. .

@JadedTLC: They should let cute girls into for free! Of course, I’m biased.

@laurenpolinsky: The geeks are drunk. But it’s for charity so it’s ok:)

Thanks again to SMX (and specifically Elisabeth Osmeloski / @elisabethos) for inviting me to speak at the conference.  I can’t believe how much fun my first live Paid Search clinic ession was! Tony Wright (@tonynwright) was absolutely hilarious as he graciously mentored me through it. And thanks to Lori Weiman (@searchmonitor) for moderating.

Hope to see you all at the next SMX!

I don’t know about you, but I’ve recently been hearing more and more buzz about the value of query mining to optimize your search campaigns. Take the following two reports, for example. Over 500 different, unique queries triggered a visit from an ad for “dog remedy” on broad match. Now, look at all of the queries – “itchy”, “smelly”, “worms” come out in more specific queries. Those are all different problems and should be in their own ad group. Then, there’s actual diseases and conditions such as “scabies” and “cysts”,  each of which would certainly will require different landing pages. Also, notice different dog breeds are mentioned. Wouldn’t dog owners most certainly be more engaged with an ad that speaks to their breed directly?

If these are core keywords to your business, knowing those other terms may help you build our your long tail list for higher clicks on cheaper (and more engaged) terms. You’ll know if you need to build out more sections of your site to accommodate a variety of content to explain the nuances of that product or service. You may discover new ad group and campaign ideas and new ways to build ads that speak directly to a specific consumer need.

I can’t wait to get started query mining right now…

However, with so many other optimizations that are tried and true “must-do” best practices, query mining might not be on the search engine marketer’s front burner. Certainly portfolio bid management, landing page testing, creative message testing, quality score optimization, match-type testing, adding negative terms, position strategies, conversion optimization, and so forth – cannot be ignored, right?

Well, Craig Danuloff, the President & Founder of ClickEquations is someone who is certainly is not ignoring the value of this optimization. I’m not going to call this man the King of Query Mining–but he just might be the Duke. Craig has written numerous query posts and recently hosted a webinar on the subject.  But I think what really proves his passion for this topic is that he made sure his search management platform has a query analyzer built in.

I asked Craig for some good insight into query mining and how to take it to the next level.

Q. Where can an SEM pro go to find search query data?

Craig: In AdWords, search queries reporting has been added in the ‘See Search Terms’ button under the Keyword tab. This shows you the queries for a select keyword or all the queries for an ad group or campaign. But if you’re not using it on a keyword-by-keyword basis, it doesn’t show you which queries were matched to which keywords, which is a little limiting. Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft provide any access to search queries within their management interfaces.

In ClickEquations, we included a ‘Search Query’ tab where each search query is listed, along with the keyword and match type it was matched to, and full statistics on the query performance. Queries are captured and reported for Google, Yahoo, and MSN and can be viewed at the engine, campaign, ad group, or keyword level. We also allow you to pull search query data into excel using our ClickEquations Analyst tool, to build a bulk sheet for keyword or negative expansion, or for all kinds of analysis or reporting.

Q. Why did you invest so much time into building query reports into ClickEquations?

Craig: The traditional view of paid search has been that it’s about keywords and bids. And a lot of PPC management time and attention gets spent on keywords – expanding them, bidding on them, organizing them, etcetera. But the truth is that keywords are just a means to an end; they’re little magnets sent out there to attract search queries. And if you’re only able to review reports and make decisions at a keyword level, you’re not getting a very accurate or informative picture of what’s really happening in your account – so you’re almost certainly making bad decisions and not optimizing your results.

We call the ‘keywords and bids’ view ‘Low-Resolution PPC’, and we preach “High-Resolution PPC”. Take one simple example – suppose you have a keyword in your account that gets 100 clicks, results in 20 conversions, costs you $100 and generates $800 in sales. Sounds pretty good right? On that information alone, you’d probably increase the bid if your position wasn’t already maxed, and be pretty satisfied.

But what if you could see the 100 search queries behind those clicks and their individual performance? Suppose you saw that 88 of those clicks, representing $55 of your spend, produced no sales at all, and in fact, included words that suggested those people were really non-qualified prospects. And just 2 specific search queries were alone responsible for 10 of the conversions but only $5 of your spend. At this level of detail, you see that you really have a small number of super-profitable queries (which should be converted to keywords) and a large number of queries which should be either turned into negatives or at least bid in a different way.

The truth is a version of this scenario is happening right now in every ad group you’re running – but you can only see it and take the right action by looking at the search queries and their performance. We included full search query reporting, and related features to take advantage of these queries, because we believe that using them is the most effective way to improve paid search results.

Q. Why do you hate Broad Match so much?

Craig: Broad Match is a tool that is frequently misused. Adding a keyword on Broad Match is a way of telling the search engine “here, you figure out how to spend my money.” That’s fine in certain narrow cases and usually for limited amounts of time, but beyond that it’s a recipe for waste and missed opportunities. We have a great Match Type Analysis Report in ClickEquations where you can see the % of your spend, revenue, conversions, etc. that are resulting from the keywords of each match type. As a simple rule of thumb, I’d say that no account should have more than 50% of their spend occurring on Broad Match keywords. Ideally, I’d say 30% is more of a goal.

The right way to use Broad Match, and all the match types for that matter, is to build what I call a ‘Match Type Keyword Trap’ which has been described in detail over a series of blog posts and a white paper at our site. Basically, over time search queries that produce good results should be promoted to Exact or Phrase Match, so that less and less of your sales result from Broad Match keywords. The Broad Match that ultimately remains should be either a way to catch new or strange queries you haven’t seen or considered before, or for those circumstances where a huge range of queries are infrequently used to express the same search intent. Using Match Types in this way is another example of working in ‘High Resolution’ and results in increased impression share, better Quality Scores, higher positions and lower CPCs – everything a paid search marketer could dream of.

Q. I’m supportive of your suggestion of an Include match type. Can you sum up your thoughts on this for the readers?

Craig: Right now Phrase Match is literal – the words in your keyword have to appear in the query in the exact order. There are many cases where users might search for a set of words in many different orders and with many different delimiters: ‘cheap hotel in Spain’, ‘hotel with view in Spain’, ‘travel package to Spain with hotel’, for example. It would be nice to buy the keyword ‘Spain hotel’ with an Include Match Type and have it cover any query that included all the specified words in any order regardless of any other words in the query. It would allow us to apply one Include Match where today you would need 10 or more Phrase Matches or worse yet just have to use Broad Match because there are so many combinations.

Q. What is the best way to organize search queries to gather insights for optimization?

Craig: Search queries are naturally organized into the ad groups and campaigns where they were matched, and they’re useful at each of those levels as well as on a per-keyword basis. By looking at the collective list of search queries in an ad group, you can judge if your text ads are appropriate, and see when you really have to split keywords into smaller ad groups in order to better tailor the text ads to the search queries.

Looking at queries for an entire campaign helps you decide if you can trust the summary reporting you’re getting at the campaign level. If a few queries are generating all the cost or revenue, then it becomes obvious that the averaged data isn’t really that informative. On a keyword basis, the queries obviously let you add more negatives or expand to new keywords or match types, but they can also help make better bid decisions by clarifying whether the keyword performance was skewed by a few poor or very good queries.

Q. What are some best practices to utilize once you’ve analyzed the query data?

Craig: My favorite new use is to look at the number unique queries are being matched to individual Broad Match keywords. I’ve been shocked to find single keywords getting matched to 500 different search queries or more! This is a huge opportunity to dive into the query list and add negatives and expand the keywords and match types to better take control of that targeting. We have a report in ClickEquations Analyst that sorts keywords by number of unique queries, and it’s a real eye opener. I used it just last week to first indentify this problem and then bulk import about 40 negatives (in this case it was a medical keyword that was attracting a huge list of specific medical conditions that the product couldn’t treat) and almost 80 new keywords and phrases.

Recently, on the Inside AdSense blog, Google announced that it was opening up the Content Network to even more third party publishers and ad networks. I was surprised to see so little blowback from the online community as the title of the post, Getting the most revenue from every impression through AdSense, seems like it would be a huge red flag for search marketing professionals everywhere.

Digging deeper into their post:

Who are these ad networks? They’re ad agencies and companies that partner with advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads on sites they don’t own themselves (much like AdSense). You’ll now be able to allow advertisers from these networks to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space.

Yikes! Right? I don’t know about you, but flooding my “auction-based” marketplace with a ton of more competition is not going to help get my click costs down. The jury’s still out on this one folks.

I used to think of Content as paid search’s red headed stepchild. It never outperformed search in any KPI. However, a few years ago, a colleague urged me to pay more attention to Content Targeting as he said it was the future of SEM. He was right. By the numbers, search inventory is not shrinking, but it’s not growing as fast rate as it was earlier this decade. However, Content Targeting is growing rapidly with new web sites and pages being added every minute of every day. Eventually, the inventory for Content Targeting within SEM will be exponentially more than what you’ll find with search. At this point, it’s crucial for every SEM pro to really learn how to work and optimize the Google Content network.

Still not convinced? Check out some of these factoids from the Google whitepaper CPA Performance Trends on the Google Content Network (PDF) after analyzing over 25,000 global accounts for a year.

• The Google Content Network is the world’s number one ad network, reaching more than 80% of global internet users.
• It servers more than 6 billion ad impressions each day across hundreds of thousands of websites.
• In total, 51.6% of advertisers analyzed had an average Content Network CPA equal to or better than their Search Network CPA.
• Lower-spending accounts tended to perform better than higher-spending accounts on the Content Network relative to search.
• [A Specific Media] study suggests that Content Network advertisers benefit not only from the click-through conversions driven by their ads, but also from the increased awareness generated by exposure to a targeted message

These topics bring me to today’s column. I’ve had a bunch of questions in my head over the last few years regarding the Content Network, and after attending a webinar on Content Optimization from Jasper Seldin, Content Optimization Specialist at Google, I knew I’d found the right guy to ask.

Q. How many AdSense customers are there?

Jasper: We have hundreds of thousands of AdSense publisher partners worldwide.

Q. What is the ratio between Search and Content conversions?

Jasper: We don’t break out that ratio. What we have found is that the average advertiser on the Content Network gets 20% of their conversions from content.

Q. How is Quality Score calculated in the Content Network and how is that different for Search?

Jasper: Quality score on content is our calculation of how relevant a user of a particular site will find your ad. It functions in much the same way as search, to try to match up the right ads to the right users. Since we’re dealing with many sites on the Google Content Network versus only one site (Google.com) with search, it follows logically that we’d calculate a separate quality score for each individual page on the content network. We use a variety of factors to calculate this including:

• The relevance of the ad and keywords to the placement
• Your ad’s performance history on that and similar placements
• The quality of your ad’s landing page

Q. AdSense users can preview ads before they’re displayed on their site. About what percentage of them are using this tool?

Jasper: It’s called the Ad Review Center. We can’t break out a percentage but we’ve received positive responses to the Ad Review Center and it’s a great value add for publishers who would like to look at how ads might affect the user experience of their site.

Q. We hear that Google institutes a high level of Click Fraud protection on the Content Network. Can you go into a bit of detail on what steps are taken to protect against fraudulent clicks.

Jasper: Google uses the same industry leading invalid click protection from search on the Content Network. We proactively filter out invalid clicks using the following methods:

1. Our filters analyze every AdWords click in real-time.
2. Our ad traffic quality team analyzes the impressions, clicks and conversions over a longer period of time. In combing through all this information, we are looking for unusual behavior against hundreds of different data points.
3. In the relatively rare cases where advertisers are affected by undetected click fraud, we conduct an investigation and, if we find signs of undetected fraud, we mark those clicks as invalid and issue a refund to the advertiser.

Keep in mind we have every reason to provide outstanding returns for advertisers on both search and our Content Network and devote significant resources to creating technically sophisticated ways to filter invalid clicks before advertisers are charged for them. As a result, the percentage of invalid clicks that may escape detection — and for which advertisers may have been charged — is very small.

Q. I learned recently that you using negative match in Content ad groups can work well. Can you list some best practices for this type of tactic?

Jasper: Yes, you can use negative keywords on content and they are quite effective. However, best practices for content negative keywords differ from search. All negative keywords are exact match, and our system considers them thematically. You can have multiple themes within your negative keyword list. Be careful when you come up with your content negative keyword list, because our system blocks ad serving if a theme in your negative keyword list matches a theme on the page.

As an example, lets say you are selling fruit. Even if you only sell apples, you wouldn’t want to include oranges as a negative keyword because users interested in oranges may also be interested in apples. You would want negative keywords related to computers, because apple the fruit could be confused with Apple the computer manufacturer.

Q. How are click charges calculated on the Content Network if it’s ad group targeting, not keyword targeting. I read that it uses the default ad group bid. Is that true, and, if so, how does the platform know what to charge you if you don’t implement ad group bids?

Jasper: We have a bid hierarchy on the content network that is as follows:

• If you have a content bid, we use that. Content bid trumps all other bids.
• If you have keyword level bids, we take the average of all your keyword bids and use that as your ad group bid. If you just have the default bid for your ad group, we’ll use that for content as well as search.

We’ve recently implemented a feature that lets you set individual bids for sites you’re appearing on with your keyword targeted campaigns. This is a great way to maximize your ROI – set a bid on each site relative to the value its providing.

Q. We all know by now that Content Targeting extrapolates the idea of your ad group via the keywords and then matches it with a theme and runs on those sites. Can you go into more detail about this process? Is it the same 594 themes as can be found in the Placement Targeting list? What about if I loaded up conflicting keywords such as “car, chocolate, happiness”? Can more than one theme be targeted?

Jasper: Google performs page analysis on every page in the content network. First, we scan the page and pick out words we think are most relevant to the content on the page. We can tell headlines from footers and can pick up on words that repeat often or are emphasized with bolding or italics. Together, these words create concepts. Concepts tell us the unique meaning of each page. There aren’t a finite number of concepts, unless you count the number of words that convey unique meaning.

And of course, we look at related concepts and see how they roll up into entire categories,. It’s these concepts and categories that you are ultimately targeting with your keyword list. When you select keywords, we analyze the theme of the keyword list and place you on pages where the themes and categories match. An ad group can target multiple themes, but we recommend only targeting one theme with each ad group to ensure that you are putting the right message in front of the right user.

Q. Any new features on the Content roadmap?

Jasper: I would say that Conversion Optimizer is the most exciting new feature. It has already been released, but it gets smarter all the time and we’re constantly working to improve the product.

Q. What other interesting tidbits, tricks, tips, etc. can you share about the Content Network?

Jasper: For direct response focused advertisers, we recommend starting with a keyword contextual targeted campaign. Here are some tips to help you set and manage up your campaign.

Manage your search and content campaigns separately to customize content keywords, placements, and budgets. With keywords, create ad groups with small keyword lists that reflect one theme per ad group. Add keywords that are specific to one theme and avoid keywords that may relate to multiple themes, ie. add ‘java coffee’ and avoid ‘java’ which may expose your ad to ‘java programming’.

With regards to bidding, use CPC bidding with contextual targeting. As for your creatives, we recommend using call-to-action phrases in your ad to reference a desired action post-click. Try to clearly tell your audience exactly what you offer on your site in your ad. Make ads specific to the advertised product or service to increase the conversion likelihood. You can also align display ads to offline ads to reinforce your message.

For your landing page (ie destination URL), link your ad to customized landing pages that match the information in your ad. Then provide an easy path for users to purchase or receive the product or offer in your ad on the landing page. In your landing page, its best to make a call-to-action (ie, button) above the fold.

A few years ago, I never would have been thinking about what Paid search wasn’t good for. Clicks were cheap, ROI was through the roof, and I was one of the biggest Paid Search evangelists out there. I attended an American Association of Advertising Agencies conference in 2007 where there was a session touting “And, Not ‘If’ For Search” to drive the point home that search engine marketing was a no-brainer for every campaign. This was a traditional media agency dominated event,and I was glad to see that the message to include paid search in every plan was being spread outside the online community.

Although still a great medium, I’ve matured as an online marketer and I don’t instinctively add Paid Search for every plan, but rather brainstorm the entire digital media mix before (eventually) adding search advertising to the plan. And, although I still recommend that companies should almost always have a budget set aside for high converting branded terms, after running dozens of paid search campaigns, I’ve seen instances where paid search wasn’t the silver bullet that I once thought it was.

These are lean times for advertising budgets and marketing professionals have been tasked to be smarter with every dollar spent. A recent report on search engine marketing from [x+1] found that while organizations are investing in SEM despite the down economy, they have been unhappy to date with the performance. So, knowing this, would your business goals be better served by moving the budget on the poorer performing keywords/ad groups to different channels such as display, social, or email?

Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely love Paid Search. My colleagues know my tag line is “…next to in-house email lists, Paid Search has historically been the best ROI vehicle online.” But now is the time to raise the bar and get smarter by understanding the medium’s limitations and obstacles to positive performance.

In researching this topic, I posted a question to the LinkedIn search marketing audience and there were mini-debates, especially around reach and scale. I’m sure some in-house search teams or search-focused agencies will balk at this list, as it’s very easy to drink the Paid Search Kool-Aid. In fact, I’m positive of that. But, even if you don’t completely agree with all of the points below, maybe it will stir up some discussions within your teams on how you can be smarter with how you use the medium.

1. Predictive spending – The two things in this world that I have the least faith in are the existence of unicorns and Google’s Traffic Estimator. What’s the question that sends chills up every search marketer’s spine? “How much should we budget for search?” Especially for new campaigns, this can be a nightmare because the data always fluctuates. With most other media, you can budget months ahead of time. With search, it’s a hit or miss proposition. Budget too high and you end up bidding on keywords that aren’t ideal for your goals; budget too low and you could lose potential sales when your accounts cap out at noon everyday. Even accounts that I’ve run for years with a mountain of seasonal data can still surprise me with search volume, and when you consider the fact that most accounts aren’t stagnant and are constantly adding keywords, ad groups, new creative, etc, it can be a hard task to nail down search spend for a marketing manager that has to budget ahead for a fiscal year. Solution: Use as many data sources you can to try to figure out what the projected volume and click costs could be, but then set the expectation with your client or manager that it could be higher or lower. Search is a different animal- marketing managers need to know that we can’t plan to the dime – there always needs to be some wiggle room.
2. Reach/Lack of inventory – All Search, including Paid Search is a pull medium. Obviously, there are great benefits to this kind of unobtrusive advertising, but the downside is that you can’t get in front of people who don’t know to search for your keywords. Solution: Use other channels to promote your core terms – especially your proprietary terms which can have low competition (and low cost). I know that when we run large display campaigns, our clients see search volume spike on their terms.
3. Standing out in a crowd – I think we can agree that it’s hard for three line text ads to stick out on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) full of text. Compared to such dynamic creative such as full page ads, video ads, rich media expendables, etc, you have to rely on users to dig on the page to read your message. Solution: Study your competitors’ ads. If they all push price points, then talk about benefits. If they all mention “free”, you can talk value. Keep monitoring the landscape and make sure you stay ahead of the competition.
4. Complex products/services – 95 characters isn’t a lot when you’re trying to highlight the benefits of a hard-to-explain product or service. Think about something as complicated as a specific surgical procedure or some kind of advanced business training. A Rich Media ad can simulate a micro-site with videos, downloads, etc. and can really educate the user. Solution: Do your best to entice users to click the ad based on a single amazing benefit. For the advanced training example, something like “Earn More With This Special Degree” could be enough.
5. Brand Building – For online marketers, the term brand has become synonymous with any non-direct response creative such as awareness campaigns. When I talk about Brand Building, however, I mean the art of crafting the way consumers feel affinity to your company. Companies such as Nike, BMW, and Disney really excel at this marketing. It takes years of constant audience communication and careful sculpting of marketing creative to truly build a brand. Of course, Paid Search can bring users to your site where branding can occur, but the Paid Search ad itself does little to really achieve this goal. Solution: Integrated messaging. Even though you only have three lines, make sure your messaging is completely in-line with your other marketing efforts so that, at the very least, you can reinforce the main tagline or catch phrase.
6. Small budgets on high cost terms – A great example would be a local car dealership that can only spend $900 a month and wants to see their ads for “used car” all over Google’s sponsored listing. Frankly, with a $30/day budget, they would only get 3-4 clicks a day. Of course, the strategy would be to use longer tail and branded terms, but they’d be completely out of the “used car” bid race no matter how much they wanted to be in it. Solution: This is a hard one to overcome. Frankly, high competition in the marketplace has driven click costs up for top terms.
7. If the rest of the pieces aren’t in place – Paid Search programs are a great source of engaged traffic, but if you don’t have a good website, brand, product/service, lead generation program, etc, then it’s pretty much a waste of money. Solution: Get your act together! Before you go out and start a Paid Search program, make sure your website is setup well and tested for optimal usability. As well, do your research and make sure your message and price points are in line with your target demographic.
8. Building credibility – Users are skeptical enough of online advertising that a three line text ad is not going to really be able to completely bridge this gap. Luckily, recent data still shows that less savvy users still don’t completely realize that sponsored listings are different from the organic results. However, that is changing every day and users know that the SERP contains ads that are paid. Solution: Try to use “Official Site” creative when you can do so. This lets users know that they’re clicking to the real website, not some shady affiliate. This tactic has also shown to increase Click-thru Rates.
9. When SEO works - Of course, there’s tons of data out there that shows it’s the combination of both Paid Search and Organic Search together on the same page has the highest conversion rates and brand lift. However, if you pull the analytics reports and find out that your SEO is kicking butt, it would be counterintelligence to pay for the same keywords. Solution: Keep the Paid Search, but use it to direct users to a different page of your site than where the Organic Results are taking users. This could be a promo page, a lead generation page, etc.

All of these points are debatable. I’m sure some of you may even feel Paid Search is impervious to scrutiny. However, with click costs rising and with most marketing budgets being scrutinized more than ever, it’s good to know these hurdles are out there and how you might overcome them before they sink your account.

Ah, what a summer! The initial concept of this In the Trenches column was to provide the day-to-day search engine marketer with tips, tricks, and news to make them better at their jobs. I have been wanting to do this Microsoft Excel series for over a year, so I thank again my editors here at Search Engine Land for letting me get this done. Excel is such a huge component to all of our workdays that I thought it deserved this level of attention. Once again, my goal was not an Excel 101 for everyone, but rather highlight some advanced techniques for online marketers to be more effective and efficient when using the tool. Based on the great feedback I’ve received, I think I’ve been able to hit the mark.

But, if you’re going to social bookmark any of these posts, this final post is the one to tag. There’s a mini-guide to the previous five posts, a ranking scale of Excel ability, a twenty question skills test, as well as some final tips and tricks that I think you’re going to like. Let’s get started.

Excel for SEM Applications Mini-Guide

• Part 1 – Conditional formatting, Concatenation, Length Formula
• Part 2 – Select only visible cells, Macros, Create a Table of Contents, Set Print Area
• Part 3 – More Excel resources, Paste Special window, Protecting sheets, Custom Lists, VLookup
• Part 4 – General Excel efficiency tips, Named ranges, Secondary Chart Axis, Tab colors, Go to the next line in a cell, Print Headers on Every Page, Count days between days, Turn off hyperlinks, Excel shortcuts Cheat Sheet download
• Part 5 – Master Pivot Tables

Whew! I still have some cards up my sleeve but those posts should take any basic SEM Excel user to the next level.

Because you can engage with Excel for very simple tasks, I think that many people don’t have a good sense of just how much can be done with the tool. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had candidates interviewing for positions at my firm that rate their Excel skills at “above average” or “excellent” but cannot put together a simple pivot table. I don’t think they’re being dishonest with me, I really think that they think they’re an eight out of ten when in fact, they are an eight – just on a scale of thirty. In previous jobs, they’ve been able to use Excel very efficiently and perform all of the tasks required of them. However, that doesn’t mean they know Excel.

I’ve come up with a scale of what I think is a good set of Microsoft Excel skills for the digital marketing world. Obviously, for Accountants or Computer Programmers, this would be a different scale. However, for online marketers, here’s mine:

• Rookie – can navigate through Excel, save and print documents, do basic calculations, able to use the SUM tool.
• Can Get Tasks Done – knows how to build basic charts, use a few common formulas, uses the “left hand” keyboard shortcuts (copy, paste, select all, etc), can format a spreadsheet to match previous ones if given enough time (i.e. borders, cell shading, etc).
• Advanced User – easily flies through all common Excel tasks, can import data from various formats with ease, utilizes time-savers (such as keyboard shortcuts, conditional formatting and names ranges), can follow the wizard steps for most formulas, builds nice charts/graphs, Pivot Tables are a snap.
• Expert – is the “go-to guy/girl” for team Excel questions, builds Macros to automate repetitive tasks, tweaks “hidden features” to provide more functionality, knows basic integration between Excel and other Office software, has dabbled in the Virtual Basic environment.
• Excel Master – rarely is unable to perform even the most advanced/expert tasks, builds 3rd party applications using the Excel environment, IT level understanding of how Excel can integrate with other systems, generates custom solutions for important tasks, feels Excel is a lightweight program for non-database administrators (similar to how a NASCAR mechanic might view a ten-speed bike).

The Online Marketer’s Excel Skills Test

I have been wanting to put together a twenty question test for awhile to have on hand to check the Excel levels of new hire candidates at my company. But putting this together was harder than I ever thought. I wanted to make sure I had a good mix of easy and hard questions to get a good gauge of the candidate’s skill set, but because just about every Excel operation can be done in several ways, it took me several tries to get the questions worded correctly.

This test should take someone no longer than five minutes  — any longer than that, and they just don’t know the answers. My scale would be: 0-7 correct – needs more training, 8-12 they know the basics, 12-15 they’re pretty good, 15 to 20 they can handle themselves pretty well in Excel.

I’ve made a clean copy of this test here if you’d like to print it out. The answer key is at the end of this post.

1. What is the keyboard shortcut for Paste?
2. In what mode of Excel allows you to look at how a document is going to look when printed before actually printing.
3. Which tool allows you to copy the formatting of one cell to another?
4. Which formula is being described in the following Excel definition? “The _________ function joins up to 255 text strings into one text string. The joined items can be text, numbers, cell references, or a combination of those items.”
5. What are two ways in which you can select all of the cells in a spreadsheet?”
6. True or False? You can set Excel to print the gridlines of the cells without having to create borders around each cell.
7. How do you copy and paste just the value of one cell which is a formula into another cell?
8. To keep an area of a worksheet visible while you scroll to another area of the worksheet, you can lock specific rows or columns in one area by using which Excel feature?
9. Which formula is being described in the following Excel definition: “You can use the ________ function to search the first column of a range of cells, and then return a value from any cell on the same row of the range.
10. Right click any cell and choose which feature to change the cell’s shading, borders, font, etc?
11. True or False? It is possible to insert an image into a spreadsheet?
12. What is the shortcut for entering the current date into a cell?
13. How do you quickly change a column width to fit the contents?
14. True or False? By default, when the source data table of a pivot table is altered, those changes automatically are updated in the pivot table.
15. In the formula, =SUM(F5+G8), what do you need to do to the formula so when you drag it down, the first value to be summed is still F5?
16. What feature in Excel allows helps you autoformat cells based on rules? For example, “change the shading of all cells to red with values greater than 50″.
17. True or False? A macro allows you to look very close into a cell.
18. Which feature in Excel allows you to displays only the rows that meet criteria that you specify and hides rows that you do not want displayed?
19. Which feature allows you to reset the chosen range in alphabetical order?
20. True or False? If you use a password to protect a worksheet, you have to enter it and then re-enter it for verification.

A couple of final tricks before the Answer Key…

Sliders

You can use sliders to control values in cells. This is one of my favorite ways to trick out my spreadsheets because it allows me to quickly play with the numbers and see how other formulas are affected. Check out the example below:

Now I slide up the budget to $71,698…

Because I have the slider connected to the Total Budget cell, I’m able to see how my budget allocation changes as the budget goes up or down. There are pretty much unlimited uses for sliders in a spreadsheet. It’s very helpful in client presentations to show them, for example, how many more clicks they’ll get if they add more budget or how many conversions they’ll lose by not dropping their Average CPCs.

How To:

Basically, you’re just going to create a slider, connect it to a cell, and choose a Min and Max range for the control. First, you have to have the Developer ribbon visible, which is not a default Excel feature. If you don’t see Developer at the top of Excel, click the Microsoft icon –> Excel Options and make sure the box is checked next to Show Developer Tag in the Ribbon. Go to the Developer ribbon and click Insert. A mini-window will pop up with various controls you can add. Choose Scroll Bar under the ActiveX menu (it’s the last one in the third row). Your mouse will change to a T shape, which you can then draw your scroll bar. Don’t worry how it looks right now, because you can  change the shape later by selecting it and dragging any of the corners. The next part is connecting it to a cell. Click on the slider to select, and then click Properties at the top. The only properties you need to deal with are Linked Cell (which cell the slider is controlling), and the Min and Max Values. Min Value would be what the cell would show if the slider is at the far left, Max would be at the far right.

Creating Groups in Excel

On occasion, you may want to be able to quickly hide or unhide rows of data. For example, if you have all of your stats listed by account, campaign, ad group, etc, you can use Groupings to just look at the campaign level or just look at the ad group level. I often use groups when I’m outlining my project plans with each phase at it’s own group. That way I can look at each one separately without the clutter of the rest of the information displayed.

How To:

It’s very simple. Just choose the rows you want to group and click Group on the Data ribbon. You can Ungroup them at anytime. Here’s a visualization from the Excel help files on how this works:

Create a drop down menu of choices for a cell

To make data entry easier, or to limit entries to certain items that you define, you can create a drop-down list of valid entries that is compiled from cells elsewhere in the workbook. When you create a drop-down list for a cell, it displays an arrow in that cell. To enter information in that cell, click the arrow, and then click the entry that you want.

How To:

Create a list (best to use a separate tab which you can hide later) and name that list by selecting it, then Right Click -> Name a Range. Then, select the cell(s) you want to create this drop down list, go to the Data ribbon, in the Data Tools group, click Data Validation. Then, Settings -> Allow -> List and enter the equals sign and the name that you defined for your list in the Source box. Make sure that the In-cell dropdown check box is selected. (Note – you can also choose how Excel will handle situations when users try to input a value that isn’t in the drop down box.

The SEM Excel Skills Test – Answer Key

1. Ctrl + V 2. Print Preview 3. Paintbrush tool 4. Concatenate 5. Ctrl + A, Click the top left button of the sheet 6. True 7. Paste Values 8. Freeze panes (also acceptable, splitting panes) 9. Vlookup 10. Format Cells 11. True 12. Ctrl + ; (also acceptable “=today()”) 13. Double click the line between two column headers 14. False (you have to set that option) 15. Change F5 to $F$5 (also acceptable, name F5 something and use that in place of “F5″ in the formula) 16. Conditional Formatting 17. False 18. Filter 19. Sort 20. True

Thanks for reading. No more on Excel for now…

In the previous posts of this Excel series for Search Engine Marketers (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), I’ve shared various tips and tricks for the tool. However, today’s post is just going to cover pivot tables, as I feel they are such an important piece for online marketers to not just grasp, but master. Excel itself can be intimidating and pivot tables are doubly so. I hope this will be the definitive guide to pivot tables for anyone in this industry who has yet to feel one hundred percent comfortable with this crucial Excel feature.

By the time you finish this post, you will be a Pivot Table champ (or your money back! LOL.)

The first thing to understand is why you would need to put your data in a pivot table. Well, not all data needs to be pivoted. However, when you have a table of data that you’re trying to analyze, pivot tables allow you to quickly extract meaningful information by easily changing columns, rows, and filters to get those useful insights.

Here’s an example Google Adwords Placement/Keyword Performance Report for a fictitious company called MapWiseTech:

Ten questions you might want the data to answer could include:

• What keywords get the most impressions?
• Which engines get the most clicks?
• Which campaigns generated the most conversions?
• Which ad groups had the highest click-thru Rates?
• What was my average position for my top spending terms?
• Which keywords spent more than $100?
• Which keywords in my General Terms campaign spent the most yet converting the least?
• Which ad group had the lowest Cost Per Conversion?
• How did Search perform vs. Content?
• How did different match types affect my performance?

These are all very common questions that any paid search professional has to answer in order to optimize their accounts. For those of you who aren’t consistently using pivot tables to collect this data, how long would you say it would take you to answer these questions for your accounts? Let me tell you, with pivot tables, these ten questions will take you less than five minutes to answer. That’s right. Less than five minutes.

Are you ready to be a pivot table convert now?

Building a pivot table

Converting a regular data table into a pivot table is much easier than you think. Simply highlight your table, then go to the INSERT ribbon and choose Pivot Table. A Create PivotTable dialogue box will open to confirm your data source and where you want the Pivot Table generated. The default option is in a New Worksheet, but you can choose the Existing Worksheet option and pick a cell to begin the insertion.

That’s it. You now have a pivot table from that source data. From here, you just have to choose your columns, rows, and values from the Field List. Notice you now have two extra ribbons for PivotTable tools, Options and Design as well.

Drag/Drop fields to build reports you want to see

The first question was, “What Keywords get the most impressions?”. This is child’s play in a pivot table. Drag the Placement/Keyword field into the Row Labels box and the Impressions field into the Values box. Then, drag the Ad Distribution field into the Report Filter box. The pivot table is built. The last thing to do is to choose Search Only from the report filter (so you see keywords, not placements) and click on the first impression value listed and click the ZA down arrow to sort from largest to smallest.

I know you can say that you could have done the same thing by filtering the source table and sorting the impression column. However, let’s go to the next level. What if you wanted to find out which ad groups had the most impressions? An account with even just 10-30 campaigns might easily have 100-200 ad groups. You could tell me that you could go back to Adwords and pull an ad group report and then filter and sort. But that would take time. With the current pivot table, just drag the Ad Group field into the Row Labels box and you have the data you need.

It’s important that you understand there is always a lot of experimentation in pivot tables. Even for advanced users, trying out new ways to drag and drop fields into the various row, column, filter, and value boxes provide infinite ways to look at the data. It’s important for you not to get frustrated while experimenting with your pivot table. It will take time to learn, but you may actually uncover interesting ways of looking at the data that you’ve may have never considered. So, go ahead, drag and drop fields until you find the data you need.

Collapse/Expand fields

When you have multiple fields in the Row Labels box, they will be grouped in the order which they appear. So, in the example below, I now have both the Ad Groups and Keywords showing. If I just want to see everything at the ad group level, I just select one of the ad group cells and click Collapse Entire Field from the Options ribbon.

Normally, I may have a Row Label configuration such as: Engine -> Campaign -> Ad Group -> Keyword. By using Collapse and Expand, you can quickly go in and out of granularity. Each time you do, the Grand Totals will change based on what’s selected.

Why you should use the most granular data you can find

Understand that Pivot Tables will aggregate values if there’s a common connection between the data you’re looking at. For example, the pivot table knows that these 100 keywords are all in the “Branded Terms” ad group. So, even though the source table is at the keyword level, they all have “Branded Terms” listed as the ad group. The pivot table will recognize that and aggregate them together. Therefore, a best practice is always to get the most granular data into a pivot table as it will be able to calculate the higher level groups as long as these connections exist. You can even pull the source data at the day level and group them into weeks, months, and years so you can see that information quickly in your pivot table.

Calculated Fields

There’s an inherent problem when you have calculated metrics already in a source table. For SEM, the two big ones are CPC and Click Thru Rate. You can’t sum up these metrics together in a pivot table, right? So, you have to use Excel’s CalculatedFields feature.

HOW TO: Options ribbon -> Formulas -> Calculated Fields. A dialogue box opens up where you can name a new field and then create the formula to generate this new calculated field. In the example below, I’ve created a new CTR field with the formula Clicks/Impressions. You can type the formula in or just double click each field to add it to the formula box. Now you’ve got a CTR field that’s being generated at every level of the pivot table.

Naming trick: You cannot duplicate names in a pivot table. Since “CTR” already exists, my trick is to just add a single “invisible” space after each name. That way, it fools the system into thinking it’s a unique name.

Filtering

If you know how to use filters already in Excel, you can apply the same techniques to pivot tables. Click the little box with the filter icon in any row or report filter cell and you can filter the following four ways:

• Report Filter. This is for filtering the entire pivot table, not just individual columns. You can drag/drop any field from the Field List into the Report Filter box. Using a combination of the Report Filters and the filters below can really help you zoom in on data. For example, you could use the report filter to choose a certain month and engine and then the Standard Filter to pick just those values you want to analyze.
• Standard Filter. Every value in that group will appear in the lower box. You can chose to Select All or individually check the boxes next to the values you want to see. A quick tip – If you want to exclude only a few values, use Select All and uncheck the ones you don’t want. If you only want to see a few of the values, click Select All until all of the boxes become unchecked. Then it’s easier to select those few.
• Label Filter. This is for filtering text. You choose the standard excel options such as contains, begins with, etc.
• Value Filter. This is for filtering numbers. Once again, you have the standard Excel options such as greater than, Top 10, etc

Formatting the table

You can format each field as you would with any column in Excel. The easiest way to choose the column and click Field Settings in the right click menu or the Options ribbon. From there you can choose whether you want the data to be summed, Counted, Averaged, etc. You can change the number format to percentage, dollar, include decimal levels or commas, as well. You can also explore the Design ribbon for setting a color scheme, banded rows/columns, when you want subtotals to appear, etc. Basically, all of the same style options you have for regular tables in Excel can be applied to pivot tables.

Pivot Charts

Pivot charts are just charts based on pivot tables. If you begin with the source data, you can choose to insert a PivotChart instead of a PivotTable. All this does is build a pivot table next to your chart. Pivot around the table to affect the chart. As well, you can simply create a chart from an existing pivot table (as you would with any data table in Excel).

Quick Tip: Select any cell in a pivot table and click F11. It will instantly create a column chart for you.

Miscellaneous Pivot Table stuff

• You can make multiple pivot tables from the same source table.
• When the source table changes, you can import that new data into the pivot by choosing Refresh from the Options ribbon.
• “Blanks” may appear in rows as data. Easily filter them out by clicking the down arrow on any header and un-checking the box next to that value.
• Move row labels up or down with Right Click -> Move. This can be helpful if you want to a row to appear at the top even if it’s not alphabetically going to happen if you sort. You can also just grab the row labels themselves and put them in the order you’d like (thanks for that, Sean!)
• If you pivot a table into data you want to copy and paste, make sure to Paste Special -> Values or the entire pivot will be inserted.
• You can make multiple pivot charts from the same pivot table. However, every time you manipulate the data, the chart will change. The best practice is to make a new pivot table to be the source data for each pivot chart.

Final Pivot Table trick: the Average Position calculated field

Unlike CTR or CPC, you can’t create a simple formula for the Average Position calculated field. Since each keyword has its own Average Position value, if you were to simple create an average to see it at a higher level such as the Ad Group or Campaign level, your numbers would be skewed. Why? Because you have to take into account the weight that each keyword has on it’s grouping level. In a simple example, if you had two keywords, one with Avg Pos of 1 and the other at 3, a simple formula would tell you their average position overall was 2. However, what if I was to tell you the first keyword had 100 impressions and the second keyword had 1,000,000? The average position for that group would be more like 2.99 than 2, right? So, how do you do get around this in a pivot table?

The actual formula is (keyword 1 Avg Pos x impressions)+(keyword 2 Avg Pos x impression) etc / Total Impressions. So, to start, you have to create a new column in the source table called AvgPosXImpsFormula. Then, create the formula of Avg Position x Impressions. Drag that formula down for the entire report. Then, copy and paste values that same column so you have a column of just the values, not the formulas. I call this column just AvgPosXImps. Then, when you convert this source table into a pivot table, you can create a calculated field with AvgPosxImps/Impressions. That will create the proper metric for any level you want to see the average position (i.e. campaign level, engine level, ad group level, etc).

I’ll be wrapping up this Excel series in my next post with some final tips/tricks and a Online Marketer Excel Skills test–20 questions to see just how good you and your crew are at the tool.

I hope the previous post of this series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) have served you well. My goal was never to create an Excel manual for everyone, but rather to highlight specific tips and tricks to help out the search engine marketer who is toiling away in the tool hours every day.

Even though most SEM pros use Excel, just about everyone uses it differently. I’m sure accountants use it much differently than I do. Either from keyboard shortcuts, ribbon icons, or the right click menu – there’s probably two or three ways to perform any task, but it’s the right combination that can turn an average Exceler into a power user.

Most of the time, I find my Excel knowledge grows out of need. I’ll be in the middle of a task and think to myself, “There has to be a better way to do this.” I remember the first time I learned how to use the Paintbrush tool to copy formatting from one cell to another. That feature alone has probably saved me days of work throughout my career.

Here are some general efficiency suggestions when working with Excel:

• Use keyboard shortcuts. They are a huge time saver. At the end of this post is a printable cheat sheet of the best ones.
• Constantly save your work. This is a good idea for working with any software, but Excel can sometimes freeze up with larger documents–especially if you’re using an older computer or working on many spreadsheets at the same time.
• Freeze panes. Use the Freeze Panes feature to keep important column or row headers on the screen when you scroll down or right.
• Hide anything you don’t need. If you’re just working on a few columns, go head and hide the rest of the data. It keeps the clutter down and you can work more streamlined this way.
• Format your document at the end. Don’t waste time stopping in the middle of a spreadsheet to get your fonts and colors se. You may end up changing them later and then you have double the work.
• Use templates when possible. If you are constantly creating the same kind of report on a reoccurring basis, try building a “blank version” of it and saving it as one of your custom templates. That way, instead of starting from scratch, you already have the format ready to go.

This week’s tips:

Named Ranges – MS Excel definition – A name that represents a cell, range of cells, formula, or constant value.

This is really one of the most valuable tips when using Excel. When you name a cell or group of cells, you can then easily use them anywhere in the workbook interchangeably with the actual cell reference(s). So, for example, say you’re working with your February SEM Budget and you’ll be referring to that cell often in the document in manys table. You can name that value FebBudg and make formulas such as “=FebBudg/28″ to get the daily amount. Or if you get word that your budget might be going up by 25%, you can simply use “=FebBudg+(FebBudg*.25)” to see what it would be.

It might seem like a hassle in these simple examples, but once you start naming ranges, you’ll see how efficient you can be. Imagine: “=YearBudget-(FebBudg+MarchBudg)” versus having to go and figure out what cells those values are in. In this case, the formula will make more sense. Imagine looking at the same formula but as “=K12-(C3+B4)”…you wouldn’t have any idea from a glance what it is.

Another great feature as you start typing in the named range, Excel will autosuggest the range as you type. In the example above, simply typing “Fe” would bring up “FebBudg” in a drop down menu which you can quickly choose.

HOW TO: Right above columns A & B is the Name Box on the formula bar. All you have to do is select your cell(s) and type in whatever you want into that name box. Just remember it can’t contain spaces or weird characters.

Secondary Axis on Charts

Have you ever seen charts with two data sets and it’s confusing because the verticle axis only shows one set? You can implement a secondary axis on the cart for the second data set.

See the example above. On the left chart, it’s hard to really know the values of the blue line (Dollar). On the right chart, now that the secondary axis has been enabled, the values are easy to see.

HOW TO: Select the data on the chart you want to plot and you’ll now see the Chart Tools tabs at the top of Excel. On the Format tab, in the Current Selection group, click Format Selection. Then, on the Series Options tab, under Plot Series On, click Secondary Axis and then click Close.

Here are some more quickie tips:

Tab color

You can change the color of tabs by simply right clicking the tab and then choosing TAB COLOR. This is helpful when you have a lot of tabs and want to organize them.

Go to the next line in the same cell

One of my favorite shortcuts that I find many people don’t know is Alt+Enter inside a cell. This lets you “go to the next line” inside a cell. It’s very useful when making text notes in an Excel doc so that you don’t have to use up many rows for one paragraph.

Print Column/Row Headers on every page

Ever print a multipage Excel doc and you don’t know what Column F is on page 4? You can make sure those row or header columns are reprinted on every sheet by choosing PRINT under HEADINGS on the PAGE LAYOUT ribbon.

Countdays between dates

This is such a common task for search engine marketers. Whether you need to calculate Daily Budget or Clicks per Day, Excel has an easy formula to count the days between two dates. Just put in the date (including year in case of leap days) and in a separate cell just simple subtract the later date from the earlier date.

Turn off annoying hyperlinks

When you enter a Web address into an Excel cell, it automatically converts to a hyperlink when you leave the cell. This can be extremely annoying as its very common to accidently click these links which immediately pops open your browser and interrupts your work.

To turn off auto-hyperlinking, click the MS Logo at the top left, Click EXCEL OPTIONS and go to PROOFING. Uncheck the Internet and Network Paths With Hyperlinks check box.

Also, to remove all hyperlinks already on a worksheet, see these instructions to create a simple macro.

Free Excel cheat sheet: keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard Shortcuts are absolutely crucial to being proficient and efficient with Microsoft Excel. I really can’t urge all of you strong enough to master as many shortcuts as you can. From flipping through worksheets to inserting columns or even spell checking, the seconds gained from using shortcuts not only adds up to hours over the course of the year, but also doesn’t wear you out on things you can be doing in half the time.

When using any Microsoft Office product such as Excel, you should have one hand on the keyboard’s left side and one hand on the mouse (see above). The reason why the left side is so important is that by using your pinky on CTRL, your other fingers can reach about 75% of the most important keyboard shortcuts you will use all of the time. For example, CTRL + Z is undo, CTRL + X is Cut, CTRL + B is Bold, CTRL + A is Select All, etc. This is not only important for Excel, but for Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc. Master the left keyboard zone and you will be flying through every Office product like a pro.

I was going to put together an Excel keyboard shortcut cheat sheet, but quick search on Google found several great ones including this one from Cogniview that is ready to be printed and cut out for your cubicle.

It has all of the basics from Opening a New File, Saivng a File, etc, but here are some ones I think are extra-special that I’d like to share:

• Next Sheet – Ctrl+PageDown
• Previous Sheet – Ctrl+PageUp
• Goto – Ctrl+G
• Delete Column or Row – Ctrl+K
• Insert Today’s Date – Ctrl+SemiColon
• Insert a New Worksheet – SHIFT+F11
• Extend Selection to the Next Blank Cell- Shift+Ctrl+Arrow(any direction). You want to select all the cells of a table? Go the to top left cell and use this shortcut right and then down.
• Quick AutoSum- in the cell below a group values use Alt+Equals Sign
• Edit Data in a Cell – You an use the formula bar, but F2 is faster…

Next time, Pivot Tables for Search Engine Marketers…