Optimizing Keywords and Negatives is a task I recommend to my clients that they do regularly. In this How To, I will include some real-world experience along with the basics of how to use the AdWords Search Term View to optimize keywords and negatives. What Is Search Terms View? The AdWords Search Terms View shows us the performance metrics on the Search Terms that matched against our Keywords (more detail on the difference between Search Terms and Keywords is coming up later in this post). Advertisers can use this data to optimize the Keywords and Negatives in their account. Optimization [...]

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

Some of you may not have any issues with other advertisers infringing on your trademarked terms via search marketing… count yourselves lucky. For those of us who have been left by the search engines to self-police these problems, AdGooroo’s Trademark Insight tool can turn a laborious challenge into a fairly efficient task. AdGooroo is well known in the SEM industry for their SEM Insights and Natural Search Insights products that help marketers get a very accurate view of paid and organic listings on Search Engine Results Pages. In full disclosure, I’ve been using AdGooroo since 200 [...]

Related Topics: Search Marketing Toolbox

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

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | How To: SEM | Microsoft: adCenter | Search Marketing Toolbox

We use a number of PPC shop tools in our everyday work as PPC campaign managers; today, I'd like to focus on the PPC Permutator. We use the PPC permutator to help us rapidly expand keyword lists from simple ideas. Let’s work with an example. Consider the following keyword ideas related to a hypothetical bicycle shop. Using the tool, we take three simple ideas and generate 48 keywords. Terrain: mountain, road, touring Bike Synonyms: bike, bicycle, cycle Product: tire, tires, tube, tubes We enter them in the tool, like this: Push-Button List Generation The tool built an ext [...]

Related Topics: Search Marketing Toolbox | SEM Tools: PPC

For those of you who read my columns regularly, you know that I’m fascinated with watching the paid search industry develop. Having been one of the lucky ones who fell into this marketing niche early on, I’ve seen it grow from a little seedling into a giant oak. In fact, one of the major draws for me to SEM was that it was a gold rush to new territory. Appealing to my Gen X trailblazer sensibility was the fact that there weren’t a bunch of stodgy gray-hairs telling us how it was supposed to be as many of my peers were discovering in their established career paths. No hard rules. No [...]

Related Topics: Search Marketing Toolbox