Cameron Gibbs

Today I was calling my brothers and sisters to try to convince them to move to utah.  Though I don’t think I’ve convinced any of them it got me thinking why Heidi and I are content with living in utah.  Here’s a few reasons…

• relatively low cost of housing (though house values have increased significantly over the last couple of years)
• low crime rate
• scenery (wasatch front) — I’ve come to love the view of the nearby mountains
• “greatest snow on earth” for you snowboarders and skiers
• good people — like everywhere else, you may run into a bad apple or two but most everyone seems friendly here
• cutting-edge technology — the local government does a good job of promoting/encouraging new technology such as fiber optic cable infrastructure (internet, cable, phone, etc) and both utah and the salt lake counties are full of hi-tech business.
• four seasons — to be honest, I’d rather have sunny weather all year long but since I like to snowboard and I don’t like to drive a long ways to a resort, something has to give.

Well, that’s all I can come up with now… for those of you that live in utah, what to you like/dislike about it?

This tip actually applies to traffic from any channel but its definitely something you can do to improve your return on ad spend and justify your cost-per-conversion for ppc ads.

Before killing a costly adgroup, make sure you’ve offered everything searchers may be looking for when they click on your ad.  For example, try selling different variations of your product… different colors, different lengths, different brands, etc.  If you’re only offering one or two varieties of a product, a searcher will be more likely to go with a competitor that offers a more depth product line.

If sales to businesses make up a majority of your revenue, you may want to consider reducing your max cpc outside of business hours.  Allow me to explain…

Say you have a product that you make $10 profit per sale and businesses buy five of them on average while consumers only buy one unit at a time.  See where I’m going?  With businesses, you’re probably making a decent profit when you’re spending less than $40 on advertising per conversion (hopefully much less to cover your other expenses) but with consumers, you don’t have as much room for advertising after your other expenses (overhead and operations).

This logic mostly applies to advertisers that sell to both business and consumers.  If your product is only searched for by businesses, then you don’t have to worry about the advertising bill being run up outside of business hours.

From a single keyword, its very easy to generate an incredibly long list of keywords… synonyms, plurals, misspellings, broad matches, phrase matches, exact matches, etc. Keep in mind the costs associated to managing so much data. When the data becomes spread over so many keywords, it becomes difficult to analyze and interpret… which keywords are working, which ones aren’t, which one have a max cpc that needs to be adjusted, etc.

I was once analyzing keywords that generated thousands of dollars of clicks over several months that didn’t lead to a single sale. At first glance, I was shocked… but then I realized that the ads would have showed up for those keywords even if I hadn’t been bidding on them because I was bidding on the broad match version of the keyword at a slightly lower price (which keyword wasn’t doing bad). Moral of the story… long lists of keywords are just spreading the data thin (impressions, clicks, ctr’s, conversions, etc) making them difficult to manage.

On the flip side, Google doesn’t always show ads for synonyms and misspellings so make sure you do include them.

Within the adgroups, be sure to take advantage of the exact and phrase matching — searchers typing the exact same keywords are looking exactly what you’ve got. Since exact matches are the most targeted forms of keywords (i.e. they have the highest conversion rate), they are the most valuable so you’ll want to set a max cpc higher than broad matching. Phrase matching is also more targeted than broad so it should also be set higher than broad’s max cpc but lower than exact match’s… it just makes sense.

If you don’t have a huge product line and/or its worth the time, you may even want to create separate adgroups for each type of keyword (broad, phrase, and exact) in order to more easily manage them since they will each have a different max cpc.

Ok, this is another really obvious tip but it can’t be stressed enough. There are a number of reasons why you want to have targeted adgroups. I will explain how to create targeted adgroups and what the benefits are to doing so.

First, take your entire product line and divide it up into as few main groups as possible… each of these groups will be a campaign in google. Next, create an adgroup not only for every product, but for every keyword family. A keyword family is a group of keywords that for the most part, are just a variation of one keyword (word or phrase). For example, if you sell widgets in various forms, don’t create one adgroup for all of your widgets. Instead break your widgets down by how they are searched for such as blue widget, widget extender, or microsoft widget. By doing this, you can create an ad that contains the exact keywords the searcher is using. Both the searcher and adwords like this and you will be rewarded with a good CTR and quality score. There is a way to show the searchers exact query in your ad, but searchers have figured out that advertisers that use this technique don’t really have what they’re looking for.

Another benefit to targeted adgroups is keyword management. You’ll find that some keywords for a product merit a higher max cpc while other keywords for the same product don’t. It’s difficult to manage adgroups that have several keywords with different max cpc’s and when you’re running your adgroup reports, each keyword in an adgroup that has a max cpc that is different than the default cpc shows up on a separate line, making management of those adgroups confusing.

Heidi and I have two boys with very good sleeping habits (both sleep soundly through the night). We’ve known several parents whom have not had such luck so we feel very fortunate. If it takes hours to get your little one to sleep or if he/she regularly gets up through the night, here’s what we do… it’s always worked great for us.

From the day we brought our boys home from the hospital, we got them in a nightly routine of taking a bath, feeding, clothing them warm, and putting them to bed. It’s a great one-two-three punch and it almost never fails. Try to do it about the same time every night and make sure that if they take a late nap, they don’t sleep too long; otherwise, you’ll be having a long night. By doing this, both of our boys were sleeping through the night at two months.

As I’m writing this, Noah is lying next to me wide awake and its almost midnight — knock on wood.

Heidi and I just finised watching Wal-Mart, the High Cost of Low Prices. Though the “documentary” is obviously very biased and full of half-truths, I learned a few things and found it to be interesting. Though it makes a lot of claims that I don’t agree with, I recommend the movie to anyone.

I should also mention that I slept through much of it (it was late) but Heidi gave me a recap of everything I missed. Thanks honey.

It’s been said that there are two sure things in life: death and taxes. Well, there’s one more, regular updates to search engine algorithms.

Search engines regulary update algorithms (google 3 or 4 times a year) to improve the results and fix weaknesses exploited. If you want your site to get to the top of the results and keep it there, its important to keep informed on SEO. One of the best ways to do this is to read blogs from notable SEO’s. Here’s a few I highly recommend: SEO Book, seomoz.org, Matt Cutts, and searchenginewatch.

There’s a saying amoung SEO’s that “content is king.” The more content you have, the more content google (or any other searh engine) has to match up queries to. The more unique content you have, the more valuable you become to google and more importantly, google users. Google actually avoids indexing pages that have the same content as pages already indexed.

Take wikipedia for example. When was the last time you did a search and wikipedia wasn’t one of the first results? It’s been awhile for me. Just about every page in wikipedia is full of informative, unique content.