Cameron Gibbs

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.

A while back, Google Adwords added a setting to campaigns called “delivery method”. The setting includes two options: 1) Standard: shows ads evenly over time and 2) Accelerated: shows ads as quickly as possible. Surprisingly, Google sets the standard option as the default. Common sense would be to make the accelerated option the default. Read on…

If every $10 in ad spend results in $20 gain, why would anyone want to spread out a limited budget over the day? That also leads to another question… why would anyone want to limit their budget? I can’t think of a scenario in which setting a limited budget and spreading it out over the day makes sense. Anyone that can think of one, I’d love to hear it.

Those that have a very high budget that they never come close to reaching probably don’t have to worry about the delivery method, though I’d switch it just to be safe. If you aren’t hitting your budget than your ads will show all day, regardless of which option is selected.

The other day I signed up for a Google Adwords account just for fun. I’m currently applying for marketing jobs for online retailers so I thought I’d use my adwords account to see if I can impress a potential employer. One of the jobs I’m interested in is a “Organic Search” position at backcountry.com. So, with my Adwords account, I created an ad that shows up when you type in the keyword “Should backcountry hire Cameron Gibbs?”

Isn’t it so fun what you can do with Google? I don’t know why but I just get a kick out of it. Now I just need to get my page to rank #1 in the organic results on that keyword — no prob.

Last week, Google announced content match bidding. Now advertisers can have a separate max CPC for content network sites.

Before this change, when content match was turned on, Google would select a keyword from each ad group in the campaign and the max CPC for that keyword (usually the same as the max CPC for the ad group) was your content match max CPC. This was rediculious as the content network sites don’t drive nearly as qualified traffic as the search network sites. Since the traffic isn’t as qualified, it is hard to justify spending as much per click in the content network as in the search network and you can’t lower your max CPC without lowering the max CPC on search — at which point you are forced to turn content match off for the entire campaign. Now, I can just lower my max CPC instead of shutting off the advertising and the traffic to my site.

Now that the minimum bid for content match is just $0.01, I can advertise where I wasn’t advertising before. Google has opened up a market that they had eliminated due to the previous high cost of content match advertising. In other words, they have eliminated the price floor and advertising willing to advertise at a lower cost can advertise on publishers’ sites that are willing to rent their space for less. My friend Preston does a good job explaining this economic principle in his blog.

Another problem I always had with the content match was that is was set at the campaign level. Sometimes I would have an ad group that had a good return while another ad group couldn’t produce any sales. Now, though the setting is still at the campaign level, I can bid as low as $0.01 on ad groups that just don’t produce sales. I have no problem spending $0.01 per click on less-qualified traffic because eventually, someone’s going to buy and that purchase will likely come before the cost per conversion is more than the margin on what I’m selling.

I am really excited about this new feature. I’ve had several sales on content match advertising but the clicks were to expensive. Now, I can get those sales at a lower cost and generate more profit.

As anyone reading this post already knows, Google recently released Google Analytics, web-analytic software that reports everything you ever needed to know about the traffic on your site. Among a million other features, Google Analytics reports conversions, where they came from, dollar-amount of purchase, etc. Very, very cool software.

While online marketers everywhere are gawking at the incredible capabilities of this web-analytic software, Yahoo!, in the meantime can’t even get their bland conversion counter to work. I recently emailed them about our sudden drop in conversions. Latter that day, they sent this email out to all of their customers:

From: Yahoo! Conversion Counter [mailto:analytics@email.yahoosearchmarketing.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 3:26 PM
To: Cameron Gibbs
Subject: Important information about your Conversion Counter data

Dear Advertiser,

We wanted to let you know that some advertisers are currently
experiencing an issue with Conversion Counter data. For these
advertisers, Conversion Counter is undercounting conversions
since September 29th, 2005. As a result, your Conversion
Counter data may not accurately reflect the actual number of
conversions you have received since September 29th. We
sincerely apologize for any difficulty you are experiencing
and want you to know that we are working to restore full
functionality to this feature.

Again, we sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and hope
to have your service restored as quickly as possible.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

Sorry Yahoo!. I think it’s time to drop the exclamation point.