SMX Overtime: Here’s how to take control of your account ad groups and search terms
PPC veteran and SMX speaker, Brad Geddes, explains how to adapt your approach to search terms and conversions after Google's exact match update last year.
Brad Geddes has been involved in PPC since 1998. He is a co-founder of AdAlysis, an ad testing & recommendation platform, and a member of the programming team for SMX events. Brad is the author of Advanced Google AdWords, the most advanced book ever written about Google's advertising program. Brad has worked with companies who manage tens of thousands of small PPC accounts and other companies who spend millions on marketing each month. His experience ranges from owning his own agency, to managing a boutique agency, to overseeing programs that were official resellers of Google and Microsoft. Some brands he has worked with include: Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Thomson Reuters, YP.com, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Salesforce. One of his trademarks has been demystifying the complicated aspects of SEM. Not one to hold secrets, Brad prefers to educate his readers on the various aspects of crafting successful marketing campaigns to ensure the success for all parties involved.
Reverse-engineering AdWords Quality Score factors
Google recently launched a new version of the AdWords API that allows users to download Quality Score information at scale, so contributor Brad Geddes used this information to break down the weight of each factor impacting Quality Score.
Should You Create Ad Group Sitelinks in Enhanced Campaigns?
One of the nicest things about AdWords Enhanced Campaigns is that you can now control sitelinks at the campaign or the ad group level. From a feature standpoint, this sounds great. However, when you start considering the execution phase of creating sitelinks for every single ad group, the task can suddenly seem quite daunting. First, […]
How To Conduct Ad Tests In Enhanced Campaigns
Enhanced campaigns have brought about many changes to AdWords. One of the biggest changes yet to be discussed is the fact that your ad testing methods will have to change. One of the “features” of enhanced campaigns is that your campaign can now run on desktops and mobile devices with different CPCs that are controlled […]
4 Simple Lessons To Make CPA Bidding Work For You
I’m a huge fan of Google’s CPA bidding system. Setting bids is necessary; but merely setting them only leads to short-term progress. Your bidding work is only useful until the data changes, and then you have to set bids again. The maxim, “your data are only good until the data changes,” can be applied to […]
Geographic Targeting In An Enhanced Campaign World
AdWords enhanced campaigns will force many advertisers to change their campaign structures. One of the benefits that have been touted for enhanced campaigns is that you will need fewer campaigns, thus making AdWords easier to manage. For mobile targeting, this is true, as the ability to target mobile devices is now gone. However, for the targeting features […]
Should You Upgrade To AdWords Enhanced Campaigns?
Google made a huge splash last week when they announced Enhanced Campaigns. There have been both positive and negative reactions to the announcement. If you haven’t heard about the changes, here is the quick, bullet-point list: The ability to set mobile-specific bids will be removed (you can do bid adjustments at the campaign level) The […]
4 Ways To Determine Your Starting Bids
While ad testing, proper account setup and conversion tracking are necessary for a successful account, you can’t get any data without a competitive bid. If your bid is too low, then your ad never shows. If your bids are too high, then you can quickly lose a lot of money; and if you are new […]
Case Study: Quadrupling A Small Account’s Conversions In Just 90 Days
CPA Bidding in Google AdWords allows you to set a CPA bid, and then Google will do all the bidding for you. When it works, its fantastic, as you don’t have to spend all day trying to set bids inside the account. Instead, you can focus you time on more permanent improvements, such as testing […]
Why You Must Choose A Winning PPC Ad
One of the worst ways of testing ads is: Writing new ads Turning on one of Google’s ‘optimize’ features Letting Google serve your ads Writing new ads Let Google serve your ads repeat… However, I find this is a very common testing method. There’s a big problem with this method: there’s no delete. Just by […]
How To Easily Manage & Test Millions Of Ads
You must test ads to make your paid search account grow and thrive. That fact is no longer debatable – it is just a best practice fact. Ad testing in small accounts is very easy as there are not thousands of ad group or hundreds of thousands of ads to track. However, in large accounts, […]
5 Most Common Ways PPC Accounts Get Out Of Shape
When you first build a PPC account, it’s usually well structured, lean, doesn’t have any fat, and hopefully performs well. As accounts grow, offers change, websites change CMSs, accounts start to get out of shape. AdWords is now over ten years old. Many accounts have a decade of changes and additions which have grown out […]
How To Find Success With Google’s Display Network
Google’s display network is massive, encompassing more than 4 billion daily page views, 700 million monthly users, and reaching more than 80% of the online audience. Yet, with all this inventory, many marketers fail with display marketing. The major reasons are they either are trying to reach the incorrect goals or they don’t understand how […]
How To Manage & Measure Local PPC Accounts
In my last column, I looked at some of the differences between small and large accounts as the best practices vary for each. In this column, we’re going to specifically focus on one of the most common small accounts: local accounts; and examine some of the best practices for this type of small account. A […]
How Best Practices Differ In Small & Large Accounts
There are a lot of great articles written about paid search and best practices. However, almost all these articles ignore one important aspect of paid search: account size. For instance, it is a best practice to bid at the keyword level, and every large account should be doing that on most of their keywords. However, […]
Ad Testing: Are You Using The Wrong Success Metrics?
Everyone knows you should test ads – that’s not debatable anymore. However, what is debatable is which of the ads you are testing is actually the best ad. I recently polled a large group of marketers and asked them of these ads, which one performed the best: Take a moment to decide which you think […]
8 Features Advertisers Really Need From Google AdWords
Google AdWords has seen a flurry of releases recently. Some have been good (Display Campaign Optimizer) and others bad (rotate changes) for advertisers. Many of these features are items Google wants to see as they help increase their bottom line or make it very easy to advertise. However, these new features are not necessarily what […]
The Who, When & Why Of PPC Account Audits
Auditing your PPC accounts on a regular basis is something every company should be doing. Performing an audit lets you step outside of your normal day-to-day activities within an account to reevaluate the big picture and see where large opportunities may lie. Normally, when you hear about a company doing a PPC audit, it’s a […]
4 Pieces Of PPC Conventional Wisdom You Should Possibly Ignore
Best practices are called such because in most cases they work. In the PPC world, they are a set of processes or layouts for which conventional wisdom has concluded they are the best method for creating or managing accounts and landing pages. Conventional wisdom is an idea that is widely accepted because it is usually […]
How To Run Your PPC Accounts Like A Project
Managing PPC accounts can be overwhelming. There is so much to-do, and no one ever has enough time. This leads most people to just make huge todo lists of items they either should be doing, or want to eventually do inside their account. The problem with to-do lists is that they are easy to ignore. […]
8 Quick Ways to Increase Your AdWords CTR
There are times you just want to increase your click-through rates. You might need to raise it to help Quality Scores, increase traffic, or gain visibility for a new product. Often by just raising click-through rates, you might not be raising your conversion rate. You can even decrease your conversion rates with ads. However, we’re […]
How Savvy Is Your AdWords Account? 7 Areas To Audit
When you do AdWords account audits, you need to go beyond the data to see how savvy the AdWords account is overall. If the account is well put together, then the account manager generally knows what they are doing and you will end up talking quite a bit about the data and the account’s strategy. […]
Remarketing Strategies For The Holiday Season
Let’s face it – people just go crazy during the holidays. Your CPCs will increase, but so will your click-through-rates, and your cost per action should even go down even through your CPCs have increased. It’s an insane time full of people who want to find deals. Marketers are willing to oblige and throw offers […]
Are You Creeping Out Your Customers With Remarketing?
I was recently talking to a group of consumers (not search marketers) who had some very negative perceptions about a handful of brands. In some cases, they used to be a fan of the brand, or at a minimum would continue buying from that brand. In other cases, they had never purchased from the brand […]
How To Save Money On AdWords Placements With Google Analytics
Google’s display network can bring you tremendous amounts of clicks and conversions if used correctly. If it is not used correctly, you can quickly spend mass amounts of money and have nothing to show for it. A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on how to manage the display network so you can […]
3 Ways PPC Can Improve Your Organic Results Through Testing
Organic search can be an excellent traffic stream that helps your website increase its visibility, find new customers, and ultimately be a nice source of revenue for your company. However, organic traffic has some drawbacks: You can’t easily test landing pages, headlines, and templates You can’t get rapid feedback You don’t get traffic on certain […]
What PPC Practitioners Should Know About Robots.txt Files
Search engines use a computer program known as a bot to crawl and index the Web. A robots.txt file is an instruction manual that tells a bot what can and cannot be crawled on your site. An improperly configured robots.txt file can: Lower your quality scores Cause your ads not to be approved Lower your […]
Should You Bid On A Keyword If You Rank Organically For That Term?
Over the past several years, I have done numerous case studies with companies looking at the differences in their paid traffic when they also rank organically for a term. In this column, I’m going to share some of that data and walk you through some simple calculations you can do to see if you should […]
The One Minute Paid Search Account Diagnosis
Every PPC manager wants to know how to increase their exposure, especially if they feel there aren’t any new keywords they wish to add. There is a simple way to determine how to increase an account’s exposure that can be accomplished in less than a minute. Generally speaking, when looking to increase your exposure, you […]
3 Ways Topic Targeting Can Improve Your Display Advertising
Google AdWords has a feature known as topic targeting. This feature allows you to target topics and not necessarily placements or keywords across the Google Display Network. If you just use topic targeting, you will usually receive a lot of impressions; but not necessarily a lot of conversions. It is fantastic for reaching a large […]
Should Your Paid Search Account Care About Bounce Rates?
Most companies measure paid search based upon revenue targets, ROI goals, and conversion rates. Metrics such as bounce rates are generally left for the web design team to figure out, or the paid search term to obsess about without any clear strategy. In this column, we will examine bounce rates and put them in the […]
3 Simple Strategies For Organizing Your Match Types
When you have two or more keywords that can be triggered in your AdWords account from a search query, Google tries to show the most restrictive option. The constraints go beyond just match type to include geography, time of day, etc. However, Google does not always show exact match over phrase match and phrase match […]
Step-by-Step Instructions For Testing Low Volume Ad Copy
Ad copy testing is essential for anyone running a paid search account. Testing ad copy in accounts in high traffic accounts is fairly easy, as you can add new ad copies to existing ad groups, wait, and then examine the metrics. However, in low volume accounts, testing is not nearly as easy, as it could […]
6 Tactics That May Put You At Risk Of Being Banned From AdWords
Every few months, there is an outcry from advertisers because they received the dreaded notification email from Google – their accounts were banned. Some accounts eventually get reinstated, some companies are never allowed to advertise on Google again. There are several reasons AdWords accounts may get banned; however, most accounts are banned for one of […]
The Top 10 Paid Search Features You Might Have Missed In 2010
At the beginning of each new year, our eyes shift from looking backwards at what we should be doing to exploring new prospects that will arise. It is easy in January to put the previous year behind you and gaze to the future. However, if you have not taken advantage of past opportunities, your future […]
Is Google Changing Quality Score Rules Again?
In the past few months, two significant issues have been messing with AdWords quality scores—or at least with how many of us perceive quality scores. Google has developed several bugs in how it displays quality score. Keywords with low quality scores are acting like keywords with high quality scores. Google Quality Score Display Bugs Google’s […]
Priceless Keyword Research Data You Already Have – But Never Use
It is easy to lose sight of your customers when doing keyword research by relying on tools. These tools are not going to spend money with your company; tools just show you the most popular phrases regardless if your customer’s actually use these words or not. One of the best sources for keyword research is […]
How To Navigate Google’s New AdWords Reports And Avoid Losing Valuable Data
Google has made dramatic changes to their AdWords reporting infrastructure. The old reporting system is being retired, and users are being forced to pull reports from the interface. This change has left many unable to find their reports, or know how to extract data from AdWords. In this post, I’ll walk through how to pull […]
How Many Google Privacy Policies Are You Violating?
If you're a Google advertiser, or use Google Analytics, you may be inadvertently violating some of their privacy policies. When I examined more than 200 sites I found that more than 90% were violating at least one Google privacy policy. Are you?
Google’s New Forced Transparency: Is Your Agency Ready?
Google is making changes that require agencies to be more "transparent" in their reports to advertisers. But will this change benefit advertisers—or is it a move by Google to build its own brand and assure customer loyalty? The answers aren't entirely... "transparent."